lapcat

> We did, and yet people did still often just come over unannounced, to the point that it that the unannounced visit - which was common enough to be believable, but not always welcome

The question is, what exactly is the relevance of mobile vs. non-mobile phones?

I think it really depends on the walking distance. If someone is your neighbor, there's not a lot of effort saved from calling or texting first.

Going back to the OP, these are two very different things: "you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."

As far as one-to-one communication is concerned, a landland call is just as good as a mobile call or a text. But social media addiction is an entirely different matter. That's not even about announced vs. unannounced visits but rather about living in the real world vs. living in a virtual world.

> was a frequent plot point in various media.

I'm not sure that citing fiction is useful.

So please explain the relevance of mobile phones.

Where I lived, suburban United States, landlines were ubiquitous, and we used them all the time.

> I think people also forget (or don’t even know) that before mobile phones you’d often walk over to someone’s house just to knock on the door to find out if they were in or see what they were doing.

Um, we had phones before mobile phones.

> necessarily beggars all of the rest of us

This is an exaggeration.

Nonetheless, it's true, is it not, that government budgets are not unlimited, and economic tradeoffs have to be made? Of course the government can engage in deficit spending, but that raises additional problems, creates another tradeoff.

There are literal beggars in the United States. What are we doing about that problem, and couldn't we do more, spend more? What exactly are you willing to sacrifice, which worthy causes, in order to achieve your very specific exceptional thing?

It's interesting that Kennedy did not choose to cure cancer, for example. That's a hard thing, isn't it? Though I've heard that LLMs may do it any day now.

Kennedy was a politician, i.e., a liar.

We went to the Moon as a bit of Cold War posturing, to plant the American flag and demonstrate superiority over Soviets. After that was accomplished, we lost interest.

You know what's really hard? Solving longstanding social issues. How about we try that instead.

> How much do you think is spent on Golf every year world wide? 100 Billion? 200?

I don't know. Too much, probably. Certainly there's too much land devoted to golf courses. However, "humans should not spend money on leisure activities" would not be a serious proposal. Should we never enjoy life? I suspect that even people who are hungry and homeless also aspire to enjoy leisure activities in addition to having food and shelter.

If we could go to Mars only by abolishing fun then to hell with Mars.

> I'm probably as skeptical as most about a Martian colony - to my mind it's 100's of years but will almost certainly happen in that time frame.

No, you are definitely not as skeptical as most.

> The classic example is military spending.

No, because you said, "nobody bats an eye about any of that", which is not even remotely true of military spending.

It's worth noting that the Apollo space program was controversial in its day, simultaneous with prominent civil rights movements, because it was felt that the government was ignoring the economic problems of minorities, for instance, in order to put white guys on the Moon and play golf.

> We regularly expend vastly more resources on things that are far more frivolous and questionable than anything related to spaceflight has ever been, but nobody bats an eye about any of that.

This statement is too hand-wavy, and I doubt that "nobody" bats an eye. Do you have specific examples?

Also, there's no reason why overspending in some areas should be redirected to the space program rather than to vital, underfunded problems on Earth. Again, it's always a tradeoff.

I can't reproduce this.

What exactly does “trying” look like to you?

We have limited resources, and every investment is a tradeoff. We can play with rockets, but how does SpaceX solve the problem of humans living with much less gravity than Earth, for example? It seems to me that this is a vastly greater problem than traveling to another celestial body.

Has anyone ever conceived a child off the Earth, much less given birth or raised one? Don’t talk to me about space colonies until we’ve done that.

> Yes, it's an unfathomably difficult and complex project that should not be in any way underestimated. Realistically, it will take many decades at minimum and probably in excess of a century.

I think you've vastly underestimated the difficulty and the timeline, ironically. It's unrealistic to use the words "decades" or "a century". On the contrary, that's the delusion.

Consider: more than 50 years after putting a few people on the Moon very briefly, we're no closer to a colony on the Moon. And rocket technology won't help at all. Among the problems: the Moon has very little gravity, and we can't handwave like Q, "just change the gravitational constant of the universe."

Although fact checking is essential, I doubt that it will make a difference here. It clearly doesn’t make a difference in politics or religion. Much of the enthusiasm for Mars colonization is based on science fiction rather than science fact, childhood dreams not adult practicality.

I think it’s important to hold Mars enthusiasts to specific timelines. What will humanity do in a hundred thousand years, or a million years, if it survives that long? Who knows. Humanity hasn’t even had agriculture for that long. The relevant question is, what will humanity do with regards to Mars within the coming decades? Let's be honest: nothing much. Elon Musk had made predictions about the future that have already passed and proven false. How many times will you allow him to kick the can down the road before you stop believing lies? Let’s also stop pretending that launching some rockets now will somehow prepare for the hundred-thousand-year future. The best way to get to that future is to preserve the only currently habitable ecosystem in the solar system, by immediately stopping pollution and global warming on Earth. Sadly, Musk is financially backing politicians who are doing the opposite.

