Shog9

In practice, this complexity means you at least have a chance. Most phones and almost all low-power devices will accept power from most chargers and cables. Probably not at a maximum level, but if you're stuck somewhere you can get by.

Power-hungry laptops are trickier, but even so... I've gone a week or more trickle charging a laptop from whatever travel charger I happened to have on hand, using it for a few hours, then putting it in standby and charging it up again until finally the mfg-blessed replacement fast charger arrived. The alternative (and one I was faced with more than once in the bad old days) was "no laptop".

Worst experience I've had to date has been a Norco jump box that will charge via one high-power charger and one cable, a car charger it came with, and ... Via careful back feeding from a benchtop power supply.

Link to that research, please. It would add meaningfully to this discussion.

The folks I know who've been prescribed fentanyl weren't particularly upset about it. It is very potent, and thus measuring the dose properly is very important, but it's not particularly fussy beyond that.

The people you know may be obtaining it from less reliable apothecaries; that can be a real issue.

Funny, you left out "curing" from that list.

All three preservation techniques are practiced today as they have been since antiquity. It is not clear to me where food so preserved are likely to fall on the processed / ultra-processed spectrum...

Sustenance is a health benefit. Shelf life is a health benefit. Convenience is a health benefit.

If you have options when choosing food, a framework that helps you choose the better option is useful. The history of food production is mostly centered around developing options that provide, as a baseline, the three advantages you casually dismiss.

If you have a clear definition, one that an informed reader could apply to some random product on their grocery store shelf to distinguish between "processed" (almost everything) and "ultra processed" (?), then you should post that definition.

Otherwise you're just playing the same game of Humpty Dumpty.

Uh... The history of railroads is littered with folks losing their investments for exactly this reason.

Was your point that owning the steel companies is the path to riches even when most of the railroads fail?

You're still missing the point; the strategy only works if no one is sure it's a strategy.

It also doesn't work very well then either.

FWIW, I'm not arguing for either. I think it's pretty obvious this is 100% market manipulation and consequences be damned. In that light, this approach is working very well, just not towards an end that benefits most of us.

You seem to have missed the reference to Madman Theory above, interpreting it as a literal commentary on someone's / some group's sanity.

Whether or not actual mental deficiency is involved here is irrelevant; the strategy is the same whether performed intentionally or otherwise. Unfortunately, its track record is dismal in both cases.

California is probably the best example going of how not to "legalize" weed.

However, this also highlights the primary difference between weed and meth, opiates: ease of manufacturing. The only other common drugs that come close are things like mushrooms and fermented beverages, and I'd argue both of those are still riskier.

One of, if not THE biggest challenge in getting treatment is getting past insurance rules designed to deny treatment. This is much, much easier when you're able to convince a doctor (and/or trained medical staff) to argue on your behalf. If you can't get those folks to listen to you, that's probably not gonna happen. You might have to go through several different practices before you find a sympathetic ear.

Now replace some / all of those humans with... A machine whose function also needs insurance approval.

It's gonna end badly.

I'm well aware; I previously worked "adjacent" to this sphere, and a non-trivial part of my work life was spent trying to forestall precisely this outcome.

The difference between Twitter now and Twitter a decade ago isn't in the quantity of vapid interactions; it's the proportion of that to anything else. The slide started a long, long time ago and at some point effectively no one was trying to stop it anymore. I'm sure there are still corners where useful information gets passed on in a timely manner, but like the citizens of so many venues before it those corners have been diminished and isolated to an extent that it no longer feels worthwhile for those not already entrenched in them to bother seeking them out

So, I suspect the key to your experience is buried in this sentence: "I do follow politics pretty closely, and it seems relatively balanced overall."

Balance doesn't mean much by itself. Doesn't mean "informative" or even "accurate". Extremists from every walk of life screaming at each other might be in balance, but isn't much fun to be around. Note that the person you're replying to didn't even mention politics as such, much less a lack of "balance".

I watched twitter for years, starting in 2007. It was never what I'd call "good", but for quite a lot of years you could reasonably use it to follow people or topics that interested you without consuming an inordinate amount of time or attention. In fact, for most of its history you could do this without even bothering to log in - for a long time, that made it fairly useful as sort of an alert system. And that is long gone, so gone there's a good chance most folks using it now don't even remember (or never knew) that was ever a draw.

What's left is people who are logged in, _engaging_. And man, that was always the worst part of Twitter, the constant posturing and troll-baiting for clicks, pushing every viewpoint toward its extreme.

The defense - including Jones himself - also did a very poor job, so it's debatable whether anyone at all wanted a different outcome.

This is the second time in two days I've seen a subthread here with folks seemingly debating whether or not defining and communicating requirements counts as work if the target of those requirements is an LLM system.

I'm confused as to why this is even a question. We used to call this "systems analysis" and it was like... a whole-ass career. LLMs seem to be remarkably capable of using the output, but they're not even close to the first software systems sold as being able to take requirements and turn them into working code (for various definitions of "requirements" and "working").

I'm also skeptical that direct brain interfaces would make this any less work; I don't think "typing" or "english" are the major barriers here, anymore than "drafting" is the major barrier to folks designing their own cars and houses... Any fool thinks they know what they need!

The issue here is that even if the original goal is the first thing, once you have the data you can do that second thing. From where we stand, nothing changes - same information is collected. But now, it's also used for affinity targeting or worse.

Y'all are letting "most people" carry an awful lot of water for this scummy behavior here.

In my experience, most people - even most tech people - are unaware of just how much information a bit of script on a website can snag without triggering so much as a mild warning in the browser UI. And tend toward shock and horror on those occasions where they encounter evidence of reality.

The widespread "Facebook is listening to me" belief is my favorite proxy for this ... Because, it sorta is - just... Not in the way folks think. Don't need ears if you see everything!

