E.g., agentic development is great for solo projects and prototyping, but can become overwhelming alarmingly quickly when you’ve got multiple devs involved, especially if they’re not all super-disciplined and consistent about how they use their agents. And we’re all learning how to deal with that.

But, of course, you often don’t find out what lay down the road not travelled, except for those companies that get funded elsewhere, so it’s not like there’s an obvious objective measure.

I can’t help wondering if it’s a bit like Moneyball though and, if you had good enough data that you could model it well enough, you’d discover a lot of that taste is just shooting bull and doesn’t amount to much. Possibly there’d be a lot of variability across VCs.

My immediate thought on reading the piece was along the lines of, “Yeah, but lots of the people who pick what we should work on aren’t very good at picking the right things to work on, and even the ones who are a bit better at it generally can’t do it consistently.” (And I’m not implying I’m better at it.)

So in that sense, being able to simply build more - perhaps a lot more - of what’s on the backlog gives you a much better chance of implementing some of the ideas that will be winners.

There are many countries where I wouldn't be at all worried about that, but I'd still be concerned about the possibility of theft (which, let's be real, can happen anywhere: I went on a trip to Switzerland once - generally considered very safe and low crime - where somebody had their laptop stolen from their room).

I think, realistically, the issues the author describes - particularly with the keyboard and trackpad - would drive me up the wall for any kind of serious use.

But then, if you're travelling on holiday, do you really want serious use? I like your rationale of taking something that's bad enough that you won't want to use it but you have something if you really need it even if it didn't quite work out that way for you.

And, apart from theft, and depending on where I'm travelling, maybe a cheap device that I don't mind the authorities rifling through the storage of wouldn't be such a bad thing. Like I don't necessarily want $RANDOM_CUSTOMS_PERSON_IN_SOME_COUNTRY to have access to my bank statements, account details, or to get into my social media accounts, or whatever.

And it would be nice not to have to worry about any of that stuff if the machine did get stolen (sure, the drive on my main laptop is encrypted, but physical access is always a massive force multiplier when trying to gain access to a system or its contents).

I can’t remember whether I bought it or was given it, but it would have been some time around 1988 or 1989, because I think I still had my ZX Spectrum at that point. Or I might have picked it up on a choir tour in the early summer of 1990 - by which time I was into a relatively brief ownership of a C64 - because I have distinct memories of reading it on a narrow boat.

I enjoyed it quite a lot but, even then, its somewhat satirical take on microcomputers and the culture around them already felt quite outdated in many ways, so it was like a slightly jaded insider’s view into a past I hadn’t quite experienced - especially user groups.

At any rate it obviously made an impression because 36 years later I still own it - even though I probably haven’t read it in 35 years (though I did read it several times) - which I cannot say for a lot of books I had from my childhood and teen years.

The other issue is that unless the battery has been replaced relatively recently its charging efficiency may not be that great and the high load being placed on it might be causing it to get hotter than it would have done when new.

[0] At least, in my experience, "micromanaging" the AI is what gives me the best results. Iterating on the initial design, then iterating on the plan, then reviewing the proposed code changes (including tests), then getting an independent code review from another LLM, etc. If you give an LLM too much latitude that's when the really shitty code and ill-considered breaking changes/obliteration of existing functionality starts to creep in.

It also has a multiplying effect on technical deficits.

If you habitually demonstrate poor attention to detail when developing software, AI will amplify that too.

LLMs project who we are back at us, amplified, for good or ill, and I’m starting to wonder exactly how deep that runs.

High rents for "prime" locations that, given the trend over the last 25 years, are no longer very prime, coupled with high business rates set by central government make it incredibly hard to make any money. And that's even before thinking about staff, where cover is no doubt needed at a higher concentration per square foot than warehouse based businesses.

Couple that with increases in minimum wage[0] and employer NI, and taking into account inflation and cost of living in recent years, and a lot of formerly workable retail businesses have simply been rendered non-viable.

[0] Which, by the way, I have no quarrel with.

I have plenty of frustrations with the app, but not with the core offer as a delivery mechanism for various types of audio entertainment and information.

In a just world what Zuckerberg and his cronies are doing - the sheer unrelenting tidal wave of destabilising societal damage (nationally, internationally, globally), not to mention the negative consequences of bullying and the exacerbation of mental health issues at individual and group levels over the course of, now, decades - would be considered crimes, and they would all be put on trial, held to account, and appropriately sanctioned for them.

What he's done to individuals, to marginalised and oppressed groups, to societies, and to global stability is far worse than any damage that, for example, Sam Bankman-Fried managed to do and yet somehow SBF is in prison for 25 years and Zuck walks free.

Not OK.

(Not to say SBF doesn't deserve his criminal penalty but to highlight the disconnect where we're not seeing similar treatment of these social media moguls who, at very best, are completely indifferent to the harm they cause but whom, one starts to suspect, are actually gunning for that harm in order to cement their own power and positions.)

It is. I've been using Codex to analyse repositories en masse for a project I'm working on now[0]. Codex, Claude (my usual weapon of choice), etc., make pretty short work of looking for all kinds of problems and antipatterns in large codebases.

[0] Before any wags chime in, no, I'm not the one who hacked Nx and exported 4000 internal GitHub repos. I'm talking about a legitimate client project for a reputable company!

For example: Twitter/X, along with Nitter mirrors like XCancel, are all blocked at the client I'm currently working with so although they can see this discussion, they're excluded from some of the most important details.

(Like many former twitter users, I don't have an X account these days so I'm guessing wouldn't be able to see the full original thread - glad of XCancel, that's for sure.)

The io.js fork from node back in 2014 or 2015 springs to mind. IIRC there were a bunch of changes/improvements that needed to be made to move node forward and Joyent were dragging their heels (a V8 upgrade might have been one of them but it's been so long I can't remember for sure). Some of the core devs were getting fed up with how long all of this was taking.

So a group of them forked off io.js from node, did the upgrade and a bunch of other improvements, and eventually all of that was folded back into core node, and everyone was happy with the final result.

But I think we could have found ourselves in a world where we'd all be using io.js rather than node had it turned out slightly differently.

A place I worked some years ago we even had an escrow foisted on us by our larger partner in the agreement so that they’d be able to continue running the software we were building if we went under.

Honestly, it was a pain in the ass and meant that for them alone we ended up running an older version of the software than we offered to clients because as we developed its capabilities it became ever more integrated into our core platform and we weren’t about to escrow that.

When the agreement came up for renewal at the three year mark we managed to get the escrow clauses removed.