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That's such a total misunderstanding of the US constitution that I'll assume you're not a USA-ian, and explain it in simple terms. In the USA the people are sovereign; they delegate their power to Congress, who are first-among-equals within the three branches of government; the executive branch's role is to "faithfully execute" the laws that Congress passes. So, yeah: a president "behaving like a CEO" and deciding on his own how to allocate money is patently and obviously un-Constitutional.

Now, the US legislature has, in recent decades, delegated so many of its prerogatives, and overlooked so much executive overreach, that your misappropriation is completely understandable. In fact, though, the current situation is exactly what the framers of the US Constitution most feared. (You can read their discussions at the time collected in a volume called "The Federalist Papers".) Their inability to devise a system to meet a threat they fully anticipated argues against their much-heralded "genius".

Total side-note: CEO as sovereign within "their" company is, arguably, also a perverse interpretation of the US corporate governance model. Feel free to argue that point without me, HN - I know that's just how that works nowadays - but it's totally wrong to import that model into government, where it's explicitly not intended.

I like my Bosch dishwasher, too. Never connected it to wifi; never downloaded the app. It broadcasts a Bluetooth channel I wish I could turn off, but I've not seen any other ill effect. There's just no compelling use-case for a "connected" dishwasher, lol.

I'm not arguing with your basic point - in fact, "but some people are better at expressing their intent in code than in prose" instantly occurred to me, as well - but why should "it's always possible to leave holes and stubs to be filled in later" not also apply to natural language?

I, at least, have always written in that way - essays, teaching materials, letters, long-form narratives, (and now, recently) specs for the AI-gods, doesn't matter - I get the bits I'm sure of down first, and then tinker (cut-and-paste, do more research, add or remove material, write bridging sections) until I'm able to connect them together.

The most frustrating English teacher I had in high school required us to turn in an outline a week before the essay was due. I did it for the first assignment, and was marked a B, with a comment along the lines of "this was very good, but it deviated from your outline". Which, well, of course it did, because I bloody learned something while I was writing it! The next time, I wrote the whole essay ahead of the "outline" due date, which led me to discover WordPerfect 5.1's "Generate Outline" function, which led her to the mistaken impression that she'd taught me something besides disrespect for authority.

That's not quite a digression by way of personal anecdote, because I wonder if you were taught writing by someone like her? Prose doesn't have to be composed (in both senses of the word) like that. In process, it can be just as shaggy and stubbed and non-linerally referential as code. Furthermore, AIs (I am finding), work quite well with a process like that: I'm constantly telling it to "put X into Deferred", when I haven't yet got something worked out in my head.

Agree. For the drama of it, I'd move the end-date up to 1969, just to catch the moon landing.

My great-grandfather learned to care for horses, and drive a wagon / buggy, and keenly remembered the first time he saw an automobile. He qualified as a doctor before antibiotics were invented, and then lived long enough to at least exist in a house with a personal computer - whether he ever used it is something I never thought to ask my grandfather!

If you go back further, 80-100 years ago every American city / town had functional public transit systems. The wide median strips on a couple of boulevards in my mother's hometown recall the street-car lines that she rembered seeing torn out in the 1950s. When she and my dad moved back there about ~15 years ago, after they'd retired, they voted against the in-fill development and public transit initiatives proposed by an urbanist mayor, because "[town's] too small for that".

Does selecting inputs work? That's all I need from a TV. If anything, needing to sign in to use the native interface would be a bonus, because it'd prevent non-technical family members from accidently using it. "Babe, we have Netflix on [the dongle], why'd you sign in on the TV?" is a conversation I've had more than once.

Free install by ADB, and Developer-moding once per device, not once per app / install? Yeah, OK. I don't quite get the outrage, then.

Before you @ me, HN, I run GrapheneOS. I fully understand and practice "own your own hardware". Most people probably shouldn't, though, because they lack the technical ability / interest to do so safely, and throwing them to the wolves strikes me as ideology pushed to the point of foolishness.

Now, y'all can flame my ass.

