money well spent for the UK tax payers?

In every edition of the book I try to find an example of an over-priced website ... here's an example. A few weeks ago the UK government launched a new AI Skills website. Costing - apparently - £4.1m [that is; four point one million pounds] the site was created by PwC. 

Welllllll ... I reckon it would have taken me a couple of hours to find the sites that it links to, and another couple of hours to knock up the site. Apart from the obvious [though subjective] look of the site, that many of the linked-to sites were, errr, iffy - there is the objective issue of the site not meeting the UK government's own usability rules.

Furthermore, the site has no obvious backend [eg an e-commerce provision], being little more than a list of links [rather like my own site alancharlesworth.com].

I'm not going to go all political on this ... but who signed off on this procurement deal?

just what is ai?

Anything from Tom Goodwin is worth reading - even if you do not agree with his opinion. In response to the research shown in the image below, he asked; 'Could there be a more useless term than "using AI"?'. Did it mean:

• Autonomous Robots in factory?
• CoPilot is on 1 laptop?
• HR use for writing reviews?
• There's a drone in a cupboard somewhere?
• Dallas office tried it?

For more on Tom's view on AI [which is kind-of similar to mine] see his Nowism - Edition 35.

not-so-joined-up-thinking ...

 Apparently Genspark spent around $16m on last night's Superbowl ads ... and this was their landing page at the time. Note it's their home page, but as it was the URL used on the ad, I'll count it as being the landing page to the advert.

NB the red circle and arrow were added by me 😏.

virtually useless

 I'm booked in for two nights at a Premier Inn next week. I have both booking confirmations but on my 'upcoming bookings' on the website only one is listed. So I've just rung the reception at the hotel. I've stayed there many times - the receptionists are very good. 

The problem is that I couldn't get past the 'virtual receptionist' which couldn't understand the problem ... or just put me through to a real person who, I have no doubt, will have answered it in seconds.

Ho hum.

is google going downhill?

 I've never seen a web page download on a tilt before. Can't have been deliberate ... could it?

OOOOOOf

 

irony ...

 From Google:

Is vibe coding good or bad?

AI Overview

Vibe coding (using AI for code via natural language prompts) is considered good for rapid prototyping, brainstorming, and getting quick results but bad for building complex, scalable, and secure production applications because it often lacks structure, deep understanding, and maintainability, creating technical debt and security risks without strong underlying code knowledge. 

i live in the north of england ...

 ... which isn't Scotland. An ad on my twitter feed ...

more data please ...

 For this chart I would like to see the methodology, in particular what the research considered 'shopping' to be. Bear in mind that online still only represents around 25% of all retail sales, so for around 13% of folk to shop everyday seems a bit high. Unless, that is, delivered take-a-way food is included - which, particularly in the US - would move the numbers up. The once a week/month numbers seem representative of the '25% of all retail sales stats'.

As always, never take any data at face value.

It's a retailer ...

 ... but it takes 14 clicks to get in. Would anything like that ever happen offline?