its_ethan

OP hadn't been responding to any claims about being "truly life changing" he was addressing the point regarding what parts of his day are now reliant on AI such that his work would be more difficult without it.

You're the one holding him to a standard that it be "truly life changing" when that was never what he was addressing in his comment. (You're also the one adding emphasis that increases the requirements to overcome the authors, and your own, doubt). And who are you to say that these things didn't truly change the OP comments life? Not having to look up implementation details could be a time save for them on the order of hours per week. That could free up time for him to develop a new hobby, start working out, or any other manner of things that could literally change his life. You're not the only one who gets to decide what life changing means.

Also, it really is worth reflecting on the fact that we are where we are as a society because of a bunch of cumulative "I'm X% better at my job" advancements. That's literally one of the main through-lines in technological advancement since the stone age. Another through-line is that technology (even "truly life changing" technology) is frequently over-hyped. There's really nothing new going on here.

What I'm gathering here is that your argument simply boils down to that it's your personal preference (in this example) that rotating 90 degrees should have no associated animation.

The actual job is not "feel" it is "do".

According to.. you? And subject to your expectations? If I click a button to rotate an image 90degrees on my phone's image editor, I personally expect (and want) it to have rotation animation.

So who's right? You, because you speak in absolutes?

It feels a little disingenuous to ignore the second half of his final sentence/conclusion. Feels like you're trying to do some kind of "gotcha".

The main thrust of what he was saying is in the second half: "a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too" - you could do your job tomorrow without an IDE auto-completing common syntax, but it's a useful tool for many people. OP is saying that AI, for him, is similarly a very useful tool that he considers to be close to "critical in [his] day".

Why not actually address that instead of playing word games?

No, you were saying that accessibility is subservient to efficiency

Where do you believe I said that?

I don't recall saying anywhere that efficiency should be a priority over accessibility. I said "what if" to create a hypothetical to demonstrate that it could be. You know, trying to introduce nuance to a conversation. You can read that as obstinance for its own sake if you want.

My hypothetical not existing doesn't mean that some similar scenario isn't true. That's kind of the point of a hypothetical, it's an imaginary example to demonstrate a point. My suggestion that fuel efficiency could be effected may not be correct, but the efficiency of using a pre-existing design to save on new parts/labor very likely is true.

Again, people choosing to latch onto a hypothetical and tear that down instead of treating it like a tool for illustrating a point like it's intended to be is really odd and related to:

If the majority of people "didn't get your point", consider that maybe you aren't great at getting your point across.

As I've said in other replies, I've already noted this- a specific mention of a hypothetical 2mpg that seems to really have distracted people lol

there are other considerations besides one measure of efficiency

Bruh that's literally what I was saying? Instead of how efficiently can you replace a filter in an engine, another benefit might exist instead. Said another way, maybe the "juice" gained from redesigning a fuel filter system instead of using an existing one form another car wasn't worth the "squeeze" of cost and development for the company.

Kinda feels like maybe you (the majority of replies to my original message) didn't get the point, and instead took this as some literal suggestion that I think engines need to have filters in certain spots.

The fact that so many people took this as literally as they did, and seemingly chose to ignore the underlying message of "hey maybe consider tradeoffs exist" makes me start to worry about you too.

Given how many people have seemingly jumped on misinterpreting the truism as me making some claim of a specific fuel efficiency improvement, I'd disagree with people being already familiar with it.

To be concise as well: it's been duly noted by me that contributing to a conversation by attempting to bring in nuance is not always well received when you make up a hypothetical for a topic people are very touchy about.

Yes, I'm sure most people on this website have ran into seemingly bad design choices which made sense once they knew more context. But that doesn't mean that all bad design choices are like this.

I'm literally just saying the yin to this yang. Just because you run into a design that feels malicious doesn't mean that it always is.

Again, sorry for the sin of trying to make an analogy/example of something I'm not an expert in. You can rest easy at night knowing I'll never do it again.

You also pretty neatly laid out how re-using an existing design meant for a different car leads to some benefits to the end customer. Sure the full cost savings don't ever make it to the buyer, but there's still net wins in not spinning up new manufacturing processes (as you say). So I'm not sure why you're coming at this so combatively? Because I dared float the idea that maybe it's an engine efficiency thing we're unaware of, instead of part re-use cost/lead time efficiency improvement? Again, sorry for stepping outside of my lane...

ok, glad you seem to have everything figure out so definitively

I'm just gonna copy and paste a response to another similar comment: The point that I am making (obviously, I think) is that tradeoffs exist, even if you don't think the right decision was made, your full view into the trade space is likely incomplete, or prioritizes something different than the engineers.

Putting some random number of hypothetical mpg improvement was clearly a mistake, but I assumed people here would be able to get the point I was trying to make, instead of getting riled up about the relationship (or lack thereof) of oil filters and fuel efficiency.

