keyshapegeo99

[removed as I don't wish to tank this guy's career. he knows what he's done though]

[removed]

GPTZero flags every single section of this beyond the introduction as 100% likely to be AI-generated.

Looking for recommendations for discussion forums that aren't filled with these slop posts, anyone have any suggestions?

Can I just say, I'm getting really sick of these LLM-generated posts clogging up this site?

GPTZero gives this a 95% chance of being entirely AI-generated. (5% human-AI mix, and 0% completely original.)

But I could tell you that just by using my eyes, the tells are so obvious. "The myth / The reality, etc."

If I wanted to know what ChatGPT had to say about something, I would ask ChatGPT. That's not what I come here for, and I think the same applies to most others.

Here's an idea for all you entrepreneur types: devise a privacy-preserving, local-running browser extension for scanning all content that a user encounters in their browser - and changing the browser extension icon to warn of an AI generated article or social media post or whatever. So that I do not have to waste a further second interacting with it. I would genuinely pay a hefty subscription fee for such a service at this point, provided it worked well.

Many of the author's rebuttals hinge on the assumption that everyone in an organisation is acting in its interest first - and not their own, often conflicting, self-interest. As such, they are not particularly convincing.

Large organisations absolutely do, as a function of their scale, produce pockets where slackers and incompetents can hide. They'll surround themselves with a web of process, pointless meetings, and substance-free buzzword-heavy documentation/presentations to disguise this fact. Others may become ensnared in this web, and will rightly express the criticisms that the author is attempting to debunk.

Update: Couldn't tune it to my liking. I didn't like having to swipe halfway across the trackpad before a gesture would engage. Went back to macOS.

One day, Linux. Hopefully. But not today.

Thanks for the recommendation! I've been playing around with Niri for the past hour and I have to say there's a lot here that I like. I'm still going to need to figure out how to adjust the trackpad gesture sensitivity a bit (which doesn't seem especially straightforward to do) - but this is considerably more buttery than anything I've experienced before on Linux

People can have different preferred input devices to others. It doesn't make them amateurs.

My gripes with the trackpad are less to do with window management and are more to do with the graphical components of my job.

Please explain to me how I'm supposed to design graphics in Inkscape using only the keyboard? Or create presentations in LibreOffice Impress using only the keyboard? I don't spend the entirety of my time in a text editor.

Consider these "amateur" tasks all you like, most organisations value them and I need to be able to undertake them without frustration. MacOS won't fight me in these contexts. Linux will.

For both ideological and practical reasons, I'd love to switch. If I were a desktop computing person, I'd already have done so years ago.

Alas, I exclusively use laptops - as I work a great deal while travelling.

I do not wish to have to carry around a mouse with me wherever I go with my portable computer.

If any Linux distro manages to replicate even 80% of the smoothness and functionality of a Mac trackpad experience, I'll switch. I have yet to find one, however (and yes, I've tried all the Asahi variants - they don't come close).

I carry a pocket e-reader around with me[1]. I place it in my pocket, and my phone in my bag, out of easy reach. I've been reading a lot more lately

[1] This one specifically - https://lifehacker.com/tech/this-wallet-sized-e-reader-is-my...

iPadOS 26 is an even bigger F-up than macOS 26, though

It's hugely embarrassing how they've had to perform a screeching U-turn in bringing back Slide Over and dock-launchable Split View with the .1 and .2 updates - lest graphic artists and others who depended upon these features left their platform in droves. This is essentially an admission that iPadOS 26's touch-based UX had precisely zero thought put into it. They do not have a clue what they're doing

There are still many, many more nonsensical UX degradations and bugs that need ironing out

Opening with a made-up quote (that is very simple to Google, which quickly confirms its apocryphal nature) doesn't inspire confidence in the factual accuracy of the remainder of the book...

> And… this wasn’t immediately seen as being deeply unethical and downright evil?

Oh, these people know it's evil - from the second they suggest it. The personality types associated with SV leadership are simply wired for rationalising evil as a means to any business end. It's just implicitly accepted that it's an appropriate tool to be wielded.

You're the weird one who "just doesn't get it" if you push back. Push back hard enough and you'll quickly find yourself on the receiving end.

Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

Disagree, it's making a valid observation.

