998244353

> Some of the ideas he partially helped popularize like the concept of language shaping how we think has been pseudo-scientific nonsense that is still actively harming society today.

While the idea of language literally changing the way you think is probably not true, I think the weaker version of limiting the thoughts you can express is still interesting. What's the use of having revolutionary thoughts if it is literally impossible to articulate them in any meaningful way to anyone else?

Anyway, while the book is a cautionary tale, it's still science fiction at the end of the day. Orwell can hardly be blamed for people taking the Newspeak stuff too seriously.

Non-technical users don't want to do that, and won't understand any of that. That's the unfortunate reality of developing software for people.

If Excel generates CSV files with some Windows-1234 encoding, then my "import data from CSV" function needs to handle that, in one way or another. A significant number of people generate CSV files from Excel and if these people upload these files into my application and I assume an incorrect encoding, they won't care that Microsoft is using obsolete or weird defaults. They will see it as a bug in my program and demand that I fix my software. Even if Excel offers them a choice in encoding, they won't understand any of that and more importantly they don't want to deal with that right now, they just want the thing to work.

I don't think it is "pure GPT" because of the "As someone...". It seems more likely that this is someone who is using GPT to make their comments longer or "fancier". Or it might be a rare example of someone who actually talks like that.

For what it's worth, I do not remember a time when YouTube's suggestions or search results were good. Absurdities like that happened 10 and 15 years ago as well.

These days my biggest gripe is that they put unrelated ragebait or clickbait videos in search results that I very clearly did not search for - often about American politics.

> In October, YouTube made it nearly impossible to watch its website while using an ad blocker.

Did they revert that? I saw those for maybe a week. After that, I assume uBlock Origin had already worked around that. Probably the same will happen with mobile clients.

In London too, though, have airports like London Ashford [0] considerably further from London trying to cash in the London brand.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydd_Airport

It looks at the request headers.

When you navigate to https://i.redd.it/dl34o62azctc1.jpeg, Chrome sends (I'm doing this on Chrome because I think I've made some hacks in Firefox to fix this)

  GET https://i.redd.it/dl34o62azctc1.jpeg
  Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9

and Reddit responds with a redirect to https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https://i.redd.it/dl34o62az....

But when the browser loads the same image from an <img src="..."> tag, Chrome sends

  GET https://i.redd.it/dl34o62azctc1.jpeg
  Accept: image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,image/svg+xml,image/*,*/*;q=0.8

and Reddit responds with the actual image.

Reading such stories always reminds me of taking the TOEFL test. At least at the time, their website was full of all sorts of warnings and threats about what would happen if you registered with a name that did not match the legal name on your ID. Yet their website did not let me enter the letter "ä" in the name field.

What makes this all the more puzzling is that TOEFL is presumably aimed at people who are not native English speakers, so you would expect all sorts of non-ASCII characters to be fairly common.

> and then give customer service (via phone/email) the admin/power user abilities to deal with the few special cases that the website cannot handle.

Typically, the problem here is that customer service is unwilling to deal with these special cases, through some combination of:

1. They are too scared to correct the data - e.g. they have been told to follow some poorly-thought-out procedure to the dot and/or they're scared of committing some sort of "fraud" by entering the data sensibly.

2. Although they could handle such cases in their system, the system has to interface with a labyrinth of other systems that can't.

3. They have to use an interface that is essentially the same as the website, with all of its limitations.

I like to add a 41th rule to this list: "There exists a right way to handle names that does not make any incorrect assumptions."

That, unfortunately, isn't always possible. Sorting a list of people by their names alphabetically is a fairly reasonable thing to ask and in many places, it is expected that names will be sorted the surname, whether or not it appears first. This by itself requires breaking rules 18 and 20, but we may not be able to opt not to do it.

The hard problem is not what to do in the ideal case: the hard problem is figuring out how to handle names in a way that minimizes friction if requirements force us to make some such assumptions.

