cassowary

How can someone seriously propose I put a copyrighted symbol in my text to let them know it's sarcastic? [rhetorical question device] I'll bet the world will be a better place if they profit off every sarcastic sentence someone writes. [sarcastic sentence device] If you're too dumb to work out what's sarcastic, why should you benefit from my help? [friendly period]

(nb. There's a missing "sarcastic sentence device", but I don't know where to put it, when it applies to a piece of punctuation.)

The point was that being displayed on my screen doesn't mean I read it. For instance, I have a problem where sometimes I'll log in to my phone and an app will be active. I don't want that app; I need to do a bank transaction. But now someone thinks their message has been read, when so far from reading it I don't even know it exists! It was just displayed on my screen for half a moment when my eyes and my attention was somewhere else. (Another common problem I have is when I send a message, and then they reply so fast that the message arrives at about the same time as I'm trying to return to the homescreen to ensure I get a notification when the message arrives. Well unfortunately the message arrived first, got marked as read and no notification exists. After twenty minutes I realise what happens but maybe I've already offended someone by "reading" their message and ignoring it.)

Delivered vs read is only accurate if you have an eye tracker.

The notification and icon badges help hide when you're sleeping, but they advertise when you're interacting with someone. You're "unseen" for twenty hours. The guy you're cheating with logs in and sends you a message. Five minutes later, you log in and read it. You wait two hours, read it again and send another message. He doesn't check for an hour. You're so longing for his response, so every five minutes you're logging in "how many ticks? what color? has he read it yet??". Once he's out of his meeting, he (finally noticing the notification) logs in and sends a message. Your activity drops off now that you have your reply, but you nevertheless send yours...

I'm not by any means a Snapchat power user. But I really like the way my phone tells me where my normal photos are taken — it makes it very easy to find the photos. Also, any chat app would benefit because it's very easy for me to remember "i was talking about foo with Bar when I was over in Baz", but much harder for me to remember when that happened. So to me location tracking would offer many useful features. (They may not be worth it, and even the useful ones might not be available, but those aren't answers to the question you asked.)

If this is true it isn't apparent to me. You're stating it as if it's received wisdom. Could you clarify?

(4) is an interesting question. Unfortunately it's much harder to understand than it is to ask. For instance, to people really understand, rather than just providing a thin illusion of understanding? What does it actually mean to understand something? Can you make a test that can distinguish arbitrary systems which truly understand from those which provide a thin illusion of understanding?

Optical illusions (there's also physical ones) are often demonstrations that the problems aren't solved in humans either; they're just "things that work sort of, some of the time, with caveats about how you define 'work'".

More so if you include reasoning illusions like people being more scared to catch a plane than drive a car or thinking that a lotto ticket is a good investment.

Human intelligence doesn't really meet intuitive definitions of human intelligence. But it does work well enough as long as you ignore all the times it doesn't.

An emergent property is precisely one that obtains unexpectedly from simple components. For instance, it is supposed by some that the universe truly consists of nothing more than electrons and quarks and what have you which interact in relatively simple ways, and that subjective human experience emerges from that. We then have a situation that is easier for us to reason about using higher level concepts, but there isn't a chapter in the laws of physics called "subjective human experience". That's in the book called "diverse applications of the basic laws of physics".

In any case, I dispute your facts too. I don't think we have the ability to cross apply our heuristics. I can calculate fairly accurately a lot of mathematical problems when I'm riding my bike, but put me in a maths class and I'm stuffed. I don't have independent access to those hacks.

I hate both. If "ask" is on, it's constantly harassing me. If "ask" is off, I have to search hard to find the setting that lets me connect to a wifi network in a tool that also lets me change the language I'm using.

Yes. Apple used to be about empowering people. That's what ease of use was about. You can keep doing the same thing and you get the same result, but when you're ready you can finally press that button you've always ignored. You'll discover something new which you might want to undo. But that's fine too, because it's clear and obvious how to.

This meant they got a reputation for building easy-to-use tools.

This meant they got a reputation for building things for people who want their stuff to just work.

This meant that they believed their role should be to remove things that are ugly or powerful, hiding features.

This means that they're no longer building easy-to-use tools. You don't know what your phone is going to do any more. You can't predict if wifi is off or not. There's two ways to turn wifi off, one of them doesn't work. One of them allegedly works. There's no way to know this without reading documentation or relying on word of mouth.

There's a good reason to want wifi to only be pseudo-off, but there's other ways they could have implemented this feature that would have been empowering. They opted for this one not because it's the right option, but because they've given up on the spirit that made them great in the first place.

RTFM. It's the new motto of the Apple apologist. Soon we'll be saying "next year will be the year of Apple on the desktop".

