zeumo

An example that comes to mind is layered cocktails: the syrup layer will not diffuse into the upper layer (and vice versa) on a surprisingly long timescale (at least overnight)

Luckily, "xkcd" doesn't refer to anything else than the comic AFAIK, so we can easily search and find that 143 English Wikipedia articles reference the comic. [0] Glossing over the list, I'd count 4 of these are directly referencing a specific comic or a concept invented in one: Time, Ballmer Peak, and Geohashing.

There are more if you include special pages, like Citogenesis reported by sibling.

The other way around, folks at the Explain xkcd wiki have categorized the comics and 56 of them reference Wikipedia. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&fu...

[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Wikipedi...

Absolutely agree.

Note that modern flip/soapbar phones (Commodore, KaiOI) usually support some social media, including WhatsApp.

Banking apps are a problem though, and really contribute locking everyone in the iOS/Android duopoly, and that sucks.

It's kind of cool, I like that there are people trying to do something else, but I don't how it's "minimal" or discourages heavy use.

It's an Android phone, with pretty decent specs. Nothing is stopping you from installing social media apps and doomscrolling all day and night, and chances are you will do that if that's what you do with your phone, just as you can just delete social media apps from your current phone.

The custom UI and physical keyboard are innovative though, I don't think I've seen a physical keyboard with touch support before, and I wish them the best.

> they're also (mostly) worse for cyclists and pedestrians

For cyclists, this is mostly true IMO (depending on implementation), but for pedestrians roudabouts are way better than traffic lights. In the absence of lights, pedestrians have right of way on crossing, so no waiting time, and physically slowed traffic make it safer.

People may not say that, but they are more likely to read the hand-crafted email over the LLM-generated one.

Support for in-place website translations has been introduced in FF 118, initially for a handful of western languages, now 50 languages. There is also support for translating highlighted text and user text with about:translations.

It's fully local, which means the translation might not be as good as what Google can do, but it's good enough to use, and in my experience it's usually faster, as there is no network latency (except for the first translation between a language pair, which takes a little while to download the weights).

Why would Todd Durham have issues with a Lord Buckethead doing his thing in another country and continent, but apparently not with a guitar player named Buckethead in the United States?

Neat, I'm wearing that exact shirt right at the moment I see this on the front page!

I typed it out myself, and I liked the comment in Japanese text, which sort of added another layer of obfuscation (even though pasting it in an online decoder was trivial, it still was something more to decode, a level deeper). Also, I can now spot non-ASCII blobs in base64-encoded text, which is a skill I hadn't ever considered was possible before.

They do also sell the data-hungry side-loaded app builder.

Genuine question: what's the point of vibe-coding a personal, low-stake project?

I do work on such projects, but the main goal for me is to learn, not the end result. If the end result is important, then there it's overwhelmingly likely that someone already implemented it better than I ever would, and I should just use that implementation.

I have implemented a qoi codec or a gemini client, not because I needed to use either of those, but because I wanted to understand how image codecs or network protocols worked, from bytes to end result. In the end, I learned a bit more about how computers work, how they draw stuff on screen and communicate with each other. I don't believe I would have learned much by letting an LLM do the work for me. Nor do I believe that the LLM could have done a better job than all the existing implementations of those things.

> So, what you describe, is already in place. I guess mostly the "interfaces" are missing for you, or hard to discover maybe?

That's definitely an issue. Mind you, the general population is not a developer. I'm a mechanical engineer. I can code, use an IDE, but I hate having to figure out tooling the way you describe, and it's not a skill I'm interested in developing. What you are describing sounds to me like someone using vim and a terminal trying to convince me to stop using CLion, because they can make anything CLion can do work with their setup. Sure, I believe it, but for my part I'm going to wait for the features to be well integrated into finely designed software, I'm not going to duct-tape this stuff together to get a workflow that still involves writing out and tweaking prompts.

It also sounds to me that the AI/LLM vendors are still in a phase where they are trying to figure what the actual workflow should look like so they let their power users do that work for them. I'm not going to do that either.

My take on the issue is that for most use cases where AI is pushed to the general public, a conversational chatbot is not the right tool, and the experience is bound to be frustrating.

Remember when Copilot was basically a super-smart version of Intellisense? It was awesome. Sure, there was a lot of pushback and concern, mainly about licensing and ethical issues, none of which are solved with the current chatbot model. But now I also have to come up with a prompt and type it out. How is that an improvement over having the LLM use surrounding code as context and figure out how to fill in the blanks? A well integrated tool beats a bolted-on chatbot any time for me. Another example would be translation: in Firefox, I can right click any text or click the 文/A button, and I can translate the text or the whole page from basically any language to any other. The frontier LLM's solution is to prompt their chatbot to do the task, which is a downgrade. Sure, I could also ask Claude to write a poem, but when I need to translate a webpage, it doesn't help much.

I get why all major AI companies push towards this solution, because they can build a single tool and sell it to everyone, and that training their models is very expensive and they can't afford to alienate any part of the potential market. But ultimately they're building Swiss army knives, which are able to do basically anything, but will never be able to allow users to tighten a screw better than a well designed screwdriver. Sure, I won't ever be able to clip my nails with a screwdriver, but if my business is tightening screws, I won't tolerate using a Swiss army knife for long.

Please build actual tools. Not textboxes for me to try and configure a non-deterministic tool. Then frustration will go down.