rrwo

I think the cost of paying for a dedicated email service is worth it. (There are plenty of smaller, privacy-oriented services such as Proton Mail or Fast Mail.)

They're better at it than I am, and it means I don't have to fill up my free time maintaining another server.

One solution is to use a unique email address for every website, and change the address if the site gets compromised (with the old address getting added to a spam filter).

The last thing anyone wants a smart home assistant for is to purchase stuff.

Controlling lights, heating and cooling, play music, find information, yes. But shopping is unexciting and low on the list.

Depends on how much you're willing to pay and how long you're willing to wait for them to be available.

The best carpenters will be making custom furniture and wood panels for mansions, and have multi-year waiting lists.

There are tradespeople who are excellent and available to mere mortals, though. But there's often a waiting list, and you may pay more. (I've had the best luck with auto-mechanics.)

The problem with OpenAI isn't about the license or where it's hosted.

The problem is that it's not intelligent. It's a word salad generator.

This reminds me of a story that I heard from a tree surgeon. A customer complained about the cost of removing a tree as it was "unskilled" labour, and he asked them if they knew how to remove a 30-metre high tree without it falling on his house or car, or if he even owned the right tools, or if he was able and willing to climb up to the top of that tree and remove branches.

Thanks for posting that.

People tend to overlook that the technologies we use today have a much older history.

A tool like that won't replace auditing dependencies.

The total age of dependencies tell you nothing useful.

Why are you in a worse position?

That depends on the changes to the library since, and how and where the library is used.

Suppose I regularly generate a CSV file, all ASCII, where all the rows are integers or fixed precision numbers. I have a ten year old CSV library that processes that file, and has worked without any problem for ten years.

I have no interest in updating the library. Updates can introduce downtime, but provide no improvement. In fact, they introduce a slight performance hit because of new features and that I don't need. There is also the risk that the updates will introduce bugs, and then I'll have to spend time diagnosing the bug, and coming up with a fix.

Now let me reverse this: suppose there are two libraries to do the same task, A and B. They don't have the same features, but for your use case, they are both easy to use and do exactly what you need.

A was first released in the 1980s and was last updated five years ago. It's still maintained and is available in most Linux distributions.

B was first released three years ago and has had 20 updates since, 18 of which included fixes for security issues that don't affect A. (The website for A is regularly updated to indicate that it has been tested and these issues do not affect t.)

Are you better off using A or B?

This also wrongly assumes that newer is better.

For example, CLDR changed the UK abbreviation for September from "Sep" to "Sept" and broke a lot of code as libraries used newer versions of the data https://unicode-org.atlassian.net/browse/CLDR-14412

Stack Overflow has been less useful for several years before OpenAI.

I find for web technologies it's less useful because the technologies keep change, and what was a good answer in 2010 is not now. To answer questions I find it more useful to consult a primary source, such as the documentation on a some software's website, or a forum dedicated to that software.

On SO I often get no replies, or unhelpful and often toxic comments along the lines of "Technology X is bad, use Y instead".

Or I often get people who answer the question as if they show applying for a job at Google. No, I just need help with some software to process a few thousand rows and send a summary once a month by email. I'm not trying to process petabytes of data with a response time of <1ms.

There was a paper in early 2000s with some mathematical modeling about that, see https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-all-mo...

TLDR all Europeans may have a common ancestor as late as 1400 BCE, maybe 55 CE.

I suspect that enforcement of licences will be based on who owns the licence.

A large corporation? Of course. You're not even aloud to talk about the product without paying a fee.

A small creator? Oh no, it's fair use.

Yes, it means that the plastic is going to start entering the good chain there. Plastiglomerate rocks mean that there are bits of plastic in the soil, and this will be consumed by plants and worms, which will be consumed by animals that eat them.

Sometimes a feature request is considered a bug by customers: this product would be easier to use if we could do X, and the competing product lets us to that.

Deleting old schema migrations is just busywork.

It doesn't hurt if they are there. Disk space isn't a problem, and they still take up space in git repo anyway.

The US authorities can deny a visa or even entry for those already have a visa for petty, arbitrary reasons, including the suspicion that you might engage in "immoral activities". It does not matter whether it is legal in the US.

Other countries have similar rules.

US law only applies to the US, and what is legal is not the same as what is moral.

As for fair use, this is not the same as someone remixing or sampling songs, or writing fan fiction or satire or quoting works for criticism.

People do not want models trained on their creative works, so that someone else can make money using those models to produce similar creative works as a service for third parties.

No, it isn't.

If I publish something on the internet, I am only making it available for people to read.

That does not give anyone the right to use it in other ways.

It's not being "woke" at all. Usually "woke" people are accused of accommodating other cultures to the detriment of "Western" culture. But here you're using it to criticize Westerners for not accommodating another culture.

Most westerners find the symbol offensive, so the symbol should not be publicly displayed in western countries.

Yes, the world does not revolve around the west. But when you live somewhere, you should respect the local culture, be it in "the west" or anywhere else.

A significant number of Americans and Europe whose ancestors weren't directly persecuted by nazis, but who fought in WW2 against the nazis and fascists, and they also find the swastika offensive.

Also note that the nazis also murdered Romani, Sinti, Poles, Slavs in concentration camps and ghettos. They also murdered and starved the general civillian populations of areas they took over.

The symbol is going to be associated with nazis so long as nazis keep using it, and people in the west (especially for places and people affected by the nazis) will find it offensive.

IP-based location is mostly usable for country. I've rarely found it gets the city right, often it doesn't even get the county right.

It makes sense to use geolocation for search. It's not just for searching for businesses, as the meaning of a word you are searching for will depend on where you are.

IP-based geolocation isn't very reliable. And if people are using VPNs then it's useless.

"A deadly explosion in Poland kicked off hours of near-gleeful speculation about whether NATO would join the fight against Russia."

I don't think it was "gleeful" at all. It seems like NATO members were scrambling around to find any evidence that it was an accident.

You need people to monitor bwhat users are doing. They realize that users are doing X and Y manually to do Z. So you implement feature Z.

If you don't, then a competitor that implements Z might become more appealing to users.

But features are not always user-visible. New features are regularly added to web browsers and phones, and it's often in your interest as a web site or app developer to make use of them.

Losing 80% of employees is not the same as losing 80% of the workload.

Much of that workload isn't going away, even if they are ignoring it.

Another problem is that the better employees can move to better jobs more easily. So when management becomes a problem, they'll move elsewhere, and that will inspire more employees to leave.

You end up with the less productive employees remaining.

A company like Twitter isn't made up of just "software engineers". Besides writing software, (likely different) people are deploying and running it, testing and integrating it with other systems, monitoring it, securing it.

Also, some of the people who have been working at a company for a long time know the systems in detail. They may not be the people who'd win a popularity contest, but you don't want these people to suddenly leave.

With a couple of exceptions, it looks like the further north a country is, the higher the antidepressant usage is.