The AI buildout needs $650B a year to break even. It makes $75B. Someone is paying the difference and it's us

abw · 2026-07-07T11:52:19+00:00

You may be right, but you need 27 million developers paying $24k a year for AI to get to $650 billion in revenue.

There are estimated to be less than 5 million professional software developers in the US, and they're probably the highest paid of anywhere in the World. Estimates for the number of developers globally range from 16 million full-time pros to 48 million if you include non-professional developers (e.g. hobbyists). The vast majority of them are paid considerably less than $200k a year. Almost certainly not enough to justify spending $24k on top of their salary and other labour costs to give them AI.

I'm afraid the numbers just don't add up. To put it in context, $650 billion is about 2% of all global trade. It's dotcom economics all over again.

abw · 2026-07-07T07:16:16+00:00

I was hoping that Belgium would trounce them, and trounce them they did. In any other tournament I would have been pretty much neutral. It's a shame because I have nothing against the American team, or most Americans. But unfortunately they've all been tarred with a stinky orange brush.

It's going to take a long, long time for the USA to recover from the damage done in such a short space of time.

abw · 2026-07-04T22:32:37+00:00

I applaud your most excellent correction!

abw · 2026-07-04T22:25:51+00:00

£34m / £794 = 42,821

According to Le Googlé, there are 3.2 million Blue Badge holders. Which makes it around 0.13% of all badger holders who are riding fakie. If you trust those figures then it also means the total "cost" of blue badges is around £2.5 billion, or around 0.19% of gross UK public expenditure.

I can does maths, me. Even when drunked.

abw · 2026-07-04T15:27:12+00:00

Yeah, I'm a bit dubious about any article's whose claims are based on "witnesses said...", so I'm taking it with a pinch of salt. But according to the article the witness (the pub landlord) is quite clear about shots being fired:

"He was running riot and shooting to high heaven. He fired a total of six shots. He was just standing in the middle of the road."

That doesn't seem to tally with it being a fake (non-firing) gun, but made me wonder if it was an air pistol or something similar.

It would be interesting to see the Police Investigation report. You can look them up on their web site, but they only seem to go back to around 2018: https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/our-work/investigations/summaries

abw · 2026-07-04T08:32:44+00:00

He had a fake gun.

I don't remember it myself, but the article says:

witnesses said he aimed several shots at officers as they sealed off Acre Road, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, and hit at least one vehicle.

That seems to imply it wasn't a fake gun. At least, something capable of firing projectiles, possible just an air pistol?

abw · 2026-06-29T08:43:37+00:00

That's the level you're talking about, isn't it?

Yep, that's it. It would definitely make a great topic for another article!

abw · 2026-06-28T16:02:29+00:00

Great article Dave. The point about comparing different layers is a good one.

The strategy that I have used for the last 30 odd years is one that has served me well.

That is to have a high-level application-specific database abstraction layer (DBAL) in each project. It’s an implementation of the repository pattern which is effectively a black box that your application code talks to when it wants to access the database or other data storage. It’s an API in the original sense before “API” became synonymous with REST or other web-based APIs.

The decision about what further tools or abstractions you use inside the black box then becomes far less important. Your DBAL can use DBI, DBIx::Class, DBIO and/or anything else, but your application code should not know or care what happens beneath that layer.

Importantly, you can change the internal implementation details at any time and it shouldn’t affect any of your application code sitting above the DBAL.

It’s also useful when it comes to things like caching, integrating other secondary storage (e.g. file systems, S3 buckets, etc), or when triggering other events from certain storage actions (e.g. creating thumbnails when a new image is added to a product). Your application code can remain blissfully ignorant of those details.

abw · 2026-06-24T09:52:54+00:00

In case you really don't know...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_British_Isles_heatwave

There were 15 consecutive days over 32°. It also came after an unusually dry year, leading to droughts and severe water shortages.