Well, the article was about work.

Mobile devices may be well-suited for chatting and general entertainment but I seriously doubt that many people could do effective work - more than a couple quick changes - with the mobile versions of Word or Excel.

IMO this is a red herring. A corporation's right to hold property, enter into contracts and to sue or be sued might be technically called "corporate personhood", but this is very different from what laypeople mean when they compare companies and people.

> cashiers expecting to be handed over your card

This is quite frustrating. I used to have a rather low limit for contactless payments. Back then, some terminals would not prompt for a PIN when the limit was exceeded and would simply decline the transaction. Abroad, I had several incidents where a cashier would take my card, see the "contactless" icon on the card and tap the terminal. It was usually difficult to explain with limited English that they needed to insert the card because the limit was exceeded.

I ended up crossing the contactless icon out with a marker.

It might be good for the career but this sounds like the opposite of fun to me.

Poets and novelists maybe, but not many people pay particular attention to who exactly wrote a particular magazine article.

Well, they claim to be written by a human. I would not be surprised at all if someone working for a dubious online news site wrote these articles with ChatGPT and Microsoft's curator AI happily picked them up.

I think they are suggesting that the stronger KYB/KYC was ineffective at reducing the amount of spam.

You are correct, but static typing does make it a lot easier. Working with Rider feels like working with an IDE that fully understands the code, at least structurally. Working with PyCharm feels like working with an IDE that makes intelligent guesses.

> Geolocated IP addresses always indicate the preferred and correct human language of the person on the other end.

This one is only tangentially related to fraud prevention. But I've never really understood this. Is the Accept-Language header really so inaccurate?

What do you feel has changed in the last 20 years? (This has been discussed a lot but my impression is that people compare today to the 1960s more than to the 00s).

How does uBlock help? Do you just block the thumbnail elements?

The actual paper seems to be https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00076.

I wonder why they chose 3.5mm in the first place instead of making an USB thingy. Just because it used to be more universal compared to like 5 different standards for the charging/data port? There are some theories online but no definitive answer as far as I can tell.

> - Make kids show their work (outlines, revision histories)

I don't like this. It seems to me that this would lead to teachers forcing formulaic approaches to writing on children (even more than they already do). No uniform process is going to work on everyone and having students write using a process like that produces bland, uninspired and unmotivated essays.

Furthermore, outlines and revision histories also seem easy enough to fake with a GPT-like AI: you can just ask the AI to write an outline and then have it iterate on that.

So... basically like cgi_bin?

What rights, specifically, do you propose to eliminate?

Why would it be deliberately misconfigured?

It probably isn't actually "your organization". Some MS products just use that as a generic "this is disabled in some config or the other", (perhaps correctly) assuming that in most cases, it actually is turned off by the organization.

Very random example: SharePoint has a MS Word integration - you can open a .docx file from there, it opens in Word and you are actually able to edit the file on the server as if it was on your computer. At least in the older on-prem versions, this actually used the Word installed on your computer, not some web version. If you used a custom authentication provider, a little browser opened within Word and you had to log in there. But Word needed to "trust" the domain. On a personal computer, you could just edit the trust settings in some Word menu, yet the error message still said "your organization..." if you didn't.

If I had to choose between seeing the ads by YouTube and seeing the creator's own ad, I'd choose the second.

I don't really know why. But if I turn off ad blocking, YouTube's own ads are way more obnoxious and intrusive. Maybe it's because every advertiser has figured out they need to cram as much shit into a 5-second segment? Or maybe it is because seeing an ad at the very beginning is much more psychologically disruptive (or if the YT ad is in the middle, it is usually inserted without any regard to the video, even breaking up sentences).

I feel like this position is meaningless. People experience something they call "consciousness". The phenomenon exists. Saying that it doesn't exist seems to really mean "the phenomenon is an illusion created by something else". But we don't understand how that works either, and this explanation is just as untestable as any other.