If someone is nominally trying to convince you of a point, but they shroud this point within a thicket of postmodern verbiage* that is so dense that most people could never even identify any kind of meaning, you should reasonably begin to question whether imparting any point at all is actually the goal here.

*Zizek would resist being cleanly described as a postmodernist - but when it comes to his communication style, his works are pretty much indistinguishable from Sokal affair-grade bullshit. He's usually just pandering to a slightly different crowd. (Or his own navel.)

I completely agree and I just put in the bit about the keyboard shortcuts to pre-empt comments from the minority of iPad users who never remove the iPad from their Magic Keyboard saying they quite like the update.

Although regarding your final sentence - I don't think Apple even knows what the iPad is supposed to be any more. It seems execs completely lack any kind of product vision. And given both the tackiness of Liquid Glass and the various insulting ad campaigns that have trickled out over the past few years - they also clearly lack taste. In other words, Apple is Just Another Tech Company now.

The new windowing system is actually rather decent when used with a keyboard + all window tiling / maximising / app switching keyboard shortcuts memorised. Although the lack of Slide Over is still inexplicable and sucks.

The issue is that most people don't use iPads with keyboards. The windowing system in this case is then an absolute nightmare compared to what came before, as touch-based users were clearly a distant second thought when designing it.

For any HNers who don't have access to iPads running iPadOS 26 / 18, and aren't sure if this is just the "people on the internet hating new things" reflex (it really isn't), here's a side-by-side comparison that clearly illustrates andix's point[1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/iPadOS/comments/1mq8sgd/old_split_v...

If you head over to digital artistry-related subreddits / other forums, they are almost uniformly very strongly against this due to the major UX regressions in iPadOS for their typical use cases (i.e. touch-based multitasking having been ruined)

But yes agreed, it is mind-boggling to me how broadly well-received this has been

I had to disable UBO and my VPN's ad blocker. Then the whole piece showed up

With no exaggeration, iPadOS 26 is the worst piece of software I've had the displeasure of using in a very long time (and I work day-to-day with 'Enterprise' GIS software).

It has me seriously considering selling my 11" M4 iPad Pro and eyeing up a Samsung Tab S11. This is despite the fact that the latter will lack the "magic" interplay with my Mac, which I use frequently. But I'm beginning to think slowly transitioning out of "the ecosystem" might be what's best for me.

When you pay the eye-watering premium for an Apple product you do not expect to be subject to workflow-obliterating bugs and UX degradations. But here we are.

The removal of Spilt View and Slide Over from the non-windowed mode in iPadOS was completely unnecessary and represents a massive middle finger to touch-based users.[1] To achieve the former's functionality now requires a bunch of fiddly and undiscoverable swipes, taps, and flicks to emulate what was previously a simple hold-and-drag procedure. It's also completely unpredictable - every time a guess as to whether a 'flicked' window will fill up the whole left/right side of my iPad's display, or whether it will just fill the space above the dock (why would I want that on an 11" display?), in the latter case requiring further attempts to actually get it to fill up the entire space. I'm aware there is the alternate route of holding the traffic lights and waiting for the pop-up menu, but this touch target is so small that I frequently miss it, and waiting for what was previously instantly accessible functionality to present itself is frustrating. Plus, switching back to full-screen mode by double-tapping the top of a window is completely broken - half of the time this gets interpreted as the old functionality of scrolling to the top of scrollable content within the referent app, meaning you risk completely losing your place in a PDF / on website whenever you attempt this.

Slide Over is completely missing, and was the iPad's killer feature for students and artists (or I considered it to be at least, until a Samsung rep at their store yesterday demonstrated that you can flick an app in pop-up view 'off the side' of their tablets' displays and then bring it back with a tap, in what is a very close analogue of Slide Over). Now if I wish to be working on a full-screen note / PDF annotation and I want to quickly bring up my calculator app, it is a much more fiddly and cumbersome process to do this. And best hope that I remembered every digit of that large number I'm copying down! Because the moment you touch away from a floating window to write something down, the window will vanish to the back of the stacking order, unlike Slide Over's persistent (until dismissed) window. This is infuriating.

And the bugs! Oh my goodness, the bugs. The fact that the dancing keyboard issue[2] wasn't resolved during the beta period is completely unforgivable. The fact that Stage Manager is riddled with bugs (persistent app previews poking out of the side of the display, even when the switcher has been dismissed; the swipe up behaviour taking you to the tail end of your app previews instead of your most recently used apps, etc.). Plus the constant flickering and glitching of the tacky 'Liquid Glass' effects is headache-inducing.

