17,782 karma · joined May 12, 2014
It's hard to define what's security oriented and what is not. For example, is this HN web app security oriented? Not in the way of sshd but it must keep our accounts data separated and it must not let people exfiltrate data from the db, where for example it is storing the emails of some of us.
However Claude and I did write code all the day long and a long job went down from 2+ hours to 30 minutes, same final output.
When I hear a giant company say that modifying some of its software is impossible I always think about that IE and laugh.
By the way, I think that even without safety concerns seat belts are productive because they anchor the driver more firmly, so we can brake harder and turn faster (a lot of roundabouts here) and get to our destination in a shorter time. Of course this is against general road safety.
The ThinkPads have them below the spacebar. They are conveniently placed if one uses the little red stick, not so much for the touchpad.
It becomes productive only once your business stops for days because somebody brought it to a halt by breaking into the servers and deleting them.
Personally I would not use the touchscreen very often, but I would use it sometimes to press buttons and maybe even to scroll. Maybe the resize handle in the bottom right corner of the text area I am writing now is a large enough target for a finger. On a laptop: raise a finger, drag and go back to the keys? Probably. With a desktop computer with a keyboard far away from the screen? Well, the mouse is also far away from the hands so who knows.
I never have a real use case for a mouse but sometimes I follow a link from HN to a game in which a mouse would be better than a touchpad: move move move click click move click is great with a mouse and terrible with touchpad of all kinds. My mouse is in a drawer somewhere.
I am a fan of touchpads with physical buttons. I think that only HP is selling them anymore, on very few ZBook models (maybe a 16 Fury?) and Lenovo still has them in laptops with their stick in the middle of the keyboard. However the Lenovo buttons are at the top of the touchpad, where the thumb rests if the index finger operates the stick. The thumb rests below the touchpad when operating the touchpad.
Thinkpad fans will tell me that those buttons are close to the space bar, were thumbs rest all the time and they are right. Their little stick is very conveniently placed but I never manager to operate it as efficiently as a touchpad, which required zero training. My old ZBook has both the stick and the touchpad and two rows of 3 buttons, and I've never learned to move the pointer with the stick, both Windows and Linux.
I am moving my finger on my touchpad to move the pointer to more or less match what I am reading. I am always close to a Reply button or a vote one. There is no point reaching for the screen with my hand and touching those links. Furthermore they are way too small to be pressed with a finger. They are probably too small for a pointer too, but that's another issue.
Hoever, when I open an empty tab, type new in the URL bar and FF completes it to the URL of this site, and I press return, I usually end up with a Login link in the top right. If I reload the page (ctrl-r) I am logged in. For some reason either FF is not sending the session cookie or HN is not doing what it should on a cold session. This is also another issue (sorry) but let's say that I want to login. My pointer is far away from the login link. My fingers are not on the touchpad. Is it faster to move my right hand towards myself, touch the touchpad, slide the pointer to the link or moving that very same index finger to the link and touch it? My laptop does not have a touchscreen but when I used a tablet with a mouse and a keyboard I reached for the screen many times. Of course a mouse is less efficient than a touchpad, except for games, but I also miss the touchscreen sometimes.
And I would use if to press the reply button below this line I am typing. Let's see where the pointer ended up while I was typing... At the top right corner. Moving it to Reply and clicking is slower than touching the screen.
However there are truly superhuman vehicles, spaceships and submarines, that can carry humans where no human could go alive.
I don't know if these AIs are superhuman in the way of planes or in the way of spaceships. I also don't know if they can do everything we can do by talking or if they have some limits.
I mean, a plane can fly but not reach a branch and stay still on it. A small drone, almost. My coding agents sometimes can't do the obvious but is it because of some intrinsic limitation or because my instructions are bad? So far my experience is that they are superhuman like cars or trains, not yet as planes.
It's easy to spot an increasing political stance in SciAm through those translated articles. That could please some readers and piss off others, it's understandable and of course it could be a risk for the sales maybe even for the Italian magazine.
However I also noticed another trend. The ratio of thearticles written by journalists vs the articles written by researchers increases from almost zero in the 80s to probably 1 nowadays. Unfortunately the articles from journalists are far more less detailed and interesting and place SciAm closer to the lower tiers of their competition.
Of course they have to compete with the whole of the scientific production on the internet now, but the answer of lowering quality seems wrong to me.
What prevents them from adding tool integration?