JoshTriplett

The web is the app platform of today. Many, many things that would have been local applications are now web apps. Document editing, email, chat, collaboration...

The comment upthread was:

> Bad AI writing makes an article "unreadable" - you'd have to force yourself to read it

That doesn't literally mean "unable to read", it means it's unpleasant. I don't think anyone in this thread has literally meant "I could not possibly read it", just "it's painfully unpleasant".

> bear bones

*bare

> I wonder what the boardroom meeting for this was like.

"When testing autocomplete, we found some cases where it produces undesirable completions. Imagine if someone typed 'nazis are' and the autocomplete suggested 'good'. How fast would that screenshot get around social media with a tweet comparing iPhone to Grok, and turn into a news headline?"

I'm guessing that that's how this started. Then, a few steps later, "we're getting into China, what do we need to do to not get in trouble", "hey, we've got this mechanism, what if we add 'Tibetan independence' to it". (Which is bad, but on the same scale as all the other things businesses do to get into what they see as a large market that they can be blocked from at any time.)

Then, a few steps later, after some seriously questionable decision-making, someone had the bright idea to add "iMessage isn't working" to it. Frankly, that's the one I'm actually most baffled by here, because everything else seems like the natural consequence of a combination of bad-PR-avoidance and geopolitical kowtowing.

I've likewise had success getting people onto Signal. One easy selling point over SMS/MMS: pictures and video have much higher quality.

"How dare you have a preference that is not my preference?"

The criteria I enjoy is "written by a human".

It's not possible to un-AI text, only replace it wholesale.

Suggestion for next time: "Review my prose for accuracy, grammar, appropriate strength of claims, etc. Flag any issues for my attention. Do not provide text; this work should not contain any AI-written content." That'll turn it into a very good check that doesn't take your voice away.

> I find this line pretty sad actually, what if someone wants to contribute code, written by hand? What if some beginner finds this project interesting and wants to invest own time into it?

Then they would be better off contributing to a project that welcomes them.

I used to use Google as a fallback from DDG. I haven't had to do that in a long time; now, the only time I use Google is for the specific answer "what does Google return for this".

What was the nature of the business? Was it the kind of thing where referrals from existing customers would have helped? Was it on Google Maps and similar, and findable by people looking for the service they were offering? Were they losing business to competitors, or were people who needed it not finding it? Where were those people naturally looking, without ads?

Browsers are user-agents, not website-agents. By way of example, if a website shows ads or does tracking, I will absolutely alter it to my liking.

There should be two kinds of devices in my home: those allowed to connect to the Internet and keep their time up to date, and those that are not allowed to care what time it is. My microwave and my oven are in the latter category.

Yes, please. I don't want a clock on my microwave, or my oven. If I'm not interacting with it, it should produce zero light.

(Some people use oven features that involve knowing an absolute time, such as "turn on at this time". That seems to be the uncommon case, and meanwhile everyone has to deal with a clock that's rarely right.)

We are saying the same thing: I was stating what the desirable state would be.

Among the things that need to give are 1) insurance companies should make no money because there's no margin left in the system for them, and 2) we should have several times as many doctors, which means breaking the protection racket that intentionally limits the supply.

There is no useful point to "accountable" other than "make it stop happening". The ship has not sailed. We can and should stop it.

> If all training requires a license, then none but a handful of tech giants will be able to afford the costs of training.

If the tech giants can afford the costs of training, the licenses aren't expensive enough. It should be affordable to license works for reasonable use. It should not be affordable to vacuum up the entire Internet and build an AI that competes with everyone.

> 160Wh is 160Wh.

And yet you can carry a 100Wh spare battery and a 100Wh laptop and a 15Wh cell phone...

Ultimately, an 80Wh battery and a 160Wh battery both have more than enough energy for overheating to start a serious fire. The much more important consideration is the quality of the battery controller and the physical protections on and within the battery. And it's also important that many planes now carry burn bags that they can quickly put a runaway overheating battery (or phone or other device) into.

It would make more sense to have a battery certification and require batteries to have that certification in order to carry them on a plane.

> The airline rules are a bit arbitrary. They have allowances for mobility devices but don't seem to take any extra precautions for them when they have bigger batteries. There are still a lot of dangerous gaps in airline safety when it comes to lithium batteries.

They're absolutely arbitrary. From what I've seen, one of the major problems is wild variation in quality. An 80Wh battery from six-random-letters-off-Amazon is going to be more dangerous than a 160Wh battery from a reputable manufacturer.

> Whether transparency has merit or not, tracking provenance would make the office partisan.

Tracking who added what language is in no way partisan.

The standard way you distinguish "adversary with physical possession" from "owner" is "do they have the owner's passphrase".

I'd much rather see your rough drafts than whatever AI turns it into.

Likewise; I feel exhausted after trying it for a short time, because it doesn't give any space.

Agreed. I'd love to have air purification (and air circulation to reduce CO2) without noise, to the extent possible.

> If your insert requires a parent record with a single child record, you have to get the next sequential id

Why would you need the next sequential ID, rather than just a unique ID? You could have a serial column that uses per-shard preallocations like I was describing, and allocate the IDs for both records.

There's no fundamental reason for this. Much as with per-CPU memory allocation, shards could pre-reserve chunks of the next serial space, and then only coordinate when they need a new chunk.

If we had a technique that would defeat almost every lock in the world, we might be prudent to delay releasing that until people have had time to change the locks.

Same general benefit as coordinated disclosure, except it's a big game-theory problem where we're likely to eventually have sufficiently capable defectors.

They do already exist, in multiple forms. The reason why they're not the norm, and copyright law still exists, is because the publishers with the most money won't make as much money that way.

Among the various options:

- Pay in advance, before the product exists.

- Pay for early access that other people don't have. (Yes, in the absence of copyright, people could take the early-access version and share it with others. People already do this today, and that doesn't stop folks from continuing to be patrons anyway.)

- Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money than they otherwise might have. Small price to pay for having a rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things and modifying things.