I'm just gonna copy and paste a response to another similar comment:

The point that I am making (obviously, I think) is that tradeoffs exist, even if you don't think the right decision was made, your full view into the trade space is likely incomplete, or prioritizes something different than the engineers.

Putting some random number of hypothetical mpg improvement was clearly a mistake, but I assumed people here would be able to get the point I was trying to make, instead of getting riled up about the relationship (or lack thereof) of oil filters and fuel efficiency.

I'm using this hypothetical to illustrate the point that: tradeoffs exist, and that you (we) may not have full insight into the full complexity of the trade space that the engineers were working with.

Putting some random number of hypothetical mpg improvement was clearly a mistake, but I assumed people here would be able to get the point I was trying to make, instead of getting riled up about the relationship (or lack thereof) of oil filters and fuel efficiency.

Sorry we're talking about a hypothetical car engine, and as an analogy to software development. I'm not an expert in designing car engines like you, but acting like this example being not fully realistic is some kind of "gotcha" for the point I'm making is really frustrating.

The point that I am making (obviously, I think) is that tradeoffs exist, even if you don't think the right decision was made, your full view into the trade space is likely incomplete, or prioritizes something different than the engineers.

Based on the replies, saying there's a hypothetical 2mpg improvement to be had was a mistake, everyone is latching on to that like there's some actual engine we're investigating.

Glad to know in this hypothetical car scenario the owner decided to not get an oil change leading to the total loss of the vehicle. That seems very realistic and definitely something that car designs should be optimized around.

Or, we consider that 2mpg across 100,000 cars can save 3,500,000 gallons of gas being burned for the average American driving ~12k miles per year. And maybe things aren't so black and white. You're argument, in this hypothetical, is that negligent car owner who destroys their car because they're choosing to not change the oil is worth burning an extra 3.5millon gallons of gasoline.

Right but what I'm getting at is that there can be tradeoffs that might make designing for maintainability mean optimizing for something less important to the end user.

Do you optimize an engine for how easy it is to replace a filter once or twice a year (most likely done by someone the average car-owner is already paying to change their oil for them), or do you optimize it for getting better gas mileage over every single mile the car is driven?

We're talking about a hypothetical car and neither of us (I assume) design engines like this, I'm just trying to illustrate a point about tradeoffs existing. To your own point of efficiency being a trade with durability, that's not in a vacuum. If a part is in a different location with a different loading environment, it can be more/less durable (material changes leading to efficiency differences), more/less likely to break (maybe you service the hard-to-service part half as often when it's in a harder to service spot), etc.

What if there's an efficiency in engine design by placing the filter in the middle that leads to a +2mpg improvement for the driver? Or that it fails, on average, 22k miles later into it's life? Not all hard-to-repair-yourself designs are malicious...

So... what exactly is your argument here? The children of a man who is convicted and sent to prison should also go to prison, so as to avoid separation? Or that we just don't send men to prison if they have children?

Apple paid 304m in taxes on 1200m in profits in the UK. That's ~25% tax rate on profits. It's entirely subjective to say if that's a "pretty hefty" rate or not, but it seems to be pretty standard for G20 countries.

I suspect the UK wouldn't love losing that 304m, but Apple would also probably not enjoy losing the 1200m of profits either.

It's almost like international companies having to deal with legislation in every country they operate in is a more complicated topic than could ever be hashed out in the comment sections of a tech news site...

https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2025/07/apples-uk-tax-b...

It's all relative. Except "AI". That is more of a disabler than an enabler

Feels like there's some irony here given the rest of your comment. "It's always been this way and probably always will be... except for this time it's different."

I'm not trying to say you're wrong, just a funny thing I noticed that reminded me of an Arrested Development scene.

This is a nice example/re-stating of what the heritability % "means" here.

I'm curious, with something like smoking/drinking, how you can be confident that you've untangled genetic predispositions to addiction or overconsumption from those "modifiable factors". I guess that's just captured within the 50% heritability? And if you could confidently untangle them, you might find heritability is higher than 50%?

What is it that you're arguing for then? That there be some entity that gets to decide what is and isn't a productive use of all of our excess money? Who gets to decide what's excess? Who gets to decide what is and isn't a productive use of the money?

How is this any different than buying a house? Buying a house that's already been built is pretty damn close to the same thing as buying gold. No new "work" is being done into the economy, you're just exchanging dollars for an asset that will likely appreciate a bit faster than inflation but less than $SPY.

The person you bought it from can do something else with that money, sure, but that's also true of the other person in your transaction to buy gold.

Maybe you'll say a house has more utility than bars of gold, but all of this at the end of the day, seems to come down to your specific views and judgements of what it means for capital to be used productively. So to circle back to the beginning, what is it you're advocating for here? That because you don't see gold as a low risk hedge against inflation as being "productive" it should face more taxes to incentivize it not happening?

