JoshTriplett

> But then a load of others will complain about electron apps.

I want to run web apps in my browser. I understand why Signal isn't a web app, and I'm willing to put up with that for security, but nobody else gets that excuse. Web apps belong in a browser tab.

You know what's awesome about TUIs? They live in a tab in my terminal. 95% of the time, my system has three windows open: terminal, browser, Signal.

Please, make more TUIs and web apps, so they can live in my terminal or my browser.

> Merely listing prices (without an associated automated payment form which could imply a contract was en force upon successful payment) doesn't actually force you to do business with anyone.

In some cases it could. If you want to say "we categorically don't do X for ethical reasons", that can sometimes be more easily defensible in a way that "we have a standard price for doing this, but we don't want to do it for you in particular" may be harder to defend. (Even though I think both should always be possible.)

> The cruelty scale is somewhat orthogonal to difficulty, and misses another axis; you can have punishingly difficult puzzles seem to have logic, and punishingly difficult puzzles that do not.

I'd agree with that. I dislike "read the author's mind" puzzles.

> w.r.t KQ5, not saving the mouse from the cat is something that will get you if you haven't played enough Sierra games to know that missing a single random event with a short timer is likely enough to render the game unwinnable; when I played it I just said "damn, I think I need to reload" when the mouse died.

I would classify the mouse as "Nasty", yeah; you know immediately that you missed something.

But, by contrast, you can eat the custard pie rather than the leg of lamb and be in a walking-dead state (and it's not even obvious when you reach the yeti, you don't go "if only I still had a custard pie"); that one is definitely "Cruel".

There are many cases of Cruel that are simply "fail to pick up an item in a place you can't return to" cases (which are more forgivable, I think). But even if you ignore those, there are many other cases of Cruel walking-dead states.

Getting seen by the cat in the castle (not completely obvious you've done something irrevocable) will result in you getting caught later. And the most annoying, I think: if you are too good at the game's moon logic, you can use the peas on the monster the first time it tries to capture you, never get caught, and thus fail to obtain the required item (cheese) from the cell. That one is firmly "you think you solved the puzzle and can proceed" walking-dead.

(Also, the fact that Mordack can just randomly show up in the castle and kill you is just gratuitously obnoxious. You can do everything right, and still fail for reasons of complete randomness that you can't avert.)

Yeah, agreed. Many games did the same, but that didn't make it good.

On the "cruelty scale", that'd be a "Cruel", since it has a "walking dead" state of "you did it wrong a while back and have to start over":

https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty.html (and https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty-revisited.html )

Early King's Quest games were in that same category of "Cruel", where an incorrect choice is not immediately obvious as a mistake.

I think King's Quest V was closer to "Nasty" (because it can catch you off guard with things you fail, but it'll be obvious that you did something wrong). But there are a couple of exceptions that keep it in "Cruel", though: you can eat the wrong item when you're starving, and in some cases if you miss picking up an item you can't go back for it, so if you didn't see it at all then you have to go back to an earlier save. That one definitely required keeping a full array of save files. (Very satisfying to complete, though.)

Even King's Quest VI, which is much more forgiving, has some cases of "you need the right item before proceeding into this section you won't be able to leave (for a while)". But it goes out of its way to advertise those "points of no return", so I'd rate it firmly at "Nasty" rather than "Cruel", with the asterisk that there are ~3 notable points where you might have to go back by more than just your most recent action, but it'll be obvious you want save points at those points to go back to if you find you can't progress inside. (Before the catacombs, before the land of the dead, before entering the castle.) The entry to the catacombs even offers you the chance to go prepare further, if and only if you don't have everything you need.

That too, ever since they decided everything on GitHub was fair game for training AI without respecting its license.

Some devices do this today using ultrasonic, in order to find nearby devices for subsequent pairing.

Exactly. And I think the information theory matters here: it's worth putting in information proportional to the human-supplied input, not proportional to the AI-expanded output.

Yes, it's one of the most common usages of a phone in the car. And most people I know have exactly that workflow: find and set a navigation destination while parked, then drive there without interacting with the phone.

Some of them weren't wildly worse than the era. I think many old games substituted punishing difficulty for depth, so that they'd have more staying power. That was true of some of the early NES games as well.

The only good AGI.

Impressive fitting into the machine. I wonder if SCI would be possible?

> Makes you wonder what millions of your predecessors could do that you can't.

