Presumably the "big names" are able to (or have already) implemented the requirements under the law and have an economic and reputational incentive to comply.
Unfortunately, I don't see any site being blocked that will make these shameless gremlins in power let go of their authoritarian control over the public's lives.
This is disappointing to hear. I was thinking of getting some HomePods to replace my Sonos system which has got progressively less reliable over the years to the point of being virtually useless now.
Are there any modern home audio setups that connect to streaming services and actually work reliably? At this point I’m thinking of just going back to an iPod and dock like it’s 2006.
It’s not a simple plug in and stream product, but ever since replacing Sonos with Control4 we’ve been incredibly happy. Josh on top of it for voice and it “just works”.
As I said, not a direct comparison, but starting to think consumer level stuff like Sonos and HonePods just doesn’t have the right incentive structure anymore to deliver the level of quality we all seem to be asking for.
I have Sonos and they work perfectly, I love them. If you think Sonos is bad (recent app update included) go look at the HomePod subreddit, it is basically non stop issues. Having said that, I use Airplay a bunch and it is fine for me. I have had problems with Airplay in the past that were 100% solved by checking and improving wifi signal strength.
I'm testing out Wiim in a couple rooms as a replacement for Sonos and the initial results have been positive, though I haven't been using them long. So far my biggest complaints are that every model in their lineup has a different protocol compatibility list and that the Spotify integration isn't as well-polished.
If your Sonos speakers are old enough, take a day out and downgrade them all to S1. Just like magic it will all start working like it did the day you got it.
Every new game feels like I need to spend hours learning how it works before I get to having fun, when as a working parent I might only have 30 minutes here or there where I’m able to play. When I get back to a game after a couple of weeks off, I can’t remember what I was doing, or what the controls are. It’s just not fun.
Furthermore, every time I turn my console on, everything needs an update in order to be played. So there’s a 15-20 minute wait to get to any sort of entertainment.
Contrast this to the OG Xbox/PS2 era - I’d turn the console on and be having fun within a minute or two in a game that was easy to understand. I don’t think this was due to a lack of depth in the games either. They generally just seemed to have an “easy to learn, hard to master” aspect to them that doesn’t feel present today.
Obviously this is a huge generalisation. But the cumulative effect is that it’s switched me off gaming completely. Unless something is considered a true masterpiece, I won’t even bother.
My Xbox is packed away for now. I expect the next time I’ll turn it on will be for GTA 6.
Call of Duty is the worst with this. After purchasing Modern Warfare, waiting for it to download 60GB, all you get is a fancy menu where the game you purchased is hidden away somewhere below the fold and it tries to upsell other CoDs instead. When you eventually figure out how to navigate the menu and find the game, you can't play it, because apparently, the 60GB download didn't include any of the game. That's another 50GB download. Oh and turns out, that also doesn't actually include the game mode you were interested in. That's another 25GB.
> as a working parent I might only have 30 minutes here or there where I’m able to play. When I get back to a game after a couple of weeks off, I can’t remember what I was doing, or what the controls are. It’s just not fun.
+1, I fall into this category. It's tough.
But is it a problem for the gaming industry? How many sales can they expect from the time poor?
I manage to still play, by choosing conceptually simple games (puzzle, platformer, sports, GTA, some FPS), and playing on the Steam Deck. Portability + instant resume works well for this.
One thing I appreciate about modern games is that a lot of them have quest systems that can remind you of your next objective at any point, and/or maps that tell you where you haven’t been.
This makes it easy for me to log on, do 30 minutes of gaming and then log off and make some incremental progress on the game.
(My experience here is mostly with Nintendo and indie games on the Switch, for reference)
Whilst I agree game updates have become larger and larger and there are reasons why for that as annoying as they are. I'm not sure if there is much of an accessibility issue as much as its my ability to make enough time to play games like I used to.
Game designers need to strike a balance between people like us with little time, and those that can commit much more time.
Sort of an aside from the article, but I never feel like these geographic averages translate well to densely populated countries like England.
The North, like all parts of the country, has pockets of extreme affluence near areas of relative poverty, with a lot of middle income households scattered about the place too.
Talking to some southerners you’d think the whole of the North was a dump, and I worry people write off a truly beautiful part of the UK because of this misconception.
I know plenty of engineers (web application developers) making over £100-£150k outside of London, usually in fairly low-stress remote jobs.