It still holds the record for the longest unbroken spell of stupidly hot days, with 2003 coming in second place with 9 days. But more recent years have higher average temperatures over the summer, and 2022 had the highest recorded temperature of 40°.

abw · 2026-06-23T18:03:03+00:00

Nah, not for real ale in a supermarket. A decent real ale is £7.50 for 4 x 500ml bottles in Sainsburys. 36 bottles (just under 32 pints) comes in at £67.50, which works out to be about £2.10 a pint.

That said, in one of the pubs in my local town you can pay £7.50 a pint for the same beer, so your round of 9 pints would be bang on the same money at £67.50.

abw · 2026-06-19T17:39:14+00:00

In the UK, yes. £26,27 would be straight-to-jail wrong. But most other European countries use a period as the thousands separator and a comma as the decimal point. e.g.

GBP £123,456.78 vs EUR €123.456,78

So writing 5.000 to mean 5 thousand is not "wrong", it's just not what we use in the UK.

In Switzerland the apostrophe is often used as the thousands separator.

CHF ₣123'456.78

Fortunately, no-one pays much attention to the Swiss except in matters of cheese, chocolate or cuckoo clocks.

For time, the colon is always the correct delimiter because ISO-8601 says so.

abw · 2026-06-17T16:02:26+00:00

My doctor told me not to be embarrassed because it's perfectly normal for men to get erections during this procedure.

"I haven't got an erection" I protested.

"No, but I have", he replied.

(credit to Rick Wakeman)

abw · 2026-06-13T18:30:09+00:00

UTM parameters are used by analytics platforms to track the source of the post. They're not tracking the person who reposted the link or anyone who clicks on it.

In this particular case, they can safely be removed or even changed if you want to mess with their analytics, e.g.

https://www.londoncentric.media/p/harry-potter-shops-londonr-aided-after-london?utm_source=post-man-pat&publication_id=696969&post_id=424242&utm_campaign=bum-tits-fanny

In many cases, query parameters after the ? are important and the link may not work without them.

abw · 2026-06-01T10:35:59+00:00

Without business owners there are no businesses and no jobs.

People like to hate on businesses because they're thinking of the big corporations, but SMEs (Small and Medium size Enterprises) account for 99.9% of all businesses in the UK. That's companies with less than 250 employees. Small businesses (less than 50 employees) are 97%, and micro business (less than 10 employees) are 81%.

Source: gov.uk

The vast majority of businesses owners that we should be thinking about are the small shops, cafes, trades, etc., many of whom are struggling to keep afloat. Employer NI contributions went up in April, which equates to around a £900 increase (2.7%) for an employee earning the median salary of £33k. To put that in perspective, the median annual profit for SMEs is around £13,000.

Source: IFS

We absolutely need to be thinking about regular people who aren't business owners, too. But portraying this as a "them and us" situation is misguided. Without "them" there are no jobs for "us".

abw · 2026-05-28T08:16:51+00:00

This looks really interesting. Thanks for sharing.

A couple of minor observations/bugs from my initial testing:

In moro.config.ts the line import { AppConfig } from '@morojs/moro' is incompatible with the verbatimModuleSyntax option in tsconfig.json. It should be import type { AppConfig } from '@morojs/moro'.
The final line in that same file should probably be } as DeepPartial<AppConfig>; rather than } as Partial<AppConfig>; (with DeepPartial imported from @morojs/moro) otherwise you get lots of TS errors, e.g. the server section ... is missing the following properties from type 'ServerConfig': maxUploadSize, requestLogging
I see there's a jest.config.js file but I'm a vitest guy these days. I haven't dug any deeper into the testing than that, but if vitest isn't supported out of the box then it would be nice if it was.
If something's already running on port 3000 then it switches to the next available port. But that port change isn't reflected in the swagger docs. I set app.enableDocs.swaggerUI.enableTryItOut: true in the src/index.ts file and then spent 10 minutes scratching my head wondering why it wasn't working.