Hi Lathiat. Why do you need to disconnect from the current network? I can think of many alternatively implementations which would meet most requirements that have been proposed, like turning the wifi back on when the battery is charging or at 5am. All the proposals involve compromises, but it seems much easier to make a notice that clearly says "Wifi will reconnect at 5am" then to say "Wifi is still using your battery, but we've disconnected from the current network". I mean, the message itself fits in the same space as the current message, and the icon itself could have a timer band counting down till 5am so you know that it's only temporarily disabled. (I too have accidentally used up all my month's data because I left the wifi off for a few days. It's not nice. I'd appreciate a feature which deals with it. But this one is unpredictable, unreadable and confusing.)

Also, are you proposing that low power mode with wifi uses the same amount of power as lower power mode without wifi? If I know I'm not going to see a power point for many hours, I turn my phone onto low power mode and turn wifi off (and the brightness right down and some other things). I might do it as I leave the house in the morning when I still have 95% battery. In these cases, I very often need my phone most in precisely when the battery will be weakest.

That isn't fair. My microwave "doesn't work" until I press some buttons. I leave my bluetooth, wifi and data on most days because I have bluetooth headphones and I want people to be able to send me messages and stuff. Sometimes I turn them off to get the battery to last longer. It seems like it could be quite reasonable for a large group of non-technical users to be quite happy with a phone that turns off the radios when the screen is off.

That's a really silly reply. There's nothing in the UI that tells me turning Wifi off in the control centre has a different meaning today than it had last week. It's not at all clear that turning it off in the Settings app will have a different result. Literally. You're obliging us to read someone's mind.

Moreover, going to the Settings app is laborious. There's a lot of stuff there. When you open it, you don't always "start from the start", so that pulling it up requires working out where it is in the app you are in order to navigate appropriately. Instead of focusing on the task of disabling wifi and going somewhere, you have to focus on the task of navigating an app. And also if you have a phone that wasn't bought yesterday, it will probably close some other app you were running because it's run out of RAM.

All so that some weird usecase I can't understand is available. This fellow is the only person who's described a usecase for disconnecting from wifi networks while leaving wifi on, insofar as leaving the radio on won't have upsetting results for him. But the feature doesn't work for him.

For me, sometimes I need my battery to last all day not just till dinner. I want the radio off.

I can't think of a non-technical/non-exceptional use that is benefited by this feature.

(NB. I quite like the idea that my wifi will spontaneously turn back on again when the battery is charged adequately, or at 5am or some such. It would've saved my data on numerous occasions. But that's a different feature that hasn't been implemented.)

Honestly I don't think it's effectively identical for the vast majority of users.

Every single time I've wanted to turn off Wifi and Bluetooth, it's because I know I'm going to struggle to get my battery to last till I can charge it again. I'm going to be out and on the move, so Wifi has no value to me except as a battery drain.

In fact, I struggle to think of any other ordinary use for disabling Wifi and Bluetooth. The real exceptions are like (I have this one now) I don't have ADSL at home but I haven't been bothered to turn off the modem or my mate who's paranoid of being stalked by companies. But those are exceptional. I wouldn't write a feature to deal with them. Except to keep the battery going, who turns wifi off?

It sounds like I've lost a real feature and I don't know how to get it back any more. If I want to be able to send and receive data but I want my phone to last all day[], what can I do?

[]: NB. The only reason I want my phone to last all day is because I want to use it. Consequently, saying "my phone lasts all day no problem" isn't an answer. You probably don't use your phone like I do.

How do I know when I can use it? and if my phone doesn't have 3D Touch, how can I access the same features? (I don't know if my phone has 3D Touch, but I guess it doesn't because I've never been able to make it do something different. Except once when I long clicked the control centre and it did something different. I don't know if that's 3D Touch though. My iPhone used to teach me how to use it, now it just hides things because it makes someone else feel like an elegant designer.)

A hidden feature isn't communicated. I don't know why features are going to do something weird if I short click vs long click. There's simply no communication. Maybe some shadow (3D) effect on something which you can 3D touch would make a huge difference. (It's probably ugly, but the feature itself is ugly, so you'd expect the UI should reflect that.) A right click menu was considered a hidden feature by Apple in the olden days, but at least you knew there was a right mouse button to click. Nowadays you don't know whether a feature exists or whether you just haven't clicked long enough.

I appreciate the feature is a nice one, that the wifi will turn back on sometimes. I've been caught out. But I can't know what hidden features exist and how to distinguish them.

Moreover, "Disconnected from WifiNetwork" only communicates what you say it does once you know what the feature does. Until then, you don't know. There's also nothing that says "the network has been disabled until you go home" or whenever it's going to turn back on.

Apple used to care about their products being useful to power uses and beginners alike. Now they care about their products being useful to beginners and capable of letting the elite know who they are — the power users who are not amongst the elite know that too. It's really not very nice.

I was really happy with it when I first got my iPhone. It was awesome. I'd never used one, and it kept telling me what to do next. If I guessed wrong, it was like "haha, no you've gotta do this instead". But it is not going to be replaced with another iPhone. I just can't stand it any more.

