autism warning

As most people understand the word "dolphin", Orcas are not technically dolphins though they belong to the same family.

I've heard the claim that Orcas are a species of porpoise, like dolphins, but I can't even corroborate that since Wikipedia is claiming that porpoises are distinct from dolphins.

The clearest explanation I've been able to find comes from this article: https://nextlevelsailing.com/relationship-between-orca-kille...

> The classification of orcas as dolphins stems from their scientific categorization. Both orcas and dolphins fall under the family Delphinidae, which encompasses oceanic dolphins. Despite their formidable size and fearsome reputation, orcas share more in common with their smaller dolphin relatives than with other whale species.

So Orcas and dolphins are both categorized in the family Delphinidae which is colloquially referred to as the "Oceanic Dolphins" so, depending on what you mean, yes Orcas are technically dolphins but then ... so are dolphins. Meaning that "dolphin" and "delphinidae" refer to two distinct things even though all dolphins are delphinidae and the colloquial term for "delphinidae" is "oceanic dolphin." But it's important to recognize that the oceanic dolphins is a pretty wide family that includes several species that have the word "whale" in their name, such as belugas and narwhals, in addition to orcas.

I disagree. In a lot of cases text will be clickable, but will also contain content that you want to copy/paste into Wikipedia or a search engine etc. Think annotations (click on this text for more information) or headers/titles that are a proper noun that references something public... like a person's name or a place or a type of object or something.

I don't think that's an "exception." I think that's common enough to make me ask: "please don't make that text not selectable ever."

> but I feel like software engineering has lost much of its craftsmanship

It's not just software. I'm very pro-business / pro-capitalism but I will happily agree that an omnipresent business pressure is to reduce costs and get products and services to market rapidly.

My wife and I bought an antique store this year, and we're converting it into a small live theatre with a magic (stage magic) retail store up front. We are pouring our hearts and soul into this and are trying to bring a high degree of craftsmanship into the venture. We're taking queues from Walt Disney World and want you to feel like you've stepped into a completely different world when you step inside our doors.

Yet now that we're running out of money and things have taken way longer than we had estimated, we have to cut scope. We have to start thinking "What needs to be done today in order for us to open" vs "What can we defer and iterate on and do later?" What are the "nice to haves" and what are the "must haves."

That's business and you see enshitification in all industries. We can see this in everything from clothing to furniture to product packaging. The incentive is always to try and deliver things to market faster and cheaper and this necessitates making cuts. Craftsmanship is a luxury that we all pine for. And there are small mom & pop shops (us included) that try to deliver craftsmanship. But the market for high-cost products with high-craftsmanship is niche.

Software is largely targeting the mass market just like clothing and furniture - other examples where you've seen "high craftsmanship" in the past but these days we get mass produced disposable garbage. It's tempting to say "the good old days" but people had a lot less and that high-craftsmanship furniture was often passed down from one generation to another because it's not like people could typically afford that stuff. It was that people had to save, DIY more, own less and count on hand-me-downs.

It's not so much double the design work, it's double the code maintenance.

I'm of two minds on this. I agree with your complaint that "mobile first" (or just responsiveness in general) has tended to reduce the pleasantness of the Desktop experience. As a web application developer, the idea of having to maintain two separate codebases - one for mobile and one for desktop - is a big "no thank-you." So responsiveness tends to win on maintenance overhead.

> but suggesting that these new technologies are not driving business innovation

How did you take that away from my post?

AI can provide genuine value and also be a hype train. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive.

I put "mobile revolution" in quotes because I was referring to what it was being called at the time, in the context of describing how said "revolution" was affecting me at a time when I had no interest in mobile computing or features. I was relating to the parent who has little to no interest in AI features and wishes that companies would stop trying to "force" it on them.

At no point did I even come close to suggesting that there is no value or innovation to be found there. My last paragraph even directly stated the opposite.

Are you trolling?

AI is just the current incarnation of the hype train cycle.

I've never been a big fan of smart phones and I remember in the early 2010s the "mobile revolution" was in full tilt and it even impacted the Linux experience. I ended up switching from Ubuntu to Mint because they went all in on "mobile + touch-screens are the future!" and released this god awful UI update that was reminiscent of Windows 8.

We need business to drive innovation ... but there is bad with the good (and vice versa - we shouldn't forget that either). When something gets "hot" the business world will always go all in on the trend and "force" it down everyone's throats. It's driven partly by fear: "If I don't offer this to my customers, my competitors will and I will fail." The rest is the normal pursuit of profit, which isn't a bad thing IMO but it means there's a lot of: "There's a pie here and if we don't get our slice someone else will."

How is that a refutation?

If I want to understand any position I would look for first sources. Say I want to understand why Russian invaded Ukraine, I would seek out Russian sources. When I try to understand the Palestinian position, I seek out Palestinian sources.

The beautiful thing about intellectual honesty and openness is that you don't have to agree with any position. You can expose yourself to things that deeply conflict with your personal values and walk away with a deeper understanding of why you value what you value, and how to refute ideas that you strongly disagree with.

To dismiss a source because it is Israeli ironically gives fuel to the antisemitism charge. You're saying that the very reason to dismiss it, to not even bother entertaining its arguments is because it is Israeli and no other reason. Beyond that, you are even arguing that any claims of prejudice can be dismissed outright on the basis of one thing that one Israeli Minster once said [allegedly].