The pay is clearly nothing compared to the US, but I wouldn’t say it was massively hard for them to get where they are. They all have 5+ years experience at a senior level, and are otherwise just reliable, capable, low-maintenance employees, but maybe that’s rare!
That is indeed very rare. A simple sanity check you can look at how many people earn about 100k in the UK, we know the figure for above 125k is 500,000 [1]. We can subtract the number of other jobs that we know for sure pay above this for example lawyers at magic circle firms which start on >150k for newly qualified lawyers, consultants in the NHS, directors of large corportaions, and we end up with a very small amount of people in other industries that earn these figures. Even before that we know the median is about £50k, and I can tell you from experience you can hire very very good software people on those wages, even in London.
From personal experience, I also know of software guys making that, but I also know far far more people earning below that, and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads....
> and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads.
There are many bad things we can say about software hiring, but one of the good things is that (outside the US at least), it's much more concerned with what you can do than the name recognition of the institution where you studied.
Just want to echo the other replies and say i think this is rare. It happens, but it's rare. I have >15 years experience, and currently work in finance making plenty. A while ago, i spoke to a recruiter about opportunities outside finance; everything he had topped out at ~90k for engineers, a bit higher for team leads.
But then, i also have friends working at a few non-finance companies on 100-150k. Small places, willing to pay for quality. Seems to be unusual though!
Then they are very few and far between. Generally the absolute limit is £90k. I've never seen any role for more than 90K unless it was a company in London and those are typically hybrid and not remote.
I only have the figures for end of 2018[1], but meta employed around 2300 people in the UK, if we assume the same distribution of jobs as elsewhere in the world about half will be engineers, so 1150 engineers. There aren't that many of these jobs. At goldman its a lot higher, aboutn 10,000[2] globally, but they only have around 3,300 employees in the Uk so if its the same ratio as global (25% tech), then that means around 800 developers. Again you'll note this is a very small number compared to the number of top graduates a year, with class sizes of 100-200 per university.
So like I said originally these jobs are few and far between. The point is that in the UK the salaries are much lower than those in the US and this is across all experience ranges.
That bad? Huh. Last time I was a permanent employee in the UK was nearly a decade ago now, and I think I was on something like £37k, I think some of my friends (Cambridge graduates and slightly older than me), even back then, were on £65-75k.
I kinda assumed inflation would have raised all of those by about 50% since then.
I am not a top software engineer( (otherwise I'd be working fang tbh) and I earn 85k up north. Hybrid role that's local as well.
I know people that earn a lot more than me.
It's just the recruiters are a joke and advertise silly salaries from local companies that are out touch. You have to know what companies are serious or not, and just apply direct or via recommendations.
Those are government, so probably have even better pensions than private sector.
And there was job advertised for lead software engineer by computer futures(probably an agency) for 80k
I didn't even look deep. I know there are even better jobs.
There are jobs that pay more than 65k. Just have to know where to look.
If you're working for undercapitalized local private companies, then yeah not going pay very much.
I'd also recommend looking at remote jobs. My really smart friends who can beat the competition got 100k+ jobs working remote that are officially based in London but they work up north. Then come down for meeting once or twice every few months.
A lot of the fintechs allow for fully remote and pay well.
We are comparing salaries of Software Engineers between the US and the UK. A Senior Developer position won't pay more than 90K in the UK outside of London. In the US I see well over that for a Senior Developer position.
Even in your examples (which are higher position than what was being discussed) they didn't top out past 90K (just like I said). Whereas in the US you can earn much more quite easily.
> You've moved the goal posts. You said 60k if your lucky.
No I didn't. I suggest you re-read the thread. I said 75K-90K max.
> I just found multiple jobs that pay more than that easily.
There are always certainly outliers. However most of those places usually have a bunch of iffy things going on e.g. you have to live at your workstation/laptop, or they are in the middle of no where. Enforced pair programming (fuck that btw), or have a stupid interview process (no I won't go through the humiliation rituals anymore).
However the vast majority of positions are paying max 65-70K for a Senior Dev.
I am glad that you managed to find something. But the rest of us haven't been as lucky.
Pure opinion, but I feel like the UK has a strong cultural bias towards doing things the way they’ve always been done, which can make us a bit resistant to new technologies and ways of doing things.
I don't think we're resistant, just hesitant pragmatists. When something new and shiny turns up, we don't necessarily accept the marketing saying it's going to improve our lives. Best to wait for someone else to get through the early adoption pain and work out all the kinks so we don't have to waste our time on it if it turns out to be a lemon.
