I’ve noticed pretty much zero disruption on Firefox with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock despite Google’s best efforts. Every time I thought I’d eventually be paying Google the Danegeld to avoid the firehose of spam I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

I’m currently working in medtech, I don’t want to dox myself because the company is quite niche but it involves using machine learning to diagnose a particular disease much earlier when it’s more treatable. I’m managed by an experienced senior engineer who’s probably forgotten more about about the profession than I know and the workload is reasonable and well compensated. Yeah it’s a startup so you temper your expectations in terms of long-term job security but there’s definitely good companies out there, don’t get me wrong there’s a lot about the industry and the broader socioeconomic context it exists in that’s awful but there’s a lot of good opportunities too. I could bitch about the ecosystem for hours but at the end of the day I’m a bit of a drama queen, I’m well paid for interesting work and you can’t say fairer than that.

There’s certainly much more than adtech, you could actually exclude business to consumer industries entirely if you wanted and make an excellent living in the business to business sector where there’s lots of interesting problems to solve. If you’re thinking of training as a software engineer or similar and entering the industry I’d still very much recommend it if it’s something you enjoy and are good at. Give frontend a wide berth if you’re worried about framework churn too, the vast majority of my work is backend where the churn isn’t as bad and there’s always plenty of work for you if you’re decent at SQL and a couple of common languages used for that purpose.

We’re not all patent-shagging tech bros, if you want proof of this you can look at how most of the industry runs on freely shared code that’s written in enormous volumes for no other reason making the lives of programmers easier and therefore improving their productivity. If this almost anarchistic process stopped even for a month the whole thing would fall over and never get up again!

I’ll back you on that, Mac OS X Tiger was the prettiest OS Apple ever made in my opinion although Leopard was fantastic as well. The iPod in general and early iOS was gorgeous as well.

There’s nothing wrong with speculation as long as everyone knows that’s what going on.

Take the work of Julian Jaynes for example; it’s fringe, it’s speculative, but he’s asking questions that nobody else asked before and that in itself is worthwhile because it can pave the way for better questions which are falsifiable.

I lived in rural Wales for a while so I know this feeling. Growing up in England I thought I knew about rain before but on the Cambrian Coast it rains sideways.

Here’s an opinion that’s actually unpopular rather than simply controversial: domestic flights in the UK other than to Northern Ireland (which isn’t on the same island so fair enough) should be forbidden on the grounds their contribution to climate change cannot be justified.

Instead we should renationalise the railways by letting the franchises expire without renewing them and expand their capacity as far as we can. Instead of pissing around with HS2 we fuck the NIMBYs over with an Act of Parliament which they can’t swat away or delay and extend it all the way up to Scotland.