Alexander
@alexanderrX_
most problems are solvable with software and cheaper energy.
London based. Product & Software guy.
892 Following 3.5K Followers
No preventative care, can’t get a GP appointment, and £120bn for one train line. If “mindset” is what makes a country first world, ours isn’t looking great either.
@alexanderrX_ A nice building doesn’t make a Third World society First World. What makes a country Third World is the people and their mindset, not what some Chinese contractors have built there.
only low iq westerners still say this. they’re stuck in the 80s and 90s when the west was untouchable. go to bangkok, singapore, shenzhen today and it’s cleaner, safer and more modern than half of europe. we’re coasting on a reputation we stopped earning 20 years ago
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in my mission to remove plastic and non stick from my kitchen, i’m happy to say i’m now a proud owner of a ninja crispi.
the hype on x finally got to me so i bought one to replace my cheap, very plastic, non stick air fryer.
tonight’s dinner is chicken tacos
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we’ve had flock style systems in the uk for decades. london has some of the most cctv per square mile in the world. we record everything, anpr is everywhere tracking every movement. we have facial recognition too. people still commit a lot of crimes
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Flock CEO says America must find a “compromise” between privacy and safety.
breaking my rule of no caffeine after 12pm (i value my sleep) because i’m incredibly busy at work (better than being bored) and also want to try grok bot tonight.
also this dash water is addictive. 0 cals, tastes great, amazing if you fast until lunch.
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this is exactly what london needs. proper comp to lock in the best talent and brightest minds instead of watching them drain to san francisco and dubai.
san fran did well in the early days because of the freaks and weirdos with wacky ideas who went there and built insane products. now it’s corrupted by vcs and money. london should be the hub for those people, and £360k is still a fraction of what sf pays, so it’s not even expensive by their standards
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A UK startup has just announced they're paying a minimum £360k base for their engineers.
Anthropic, OpenAI and other labs are paying crazy high salaries (over 600k).
Now a UK startup has upped their comp packages to compete.
The company is backed by @join_ef and @creandum, and is helping people find their next role.
It's called Jack and Jill and it's FLYING
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POV: Me with the Nvidia cafeteria lady
1000 prs in a month. we’re past the inflection point for ai coding, the best engineers in the world are letting agents do basically all of it now.
i said recently that agents are better at code review than humans and got pushback. but think about it, the only thing a human catches that the agent doesn’t is the undocumented stuff. document it and the agent wins every time.
and there’s levels to this. some people type two vague sentences as a prompt and get slop back. she’s running teams of agents with skills and modes she built herself. guess whose output is better
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this is a huge release! i shipped 1000 PRs last month and am on track to doubling that this month, all thanks to cloud agents. you can also launch cloud agents with Grok @Bot btw!
here's how i'm so productive:
• i built pstack ( my personal set of skills for rigorous engineering and verification. inside of our codebase i call it /lauren-mode, but it's called /poteto-mode in pstack.
• i use Grok @Bot routines to farm context for me: bug reports on slack, user complaints on X, generating new feature ideas. Grok Bot feeds my "outer loop", where i think about what to point my factory at next.
• i make heavy use of /goal, /loop, and /swarm inside of pstack to run my Full Autopilot playbook, which lets your agents/bots fully own, verify, and ship a task from start to finish.
• everything runs on cloud agents, so my bots work 24/7 even when i'm asleep or my laptop is offline.
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energy price cap up again in october. £1,723 a year. it was about £1,000 before covid, so that’s 70% in six years, and it just quietly rises every year now like it’s normal.
and the government “help” is my favourite bit. they took £150 off your bill in april by moving the cost into general taxation. you’re still paying it, they just moved which pocket it comes out of.
cheapest energy in europe should be the single obsession of this country. everything runs on it, every factory, every data centre, every household. instead we’ve got the most expensive electricity in the developed world and a cap that only ever goes one way
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i’ve been the youngest person in my team for five years. not because i’m some prodigy, because nobody’s hired below me since. no one has the cash for juniors, it’s an investment that rarely pays back.
ask anyone under 30 in an office job and you’ll hear the same thing. everyone’s the youngest. an entire rung of the ladder just quietly stopped existing.
so zoom out. graduates with £50k of debt claiming support off the government instead of paying into it. and when the current lot retire or move on, there’s nobody behind them
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🚨 NEW: Graduate jobs have dropped by almost 50% in just a year as employers replace entry-level roles with AI
forever increasing taxes is the one thing that would actually make me leave the uk.
the weather you can bear, go somewhere warm in winter, and summer here is alright. but tax that only ever goes up, especially on high earners, while everything gets more expensive and salaries stay flaccid, is crap.
people aren’t necessarily against higher taxes. but you need to actually get something back, right? if every public service is degrading and crime is ramping up then what exactly are we paying for.
