Jon Wood @jon@blankpad.net

@Edent I've bought *so many* cheap USB-C docks. The only one I've found which consistently works, and doesn't randomly drop out every now and again, is the Caldigit TS4 (although I here good things about the earlier models as well). Everything I've bought in the sub-£100 range was laughably bad.

@saramg I'm only late 30s, and definitely tick most of the con boxes already. I'd like to think I also tick the pros, but would feel like tooting my own trumpet to declare them as fact.

@tehstu @thomasfuchs and they leant into that hard support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us

@russss @SamLR I have no numbers to back this up, but I suspect the average age of The Queue is quite a lot higher than that of Glastonbury.

@Edent but do you really want a scanned copy of the local Indian takeaway's menu emailed to you every three days?

@james that's so much more tactful than my usual approach of waiting a while to see if someone gets to explaining what's going on, then butting in and saying "but what are you trying to do"?

@rvr @thomasfuchs but imagine being the person sat next to you, as you sit in your cramped airline chair flailing your arms around the place doing some work.

@solderandchaos Yo Dawg, etc.

@solderandchaos just to clarify, because Apple are awful at this, Apple TV the subscription video service is different to Apple TV the set top box. (Although to add to the confusion, you can use Apple TV on your Apple TV).

@solderandchaos as far as I'm aware tvOS, which is what does the nice set top box stuff, isn't available for Apple computers, only Apple TV, so you'd basically be in the same position as DIYing something. With Apple TV proper, it comes with a remote control, but you can also use your phone.

@solderandchaos Apple TV if you're in that ecosystem, Chromecast TV otherwise. Everything else is just rebadged Android with a random selection of extra "features" nobody asked for, and worse integration.

@JackDeeth give the customer support team a full time software engineer, who knows what pain points the team are feeling, and has the autonomy to go and either fix the bugs they're working around, or build new functionality to help them.

@JackDeeth I have long wanted to run software teams where most members are embedded within other teams around the business. Maybe have a core engineering team who are responsible for foundational components, but everyone else should be immersed in the world of their users, not the world of the technology team.

@jon @james I think this is going to be a common problem in many industries. There’s a little bit of me that wonders whether AI magically making things work is how all those sci-fi histories of humanity forgetting how technology functions and turning it into a quasi-religious thing begins.

@james the core of my job is to take non-specific, and often contradictory, descriptions of what people want computers to do for them, and then make it happen. Until an LLM learns to do that I think I’m pretty much safe.

Having said that, I do worry about what happens to junior developers and people new to the industry. There’s value in people spending time doing relatively simple tasks that have been done before, it’s how you build up a mental model of things work.

@Edent I tend to do Home Assistant first, and then the OS, but for no particular reason other than that’s the order they’re presented in. Generally one isn’t dependent on the other, and if a core feature does depend on the OS update it’ll be backwards compatible.

If GPT and other LLMs are trained on the Internet, and an increasing chunk of the internet is generated by GPT and other LLMs, does that mean we’ve created an AI that’s going to get gradually stupider as time goes on? Is this in fact not the beginning of AI, but the best it’s ever going to be?

I’d love to see the wall of my next door neighbour’s living room. Judging by the hour or so of drilling every weekend I can only assume it’s entirely covered in pictures.

@solderandchaos cheese and a castle, this sounds like a perfect conference to me.

@jon I think my ideal would be a mechanism via which I can limit how long per-hour I can spend to a fairly low number to interrupt the loop of looking at different things.

I really need to find a way to effectively back off social media use for a while. I just spent 90 minutes doing nothing but rotating between apps, when I’d been about to go to bed and read instead. Recommendations would be very welcome, I’ll be starting with some decent screen time restrictions, which currently only apply to Twitter.

@jonty may I introduce you to my friend Nuclear Ghandi?

I demand to know why we live in the boring cyberpunk future, rather than the fun one where we're all running around with these bad-boys on our wrists. vi.aliexpress.com/item/1005003

Me: `mkdir -p /path/to/directory`
Computer: `/path/to/directory: No such file or directory`

I think I might just give up on today and skip straight to the week off.