That's not fair. If Trump didn't win a democratic election, then neither did Obama, Bush, Clinton or Washington. He apparently won according to the rules that are established. The only question is, did he really win according to the established rules, or did he take advantage of foreign power?

If an electoral college upset is undemocratic, then there probably aren't any democracies around at all. For instance, there's the Bill of Rights which allows dead people to collude with about a dozen people appointed to lifelong roles to decide what laws you can't bring about. If we continue in this way, we reach the conclusion that "democracy" is a word with no useful significance. So do you propose some other way to describe countries like the US and Canada, and to distinguish them from countries like China and Saudi Arabia?

Well someone changed their vote based on news, right? From a source they trusted. But it wasn't fake news, it was real. Fake news is what they used to read back before they were enlightened.

That's nonsense. If you have a dispute between you and a company, everyone will expect you to talk to the company first. If it turns out that your dispute relates to breach of the law (for instance, improper racial discrimination of clients), you might not necessarily realise you have the ability to report it to the police. To say it sounds like a very unlikely scenario to you makes it sound like you're trying to find reasons to defend Uber, not trying to interpret the scene fairly.

That's hardly true. People criticise soft drinks all the time.

In any case, the difference between a cake with arsenic and a cake without arsenic is going to be significantly less than 1%, but I'm going to make my decision based on that less-than-one-percent.

Those comments are all irrelevant to the OP's point. Debian software is "old" by intention; it is part of the spec that it shouldn't be a moving target.

As for Debian making some policy decisions that you disagree with, it's very different for Debian to make decisions than for NPM to make decisions. There's just no comparison.

When I was in school back in the 1990s, that was certainly the approach taken for the Vietnamese edition of the school newsletter.

some languages even sort

aa ah az ba bh bz ca cz ch

treating "ch" as a single letter that comes between c and d.

or

ab ah az b c .... z aa

treating aa the same as a separate letter at the end of the alphabet.

Then there's other rules for sorting that aren't directly alphabetic, like that names beginning with "Mc" should be treated as "Mac" or "St " as "Saint ".

"10 cats" should sort after "2 cats", not before it.

Anyone who tries to sort by just numeric ordering is doing it wrong.

«Hi. How do I open a quote?»

«Oh, you just use the « character.»

Parse error. Unexpected EOF.

It's done a bit differently, but there's an app on phones "The English Dialects app" you can install that will give you some specific features and how they distribute in Britain and Ireland. It will also try to guess where you're from, if you're from those parts.

It does heat maps of features, rather than trying to group bundles into discrete areas. This is probably more accurate, because it shows you were features are strong. Sometimes they'll correlate with others, sometimes not.

People have been predicting that for a long time. I can remember reading something in Encarta 95 about it. But it's also been disproved for just as long. New dialect features are constantly being created, just as surely as old ones are levelled. Even as much as certain groups move around a lot, huge numbers of people are living in the same area their grandparents were born in.

(Sometimes, I feel surprised when I meet someone else who was born in the city I live in. But if I listen to how someone speaks, no matter if they're fifteen or fifty, I can tell whether they're from here.)

It seems the rule where I am is "always show the number" which means indeed they've very good at picking the opposite.

Well, what's "Take 5"? I mean, five is being used as an ordinal not a cardinal. Normally, to give an ordinal sense to a normal number you need to follow some noun. So "Chapter 3", "Level 8", "Freeway 5". And then we're not specifying what kind of thing it is, so "Take 5".

Btw. It's nice if you omit the word "linguistically". It's good to remember that just because you speak a language, that's not the same as being an expert on language science. Any more than because you inhabit a body, you're an expert on physics.

Hi. We're I'm from, we mostly say the plus the name of the road. So "take the Monash". But the Monash is officially "Monash Fwy". It's also called the M1. Country roads often have long names like "Main Neerim Road" or "Warragul Korumburra Rd". When I've had to give a direction involving them, I say "just before you enter town, turn left towards Warragul" because there will be a giant sign in Korumburra pointing towards Warragul; if you're in the middle of the road, you have a sign pointing to Korumburra and another pointing to Warragul.

Such roads often have numbers. But I've never committed them to memory or used them in ordinary conversation. Based on the precedent of the "M1", I guess I'd expect "the C520" or whatever. But that recommendation is probably not worth the paper it's printed on.

Take a look at the map in the original article. The areas covered in either blue slashes or blue hatches (i.e. left and right slashes intersecting), which is most of the US, has "Don" = "Dawn". There's also the "on" line, so for those who distinguish "Don" and "Dawn", some Americans pronounce "on" as if it was "awn".

For me "tonic" has a fairly short vowel in the first syllable. Whereas "Tawnic" would have a longer vowel. There's also a different in sound. You might hear my "aw" as if it was a long "o" sound. The Australian vowel system is really nothing like the American vowel system.