I think the use of AI is really missing the point here. The point is that small in-house teams can deliver a lot more quickly and to a higher quality and at a lower cost than large outsourced teams from the big consultancy companies. I've seen this over and over again (the problem is that large organisations often prefer to go the slow and expensive route with the big consultancy companies for a complex variety of reasons). So it would be like an article saying "our small inhouse team using VS Code did a much better job than a big outsourced consultancy using MS Visual Studio - isn't VS Code awesome".
> I think the use of AI is really missing the point here. The point is that small in-house teams can deliver a lot more quickly and to a higher quality and at a lower cost than large outsourced teams from the big consultancy companies.
This assumes that small in-house teams are inherently effective/efficient, which is not necessarily true.
In this sense, the difference between proven engineering leads (as the article states/assumes) leading a small team versus AI is that the latter is entirely under their control, which minimizes the risk.
So AI vs. small teams is about controlling/guaranteeing effectiveness/efficiency.
EDIT: the leads are, in practice, managing a small team, although their exact technical background is unclear ("experienced practitioners who know how to design and deliver digital products", not clear if they're professional software engineers).
Or smoking a cigar in an oxygen rich spacecraft cabin, as per the opening scene of the original Planet of the Apes (released in Feb 1968, after the Apollo 1 fire in Jan 1967).
I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a button in the app to put it in both broadcast and receive mode, which seems like what is shown here. Some notes:
- It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course.
- Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3].
Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation.
Interesting. Android has a Nearby Connections API[0] which "uses a combination of Bluetooth, BLE, and Wi-Fi technologies" and appears to allow interoperability between Android and Apple devices, and Apple has a Nearby Interaction[1] which "use[s] the high-frequency capabilities of the UWB chip" but is restricted to Apple devices, so I guess it could be one of those rather than NFC.
> "The software used a special driver to get better than standard quality from the then most common 24 pin printers (laser printers where much expensive) by kind of double-printing, I forgot the details. It looked really good though."
In opening up a few ancient files to answer another question about formatting, I found some long forgotten notes on how to make my Epson LQ400 24 pin printer work at 360dpi rather 180dpi, which may have been the same for you: First you had to install it as a NEC 24-pin 360dpi printer rather than 180dpi printer. Then, because it used fonts of half the size, you needed to switch fonts. So I had two fonts disks, one with 180dpi installed fonts and one with 360dpi fonts, and used the ASSIGN.SYS file to switch between them. It also seems to have taken twice as long to print out at 360dpi, and used twice as much printer ribbon:-)
I remember some printers had a "draft" mode and a "fine" mode (and you could simulate the fine even on those that didn't by printing, and then carefully going back and printing again but off by a tiny, tiny bit vertically).
I used ST Writer which came bundled with my ST. I still have all my ST Writer files (last modified in 1993!), and quite impressively they open just fine in LibreOffice with formatting and everything preserved (unlike some later .doc files I have).
Yes. Just opened some files to check. There was one including a table which I thought at first was a little wonky, but then I realised the column that looked off had currency where I'd right aligned on the decimal point, so even that seems to have been preserved!
I think this is missing the point - it is a bit like saying "you only ever notice bad fraud, if the fraud is well done you never notice it" - the point is what it is, not whether you notice it or not. With AI in films at the moment there are still people behind, and reviewing, the AI output, so it is just another creative tool, which is fine. However, if someone were to generate an entire 90 minute film and put it online without even having the decency to spend 90 minutes of their own time watching it themselves first, that would not be fine. But that is happening with AI slop on the internet now. Whether it is any good or not is not the point - the point is that it is disrespectful of people's time and attention.
Thanks for the great feedback:-) This is what searchmysite.net is attempting to do - help make "surfing the web" a fun leisure activity once more. It is good to see more people seem to get that point now. When it was on HN nearly 3 years ago[0], many people saw a search box and thought it must be a Google replacement, but were disappointed to find it wasn't. And I guess now more than ever it is useful to have a way of finding content on the web which has been made by humans rather than AI.
At a big corporate, we had an Apache Solr based search which had some reasonably clever lemmatization and stats analysis and spell check config to suggest alternative searches if not many results were found for the original query, but one day someone reported an unfortunate edge case which caused a bit of a panic - if you searched "annual report” it returned "did you mean anal report?" (we were in the finance sector rather than medical sector, but there were a lot more documents in the corpus containing words like analysts, analysis, analytics etc). Anyway, the point is yes, it is great to have that sort of functionality, but it does come at a cost, and a small project like this might prefer to keep it simple.
Generating suggestions from something other than what your users have already given you is inevitably going to result in something different and potentially offensive being shown to them.
One solution is to offer suggestion from a list of previous searches.
Also, that is very much a big corporate problem: I imagine most searchmysite users are mature and stable enough not to have a melt down at the word "anal".
But I agree with your point, sometimes seemingly small features take a disproportionate amount of support, and this could be one of them!
That's right. Most search engines are funded by advertising, where there is the clear conflict of interest[0], not to mention incentive for spam etc. Alternative models include a subscription fee (which I don't think would work for a small niche search like this) and donations (which may or may not be sustainable). Looking through some of the support forums for the big search engines, I'm pretty sure that enough site owners would pay a fee for support to pay the running costs for a large search engine, although for a smaller search engine like this there needs to be something more than just support, hence the search as a service features.
[0] "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers", to quote Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in their "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" paper from 1998.
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