I don't mind it at all for decorational images, but in this case I would mind. I suppose I would mind the inaccuracy, the worry that the creatures might not look exactly like the real world ones look.
Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me, even if I can't tell the difference.
It can matter to you without it being a grand philosophical, ethical or commercial concern.
That's where I'm at with this stuff, and I think I am in good company.
The image represents a facsimile of seeing the real world with my own eyes, which an AI image does not. That is important to me in this context, that of learning about the real world by literally observing it.
> Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me
I also very much felt like it doesn't really matter, perhaps too much and without considering other potential points of view, that's why the "plenty of worries" seemed so strange to me. How could you experience plenty of worry over an internet site being disingenuous about facts or images? You'd be freaking out all the time. But I can see now that it could be serious for some people in this case.
Yes please, but do it in a way where the government doesn't know what services am I using and the service doesn't know who I am beyond being a unique non-registered human.
I'm not sure this is possible in EU and US. And I'm sure it is not possible worldwide.
As always when this pops up, I'm asking what options are there to prove that a user is human that are more privacy friendly (and as the author puts it, less creepy).
Because the problem World claims to try to solve is real.
I’m glad you asked. I’m working in a competing product named Globe that will offer twice the service at half the cost with a greater emphasis on security and privacy than Sam Altman ever could.
All you need to do is send me your biometrics, and if you don’t feel like doing that willingly I’ll use the billions of dollars of capital that my friends and I have to coerce you into doing so because I’ll leave you with no other choice.
The problem we at Globe are trying to solve is real and necessary to solve.
People who oppose it are obviously the problem, not me and the existence of a problem is sufficient reason for me to coerce people into accepting my solution without government oversight because my friends have been diligently working hard to reduce the ability of governments around the world to do so.
Imagine A system where there's a vending machine outside City Hall, you spend $X on a charity for choice, and you get a one-time, anonymous token. You can "spend" it with a forum to indicate "this is probably a person or close enough to it."
Misuse of the system could be curbed by making it so that the status of a token cannot be tested non-destructively.
I like the idea, but I'm not sure it solves the problem enough. I'm not convinced that there is an $X where the service is not too cost prohibitive for humans and at the same time cost prohibitive enough to discourage bots.
In the specific case of Tinder you might as well just make Tinder paid and skip all of this.
There's a rather rich spectrum of solutions, and too-often often the debate becomes a binary of comprehensively-identified versus uncontrolled-anonymity". By clarifying our requirements, we can get better mixes of cheapness and privacy.
For the average web-forum, you don't really need to know that an account is a human, let alone a unique human. It's enough to know that whatever is on the other end (A) likely cares about what happens to the account if it doesn't follow rules and (B) probably isn't running a hundred sockpuppets, or is at least taking a risk doing so.
I think a key part of the idea is that it's a vending machine you'd have to physically interact with and not an online service. That would filter out bots pretty effectively.
Yubikey type device issued by an authority trusted by the website owner. Same as we have it now with browsers and SSL certificates.
We can even have a key issued by the government as a digital ID card. They can be used to check: is over 18, is real person, for digital signature, etc.
Yes, I agree, but as one of the other comments say, they are not able to read your mind. So even if the structure and style is not clear, you must be able to express what you want.
Certainly. I just think "expressing thoughts in words clearly" might in the end turn out to be something different than what we, humans consider clear.
For example long unstructured rambling might turn out to be a non-issue, while as human I would rank such message low no matter how good it is in other informational aspects.
That's true. I feed Codex some very long .md files that I use as a kind of work diary and that are pain to use into something very much usable. Writing your thoughts is important even if done carelessly.
Please explain to me which part they are automating.
A person scans the goods. A person handles keying in codes when necessary. A person tells the system the scanning is done and to accept payment. A person bags the groceries.
I guess if you’re paying cash it automates taking the money slightly more than the standard cash register does.
