Camillo

What do you do with a pocket knife every day? Whittle?

The Figma redesign shows an MDI interface, which was simply never a thing on Mac. It would have had floating palettes, like Photoshop: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/683-adobe-photoshop-4-0

> Secondly, I wonder (not trying to cast doubt, genuinely wonder) how surveymakers level-set these questions to be linguistically neutral. How do they account for "material well-being" translating perfectly across most European and some Asian languages? Or even the expression "meaningful"? Just something I think about when it comes to large surveys.

We're talking about survey professionals here. Experts. To suggest that they did not take care in aligning translations in an international survey is borderline insulting.

On the other hand, the article says:

> But in these four European countries many provide more than one answer to the question on what makes life meaningful so material well-being is pushed down to the position of the second- or third-most common answer.

> (Interestingly, in Asian countries respondents were far more likely to mention only one source of meaning in life, with Koreans most likely to do so at 62 percent.)

Which to me sounds like most Koreans might have not realized that they were expected to provide multiple answers. I can easily see that happening, given that European languages tend to have grammatical plural ("Please list the most important things that give meaning to your life"), while Korean doesn't, AFAIK.

So yes, I guess it's entirely possible that they fucked up the basics of their international survey.

Let's not forget the media. Renting a boat and talking to people at the port to see what's going on should be right up an investigative journalist's alley. The Silicon Valley guy is doing the job of not just one power center, but two.

> India Counting Down to 1B Doses

Misleading, disingenuous, mendacious title. They're clearly counting _up_.

Does this feature have a general name? Swift users seem to call it "dot syntax", which is not a good name. I want to google "C++ should have <this feature>" and find a proposal from 2013 that never moved forward, but "C++ should have dot syntax" is just silly.

Why would you need to return something (opened, used, without packaging) a year later?

So it's like the bluecheck on Twitter, but not visible to users?

How are you going to deal with the situation?

Eh, at this point it's a boy crying wolf situation. Whenever there's a new space gizmo you know they're going to say "we only designed it to work for eight minutes", and then six months later it'll still be chugging along, because the actual design life was measured in years.

They could at least say "the doodad is designed to work for two years, but there's a 5% chance that it'll be DOA, because so many things can go wrong in space". That would be more realistic.

Would be very interesting to hear from a Finn about this.

- Is the labor shortage real, or is the available labor simply too expensive for local tastes?

- The Finnish education system was held up as the most successful in the world when that was a topic a couple years ago; why can't it produce more tech talent?

- Does the country experience a significant brain drain of (English-speaking) local engineers?

- Given the circumstances, why not try to use more remote labor (e.g. in EU countries, within the same time zone) rather than trying to move people to Helsinki?

No, 2% is the percentage of US population that identifies as Native Americans, but it's a highly mixed population. The percentage of actual NA DNA in the US gene pool is certainly much less than 1% at this point.

"It becomes too hard for a small team to write a browser" can't be both the horrible dystopia you're trying to avert and the catastrophe from a few years ago that you're still mad about.

Read-only Wikipedia is just "Wikipedia" for 99.99% of users. I can't remember the last time I've even considered clicking the edit button.

The funny thing is that Carbon was based on the modified Toolbox APIs that were intended for Copland! There used to be a header with a big comment block telling the whole history. AFAIR, they had tried changing the System 7 APIs so they could run on a system with memory protection, then they gave up because Copland had failed (and I think part of it was a mandate to be able to use the System 7 API _without_ changes, which was impossible), then Mac OS X came along and the comment changed to "we're doing this after all, lol".

I can't believe this awesome joke is getting downvotes. It's like pearls before swine, but I'm leaving it up so you can find out which amongst you are objectively bad people.

Snell's work on optics would later be overshadowed by the GNU alternative, Fresnel.

A "man bites dog" story.

OLPC straddles the line between startup and social program. Given that it wasn't actively harmful [citation needed], it actually managed to produce the laptops, and they had some non-zero if modest utility, we'd have to place it in the upper ranks of the latter category. Even if it had zero impact, that would merely place it in the modal group [0], nothing to be ashamed of!

[0]: see the Iron Law of Evaluation.

What's a typical rude passenger like?

Surprisingly readable! It seems quite usable if I move the screen a bit closer (at the wrist of my extended arm), but it gives me eyestrain at my preferred distance (at the tip of the fingers). Maybe I need better glasses... or better eyes. :/

Or just "than previously"?

> I'm confused though by his comments about "our species’ one-time amazing levels of genetic diversity." Overall, he seems to be espousing the idea that "diversity" is something we once had lots of, but have lost over time. Is this true?

"Diversity" can mean a lot of things. In this case, he's referring to the variety of individual alleles. Due to population bottlenecks, most of humanity has reduced variation: for example, at a certain spot in the genome everyone has a T, because everyone who survived the bottleneck happened to have a T there; but in the population that didn't go through the bottleneck, some people have a G instead.

On the other hand, for phenotypical diversity it's not just the set of individual alleles that matters, but their distribution and correlation. For example, let's say height is affected by thousands of genes, for each of which there is an allele that makes you slightly taller and one that makes you slightly shorter, and the combined effect of all these genes is approximately additive.

Then you may have a population A which has both variants for each gene, but they're independently distributed, so everyone is of medium height, with some variance. We also have a population B, which has only one variant left for several of these genes (they have lost diversity!). But B is split into two sub-populations, which differ in the distribution of the remaining height genes: B1 has more tall alleles, and B2 has more short alleles.

Now the average height of B1 is higher than that of A, and the average height of B2 is lower than that of A. You will find very tall people in B1 that you would never see in A, and very short people in B2 that you would also never see in A. So B has more diverse height phenotypes, even though B1 and B2 (even put together!) still have lower genetic diversity than A in terms of the available repertoire of alleles.

The problem here is not the AI, but the incentive design. The Chinese netizens who take this as inspiration to comment on the incentives in their own lives (under the 996 system) are the insightful ones, more son than those who worry about "AI ethics".

We have so many systems in the real world that set up bad incentives for humans, yet the concept is largely misunderstood by politicians and decision makers. Our democratic discourse is dominated by first-order thinking, our laws are too often written under the assumption that the affected entities' behaviour will remain the same under the new incentives, which never holds.

Is there really that much API churn on Android? I have a cruddy old app originally written for API 16 and it still works. It's not on the play store, though.

A related problem with the apps is that they expand the tipping expectation to all sorts of interactions that were not traditionally tipped, such as ordering at a cash register. You don't need to tip someone just because they have an iPad!

This setup seems beneficial to both restaurant owners and customers in China. The faster ordering process saves time for servers, which reduces labor costs, and the savings can be passed on to customers.

But it cannot work in America because of the tipping culture.

Most of the workforce is young enough that they weren't going to die anyway. The endpoint they're interested in is "does the person end up with long-term lung scarring/cognitive impairment/erectile dysfunction/dry mouth" and all the other scary long covid effects. I've seen at least one study showing increased risk of all sorts of neurological issues after even mild covid cases, FWIW.

It's not actually a decision yet, is it? It's just something the French want to do. Presumably everyone else will oppose it, for the reasons you gave.

Oh, it's no secret. Google's autocomplete will actually suggest appending "reddit" to certain queries. For example, let's take one of the most SEO-spammy queries imaginable, "best mattress 2021". Google will suggest:

- best mattress 2021

- best mattress 2021 consumer reports

- best mattress 2021 reddit

- best mattress 2021 for back pain

- best mattress 2021 wirecutter

etc.

But of course Reddit is already rife with shills. Not sure about CR.