With this strategy I entirely missed blockchain, crypto and NFTs and am in the process of missing AI.
To think that AI is as irrelevant as blockchain, crypto and NFTs is a tragical error many are committing, sir. Those things were trivial and useless and it was clear since the start, and even if tons of money and marketing were put inside, nothing changed because of the blockchain, at least nothing useful.
AI is a completely different story: you likely not even realize you are already a heavy user just as a side effect of everything technological you use, from voice dictation, to medical, to all the images you see around. Soon also: when you are going to watch a movie. Moreover LLMs are already transforming the way people work.
These two entities, blockchian and AI, have very little in common if not the hype.
So what you're saying is that blockchain, crypto, NFTs had no application up front. Correct. I agree there.
What I am saying is that the applications of AI cannot be fulfilled to the level of the promises made. The promises were made to solicit hype to generate cash, not because the idea was viable or achievable on proof. When we reach maturity, we'll see what is left and I'll wait for that. That's fine. In the mean time I'll have to put up with cats appearing every time I search for dogs in Apple Photos and arguing with ChatGPT about its understanding of the relative magnitude of 9.9 and 9.11, while everyone tells me repeatedly with sweat on their brow that WhateverMODEL+1 will make that problem go away, which it didn't on WhateverMODEL-3,-2,-1,0. Only another $2 billion of losses and we'll nail it then!!!
The end game for all technology changes is not what we think it will be. Been in this game a long time and that is the only certainty.
I'm not sure what promises you are talking about, but I've found LLMs to be extraordinarily helpful for both my job and daily life. They are excellent at translation, summarization, troubleshooting, and brainstorming. I've used OpenAIs API to translate an entire epub, including the HTML so images are retained and the results were shockingly good after some prompt fiddling. With Claude I've received some excellent advice on decorating my living room, organizing my schedule, and quick hypotheticals. There are no pinky promises here, it already works.
For general Q&A they can hallucinate, but so long as you are using it to augment your productivity and not as a driver this isn't any different than using stack overflow, or any other kind of question you might ask on the internet. It's basically a non issue too if you upload a document into its context window and stick to asking questions about that document though.
>I'm not sure what promises you are talking about,
AI wiping out programming as a career. AI wiping out writing stories. AI replacing the need for doctors to diagnose illness. AI generally replacing all white collar jobs.
LLMs are useful assistants, but they are nowhere near the hype flooded everywhere a year or so ago.
Did everyone think it would take two months and all the doctors in the world would lose their jobs to ChatGPT?
AI is a societal shift that will take place over the next 20, 30, and 40 years, much like what happened with personal computing. This is a time horizon that impacts investments right now. Professions that existed for thousands of years will cease to exist. That is an unbelievably big change.
you should celebrate they are people in this world that think like this… as long as they are around we can capitalize on this :) like the people who were still riding horses when fords started rolling around… :)
FWIW, I think LLMs make better stories than quite a lot of the human writers on Reddit.
Not that many of the Redditors were ever going to go on to be successful novelists of course (and I say that as someone who is struggling to finish writing this darn book for the best part of a decade now…)
Honestly, and this is not personal, I doubt your ability to determine a bad summarisation or translation outcome. My wife is a professional translator and spends a good deal of time picking up the steaming wrecks that LLMs have left after someone went for the "cheap" option first. And we're talking best of breed stuff like DeepL here.
As for the other points, I rather like to spend some time thinking on them personally. If you're not connected to the decision yourself, what are you?
> My wife is a professional translator and spends a good deal of time picking up the steaming wrecks that LLMs have left after someone went for the "cheap" option first. And we're talking best of breed stuff like DeepL here.
Just so we are clear, for Japanese to English translation, DeepL is hot garbage compared to a top class LLM with the right prompt. DeepL translations are basically unreadable, and regularly just cut sections out entirely! So I wouldn't call DeepL "best of breed" by any means, it's not even at the starting line. Can't comment on English <-> French/Spanish/German/etc though, never tried it with those.
In my case the epub was technically a replacement for a fan translation I was reading, which was decent enough, but with a simple script and instructions to keep the vibes of a light novel, it got very good, I remain impressed. Next I plan to convert it all to markdown to see if I can help encourage it to structure paragraphs properly, the html tags have so far limited it to line by line translation.