That is the very definition of prejudice.

There's a content creator I used to follow who said her outlook on social media changed the day she discovered that her 11 year-old nephew was an "edge-lord" on Twitter who was trolling at such a sophisticated level that it caused her to rethink every post that had ever provoked an emotional reaction.

Apparently he came across as articulate enough that she couldn't tell the difference between his posts and that of any random adult spewing their political BS.

This predated ChatGPT so just imagine how much trouble a young troll could get up to with a bit of LLM word polishing.

20 years ago it was common for people to point out that the beautiful woman their friend was chatting up is probably some 40 year-old dude in his mom's basement. These days we should consider that the person making us angry in a post could be a bot or it could be some teenager just trying to stir shit up for the lulz.

Dead Internet theory might be not be literally true, but there's certainly a lot of noise vs signal.

> Do you have a right to force the other person to keep your conversation private?

It depends. If you're speaking to a doctor or a lawyer, yes, by law they are bound to keep your conversation strictly confidential except in some very narrow circumstances.

But it goes beyond those two examples. If I have an NDA with the person I am speaking with on the other end of the line, yes I have the "right" to "force" the other person to keep our conversation private given that we have a contractual agreement to do so.

As far as OpenAI goes, I'm of the opinion that OpenAI - as well as most other businesses - have the right to set the terms by which they sell or offer services to the public. That means if they wanted a policy of "all chats are public" that would be within their right to impose as far as I'm concerned. It's their creation. Their business. I don't believe people are entitled to dictate terms to them, legal restrictions notwithstanding.

But in so far as they promise that chats are private, that becomes a contract at the time of transaction. If you give them money (consideration) with the impression that your chats with their LLM are private because they communicated that, then they are now contractually bound to honour the terms of that transaction. The terms that they subjected themselves to when either advertising their services or in the form of a EULA and/or TOS presented at the time of transaction.

> Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit.

That is physically impossible. Again, it's a "me problem", I'm not trying to say that the world needs to accommodate my unique personality, but if other people are within speaking distance of me with no partition, they cannot "melt away."

When I was younger, discovering my mysophonia and autism, my mother would used to say things to me like "just tune out the noise." If only! I mean, how do I develop that super-power? Please, it would change my life so much for the better. I don't know what that means.

The thing that practically defines mysophonia is an inability to do that with trigger sounds.

But for me it's not just noise. I can't relax in the presence of other people. I guess it could be an extreme form of social anxiety. But it's not so much that I feel fear or anxious ... it's that I am hyper-alert when other people are around me. If I can see someone out of the corner of my eye, my brain can't go "just ignore them." It's not wired that way.

One of my trigger sounds, speaking of mysophonia, is actually people talking. I don't like listening to the sound of people speaking amongst each other. I don't know anyone else that has that particular trigger sound. But if I'm minding my own business somewhere and suddenly I hear people having a conversation ... it can send me into an autistic meltdown.

And yeah, you can put on noise cancelling headphones in public. Which I do when I'm in those situations. If it was just the noise alone then it would be a problem that is not insurmountable. Though it would still be a problem.

But reading a book? Impossible for me when there is even a single other person in the room.

Again, it's a me problem. I'm not saying the world should change for me. All I'm saying is please don't take away my car. It's the only thing that enables me to be at all mobile.

From an efficiency point of view public transportation makes a lot of sense.

From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I do look forward to travelling to the Netherlands one day and I will enthusiastically use public transit there just as a personal experiment to see if my experience differs enough from the subway transit in Montreal or Toronto that gave me nightmares and has me thinking every time I travel there: "Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this."

The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers. I don't see myself ever not being a driver. I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.

It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.

> Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it

Citation required.

Money is an intermediary form of exchange. It arises organically because if, for example, you are a dairy farmer, there is no practical way for you to a) save enough milk to barter for a house (not only is it perishable but where do you store it all? Especially before refrigeration) and b) find someone with a house they want to trade for that much milk.

Money is just a commodity and in the absence of fiat currency it arises organically. People tend to seek intermediary forms of exchange that are non-perishable, easily divisible, transportable and difficult to forge/counterfeit because it is a necessity of life.

You simply cannot practically barter everything you'd ever want to trade. So instead we humans trade what we produce for something we can stash away and trade later more easily.

Money is not an invention to compel action. It is a natural product of trade that arises because most people, when they're not too busy spouting ideological drivel on Internet forums, have common sense.

What a weird straw-man. I said that, on an individual by individual basis, people get to decide what criteria are important to them and can discriminate (or not) accordingly. That if one entity doesn't want to work with another, there are lots of other permutations that an environment of liberty allows for. As opposed to a government mandated system where everyone is forced into the same criteria under threat of penalty.

I did not say, or even suggest, that the absence of a social credit system somehow results in everyone wanting to do business with you under any circumstance, and that you can opt out of the criteria that someone else uses to decide if they want to associate with you.

I really cannot understand how you were able to twist the meaning of what I had written so dramatically. Or are you just trolling?

You misinterpreted my language. What I meant, for clarity, was "individual entities." Be that individual persons or individual businesses.

It's the difference between one party wanting to distance themselves from you, due to their own "individual" reasons, or all of society by decree under penalty of law.