dmd

Huh that's really interesting because my 12 year old has been using a school-provided chromebook for 3 years now and she and all her peers almost NEVER use the touchscreen, they use the trackpad almost exclusively. And I've watched her using her ipad too, and she uses the touchscreen when she's in (her words) "that kind of app" but if she's in Google Docs she's 100% trackpad.

We have a Brother laser ("just get this one, it's fine") and probably use it 4 or 5 times a week. UPS and other postal labels. To-do/checklists for kids. Sewing templates. Kids' homework for the one teacher who's not on Google Classroom. It's really in kind of constant use.

I picked the wrong week

In 1952, people were arguing that using words like "instruction" and "memory" were anthropomorphizing computers: https://3e.org/private/ai_words.pdf

Weird to see this here. I posted my first story of any length to it just a few days ago, a short story in the universe of Iain M. Banks' Culture.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/94745346

Gneiss!

There are certainly alternatives, like https://pomsky-lang.org/

I'm guessing you've only ever worked at startups?

Large company codebases are very much not like that. I've worked on systems (e.g., banking) that have accreted still-running code for as much as 60 years. Nobody understands how it works. Nobody ever understood how the whole worked, and many of the parts were never actually intended to work together.

HN readers - and even more so HN commentators - are not typical though. Literally 99% of people interacting really are asking a question answered by the FAQ, just like 99% of people calling the customer service number for their credit card want to pay their bill or find out their balance.

Once again - I’d rather be alive than right.

If all the many many other drivers on the road are passing you, going 20 mph (30km/h) faster, you are driving unsafely, regardless of the speed limit.

Ok? When I was learning to drive, I was taught to drive safely, whether that was under the speed limit or not. As my dad put it, "would you rather be right or alive?"

Am I just a weirdo or something? It was at chance for me after more than 100.

https://shot.3e.org/ss-20261013_160043.jpg google's roll-out procedures on point as usual

Please don't do this kind of thing. It is incredibly rude. For me it's migraines - anytime I mention them I am absolutely flooded by people saying "oh, have you tried X? have you tried Y? All you need is celery juice!" I've been having migraines for 30 years. Believe me, I know more about them than you do.

> I became somewhat of a historian over many quiet nights

Please step into the shredder, sir.

It's not personal–it's just policy.

oh, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what is a heaven for?

OMG. This has explained a life long mystery to me. God dammit dad.

In fact, if we had been using left and right quotes from the beginning in shells, most “quoting problems” go away, as they’re all inherently rooted in not being able to know what level of nesting a quote character is at.

Same. Especially when one remembers that the stuff that happens in Culture novels is mostly, by narrative necessity, the "weird/bad on-the-edges" stuff - not the essentially utopic lives of the 13 trillion everyday, non-Contact, non-SC citizens.

Find me even one human in the world who meets your criteria, then.

edit: I guess I misread this. I thought you were saying "well, AI isn't smart until it can solve any arbitrary problem in the whole world"

Aha. If you click 'Uh' exactly on its text, it works. If you click even one pixel away from the actual text, you get the chooser with not enough options.

No, there’s only the listed options (street has a sidewalk, or it doesn’t - no option for “sidewalk extends for half the street but not the other half”).

I don’t know if that counts as it does or it doesn’t.

Maybe I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work, but the very first question I was given had three choices and none of them were correct. What are you supposed to do then?

If it's so good - who is using it, and to what effect? Because it sure doesn't seem like it's doing much for the US.

There’s no “maybe” about it.

maddening that you have to manually scroll

wow nobody but you has ever thought of this and certainly simonw has never addressed this

Yeah, the Culture is what happens when this transition goes perfectly right.

How does that even happen? HN software hiccup? Or what?