When I've experimented with officially translated works, meaning cases where I've translated the raw and compared it to the official, it's still not up to par, but good enough in my opinion. I'm not aware of any payed service that streamlines this yet though, not sure why. It's nothing like traditional MTL.
> As for the other points, I rather like to spend some time thinking on them personally. If you're not connected to the decision yourself, what are you?
What? It's a dialogue, a conversation, I bounce ideas off it and ask for advice to help guide the direction of my thinking, have you ever even used an LLM? I do this with my friends and co-workers too, do you not do this?
This comes off as a bit presumptuous, an LLM lacks executive thinking, if I'm not directing the conversation then the LLM has nothing to give.
Just to note my wife is Japanese so she's aware of that. She does German / French as well and it's fine for that. But still needs a lot of work cleaning it up.
AI and Crypto both use extraordinary amounts of electricity but at least AI actually does something and has replaced Google for me in at least 50% of searches.
There's a lot of stuff that LLMs can do for me that Google never could, like synthesise a new python script to solve some idea I want to iterate on.
But also, Google results nose-dived and only recently seemed to get less bad… though now it seems to be the turn of the YouTube home page to be 60 items of which 45 are bad, 14 are in my watch later list already, and only 1 is both new to me and interesting.
Based on my experience growing up in the UK, then having long visits to the US and moving to Germany… the UK overall is fairly open minded to new tech and social change.
Well, so long as the monarchy and the castles remain.
I think the Brits are pretty fast at adopting technology, their digital public service infrastructure for example is excellent as is their research and engineering sector but I think they have a pretty big distaste for hucksterism or fads and a very no-nonsense attitude. Sort of like us Germans but less digitally averse and with a better bureaucracy.
I'm British but have lived in Germany for several years. I'd say the Germans are explicitly more conservative than Brits. Germany has several aspects in business and law which do, and admittedly I never lived in medieval times, literally feel like something out of some medieval guild system. "I must tithe to the Driver's Guild" is the long and the short of the entire learning to drive system here for example. And Germans just accept it, or even more pathetic, defend it. They just accept having these legally mandated wallet inspectors / guild members ambushing them every now and then for cash. Baffling.
Hard disagree. You might think that, then you see how other countries do things, and you realise we're actually pretty good at adopting new stuff. Not the best, but better than most.
People living in techno bubble are always surprised how much „normal” people are behind and how much they don’t care.
I see people who are doing white collar jobs where most of it is doing stuff on computers being absolutely not interested in any of it.
I work with generally people from all over Europe and it mostly is the same so I would not say Brits are like that but more generally people have bias towards doing things the way they’ve always been doing.
Last month our company released new interface because old one is built on unsupported tech and with all the regulations we have to change it anyway - outrage lasted 2 weeks - people are getting used to new way and in 2 months no one will remember the old way.
There's many people like me who were born and pushed for more tech and are now back pedaling. You start to see through the trends, the marketing, the manias.. and nowadays the disconnect between joy, usefulness and actual results.
Could be, but a bit of conservatism ain't gonna hurt, more conservative nations like Switzerland or nordics are doing more than fine long term, QOL is top notch globally for various reasons.
Much better than having sheepish mentality and chasing what rest of the crowd is chasing too, shows some character and thinking for oneself and not being an easy subject to manipulation. X was almost pure toxicity even before musk's ego trip and I never understood why I should care about some random brainfarts of people 'I should be following', don't people have their own opinions formed by their own experience? Thats rather poor way of spending limited time we have here, on top of training oneself in quick cheap dopamine kicks which messes up people for rest of their lives.
ChatGPT at least tries to be added value, but beyond a bit better search, hallucinating some questionable code and some random cute pics (of which novelty wears off extremely fast), I don't see it, I mean I see the potential, just not reality right now. Plus that code part - I want to keep training myself and my analytical mind, I don't want to be handed easy answers and become more passive and lazy. That's why I do git via command line tool and not just clicking around. That's why I don't mind at all doing some easier algorithms instead of having them served. My employer only wants good result, I am not working in sweat shop being paid by number of lines of code per day.
Quality life is about completely different things anyway. IMHO UK is fine in this regard.
Facts. It’s why they have no semiconductor industry, why their cars are all literally the most unreliable brands, and why they are becoming poor af compared to Americans. I’m so tired of euros trying to act smug about them not working hard. There’s a reason why the EU and the UK are fading into obscurity.
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