Mine have lower wait times because people with lots of stuff can’t fit that shit on the tiny scale-tables, and likely don’t feel like doing all that work themselves, so they go to the regular checkout line (there is usually only one, maybe two if it’s busy), plus the five or six stations share a line so it feels faster.
The difference is that where I live stores that used to have, say, 10 counters out of which maybe 6 were open on average now have 4 human counters and 20 self-checkout counters.
So for me it is in effect automating the part where I need to wait in a queue. We should surely keep some human counters for accessibility reasons, but I as a person able to scan my groceries in the 3 minutes it takes I'm perfectly happy to do just that.
By the way there are also RFID counters where you just dump your goods in a bin and it scans everything automatically. Wouldn't solve the problem with items priced by weight, but makes the rest significantly easier.
Retail business profit margins have always been low single digit percentages. More staff can only mean higher prices. I'll gladly scan my own stuff to have lower prices and be able to get out quicker.
> Retail business profit margins have always been low single digit percentages.
And yet overall profits remain high - they’re high-volume low margin businesses.
> More staff can only mean higher prices.
When you’re talking about massive chains that are prioritizing profits, usually on behalf of shareholders, that is true. For smaller businesses, coops, or even gov run grocery stores - things that aren’t as focussed on rates of return for investors - it can just mean less profits for the owners.
> I'll gladly scan my own stuff to have lower prices and be able to get out quicker.
It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down. Maybe the “quicker” bit… except only if I have just a handful of items.
> And yet overall profits remain high - they’re high-volume low margin businesses.
Why would they not be high? The purchasing power of the currency goes down day after day. If nominal profits are not hitting highs day after day, then you are losing purchasing power.
> It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down.
Profit margin is the relevant metric to look at for this context. It is possible prices would have gone up 10% instead of 5% if not for the automation. It is also possible the automation fails to reduce costs.
There are no guarantees in life, just bets that may or may not pan out. Long term trends will the story, but for now, the profit margins make me happy that I don’t invest in grocery stores.
You're blaming the store, which I agree with. My question was whether you could blame the GP, or the consumer in general. They have little control over how much the staff of their grocery store is being paid.
People have different preferences. What's to be confused about that?
I share their preference. The cashier saves me no real amount of work. The difference between putting my groceries on a conveyor belt and having a cashier scan them, and me myself dragging my groceries past a scanner, is somewhere between minimal and non-existent. The amount of work I perform is functionally the same. The biggest difference is in the amount of time I spend, where the win clearly goes to the self-checkout, since then I can bag my groceries at the same time as I scan them, and there's more self-checkouts available than normal ones, meaning I spend less time queuing if I use those.
Some places have more automated steps - Uniqlo has bins where you just toss in all your clothes and it detects it via RFID tags in the price tags and rings up a total.
It looks good, but since the design is becoming so ubiquitous in the small personal projects space (elsewhere as well, but I think it is most noticeable here) it is also boring.
I've vibecoded a few websites for my own use that look very similar to this. If I designed them myself, I would (in those cases) not put up enough effort so they would be much less refined, but also less boring?
edit: The expand/collapse behaviour of the table cells is quite strange. So the design is not that okay, afterall.
25 years ago one of early engineering courses included a case study about Ingersol Rand (IIRC). They went out to work floors and saw how all the workers had modified their air wrenches in the same way, adding padding with tape in various areas. They realized they could probably make a better wrench if it had some of those ergonomics built in.
Maybe the next phase of Apple could return to flowing shapes and save our wrists.
If your wrist is in contact with the edge of the laptop while you are actively typing, then your typing style has a good chance of giving you RSI. You'd be better off trying to fix that than trying to make the fast path to RSI more convenient.
How the f are you supposed to type? Ideally I'd like full support for my arms from the elbow to the wrist.
