Indie Windows software at https://puremint.co.uk — small tools that do one thing well: speech-to-text, batch image resize, photo collage. One job per tool, no subscriptions. Solo shop, building minimal tools I wanted to exist.
I had to do a Captcha the other day, and the letters looked awful, so I clicked the speaker for an audible Captcha instead. I was even more horrified. The sound was almost painful. Sharp noise blasting as a high pitched tinny voice bellowed numbers at me. I honestly don't know how blind people use the internet these days with such blockers in place, and that's kind of sad. The cookie banners, the captchas and the bots and laws that made both appear have kinda en$hittified humanity's greatest communication tool.
It's coming. I actually imagine it will seem trivial in a few years. "Better Than Life" from Red Dwarf is the next tier of computer games I guess. They wrote that episode back in the late 80s or early 90s and here we are with Google Genie 3 and the models that will supersede it.
The fact that this could happen is widely known and has been talked about for years now. What to do about it is the real issue. I've seen David Shapiro and many others tangentially talk about UBI and similar "post AI economics". The dream was that the machines could do the housework whilst we all painted, wrote music and built beautiful wood furniture in our sheds. It still could be that way, but we need to sort out responsible sharing of resources first, and humanity has never been able to do that. We actively try to earn as much as we can, for the very reason of getting access to the resources that others don't. So often now, it only results in standing still or sliding backwards. I feel like 20 or 30 years ago, the average person seemed to have more disposable income.
I learned Web Design back in 2001, back when AltaVista was a more popular search engine than Google. Lol. I promptly fell out of love with the field and diverted my career. I used WordPress for the first time in 2025. I found it very powerful but fiddly. I have to admit I still prefer plain old HTML, CSS and JS. Dinosaur :D
What clicked for me recently was treating skills as composable. Having meta-skills that call smaller skills in order. The "skill vs command vs subagent" confusion partly dissolves once you let skills call other skills. The meta-skill holds the workflow state, the smaller ones each do one job well.
Good shout on grabbing from the original CD. The mono and lower bitrate is almost always install-footprint maths. Stereo CD audio is ~10MB per minute. Halve the channels, drop the bitrate, the soundtrack fits in a few MB. Worth the swap if you've still got the disc.