You know what? I've convinced myself to get that S11.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/iPadOS/comments/1mq8sgd/old_split_v... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/iPadOS/comments/1njyg2y/hows_your_i...

Your point about air-conditioning is mistaken. The Jubilee line can be very unpleasant in the summer months as it is not air-conditioned.

The Metropolitan line, by contrast (the oldest Tube line and first metro line in the world, serving as the concept's namesake) is now air-conditioned - as are quite a few other older lines. The Piccadilly, Bakerloo, Waterloo and City, and Central lines are all slated to receive air-conditioning within the next 5 years. (Although the inevitable delays in delivery will probably push this back a bit.) There are no plans to add it to the Jubilee line.

This almost entirely applies to any public sector organisation, too - except for:

Remove the comment about ever having to work a weekend

Remove the comment about there being opportunities for (technical) career development

Remove the comment about upskilling / training being encouraged

The hosted version of, for example, ArcGIS Experience Builder is so buggy and limited that you pretty much have to use the Developer Edition to build anything involving even a mild degree of complexity

Ditto, I wouldn't quite say it flies on my M1 MBA, but performance is by no means frustratingly laggy. I use Inkscape a lot on both my MBA and Surface Laptop and it is much more frustrating on the latter device. The lack of support for fractional scaling is an annoyance on my 150% scaled Surface. The tiny UI has to be remedied by pinning a .bat to my taskbar and disguising it as Inkscape, with the following code:

cd <Inkscape directory>

set GDK_SCALE=2

start inkscape.exe

And within Inkscape using the Minwaita-Inkscape theme and 80% font scaling to scale back the otherwise-now-too-big UI.

On both my Mac and PC, the main frustration once the UI is scaled correctly is that often closing pop-up windows (i.e. Document Properties) simply doesn't work. Sometimes using Inkscape's tab close button rather than the MacOS/Windows close window button works, but other times the whole app will freeze up and crash when attempting to close these pop-up windows. Have had this issue for multiple Inkscape versions now, hoping the devs find a way to fix it.

The inconsistent teeth on the gears give it away. I'd wager a lot that it's AI generated

Systra also lauded his media appearances on their website: https://web.archive.org/web/20240829120751/https://www.systr...

> [Gareth's] passion and enthusiasm for all things rail are well-known across the sector through his weekly #Railnatter podcast and as a regular national press rail commentator

Guardian are reporting on it now, so it's slowly trickling out.

The article is generally confused and definitions of words seem to shift throughout.

I'm also unsure of what the question posed by the title even means. Reactionary, I suspect, does not mean what the author thinks it means.

Or it's simply because young people spend ever-increasing periods of time living in cramped shared accommodation or with their parents, due to the dysfunctional rental market in most Western Anglosphere countries.

This certainly isn't conducive to sex, and often makes it difficult or impossible to host friends (meaning that people often choose to meet at venues such as restaurants instead, a situation which often necessitates more infrequent catch-ups due to the expenses involved).

Beautifully written piece whose premise I disagree with.

At least in the UK (the States may be different), you are taught many of the concepts and underlying reasoning that the author bemoans not having learned.

At A-Level standard, you are taught the physical basis of epigenetic modification (what he describes as switching genes on or off - although that in itself is a too-binary simplification, it's more to do with up- and down-regulation of expression). You're also taught other fascinating processes such as alternative splicing - where a single gene can express many different proteins.

During my first year of undergrad at a so-so Russell Group university, the history of biology featured prominently in lectures - especially those on the evolution of genetics as a field. The inherent fuzziness of categories and concepts in biology was also made very clear. I distinctly remember a lecturer telling us (in response to a question about why we say bacteria don't have membrane-bound organelles, when the topic of the lecture - the magnetosome - was clearly an exception to this rule) that when we say something is 'always true' in biology, we mean it happens 80%+ of the time, and when we say something 'never happens' in biology, we really mean that it happens less than 20% of the time.

I do agree that there is sometimes a bit too much of an emphasis on rote learning the chemical minutiae at the expense of the broader, more important concepts (Krebs cycle, anyone?) - but I think this case is overblown by the author.