You don’t sound very mature.

I don't get your reasoning. It's in fact very mature, everyone got their job to do and you don't mess with someone else job.

If you have to make spreadsheet on a windows computer, it's not up to you to check why excel won't open. You're not trained to do IT. You might do more harm than good.

That's how it works in mature work environment.

"choke on it, boss" when they're expected to use the approved OS and software doesn't sound very mature to me.

The wording is bad, agree. But the reasoning is mature, everyone their own job.

Why is it immature to hold decision makers responsible for their decisions?

How do you answer questions like "how are other people getting their work done on Windows?" How much leverage do you expect the average white collar worker to have?

Is a cashier, for example, not supposed to tell their boss when the cash register jams?

Being part of the minority that disables those things (and then admitting to it in public) provides a lot more analytical signal than you’re aware of. That’s a remarkably poor reason to disrespect your readers.

i don't care about the 'analytical signal'. the purpose is people can't tell if im writing a (discord, slack, etc.) message from my phone or laptop or desktop, and it works for that

The web had little to do with APA’s decision to adopt one space as the standard. It was desktop fonts in the mid-eighties. Two spaces emerged as a standard when fonts were monospaced - they were a readability hack. When proportional fonts started to be introduced, two spaces began to look visually odd. That oddness was especially apparent in groups of sentences like.

“It’s hard to learn how to spell. It takes practice, patience and a lot of dedication.”

^ In a proportional font the difference in width between ‘ll’ and ‘ ‘ is noticeable. In a monotypes font, two spaces after a period provide a visual cue that that space is different.

I think this is why this all lowercase style of writing pisses me off so much. Readability used to be important enough to create controversy - nobody cares anymore. But, I didn’t care enough to read the whole article so maybe I missed something.

Incidentally, prolix is a fifty dollar word. You did successfully avoid five dollar words, but you didn’t go the right direction.

It’s okay to say ‘this was too long’. Prolix???

I get the feeling you haven’t done much government consulting. The bill has nothing to do with the actual work; it’s meetings with stakeholders after stakeholder then coming out with a plan that will please everyone.

I’m reading the original tender and there is zero mention of ISO 9000. In fact, the tendering authority even specifically stated this opportunity was a good fit for SMEs.

Where does all this talk of standards come from?

In the tender there's one line:

> IV.1.8) Information about the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) The procurement is covered by the Government Procurement Agreement: Yes

Googling the UK Government Procurement Agreement got me to:

> https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-standar...

which was when I realised this was a rabbit hole and while I am positive that somewhere deep in that rabbit hole would be a requirement for all procurement suppliers to meet ISO9000 or similar, I was going to have to spend hours finding it. Hours I don't have.

You can cheerfully dismiss this opinion if you like, I don't have the data to provide you evidence.

But I also think this proves my point; if you have to spend hours just finding out what the requirements are, you probably don't meet them.

It's there in the The Model Services Contract, under Core Terms:

> Quality Plans

> 6.1 The Supplier shall develop, within [insert number] Working Days of the Effective Date, quality plans that ensure that all aspects of the Services are the subject of quality management systems and are consistent with BS EN ISO 9001 or any equivalent standard which is generally recognised as having replaced it ("Quality Plans").

The Short Form Contract also have optional ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials (which is, uh, an adventure on its own). But there's also an option for no certification required. It depends on the contract.

But yes, you're right. Dealing with requirements takes time and experience and you likely need a dedicated person (or team) to deal with it.

Thanks for going down the rabbit hole :)

If this was a good fit for SME, and the price paid for the whole thing was 4M pounds, why didn’t any SME win the tender? Seriously, that’s the whole yearly turnover for most SME shops I ever worked at. And all of them could do a better job than this.

That's possibly why: small businesses reliant on contracts that are, to them, disproportionately huge.. well, they die at the end of the contract. HMRC killed off an OpenStack based AWS competitor by replacing them, about ten years ago. Anchor clients can be a real hazard if an SME can't live without them. Sometimes it just isn't worth it.

For government tenders, I do know that agencies need certification. Maybe not ISO2001 (which is a security standard that many corporate procurement processes require the supplier to have obtained when purchasing software), but Cyber Essentials / Cyber Essentials Plus is common.

Cyber Essentials is a lot more of a PITA than 9001, it's very prescriptive in ways that cause all kinds of headaches without helping security.

I absolutely hated doing Cyber Essentials (Plus). Huge waste of time

Canada’s industrial economy was also undamaged. And so, by definition, the US was not the only one.

And I wonder why you’re allowed here.

> the free speech crowd when you disagree with the US state department

And your opinions on how average people use these tools are 100% accurate?

If average people try vibecoding their dependencies, they’ll fail, simple as that. We’ve already seen how that looks with the “web browsers” that have recently been vibecoded.

There's a new web browser project today that's a heck of a lot more impressive than the previous ones - ~20,000 lines of dependency-free Rust (though it uses system libraries for image and text rendering), does a good job of the Hacker News homepage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522

Thanks for the heads up, that does look much more interesting.

I don't think it really affects the point discussed above for now, because we were discussing average users, and by definition, the first person to code a plausible web browser with an agent isn't an average user - unless of course that can be reliably replicated with any average user.

But on that note, the takeaways on the post you linked are relevant, because the author bucked a few trends to do this, and concluded among other things that "The human who drives the agent might matter more than how the agents work and are set up, the judge is still out on this one."

This will obviously change, but the areas that LLMs need to improve on here are ones they're notoriously weak on, so it could take a while.

at least 5% more accurate than average LLM