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the american phenomenon is the gap between their best and their everyday. they build rockets that land themselves and cars that drive themselves. and then a normal bank transfer takes three days.
cash app only exists because moving money is that slow. we’ve had instant transfers since 2008. i haven’t carried a wallet in years, just my phone. over there they’re still writing cheques to pay rent.
it’s like the whole country’s r&d budget went to the moonshots and nobody looked at the boring stuff for 30 years
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proof that uk maxing is real. i am telling you, get a remote job and get out the city. go live somewhere the pound goes way further and you will live a better life. i am serious when i say you need 250k to live a fun, worry free life in london
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The ONS stopped measuring what a pound buys in different parts of Britain in 2016. So we rebuilt it from their own data. Same salary, 114 towns, every cost you cannot avoid.
The worst number: £1 in Camden buys what 4p buys in Hartlepool 🧵
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as a dev i did 4.5 years of linux on a dell xps and it was ok but frustrating. as a pure dev machine it’s fine. but apple’s build quality is way better and imo the os is superior too.
for 99% of people you don’t want to faff around with packages and cli commands. apple works out the box. any issues, apple is there to fix it, restore from backup, replace. it’s more than just a laptop and an os. it’s also an ecosystem with your other devices
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See, here's the thing.
I don't have any major problems with Apple products. Quality may have slipped on the software side recently, but ok, things happen. New guy in charge soon, maybe that turns around. And their hardware is undeniably great. I still enjoy using Apple products, and I'm cheering Apple on. The industry benefits when Apple's at the top of their game.
But also... Omarchy is super interesting and super good. I try to be a curious person, and Omarchy presents an opportunity for me to stretch my curiousity, crack some habits, and try a novel different approach on for size. Linux!? I never thought. But here I am, and I'm here for it.
I mean this is what we ask our HEY and Basecamp customers to do. Try something new! Be open! Be curious! We don't make software like everyone else. Our products don't look or work like anyone else's. We have a very different point of view than the mainstream. And those open to shedding their perception of what they think they need, are always in for a treat when they walk through our doors.
I've essentially been following the Apple way for 40 (!) years. Maybe it's time for a break? Omarchy feels good for my brain! And I really like it! Getting more and more used to it every day. It's now my primary computer. The Macbook is sleeping, clamshell closed, under a pile of papers. The Dell XPS 16 w/ Omarchy is bright and alive. I'm writing this on it right now.
I try to live my life by a few simple principles. One of those is to Like More Things. I wish that for you too.
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it’s crazy how fast things are moving right now. someone born before ww2 has watched commercial planes, men on the moon, computers, the internet, smartphones, and now ai you talk to, all arrive in their one lifetime.
and the pace only picks up. that same person was 60 before they saw the internet go mainstream. everything since, google, iphones, ai, landed in what for them is basically the final stretch.
for most of history people lived and died and nothing changed at all. not one new thing between their birth and their death. and here we are casually speedrunning the biggest inventions ever inside a single lifetime.
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we’re a nation that doesn’t understand living below our means. we’re a low salary high cost country and most of us are driving around in £450 a month cars, 5 holidays a year and eating out a few times a week.
i’m actually backing the boomers here for once. i accept they could afford a house and a lifestyle on one income. house was 3x salary and went up 20x in value since. but they also didn’t live like we do, haemorrhaging cash.
imo it’s social media, everyone trying to live the life they want to be seen living. but also finance. you used to have to save up to buy something. now people klarna a deliveroo order
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the more i travel the more i think london has the best public transport going. you get spoiled by it. tubes and trains every 2-3 minutes that take you basically anywhere, and you just stop noticing until you’re somewhere without it.
i’ve also decided underground is just the superior form of transport. if something’s moving millions of people a day it can’t be sharing a road, it has to be above or below. trams and buses always end up sat in the same traffic as everyone else, which is why most uk and eu cities feel worse than they should. and america’s obviously the extreme end, 3 hours in traffic to go 15 miles.
dubai’s the funny one. they could build the best metro on earth and half the people wouldn’t touch it because it’s seen as poor. no idea how you fix that.
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