dse1982

Amen. Chatbots are a band-aid on broken UX. <insert bandaid tank meme here> Trying to explain this for a while at the company I work at, but everybody is drunk on the kool-aid. But I get it: good UX takes deep thought and creativity. Tacking on a chatbot does not.

Insurances are not hedges. Hedges are „investment position[s] intended to offset potential losses or gains that may be incurred by a companion investment“ (wikipedia) of which insurances can be a part of, while in an insurance „a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury“ (wikipedia).

Absolutely not the same thing. But even so there is still an interesting insight to be gained from common parlance:

Usually we talk of a bet in a situation where you take an event that is somewhat out of your control and irrelevant for your wellbeing and intentionally and actively make some kind of material outcome for yourself depend on it. In so far speculation at stock markets is „gambly“, you are right about that. And if you have measures in place that hedge the risks of those speculations you might be tempted to very loosely call those your insurance.

If you look however at how the term insurance is typically used you can see a difference there: you insure against risks that are non-avoidable risks of your daily life or business. You do not intentionally and actively enter the cancer-lottery. And you do not actively take measures to win your „health-insurance-bet“ because the outcome is still considered catastrophic, even in case of „winning“ it.

And the way people tend to see things more as insurance vs. bets follows exactly these lines: is it about mitigating a devastating natural risk that is hard or impossible to avoid 100% or is it about something where you actively and intentionally attach your wellbeing to a random event. (We could separate this out in two questions: do you involve yourself actively and intentionally; and: is the outcome that you bet on inherently against your intrinsic interests. But that is a detail that I don‘t think we need to go into)

I think this explains the common parlance quite well: health-insurance: the risk is unavoidable, you do not willfully enter some kind of cancer-lottery on whose outcome you bet. Also you have an intrinsic interest in not „winning“ said „cancer-lottery“. -> no doubt it is insurance.

Legal expenses insurance: risks depend largely on your behaviour but you usually still have an intrinsic interest not having to use it. -> some people might see this as more gambling- or “bet-“ adjacent.

Speculating on one stock and hedging that bet. -> Totally not an insurance. Also not something insurances do. An insurance might be part of your hedge (maybe insurance of freight against loss) but insurers typically do not insure bets. Which makes sense, since part of their business-model is that the customer has an intrinsic interest that the payout case does not occur.

I don't know what she is doing now, since we lost contact many years ago. Basically after school when I moved away to study. So no happily ever after with her, but it was absolutely worth the effort. It would never have worked out, since we were way to different, which she knew, but I – as always – took longer to understand. However it was such an important thing for me, since it was the first time that I was really confident and brave enough to be really open about my feelings and my interest. Of course it took me some time and overcoming, but in the end I was able to openly communicate to her and also not trying to play cool or hide it from my friends. I think it really was the first conscious experience for me in regards to that: to really just do the jump, be open about my feelings, take my shot and in the process make myself vulnerable. As I said, she gave me a clear "no" and I think that was for the better – not only because we came from quite different worlds but also because I still had so much to learn. However she handled all this so perfect, gracefully and appreciative: actually for me the perfect experience to learn and grow from. We stayed friends, continued to do stuff together and it never was much of a topic after a while. I still remember how after I was a bit petulant in the first time after her rejecting me and refused her offering me some of her lunch. She told me in the most respectful way that just because she said no to one thing I didn't have to say no to everything else now. Which was exactly what I needed to hear. It showed me that I hadn't lost any of her respect and that relationships with people do not have to be all or nothing, can have so many facets which can (almost) all be valuable and should be appreciated – just as she still appreciated our relationship. Although there was no happily ever after, I still like to remember all that. Today I am having my happily ever after with a very wonderful someone else. But to become the person who is having this, the whole experience with that girl was so important. I was making myself very vulnerable for the first time and it was the best fail-scenario I could ever think of and it helped me become more brave and open about myself and my feelings.

Thanks for making me remember this experience.

When I was a teenager I made a ttf-font from the handwriting of a girl I was in love with as a gift for her. Man I underestimated that task seriously. I used some tool that was included in the Corel Draw Suite, scanned a sheet of paper on which she had written me the alphabet (in upper and in lower case) and vectorized everything by hand. It was so. Much. Work. Since then a quarter of a century has passed and it is one of those stories which leaves me amazed at the amount of naive stubborn energy of youth. I mean it was just for a birthday but I spent so much time on it and most of that time I didn't really know what I was doing. But somehow I succeeded, probably just because I didn't know any better.

Right on point.

Out of pure curiousity: do your really think that would make any significant difference for voter behavior? My understanding is that one of the biggest misunderstandings of the last decade+, was that center and leftist politicians assumed it would keep people from voting against their interests if you point out the lies of the relevant politicians and how their policies actually go against their voters interests. I mean that was the whole point of the fact-checking stuff gaining traction in mainstream-media during that time: just to be mostly abolished again because people are just not interested in truth and facts as much as we like to assume. Not not at all. But not as much as we tend to think.

Please don't get me wrong, I am not trying to be sarcastic here. I would love to see a perspective – just any perspective – of how to get out of the current political situation. Not just in the US but in many other countries the same playbook is followed by authoritarians with just as much success as in the US. So if you have material or some reasoning at hand why more information for the population would make a difference on the voting behaviour I would be super-interested. Thanks in advance!

Because the users pay an unrealistically low price. You aim for money and right now you make money via the investors and not the users. Would 700M people use it if they had to pay a realistic price? I doubt it.

