This is a good point. Intelligent sociopaths do exist. “stupid” and “evil” are not synonyms.

Ugh, I hate that you’re right about this. It used to mean a topic of study in computer science. Now it means…I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean.

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

So you’re saying copyright infringement is on par with speeding or parking past the meter’s end? Eh, fair enough.

If you do something illegal, you should be arrested.

Copyright infringement lawsuits are a far cry from bomb threats or the like.

I use podman at work, mostly just a Docker replacement. My biggest problem with it is typing “pdoman” in commands by mistake.

Good idea for those who are covered by the GDPR. Doesn’t help me, though.

Don’t regret too much. I wouldn’t be surprised if reddit’s “delete” function was really just "move to the “suckers-wanted-to-delete-this” file.

then there really is no hope for this world.

I don’t know how to tell you this, but…

I get the same white background on Windows, Chromium and Firefox. Checking settings, I see FF is set to “Automatic” light/dark mode. When I manually select Dark mode, I see the dark background.

I disagree. I think it’s more helplessness than apathy.

I don’t approve of all the spying, but I don’t “own” any congress critters, so what can I do? I can’t even opt out of the spying by cancelling my Internet plan and smashing my phone – there’s still tracking through CCTV, face recognition, license plate scanners, etc. I’d have to move to some remote middle of nowhere and live as a subsistence farmer – and even on the way there, I’d be thoroughly tracked. There’s no escape, it’s like we’re all in a giant digital cage.

Bad phrasing. I read your previous comment as demanding an explanation from me for why the author wrote an article about simple design rather than about user testing.

Honestly, I don’t think the article would have been well-served by detouring into user testing. It’s long enough as it is, and again – NN group has written a LOT on the topic.

I’m not really sure why you brought it up in the first place. It seems like ‘beating a dead horse’ territory.

Why are you asking me? I didn’t write the article.

It’s not the point of this article. NN group talks a lot about user testing in other articles, IIRC.

Whoosh!

I see some of that in my job. We put encrypted data in settings files, and the keys for decryption are provided on the VMs where we deploy. The developers never actually see the keys.

I suppose it’s as secure as the process for managing the production VMs, assuming the encryption isn’t just md5!

Hmm, that makes me think we could adopt a tiered pricing system for things like water. The first 100 gallons are priced at 10 cents each, then usage beyond that goes up to 50 cents each?

You could tweak the rates & threshold to make more sense – I don’t know water rates off the top of my head, and that probably varies by orders of magnitude across the entire U.S. Also, I have no idea what water usage rates look like for different types of properties. A sports stadium, an office building, an aluminum processing plant, and a SFH with a rain garden will all have really different water usage details.

All this is kind of hinting at a broader “environmental impact” measure. That gets super complicated, though.

Image generation requires no fact checking whatsoever

Sure it does. Let’s say IKEA wants to use midjourney to generate images for its furniture assembly instructions. The instructions are already written, so the prompt is something like “step 3 of assembling the BorkBork kitchen table”.

Would you just auto-insert whatever it generated and send it straight to the printer for 20000 copies?

Or would you look at the image and make sure that it didn’t show a couch instead?

If you choose the latter, that’s fact checking.

That said, LLMs will always have limitations and true AI is still a ways away.

I can’t agree more strongly with this point!

Some problems lend themselves to “guess-and-check” approaches. This calculator is great at guessing, and it’s usually “close enough”.

The other calculator can check efficiently, but it can’t solve the original problem.

Essentially this is the entire motivation for numerical methods.

I’m curious, why do you write it “70ies” instead of “70s”?

The former always makes me say “seventy-ies” as I read it. Kinda funny.