This is not unique to humans. Animal behavior also emerges from the complexity of their interactions. Look at the "[duck] raised as a [chicken]" genre of videos, for instance.

To return towards the subject of the thread, "AI behavior emerges from the complexity of their training", is the whole point.

Some banks can schedule transfers, but not payments. Or, not payments by specific routes. My credit union will cut a paper check and mail it to your bank (yes, that's seriously what they actually do), but can't schedule Zelle, or (maybe they can do it now, but they couldn't a few years ago) an electronic transfer.

Like someone else up-thread, my experience moving back to the US from Europe, ~15 years ago, was like stepping back to the financial dark ages. It's a bit better now (Zelle, Plaid, Mint / Monarch - though I'm well-aware of the privacy downsides of those third-party platforms), but the industry isn't close to catching up with the fifteen-year-old state of the art, let alone, say, Indian or Brazilian micro-transaction networks.

> Companies expect you to learn the ropes elsewhere and only show up when you're experienced.

This is every industry - barring unionized trades with established apprenticeship pathways - over the past few decades. Either someone does the early-career job-hop dance, or they take on student loans to (maybe!) skip some of that. (And, you know, universities would prefer not actually to train anyone, either. If they can - "highly selectively" - find cohorts who don't need much mentorship then that's much better for their bottom lines.) Regardless, the entire cost and risk of training has been pushed onto individual employees.

Yes, this works well for a small minority of highly-motivated people - who are, of course, vastly over-represented on this board, so few here will object to it - but it prevents far, far more people from ever reaching their potential.

Ding ding ding! Here is a photo of a cigarette packet included in a Christmas box sent to every BEF (British Expeditionary Force) soldier in France in 1914. You can see that the back offers quite a lot of room for writing:

https://britishmilitarybadges.co.uk/products/princess-mary-1...

That Christmas box itself, by the way, is beautiful. Brass, with an embossed portrait of Princess Mary, and scrollwork on the cover. My former father-in-law had one, that had been brought back by his father from France - missing, ironically enough in the context of this conversation, only the cigarettes, which he didn't smoke, but used in trade.

> an upper limit on the number of radio-emitting civilizations in the galaxy at any one time

I think there's a time-value parameter in the Drake Equation that captures this.

I agree. To expand your point a bit, it seems to me that for any civilization to get to the point of developing AI it needs a resource distribution mechanism at least as efficient as capitalism. It's not impossible to imagine an alien species with different biological imperatives than our own - a hive-mind, for instance - which could achieve that, and thus take a very different path and attitude towards AI. They'd be be very different from us, though.

> Who was ever writing on the back of cigarette packs?

British officers planning trench raids in the front lines during WWI. Or, at least, that's where I've been told the expression originates.

Really, though, is it impossible to imagine no one, ever, using a cigarette pack to jot something down? It's a colloquialism. It doesn't even have to be taken literally to make sense. What is gained by questioning it on that level?

Europe offers a useful counter-example. They (EU? Most countries? I don't know exactly, but it's immaterial) cap transaction fees, and there's absolutely no shortage of "ways to pay by card". In my experience there are, in fact, more - and, their middle-men have been earlier adopters of both security and convenience features (PIN codes, tap-to-pay, and rapid settlement among them) in which the US sometimes still lags.

What there aren't are rampant cash-back rewards for using a particular card. Or easy access to credit cards with usurorious rates. I think missing out on those is a societally good outcome.

Size matters. WinCo is big enough to do that, because it's a chain and a brand, and people make a choice to go there despite knowing ahead of time that's how it works. (That said, the first time I went into a WinCo I abandoned a cart-load of groceries because I had neither a debit card nor enough cash with me.) That doesn't work for a small business, like the ice cream shop in the example GP offered. They will be giving up a significant fraction of their custom.