Thx for your thorough explanation! I don’t know much about these things, just thought about similarities in the algebraic properties, especially with regards to the zero-element: 0*1=0.

Isn't the AND operation often represented using multiplication notation (dot or star) because it is basically a boolean multiplication?

Well, China is more on the side of Iran than the US or US allies. So there is that.

This and 1000 times this. It is so absurd: of course it seems ad hoc plausible to treat roughly similar things as if they were the same. However: never do this in this forum, since this is a community is looking a lot into all kinds details, so you will get called out.

But somehow – SOMEHOW – the same people that ask for nuance in everything act as if it would be even remotely plausible that the two most polar opposites of political theory would be basically the same for all important intents and purposes if thought to an end.

It is simply mind-blowing. People looking at something, seeing it is complex, stopping their thinking and just somehow feeling their way to the most empty assessment ever: "probably the same consequencesif you think it to the end". Without even having begun to think their way through it!

But I get it: thinking is nice as long as it is a purely intellectual endeavor but not if any personal moral responsibility is concerned. You might be morally obligated to draw consequences in your behavior – Heaven Forbid!

The system is eroded by the people who were brought into the position of being capable to destroy the system: by the system!. In so far: "The purpose of a system is what it does" (Stafford Beer). This should motivate us to ask what properties of the system lead to this and how we might change it.

To me it seems to be a bit like what the Böckenförde-Diktum points to, which is: "The liberal secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself."

Basically the modern capitalist secularized society is so void of deep human values and only emphasizing legality and profitability that it brings out a certain kind of elite. An elite which is decoupled from all real human connection and value leading to a thinking like this: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-...

Well and now we have to cope with this. But until we understand that these elites are no accident but logical results of the system we foster, nothing will really change. Or better: until we accept that the reductionist approach to human society and value that this system is based on is flawed and act accordingly everything we do is basically just flex-taping it and waiting for the next escalation.

So it was not uncovered by doge? and it is also not simply fraud? „Every year, agency reports posted online document billions in improper payments, which include fraud but also underpayments, duplicate payments, payments to ineligible recipients or for ineligible goods or services.“ (from the article you linked)

This. Also the question is what the possible complexity of the question is that you want to convey. As long as it is rather simple it might seem realistic to argue that there is no language involved (i would argue this is wrong). But as soon as the problems get more complex, the system you need to use to communicate this question becomes more and more undeniably a form of language (i think about complexity here as things like self-referentiality which need sufficiently complex formal systems to be expressed – think what gödel is about). So this part seems more complicated than it is understood. The same goes for the brain-imaging argument. As a philosopher I have unfortunately seen even accomplished scientists in this field follow a surprisingly naive empiricist approach a lot of times – which seems to me to be the case here also.

Well, I think it is barbaric to drop bombs on areas where you hit such a high proportion of civilians that in the end your overall distribution of victims matches the distribution of the overall population.

So unless the distribution in age etc. of your combatants matches 100% of the distribution in the overall population, then the distribution of the victims should also not match the overall population. If it does, that is a very, very bad sign since it means that you basically mostly just kill the population so much that the killing of the combatants does not meaningfully influence the statistics. And this is a bad thing regardless which country does it.

Or let me simplify this: targeting your indiscriminate bombs indiscriminately is very bad.

Caveat: I did not check any numbers here and my comment is only based on the comments in exactly this thread. I just found your take on this very weird.

It is absurd to act as if machines would do the same as human brains if you don’t even know what human brains do.

My cousin wrote a book about this topic (it is not only about blue animals but the general scarcity of blue in the natural environment): https://www.amazon.de/Blue-Science-Secrets-Natures-English-e...

I never gave this much thought before but the book quite successfully managed to interest me in its subject and lead to me understanding some of the underlying mechanisms (which lay all outside my domain as a software developer).

You do care obviously, and understandably, since you want to be recognized as competent regarding language and communication. But then you should react more openly and be grateful for the feedback you get, since it enables you to improve your communication-skills. Not correctly using a term or not knowing a better one does not make you any less in any meaningful way.

Would seem more obtuse to me to assume that a gain of 14% for mice in a lab-situation would translate to a similar gain for humans in a real-life situation.

I had the same problem, keeping me from really exploiting the power of jq. But for this and similar cases I am really glad about copilot being available to help. I just tell it what I need, together with a reduced sample of the source-json, and it generates a correct jq-script for me. For more complex requirements I usually iterate a bit with Copilot because it is easier and more reliable to guide it to the solution gradually than to word everything out correctly in the question in the first go. Also I myself often get new and better ideas during the iterations than I had in the beginning. Probably works the same with ChatGPT and others.

Am german, can confirm you are right. Not much to correct here :)

As far as I understand it, they were not forced to respect the DNT header in their processes. They were only forbidden to claim that the DNT header would not be legally binding and therefore not respected.

The court did not force LinkedIn in any way to actually respect or at least consider the DNT-header in their processes.

This is how I (being a German native-speaker) understood this article by the usually very reliable heise online: https://www.heise.de/news/Do-Not-Track-LinkedIn-darf-nicht-m...

This is a very interesting article. I was however a bit confused by the lingo, calling everything generics. As I understood it the main point of the article quite precisely matched the distinction between generics and templates as I learned it. Therefore what surprised me most was the fact that go monomorphizes generic code sometimes. Which however makes sense given the way go's module-system works – i.e. imported modules are included in the compilation – but doesn't fit my general understanding of generics.

What about this: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-is-intentionally-makin...