Please keep Assistant, it's an easy to use alternative to OpenAI, and is not intrusive. I will say that I find the GUI infuriating though...
It's never clear where the cursor is when you start a new chat. Don't understand the low contrast layout with too much whitespace.
Another Irishman here.
Stop trying to harken back to some notional "good old days" that didn't exist. People are better off than they've ever been.
Energy was always expensive relative to income. When I was a kid in the 80s, we weren't allowed to turn on the central heating unless there were arctic conditions. The main issue driving COL issues is the complete lack of social housing construction for the last 15 years. You can't blame the tree huggers for that. Renewable energy is a matter of national security, and prevents our hard earned money being sent overseas to regimes like Russia and all the charmers in the Middle East. Our very first electricity plant as a free state was hydro ffs.
Indeed. This was not such an issue when everybody had their own website or blog or whatever, and you had to seek out content intentionally... It's the active intervention of an algorithmic megaphone that is causing the damage. To me this is when it stops being free speech and starts being corporate policy that needs to be regulated.
Delighted to see something made in Ireland that didn't come from a multinational... The Zorin brothers have worked on this since they were teenagers.
https://stconleths.ie/the-zorin-brothers-technology-for-huma...
They were even on the national news a few weeks back!
Excellent piece, captivating.
I found many parallels here to managing IT. So much of control theory and systems engineering is relevant to developing and deploying cloud systems, improving performance etc...
Many times I've seen engineers polishing and optimizing the code of an existing system without ever questioning the process itself or indeed the paradigm. I myself was in that position, spent 5 years optimizing the parameters of a complex system, only to realize that system was put in place based on faulty assumptions that were never questioned. The whole thing could have been removed and performance sped up 200%.
In my experience people ~25 years of age and younger, who are not tech-savvy enough to install an adblocker, simply do not surf the web. Everything is an app, thus the internet browser becomes an online shopping (no/very few ads) and "googling" tool, though this second use is fading away as well with the rise of LLM chatbots. The ads baked into short-format content are much less obtrusive than the popups or fake download buttons of yore—though in my view this makes them even more insidious. I've witnessed my friends not even realize a video was an advertisement until they'd already watched it in full.
* Grain of salt; just the anecdotal opinion of a jaded zillenial.