In my first job - i think it was in 1997, I had my own small room with an L-shaped desk with a rounded corner. That gave a few inches of space for resting my arms - both when typing on a quite reasonable Pentium laptop, and especially when using the mouse.
Since then, the desks and the chairs has become shittier and shittier. Except perhaps when a was a consultant for an HR-department.
The U-shaped desk was probably the best ergonomically designed workplace I've had. Maybe a wheat-filled pad along the desk would have made it better.
If your arms are resting, then your fingers and wrists are doing the maximum amount of reaching as you type. If you use a wrist rest you are encouraging your fingers/wrist to reach up (bend in your wrist) instead of neutral or reaching down (more natural position).
Constant change in position, dynamic motion, strong & brief muscular exertion of whole hand and arm, even including the shoulder vs constant static position w/ small repetitive motions, where the fingers really are doing almost all the work.
You should try to avoid continuous static load on your muscles, especially the smaller ones. So you should find a typing position where that doesn't happen. You also want to use your muscles in the strong and comfortable part of their range of motion, which depends on the entire chain of joints, because tendons have to stretch past several joints to get to whatever bone they attach to – so for fluent finger motions, you want to keep wrists and hands in as neutral a position as you can.
If your wrists are not straight while typing a lot, that's really bad. I constantly see people typing with their wrists either significantly flexed or significantly extended; doing that a lot is a fast road to RSI, and even doing it a little is pretty unpleasant and inadvisable.
If you are going to type a whole lot at a stretch (say, as a programmer or writer), you want your arms to be mostly passively supported from the shoulder. Having your arm bent at the elbow doesn't cause much strain, as long as the upper arm is hanging loosely down with your shoulder relaxed – so bring the keyboard relatively close to your torso. Resting your wrists, palms, or forearms on some surface and then typing generally causes more strain than having your wrists and palms "floating" above the keyboard while actively typing. You can rest the fingertips lightly on the key tops if you want. You can rest your palms on a palmrest or arms on an armrest (or table, or lap, or whatever) while you are taking a break from typing. It's generally a good idea to take regular breaks.
There doesn't appear to be good evidence that this is better for RSI. I found one study that shows greater shoulder and back strain when doing the hover hands approach. It might make more sense for piano since you need more mobility up and down the keyboard, but for typing your hands don't need to move nearly as much, so resting should be just fine. The do suggest some sort of support under your wrists, though.
Huh, seriously? Have you ever worked in an office? Perhaps your mental picture of what op is describing might be misaligned? I just always assumed it was a rarer/ more disciplined style some people had
On a modern laptop, the keyboard is on the top half of the lower case these days, not the bottom.
My palms are hovering over or resting on the chassis, and I sit high enough that my wrists do not come in contact with the edge of the case or desk. The majority of the weight of my arms is supported by my shoulders. For me, the ideal height happens to be pretty close to a neutral wrist position.
A more concrete way of putting it is if you are putting so much weight on your wrists that the edge of the MacBook is making you uncomfortable, you're probably doing it wrong.
I've heard this but I've personally been typing this way for 25+ years (wrists on the rest, including on laptops exclusively for the last 15) and my wrists are fine. Meanwhile people I know with ergonomic keyboards and everything that's supposed to save your wrists are the ones with bad wrists.
The reasonable takeaway from that correlation is that people with preexisting issues turn to ergonomic keyboards to avoid worsening those issues, not the other way round.
While this is true, if standard keyboards were bad then everyone who uses them would have issues, yet many (most?) don't.
Sometimes I think it comes down to actual typing technique. For example. I've heard of "Emacs pinky" which is easily avoided by simply using the Ctrl key opposite the key being pressed (use right Ctrl for C-c for example). I religiously never use Ctrl, Shift or Alt + another key with the same hand and I feel that's been huge. Also my elbow, wrist and hand always form a straight line to the keyboard with a standard laptop keyboard and the right body position/desk and chair adjustment.
