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David Galbraith Profile picture
@daveg
May 18, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
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This is so true. The dirty secret of web design is that it is incredibly badly designed itself. HTML grew over attempted rivals like Flash because you could view source, copy and evolve things and unlike Flash it understood the principal feature of the web - linking and tracking.
So Flash was a crappy, proprietary web building tool that nevertheless allowed for much more interesting visual websites to be built (that didn't actually work structurally). Meanwhile, regular HTML sites were difficult to build anything visually slick, but...
... allowed things to be copied and iterated on. But then several structural mistakes such as putting design elements in a style sheet language that bore no relation to what the page looked like, rather than in a template one (you can't read css and see what a page looks like)...
...led to the disastrous situation today where web design has all of the downsides of things like Flash (actual code is buried in unnecessary complexity) and none of the upsides (it's too difficult to make visually innovative websites).
So although this point about Unreal Engine 5 is a joke, it highlights an important truth - website building is like being an artist who spends 90% of effort manufacturing pencils whereas games development has tools to make things that are light years ahead of web pages.

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More from @daveg

David Galbraith Profile picture
Apr 24, 2025
Everyone who has tried vibe coding knows that you can get 99% of the way there then hit a 'whac-a-mole' wall of introducing three new bugs for every one fixed. At which point manual coding is easier. Here is a work around.
1. Use reasoning models like o3 to create better one shot prompts to start with.
2. Include a test harness in the prompt structure so you can lock down things into unit tests.
Read 4 tweets
David Galbraith Profile picture
Mar 29, 2025
This is the simplest diagram I could do to explain what is happening in the world and why China has already won. Image
Before this, there was the mantra that 'software is eating the world'. It was true and the US beat Europe which failed to enter the digital era and build any dominant internet platforms. This was the best diagram that explained this. Image
But as the commanding heights of the new economy change from internal combustion engines to EVs, batteries, chips etc. China owns a majority of the manufacturing of everything. Image
Read 10 tweets
David Galbraith Profile picture
Mar 28, 2025
Ok, now I understand what's going through Vance's mind. It's nuts, but this is what's happening:
Their view is that Europe is 'pathetic' and that US is sick of picking up tab for Pax Americana in Europe.
In Ukraine they flouted the idea of mineral rights to subsidise support and get a sort of instant belt and road style access to rare earths etc. for repatriated manufacturing in the US, via tariff threats.
In other words it's a half baked plan to copy China (domestic manufacturing with control of supply chains) in a rushed fashion and through protection racket style coercion. Protection racket is actually unfair as the threat is genuinely from Russia not from US.
Read 8 tweets
David Galbraith Profile picture
Mar 27, 2025
AI creates network effects in production (software application production costs go to zero, running costs increase) - ultimately this means, infrastructure and energy, and we will need more.
But just like the telco/dotcom bust masked continued secular growth in the internet, there could be a dotcom style implosion of AI infrastructure (and this could be the first tremor).
Infrastructure overspend would be when new alliances form leaving redundancy, winners emerge driving consolidation or new more efficient architectures such as DeepSeek hinted at are released.
Read 8 tweets
David Galbraith Profile picture
Sep 21, 2024
What is wrong with our world, in one tweet.
1. The structural change that created the Reformation (bypassing churches control of books) was replacing one (scribe/priest) to many (congregation) with more (mass duplicated printed book) to many (congregation).
2. The structural changes of the internet are larger:
few (publishers, TV channels, newspapers) to many (nations) replaced with many (everyone has a channel on the internet) to many (everyone, regardless of borders).
3. Play this simple game (30 minutes and it will explain network theory without any jargon or tech knowledge requirements) and it will show that until the network (our world post internet) settles into a small world one (largely siloed communities where people can belong to more than one, connected by just a few individuals i.e. not like twitter, where everyone is connected to everyone), there will be instability as lies will propagate more than truth.ncase.me/crowds/
Read 5 tweets
David Galbraith Profile picture
Sep 7, 2024
As if it wasn’t clear already VW illustrates the giant, ticking time-bomb at the heart of Europe’s economic model.

The European economy is based on two things, industrial production and selling the past.
Selling the past includes tourism, where nice places have a history and the story increases the margins. Selling the past also includes things like fashion, perfume and luxury goods where the brand associations with history, also increases margins.
Industrial production is obviously about making things. But it is no longer about making industrial era things. Cars are a great example here. as although EVs look the same as the type of cars that Germany produces, the way they are produced and their business model and margins are totally different.
Read 12 tweets

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