I disagree. I think it’s more helplessness than apathy.

I don’t approve of all the spying, but I don’t “own” any congress critters, so what can I do? I can’t even opt out of the spying by cancelling my Internet plan and smashing my phone – there’s still tracking through CCTV, face recognition, license plate scanners, etc. I’d have to move to some remote middle of nowhere and live as a subsistence farmer – and even on the way there, I’d be thoroughly tracked. There’s no escape, it’s like we’re all in a giant digital cage.

Hmm, and what about fish?

Right? All I want for Christmas is a phone that fits in my hand. Apparently, that’s WAY too much to ask for.

Very possible. Or maybe “just” connecting to any open wifi networks that might be available…

OTOH, I take “non-tech-savvy” reports with a healthy grain of salt. “Never been connected” could simply mean “I didn’t plug it in to the Comcast box”. Or “I connected Netflix, I didn’t connect the TV”.

Yeah, that’s true. Part of why it’s a niche appeal.

In my case, I was having a hard time finding a reasonably sized phone. All the major manufacturers really jumped into the phablet trend (150mm x 70mm is where I start to feel like a phone is too big).

For now …

I wouldn’t put it past them to start trying to mesh network their way out of local network jail. Are your neighbors as diligent as you are about privacy and security?

They are definitely niche appeal, but take a look at Unihertz. They make some phones that diverge from the current trends with flagship phones.

Omg, that reminds me of a time when a retail employee insisted that installing Linux on a particular machine would rock crashing the hard drive. This was, oh, maybe 2006 or so.

I did not buy a new computer that day.

Bad phrasing. I read your previous comment as demanding an explanation from me for why the author wrote an article about simple design rather than about user testing.

Honestly, I don’t think the article would have been well-served by detouring into user testing. It’s long enough as it is, and again – NN group has written a LOT on the topic.

I’m not really sure why you brought it up in the first place. It seems like ‘beating a dead horse’ territory.

Why are you asking me? I didn’t write the article.

It’s not the point of this article. NN group talks a lot about user testing in other articles, IIRC.

Whoosh!

hard-right

Hehehe…

I see some of that in my job. We put encrypted data in settings files, and the keys for decryption are provided on the VMs where we deploy. The developers never actually see the keys.

I suppose it’s as secure as the process for managing the production VMs, assuming the encryption isn’t just md5!

Ah, that all makes sense. I live in the US, so I’m looking at it from that lens.

don’t think the government should have power over dissenters assets

Agreed, but this is a thorny problem. Clearly the government has a legitimate cause to freeze some assets in some cases (obvious example: US govt freezing Osama bin Laden’s accounts). This becomes an abuse-of-power question, then. Unfortunately, we as humanity don’t have a good answer to it.

third world Russia

Technically, Russia would be second world :)

I do think cryptocurrencies fall short of the promise/hype with the exchange problem – either there’s a big bank-like clearinghouse that the government can target with freeze orders, or you’re in “You have to know a guy who knows a guy” territory when it comes time to actually use the cryptocurrency. I can’t pay my mortgage by transferring Bitcoin or Ethereum to my bank.

government straight up saying that you don’t own any of your money anymore

What are you referencing here?

I feel like I should be recognizing some specific thing here, but I can’t figure it out.

Hmm, that makes me think we could adopt a tiered pricing system for things like water. The first 100 gallons are priced at 10 cents each, then usage beyond that goes up to 50 cents each?

You could tweak the rates & threshold to make more sense – I don’t know water rates off the top of my head, and that probably varies by orders of magnitude across the entire U.S. Also, I have no idea what water usage rates look like for different types of properties. A sports stadium, an office building, an aluminum processing plant, and a SFH with a rain garden will all have really different water usage details.

All this is kind of hinting at a broader “environmental impact” measure. That gets super complicated, though.

Image generation requires no fact checking whatsoever

Sure it does. Let’s say IKEA wants to use midjourney to generate images for its furniture assembly instructions. The instructions are already written, so the prompt is something like “step 3 of assembling the BorkBork kitchen table”.

Would you just auto-insert whatever it generated and send it straight to the printer for 20000 copies?

Or would you look at the image and make sure that it didn’t show a couch instead?

If you choose the latter, that’s fact checking.

That said, LLMs will always have limitations and true AI is still a ways away.

I can’t agree more strongly with this point!

Some problems lend themselves to “guess-and-check” approaches. This calculator is great at guessing, and it’s usually “close enough”.

The other calculator can check efficiently, but it can’t solve the original problem.

Essentially this is the entire motivation for numerical methods.

Efficient at confusing people, perhaps. Personally, I have no idea what you’re on about.