Millions of your predecessors died in ways easily preventable today.

"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." - Ovid

Or data for the increasingly invasive Cloudflare captcha.

They're serving the HTML, they have every ability to track individual web requests without modifying the content they're serving.

The degree to which you have to follow the laws of a place you have no legal nexus in (e.g. no employees) is limited. Non-US companies can and do refuse overreaching requests from the US sometimes.

Apple is subject to the DMA in europe because 1) they have employees in Europe and 2) they want to import and sell physical phones into Europe. It's easy to block imports or fine employees. It is not especially easy to prevent people from spending money on a service provided entirely via the Internet from another country.

It is not at all impossible to impose sanctions on an entire company. But if the US tried to do so over a refusal to put in a backdoor, and the company very loudly made that clear, that would to some extent be exceptional free marketing.

I'm not suggesting giving up the US market. I'm suggesting moving out of the US and continuing to serve the US market from elsewhere, because the US does not have a nation-wide firewall. And working with organizations mounting legal challenges to "please destroy your company in order to put in a backdoor for us".

Certificate Transparency has essentially eliminated the problem of backdoored CAs, because attempting to do so would destroy an entire CA. Binary Transparency can do the same for software.

> If you're a US company building an app/device/etc. such that an intelligence agency like the CIA or FBI would want access to the data in that product which is normally secured, then they're not going to try to sneak it in there without your development team knowing. They're going to have a meeting with the owners of the company and say, "hey, we'd really like you to implement this backdoor for us, and in return we won't cause you in problems."

And then you say, loudly and publicly, "all the source code of our software is public, and our binaries use binary transparency so it's not possible for us to build a binary that doesn't match the source, and people will rapidly find this in our source code at which point we go out of business and you stop having a product to backdoor in the first place".

(And you move out of the US.)

And since this is a foreseeable future, you should start acting now to prepare for that future.

> Immigration is a serious and key issue, which impacts everything else, too.

No, other things are serious and key issues, and immigration is the scapegoat that gives people someone to blame for their problems, distracting from actual solutions that don't fit in a one-sentence slogan the way the non-solution "kick out all the Xes" does. This has been an electoral tactic of right-wing populists for a long, long time.

Standing reminder: The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Social sites aren't supposed to knowingly allow users under 13, but they're not required to proactively exclude them either, nor should they be.

And addictive feeds are a problem for everyone, of any age.

Code submitted to a project should follow the formatting standards of that project and its programming language, which doesn't leave much room for flexibility in whitespace. However, there are many ways to write comments, and many ways to write PR descriptions and commit messages, and often many choices of words to name identifiers, and other potential sources of bits of entropy with no functional impact. It doesn't take that many bits to encode a robust "AI was here" indicator.

Agreed. Put half of it in investments every year, and after a few years they'd have had enough to sustain a browser nearly indefinitely.

That said, the terms of the contract are not public, and it's possible that it was restricted in a fashion which did not permit such usage.

We've seen what happens when almost everyone uses one browser engine (Internet Explorer): that vendor gets undue influence over the direction of the web, and their proprietary extensions make it difficult for others to compete.

We would end up in the same place if everything is based on Blink/WebKit; arguably we're partway there already.

Hopefully Servo will provide a competitive browser engine and full browser in the future as well, with the bonus of being great for embedding. But it's not quite there yet. And other potential competitors have their own problems. Firefox is, for the moment, the most popular and only viable browser not based on Blink/WebKit.

> But the idea that you have a right to privacy while in public is wrong and bad.

On the contrary, you should absolutely have a right to not be pervasively tracked and surveilled.

Exactly. If this works on pull requests, for instance, it'd be really useful for projects trying to do a first-pass filter to close slop spam.

Leeway to advertise in unrelated content? Nope.

> That would be a killer feature for AR glasses. Imagine no billboards, no political posters, no neon storefront clutter.

...people invisible to you by wrapping themselves in a banner-ad cape...

(Actual plot device in a science fiction book.)

Nope, this is a common expression.

If someone's feeling especially playful, they might ask if it's a metric or imperial buttload. An imperial buttload would be loosely based on the idealized/claimed size of some prominent arse in the past, while a metric buttload implies the existence of a platinum-iridium reference derriere.

> This but after going inside the building without authorization

That would make you eminently qualified for a position in AI these days.

"AI assistance" is still not welcome in general. AI security reports are.