> "The medium is the message." - Marshall McLuhan

That's certainly a simple universal aphorism.

By itself, though, it's completely useless.

This is not intended as an insult to Marshall McLuhan. It would be an insult to reduce his work to a pithy quote. As I said, there's no substitute for doing the work. One has to study his work, not just grab excerpts.

> You are making a strawman of what OP said.

I don't think so. Is the OP not asking for some kind of simple universal aphorism? On the contrary, I think that the OP is making a straw man out of the humanities.

The usefulness to tech of those trained in the humanities is not to apply a few "brilliant" insights but rather to apply their "ordinary" but trained insights every day to ordinary tasks. In a meeting, you might say, "That's a good idea, Chris", but it would be so specific to the task that you couldn't state it as a "brilliant humanities insight". What you want is someone who "thinks different", as the saying goes.

Peter Thiel studied philosophy. That didn't help.

What they're missing is ethics, not education.

> I thought the humanities were supposed to train you to better express and share ideas?

Of course. But that applies to ideas broadly, whatever you happen to be working on.

Whereas the OP apparently wants something like a top 10 list of brilliant humanities insights, which is a misunderstanding of what students are learning: skills, not atomistic facts.

Even in the sciences, students are learning skills, not just facts and equations. The key is the ability to use them, and that takes a lot of practice. The result is a skilled scientist, not a container of facts.

If you think an education can be reduced to simply-stated aphorisms you can follow, you're missing the point. If that's all there was, you wouldn't need to spend years in school.

It's like thinking you can become a tennis player by watching a single instructional video. There's no substitute for doing the work. The result is the skilled person.

It's interesting that you seemingly want to erase the humans from the humanities in order to distill the "insights".

As a former philosophy PhD student, I don't think it's good career advice. My philosophy degrees got me precisely zero jobs in tech. Nobody cares.

The best career decision I ever made wasn't studying philosophy; it was starting my own business. I hired myself, because nobody else would, and now I don't have to worry about layoffs, job interviews, or all the other employer BS.

> It seems I misread the original comment - he actually told the audience he was nervous.

Correct.

> I'd love to know which product announcement that was and see it for myself.

Some NeXT computer.

> I'm still not sure how a coworker would be able to know what he was feeling any better than the audience did.

Because his coworkers had known him for years, worked through many product announcements with him, and the audience did not?

The whole book "Steve Jobs in Exile" was basically the reminiscences of his coworkers.

I don't understand your question.

You wouldn't be nervous without an audience, so why would the coworkers be talking about the practice talk and not the real talk?

The pause may have been rehearsed, though.

An anecdote from the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" I just read: at the beginning of one product announcement, Jobs told the audience that he was a little nervous, but his coworkers said that he was never nervous for keynotes. It was pure manipulation.

"Hackenburg found that models trained to become more persuasive also ended up being less truthful."

It sounds like the arguments were basically AI slop hallucinations.

> Hackenburg found that models trained to become more persuasive also ended up being less truthful.

> Even in Hackenburg’s recent preprint, Claude spouted numerous inaccuracies and falsehoods

> when Hackenburg ran his competition of coached elite debaters and AI, there was one way he could bring AI down to human levels of persuasiveness: by forcing it to write human-length messages at human writing speed.

> they found that an AI could talk people into conspiracy theories, and that the magnitude of their increase in belief was roughly the same as that of the decrease in belief after talking to a debunking bot.

None of this seems good.

> The browser handles the passkey matching to the domain which is obviously a better place to do it.

I'm not sure why you're making a distinction. In many cases the browser is the password manager.

> Some password managers will only fill if a domain matches, but IRL the response I've seen from most users when it doesn't match is to assume the integration broke and manually copy/paste it in. I've also seen lots of them do stuff like happily autofill on any prefix of the domain, so your credential for `something.example.com` will autofill into `fake-something.example.com`.

Why would you trust the very same password managers that don't handle passwords properly to handle passkeys properly?

Two crucial things you can do with a password that you can't do with a passkey:

1. Write it down on a piece of paper and put it in a safe deposit box.

2. Read it on one device (or from a piece of paper!) and enter it manually on another device.

Plain text is the ultimate form of cross-platform portability. Passkeys are the ultimate form of vendor lockdown. The passkey vendors won't even allow you to view the private key, unlike with ssh keys, which you can also write down on a piece of paper. It's vendor cabal to destroy computing freedom in the name of "security", always the excuse. Tech company paternalism at its worst.

> doing the test on the same computer wouldn't have caught this problem.

Doing it on a second computer wouldn't have caught this problem either with macOS 26.3 and earlier, because it was introduced in 26.4.

Look in the Keychain Access app.

> This is pretty much how it's suppose to work...

No, it's not, and that's not how it ever worked in macOS 26.3 and earlier.

This change was introduced in 26.4 for some reason.

Then you're in trouble.