I miss being able to talk about business more, too, but a lot of people who grew up in the Obama-era tech boom seemed to have a blind spot about how much this macro stuff affects everything we do.

The big money is both piling into a small number of tech companies _and_ demanding layoffs to a degree we didn’t see in past recessions, but unlike in the Bush recession we aren’t going to see consumer demand floating startups, government hiring is dead, non-tech companies are cutting back, and unlike with the web the AI push isn’t going to work the same at the big non-tech organizations as it did two decades ago when there were tons of jobs helping them move online: if AI does have a solid benefit for those companies, it comes in the form of a license more than jobs. You can see that in two ways: all of the people talking about how hard it is to find work, and the flood of App Store submissions but not revenue as a bunch of laid-off tech workers try to find anything which won’t be lost in the noise.

This is especially true because so much of that data comes from outside of your organization. I receive Google Calendar invites from scammers a couple of times a week and those show up in my invitation list just like anything else. If LLMs start screening things, that kind of thing will become even more popular but most of us can’t just ignore everyone outside of our employer’s directory.

That's usually not even in the books of a typical SPA: It doesn't have fallbacks at all, and just shows a blank white page. Accessibility is always taking a rear seat with such SPAs.

It can be really difficult for people with screen readers: focus jumps, inconsistent update flow, too many or not enough announcements, etc. People just want to live their lives, not have to threaten 508 to be able to pay their cable bill as easily as it was 20 years ago.

> I think agents are scary and complicated and dangerous enough that it is genuinely scary to give an agent an instruction like go buy this ticket

These ones also seem really weird because the baseline is most often someone using the iOS app to do the same thing, and the agent demos are usually slower in addition to being riskier. One of the Chrome demos had someone buying groceries at pretty hefty markup, which seemed to be targeting a narrow demographic of people who a) don’t worry about paying 50% more for produce and b) can spend time writing a prompt but not 30 second opening an app and just doing it with zero chance of getting scammed.

Something that I thought when reading this was that I'm not willing to buy groceries remotely, because when I had covid during the pandemic I had grocery delivery and I ended up with milk that expired in a few days and produce that was very subpar neither or which I would have bought in person.

I would actually be willing to use AI to purchase groceries if it could provide me with some assurance that it would choose the items better than a shopping cart.

As for now, I'm only willing to purchase non-perishable goods that are difficult to screw up online.

Might be a service idea for AI.

I agree but I also think this end up a case of "worse is better". Sure it sucks that doing things with AI is slower and more prone to issues, but now you can be more lazy and still mostly accomplish the same things.

I don't expect to go for that, but other people might. Especially if AI stuff continues to improve.

Don’t forget Google search and Copilot giving you wrong answers. The first time someone gets graded poorly or called out at work for obviously not checking what they sent tends to reframe their perspective.

What counts as “done” has a time component, so I think we’re going to see more of a spectrum where some businesses try to skimp as much as their market will allow but others will recognize that racking up technical debt is a long-term loss. Stuff like brochure sites will certainly be cut down but anything where there’s liability or long-term customer relationship is going to need to factor in quality as well.

If you anticipate that models will continue to improve, tech debt isn't worth worrying about.

This is off-topic and it’s especially a waste of attention because it’s a social media meme, not a real problem. People who actually use them don’t spend time talking about it because it means every few months you plug it in long enough for a coffee break, and in return you can use it for many years without the connector breaking.

Even if you set aside the stupid charging situation, it's still a bad mouse. The multitouch capabilities are not well used by the software, and it's the only mouse I've ever used that routinely sends scroll events while I'm just trying to click or drag. Their laptops are pretty good at rejecting accidental touchpad inputs despite those touchpads being quite large, but the mouse is a constant source of unintentional inputs.

This! It is a bad design because it is a compromise. It is flat because of the need of multitouch, which doesn't get used. And because of this flatness it is not ergonomic to hold it.

It is neither a good trackpad replacement nor a good mouse design.

> which doesn’t get used

Any non-anecdotal data on that assertion?

I can’t say I’ve ever had that problem. Multitouch still works great on the one I bought in 2010 after near daily usage. You’re not required to like it, of course, but I think it’s a question of personal preferences more than an objective good/bad verdict.

I think that assumption is very dangerous: if your editor only prompts when you first open the project, it won’t help when that project is compromised later or if you checkout a merge request from someone untrustworthy/compromised and are mentally thinking “my project is safe” even though you’re a single gh/glab command away from that directory having anything an outside party wants.

One thing to remember is that “heavily pushing subsidies” needs to be more comprehensive than it tends to be when you look at the details: people decide to delay kids for many reasons and societies often fail to address all of them – e.g. if you subsidize childcare but still have a work culture which expects long hours or sidelines mothers, the existence of the subsidy lessens the impact but probably doesn’t get too many people to change their answer. It’s fairly common to find reports of gaps in the supports for even the more generous societies which lead to people stopping at 1-2 kids when they might otherwise have wanted more.

These days, the big factors include not having dealt with climate change: parents are being asked to make a big gamble that the future will be better, and having all of the evidence suggest otherwise is a widely-cited deterrent.

That’s the part I keep thinking about with this story: they have spent over $200 billion dollars on AI and achieved this.