I mean... Yeah. Alcohol is very well documented and even more widely used for exactly this purpose BECAUSE it works.

The side-effects are often terrible. This is also true for many widely-prescribed drugs, and has been even more true in the past. The folks I've known on MAOIs were pretty wrecked.

Crucially, SO's election system needs to be bootstrapped: users aren't eligible to vote until they have a history of participation. The level of participation is fairly trivial, but it provides enough signal to allow a reasonable detection (and elimination) of bot / sock puppet networks without resorting to crude measures like blacklists or "bot tests".

For new sites, this meant that the bulk of moderation was done by employees, followed by employee-appointed temporary moderators. This dramatically reduced abuse, but also reduced the explosion of new sub-communities that sites like Reddit thrived on.

It has been ... Borderline creepy... Watching how folks - including some professional writers - have adapted their workflows to the capabilities of LLMs, treating them as a copywriter whose input is a spec and for whose output they are the editor.

Because it seems natural to me; that's how I've always written... Except, I'm also the bot. Just turn off part of my brain and an endless stream of verbiage emerges, vaguely centered around a theme... Then the real work begins: editing for relevance and imposing a coherent structure.

So, I don't really fault anyone who adopts these new tools for the task. But I have some strong feelings about the lazy editing.

There was some of that for sure; sites that were all but designed to be attractive nuisances and took near-heroic efforts to moderate at all, with little chance of not causing a lot of drama.

OTOH, topic-specific sites like Mathematics, MathOverflow, Physics, even small ones like Home Improvement or Seasoned Advice... Managed to collect a lot of good stuff: common niche questions with good answers that have a good chance at staying relevant for a long time to come.

In a sane world, a few relevant ads on these sites would be enough to fund them for decades. But that appears to be another area where Google kinda shit the bed.

Yes indeed! Glad to see you over on Codidact; I suspect small, bespoke q&a will be the future of the form, at least after Facebook implodes.

I was writing like a robot before robots could write, dammit!

This sounds plausible - I grew up in the Midwestern US, and thus "vaguely passive-aggressive" is pretty much my native language. The hardest part of the job for me was remembering to communicate in an overtly aggressive manner when necessary, developing a habit of drawing a sharp line between "this is a debate" and "this is how it is."

Sometimes I put that line in the wrong place.

That said... I can't take credit for any major change in direction (or lack thereof) at SO. To the extent that SO succeeded, it did so because it collectively followed through on its mission while that was still something folks valued; to the extent that it has declined, it is because that mission is no longer valued. Plenty of other spaces with very different people, policies, general vibes... Have followed the same trajectory, both before SO and especially over the past few years.

With the benefits of hindsight, probably the only thing SO could have done that would have made a significant difference would have been to turn their Chat service into a hosted product in the manner of Discord - if that had happened in, say, 2012 there's a chance the Q&A portion of SO would have long ago become auxillary, and better able to weather being weaned from Google's feeding.

But even that is hardly assured. History is littered with the stories of ideas that were almost at the right place and time, but not quite. SO's Q&A was the best at what it set out to do for a very long time; surviving to the end of a market may have been the best it could have done.

Nail guns are great. For nails that fit into them and spaces they fit into. But if you can't hit a nail with a hammer, you're limited to the sort of tasks that can be accomplished with the nail guns and gun-nails you have with you.

This is the way with many labor-saving devices.

There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also...

For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't.

At some point, Google started surfacing fewer "tried and true" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore.

...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call.

I don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits.

[0] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

It's a solution. There are better solutions, and far worse solutions (anyone who has worked to get a deposit back on a college rental has probably developed a few of their own), and most of them are all still fine because drywall isn't (shouldn't be) structural.

Crucially, even if you are completely unwilling to take a stab at a fix yourself, hiring a local handyman to patch a hole via some good enough technique should still be far cheaper in most places than buying a nice new TV.

But nothing is gonna ever beat buying a 2nd-hand framed picture or plaque or movie poster or grabbing a flyer from the junkmail on your porch and tacking it over the hole... And if you're determined to fix holes with a TV, you can probably find one used for about as cheap / free as any of the other choices. Which is what makes this such a stupid example - the cost of TVs, like framed images or furniture, spans from $0 to "as much as you're willing to pay". Hiring someone can also be arbitrarily expensive, but can by definition never be 0. So the comparison is rhetorical trickery and demonstrates nothing.

...other than, apparently, Andreessen's dissatisfaction with paying tradespeople.

Android works great - lets you select the # and then gives you a context menu with the option to call (or copy, or search).

...unless someone made the phone # a tel: protocol link, in which case it has the selection behavior of any other link. Which is mostly fine, since "copy" is a context menu option for tel: links... unless some jerk put a tel: URL in that isn't the same number as what is shown in the text of the link, in which case it's time for some crazy hoop-jumping to either copy OR call the number.

FWIW, you can generally figure out what's allowed fairly quickly by checking the content model for a given element[1]. Some browsers might be more or less restrictive, but for normal usage this'll be more than enough to avoid unexpected behavior.

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#the-button-element:concept-ele...

It does not. What it does do is submit the form, so if you trigger some fast change to the page or async behavior from the click event, you may never see it because the submission happens and the page reloads (or a different page loads if form action is set to a different URL). If you're relying on event bubbling, the click handler may run after the form is submitted, which is even less likely to do what you intend.

If you aren't expecting this (and don't know how to discover it e.g. by examining browser dev tools, server logs, etc.) then you'll assume the button is broken and... probably try something else.

Even if you do discover it, you may try something that won't quite have the same reliability - at one point it was common to see folks putting preventDefault() or return false in their click handlers to squelch the (correct) behavior, rather than changing the type of button.