Category: Opinion
You know what they say about opinions…
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Shopify has a strong developer ecosystem, but it isn’t an excuse for a lack of basic functionality. I get that Shopify attempts to be the one-stop shop for well, online shops, by providing the storefront, payment processing, blogging, newsletter, and pretty much most aspects of your marketing. It’s a big ask to cover all of that from one platform, but as I’ve been working with clients who use the platform for their storefronts, I’ve been shocked by how much basic functionality is missing. A very simple example is social share buttons for product pages. There simply isn’t an option to…
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I’m so sick of these AI fluff pieces showing up on the sites of supposedly reputable news organizations that feel like little more than paid advertising. Take this piece from The Guardian as a prime example. Yet another evacuation of verbal diarrhea to declare that AI isn’t the problem: you are, we are, I am! We are simply too stupid to understand it! “Some people hand everything over to the machine and stop thinking. Others won’t touch it at all. But there’s a third group. They learn to work with AI critically, treat it like a bright, enthusiastic intern that…
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“Today, we’re beginning to test ads in ChatGPT in the U.S. The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads. Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you, and we keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers.” Let me rephrase that for you, Sam and co: “We’re bleeding money. We lose money across the board. Nobody is really using our product. We’re introducing ads in a desperate attempt to generate some revenue to offset a tiny portion of our massive debt…
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The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Google has proposed changes to how Google Search works in order to promote a “fairer deal” for consumers and businesses in a market that is absolutely dominated by Google. To be clear, these are proposals, not laws, and are only at the consultation phase. Google Search accounts for more than 90% of all general search queries in the UK – with millions of people relying on it as a key gateway to the internet. More than 200,000 firms in the UK collectively spent more than £10 billion on Google’s search advertising last year.…
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Babies utter their first words to smiling faces, and the parental “oohs”, “aahs” and “omg honey, did you hear that?” of family. Programmers typically type their first words of a new language (or even their very first programming language) by having the computer announce “Hello World” to the ether. It’s an achievement rarely seen or recognised by anybody other than themselves, and is always accompanied by a satisfied little grin because “That worked!”. This post is my “hello world”. It’s the first post on a new blog, and I know nobody will see it. I’ve been “online” for more than…
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