After RSI years ago, I switched to an X220 and had 100% the opposite experience. The curve at the front of the case was a perfect resting point for the heel of my (average size) hand to allow easy reach of the keys. I replicated this geometry by sanding a pine 1x4 and wrapping that in soft leather for a wrist rest with a procession of mechanical keyboards (currently a Lenco Majestouch 2). Literally decades later, all is well.
My experience with Apple hardware has been it generally holds up. I've only on my third iPad since I bought the original in 2011. My iPhones have all lasted at least four years.
The screen on my Macbook Air has been the exception. I wonder why they can't just use the same display on those that they do iPad. Seems better quality, as well
I’ve made my living as a pro photographer for over 30 years. These days I consider most cameras to be disposable. I also keep any older bodies as hazardous duty remote cameras. Once you get into the mindset it opens a certain amount of creativity.
The number of times I find myself saying to beginning photographers that babying their camera is the surest way to hate photography, whether as a hobby or a profession… I get particularly testy about handwringing about weather sealing or protecting the finish on their kit. Just take the camera places and use it. It’s probably going to be fine. It’s going to get scars. That’s just stories.
There's a curve. Beginners with pristine gears are babying it, but veterans just don't bump their camera everywhere nor drop them, they have the bags that fit what they do, use straps (or not) that fit them and there's little to hurt their camera.
Event photographers are another kind, camera throwing is part of the job.
I wonder if you feel the same about cars, expecting expert chauffeurs to have bumps all over their car ?
> but veterans just don't bump their camera everywhere nor drop them, they have the bags that fit what they do
Most veterans I know would not be seen dead with one of those bags that shout LOOK AT ME I AM A CAMERA BAG ....
The theft risk is just too great these days.
Most of the time they will take a standard bag, with their other stuff in it (e.g. change of clothes etc.) and just dump their camera and a couple of lenses in there. Either padded by their spare clothes or with a velcro-neoprene camera wrap cloth.
That solution also enables them to move fast instead of having to make sure everything goes into the right stupid slot in a camera bag.
So for example if it starts raining heavily (or if they have to get through airport security) it can be done quickly and efficiently.
I made a car analogy because I didn't get the sense that you were in groups of photographers yourself, looking at other people's gear. I spent a decent amount of time with birders, being out in the field for day in day out, climbing, crawling, hiding, and their gear was far from beaten up.
I mean, it takes some effort to dent our current magnesium alloy bodies, you won't get scratches by laying it a bit fast on a counter table or hitting your bag's zipper.
The modding community lives on where it always were, hacking gaming and demoscene, and that never wasn't on Apple platforms for the most part, rather Amiga, PC, Atari,...
That doesn’t seem strange to me, Apple is my “buy it for what’s on the box” brand, stuff that I don’t want to mod. If I want to mess with something I usually use hardware that runs Linux.
This is why I like cheaper tools. Yes, that means cheaper quality but it's far easier to approach taking a dremel to it. And the DIY look usually matches the stock materials better anyway.
I'd say it's an even split. Half the Jeeps on the road and on the trails are modified. On the road maybe 1/10 of Porches are modified, but on the track 90% are.
Big difference between bolt-ons vs deeper mods too.
Go to any mechanic thats been doing cars, especially if it's a focused subset of cars, for more than a few year and I guarantee they'll either have some modified HF sockets or wrenches or some home made tools. Probably don't want to cut up your SnapOff debt peonage tools, but a lot of the time they alone don't cut it.
The interesting part isn't whether Apple got the design right or wrong, it's that most of us never even consider altering the tools we use every day. We just adapt ourselves instead.
I used to turn the back of my laptop into a whiteboard. Then you could write todos on it or custom messages. Was kind of neat. You know I've always thought the back of the case was wasted potential. Can you imagine if it had an eink display? You could flash whatever you wanted to it as a clean customized print and it would stay there without power. would be cool but prob expensive.
Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me, even if I can't tell the difference.
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