All of that, and more broadly because FOSS developers are horrible about accepting advice or feedback from non-engineers, like designers or "normie" users. (Naturally speaking in broad terms, here; I'm sure some are great.) I can think of three or four (otherwise excellent projects) I've used where a "please put that CLI-only utility everyone uses all the time into the GUI" PR or Issue gets repeatedly closed. Or where making the rudimentary GUI look just a bit nicer would attract an order of magnitude more users. I think some developers really don't want to make things for non-developers. I get that, to a certain extent - support gets way, way harder, for instance - but then there really isn't much ground for complaining about FOSS's limited reach.

Unless they've recently changed the deal, they'll be selling GOS out of the box. That was the announcement two or so years ago, and so far as I know nothing had changed.

The problem happened during the formation lap. They red-flagged the race and brought all the cars off the track. I don't know any more about the update mechanism than you do, but GP's theory is plausible.

Huge mistake! I loved Wave, and used it very successfully on one creative project. When I tried again, with some of the same people, we'd collectively burned all of our invite tokens and couldn't get any more, so we had to revert to emailing things back and forth so the new folks weren't kept out of the loop. That killed it, as far as any of us were concerned. I think I used it one more time, to plan a party or something with my sister, and never again. Integrating it into Gmail, as you suggest, would have been a better path, but hardly necessary. It was great as a stand-alone product, but destroyed itself because the damn invite system stopped the network effect cold.

I have yet to replace any of the LED bulbs I bought at Costco in 2013. I dunno who manufactured them, or what kind of unobtainium they're made from, or whether I will jinx them by talking about it, but they just... Keep on going. Basic Edison screw-ins, from the first generation of bulbs that emitted warm light, that I've used exactly as I would any light-bulb. They weren't really expensive - maybe $2-3 apiece, though I really don't remember - and, I dunno. I hear everyone constantly complaining about their LED bulbs, and maybe they've been enshittified since, but I have absolutely no complaints.

That's a fair point. Fortunately, most games are short enough that you don't lose a lot of time when that happens. Mostly, though, I see a way I could have tweaked my card mix a bit to have made it work, so I want to play the same board again.

But, sure, if you're looking for a game with a lot of player interaction then Dominion isn't for you.

Yeah, but that's what makes it such a good game, in my opinion. Ten or so years ago I played a lot with / against two friends. With other "deep"(-ish) games someone who's never played before never has even a remote chance against experienced players - we had other games we'd never pull out with a n00b at the table - but with Dominion you can give them that strategy, plus a few tips, like "trashing cards is really helpful", and they know enough to hang. They'll lose, mostly, but they won't be immediately crushed, and they'll want to play again.

Anyway, the main fun is trying to get an approach working with unfamiliar card combinations - and yes, we owned all the expansions, thank you for asking. :-)

Rename spaces + move to them by name. At one point I had a hacky buggy mess of a (Quicksilver, I think) addon that let me do this, and it was the best, even though it crashed my computer a couple of times a week.

Does anyone know how to do this, nowadays? I've lost hope that Apple will make it a native feature.

Raisin grapes are a whole different thing, too. Wine and eating grapes don't make good raisins.

One of the things I miss the most (on a daily basis the most) about the UK is the beer. What you're suggesting just doesn't exist in the USA. Really and truly doesn't.

(Though, as others in this thread point out, NA beers are more common, and better, than they used to be. They're not the same thing, though.)

For those of you not familiar with the acronym, "AGW" stands for Anthropogenic Global Warming.

(Though, Istodd, please correct me if there is another meaning of which I am not aware. I would be embarrassed to have impugned your credibility in error.)

I was introduced to this by an HN discussion a few months back:

https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index

It's the closest thing I've seen to a once-shot explanation of the "vibe-cession" phenomenon, because, I think, it's a better metric of most people's experience of the current economy than the official measures. What do you think of it?

The few times I've had a chance to have something signed by an author I like, I've deliberately taken along with me an old and well-loved copy of one of their books. I've bought the new one, sure, but it's the old one I'll ask them to sign. I don't even know if I'll like the new one yet! No one has said anything about it, yet, but I kind of hope they notice and appreciate it.

I took a look at this over the weekend, and it's not really for me. Thanks for recommending it, though: I hope it hit with at least one other reader on here.