Well it's more like a currency than any other object because it has been used historically to either a) be the currency, or b) back the currency. Sure that's not true today in the United States, but like, it's obviously different than frozen concentrated orange juice... can we not at least agree on that pretty tame assumption? Or is this just some semantics race to non-meaning?

Iron ore is similar physically, but it's really just a raw input material/ingredient used for heavy industrial manufacturing and production, it's never been intended to be an appreciating asset/hedge against inflation.

I'm unfamiliar with whatever tax is being referred to in this specific comment thread, but I'd be curious how something like $SIVR is handled, considering it's backed by actual silver in vaults. That could lead to some unintended consequences if the investment plans of a lot of money suddenly changes how it's being allocated.

Sure, that stuff too. The point still being that it's a pretty predictable set of changes being made to whatever photo you give it.

There's a pretty clear expected transformation here though? It takes an image and then reduces the "shiny-ness" of it by giving it the same transformation: change the sky to overcast, add material degradation like rust, reduce the landscaping by adding weeds/puddles, and remove the happy looking people.

I don't recall the exact specifics, but I do remember a while ago there was some outrage that Nestle was bottling some really large sounding amount of water (think ~millions of gallons a day?) from a Great Lake. The math behind how much was being used as a % of lake volume was negligible (it would take ~3,500,000 years to "drain" Michigan at that rate).

In my mind this is partly due to people not understanding large numbers, and also not understanding just how much water is actually in the Great Lakes. It's a huge amount - Lake Michigan has 1,288,000,000,000,000 gallons in it. Every human on earth could use close to 10gal of water per day for the next 50 years before Lake Michigan would be "dry", assuming it was never replenished. And that's just Lake Michigan. (Obviously environmental systems are more complicated than the simple division I did, and individual water usage isn't simply 10gal a day - it's just to demonstrate a point).

Now, someone else pointed out that the tragedy of the commons is a sort of death by a thousand cuts. And if anyone who shows up is allowed to draw millions of gallons a day, that can add up and certainly have negative effects. It's just important to actually understand the scale of the numbers involved, and to not let legitimate environmental concerns be cross-contaminated with just anti-tech-of-the-year sentiment, or political motivations, or whatever else might cloud the waters (pun unintended).

Sure, but that's to my second point of if they pick up camp and leave, that's still developed property that has potential to be more useful than it had been.

And in the same way that construction-damaged roads can lead to costs on everyone else - the development of that land employed people, and that is a positive thing for construction workers and their families (more than just financially).

Just because you can point at negative consequences doesn't mean positive ones don't exist as well. It's rarely black and white as to the net effects of things like this. You could/should even be considering what doing a build-out like this does for the reputation of a city, and the sense of optimism it can bring to a local community that might otherwise be left behind, completely out of the picture. There's another world where a small town appears not in an article about a new datacenter (or the possible ensuing city renege boondoggle) but as a small blip in a story about how small towns in this country have decayed as a result of being passed by during the current tech "boom".

It's also not all that trivial (or cheap) to just transport a datacenter to another state, or even county. You'd have to be pretty sure that whatever tax you're trying to now avoid is more than the (potentially) zero-tax new build or relocation you'd have to do to "escape".

At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of the local government to make sure that the deal is a net benefit to the community. Maybe that is too much to expect lol

I'd also chime in that the presence of a datacenter in a smaller community can also help through the increased tax revenue the town/county gets.

Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I have to imagine that the local county is going to net some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used to then support the town.

There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on being developed. Even if that is done in financial isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new building designed for tech is being built. Should the datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable building/development that has some value.

Due to the United States Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin v. Illinois, the State of Illinois is not subject to certain provisions of the compact pertaining to new or increased withdrawals or diversions from the Great Lakes.

I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt around this compact?

Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a framework for how the states are to manage it. It is entirely believable to me that this compact would actually support water being used for developing tech in the surrounding communities (like using it in data centers).

They may not always work, but it's also not the case that they never work - which is what it seems like you're suggesting.

Sorry, but if someone makes a claim and cites a reference, how do you verify "is the stuff correct" without checking that reference?

0 degrees F is a cold winter day, 100 degrees F is a hot summer day

0 degrees C is a cold winter day, 100 degrees C means you're dead

I think he's suggesting that a 0-100 scale for temperature/"relative warmth outside" is more intuitive than a 0-37 scale. It's easier to to place 73 degrees on a 0-100 relative warmth scale than it is to place 18 degrees on a 0-37 scale (unless of course you grew up calibrated to the 0-37 scale and know that 18degrees means you maybe need a light jacket or whatever).

I think it's funny that one of the main benefits of metric is its base-10-ness where things scale so nicely from 1-10-100-1000 etc. but then for temperature we're supposed to be fine with a 0-37? Fahrenheit is basically the 1-100 version of temperature (when it comes to weather).