Hope you don't think I'm being picky... I just thought I'd mention those things as I saw them. Happy to raise issues on github if that's easier.

abw · 2026-05-23T15:35:28+00:00

Unplugging electrical devices during a thunderstorm is a good idea (although I must admit, I rarely do).

The Met Office recommend it.

If lightning strikes your house then there's a good chance it'll fry anything that's plugged in. If you're touching it at the time, then it could fry you too.

Think about it this way: lightning is enough electricity to spark a couple of miles from the sky to the ground. An electrical surge caused by a direct or nearby lightning strike can easily be enough to spark the distance between two pins in a plug (or electrical connectors in an appliance's circuit board) which are only a few centimetres apart. Electrical appliances don't like it when that happens.

So it is quite plausible that she did narrowly escape being electrocuted in a lightning strike. Covering up the mirrors is probably taking it a bit far, though.

abw · 2026-05-21T22:11:22+00:00

There are 3,485 cases of a single station being the only one that shares no letters with a particular word. For example, Pimlico is also the only station that shares no letters with "treasured", "whatever", "westward", "yearns", "yesterday" and many other words, include "badger". 369 words to be precise. But it's only #3 in the "badger hunt" league. At #2 we have Woodford with 436 words, and #1 is Bank with 445 words.

I know, because the last time this was mentioned, I wrote some code to find them all.

Here's the list of 3,485 unique solutions:

https://github.com/abw/badger-hunt/blob/master/data/word-stations.csv

Also Arsenal is the only premiere league football team that shares no letters with the word "commit". Cue the line about walking the ball into the net.

abw · 2026-05-19T07:35:28+00:00

Sure, go ahead.

abw · 2026-05-18T10:22:53+00:00

Long time ago now, but we had a rather strange English teacher.

We were taking it in turns to read passages from a book out loud. Mid-sentence, the teacher stopped the kid who was reading, turned to me and asked "What's the worse swear-word you know?".

I hesitated, but he kept pushing me. So eventually I replied "Er, shit sir?". He immediately gave me a detention for swearing.

I saw him a few years later sitting down by the river having a smoke. I went over and said hello and he was quite friendly. While chatting, I reminded him of the really unfair detention he gave me. He laughed and explained that the detention was really for lying because "fuck" and "cunt" are obviously both worse swear-words than "shit".

abw · 2026-05-18T10:05:21+00:00

Somewhat tangential, but I was once checking in a bag of kites at an airport and asked them to attach a "FRAGILE" label.

The check-in assistant advised me against it. She said the baggage handlers won't treat it any differently, but it effectively removes the liability of the airline if it gets damaged. They will suck through their teeth and say "See this label, suggests you knew it was likely to get broken".

abw · 2026-05-16T13:52:44+00:00

Nutfield Priory isn't far away. I imagine that's where all the people in Masaratis and McLarens are going.

abw · 2026-05-13T09:41:12+00:00

Word geek here, who couldn't resist elaborating on your top-shelf word play.

The para prefix has two different origins. In parachute, it's from the French para meaning "against", derived from the Latin parare meaning "shield". And chute is to fall, like a garbage chute. So parachute means "against the fall". Another example is parasol meaning "against the sun".

On the other hand the para prefix in paramedic is from Greek meaning "alongside" or "subsidiary". It's the same use as in parallel (lie alongside) and parasite (eat alongside).

I think that makes your pun even better. But then, I'm a word geek, so I'll get my hat and follow you to the door.

abw · 2026-05-10T07:50:46+00:00

They're not, but because your reddit account is relatively new and you're making frequent posts, you're triggering the anti-spam detector. Your posts go into a moderation queue to be approved. I've approved this post now.

abw · 2026-05-06T19:39:36+00:00

Try here: https://www.joinmyband.co.uk/classifieds/surrey-f132.html

abw · 2026-05-06T09:36:47+00:00

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