NYC is one of a number of world cities known by acronyms or nicknames:
There’s even a whole country that goes by its initials: UK.
So, stop thinking this is some American thing, it’s just a way that people shorten the names of common cities that have a few too many syllables to be convenient.
I wonder if that’s true. Sewing machines haven’t changed much since they started. Cooking hasn’t either. But, if you’re a computer-using Gen Xer, you can’t still be running Windows 95 or something. You’ve had to keep up with the current tech.
Now, you might be using Windows 11 the same way you used Windows 95, and missing out on some of the newer features. But, I think most people who knew how to debug a networking problem in Windows 95 still can figure out how to do it in the newest Windows releases.
It’s like driving. Yes, older drivers are worse drivers, their eyesight and hearing is worse, their reaction speed is slower, etc. But, cars have changed pretty considerably in the last 50 years, and most older drivers know how to use modern cars. They may not be as good at using some of the gadgets, like the GPS system, as younger people. But, they’ve adapted to keyless entry, push-button starts, push-button windows, backup cameras, traction control, and so-on.
Google has had to deal with disputed place names a number of times.
There’s the Sea of Japan which has the parenthesized name “East Sea”, which I think is only used in Korea.
There’s the Persian Gulf sometimes known as the Arabian gulf.
There’s the Falkland Islands which the Argentinians refer to as Islas Malvinas.
What’s really dumb about this is that it goes directly against the old policy (from 2008) where they said:
When our policy says that we display the “primary, common, local” names for a body of water, each of those three adjectives has an important and distinct meaning. By saying “primary”, we aim to include names of dominant use, rather than having to add every conceivable local nickname or variation. By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.
But, the Gulf of “America” is not in common usage anywhere. Canada should see only “Gulf of Mexico”, even though it shares a language with the country that officially renamed it to “Gulf of America”. And in particular Germany shouldn’t see anything about “Amerika” because that’s just not a thing in any German-speaking country.
Really, it should be Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico) in the US and whatever the local name is everywhere else.
Sounds like an answering machine could take the AI’s job.
Instead of what, an answering machine, or a printed sign?
I didn’t say it was true, I said it was funny.
I saw another funny one somewhere. Apparently one of nVidia’s social media accounts posted a bible quote. Someone replied to it with something like “Hey fellas, I’m not so good at the stock market. Is it good news when your investment starts praying?”
I agree, and If you can’t manage your own health, don’t be alive, which is why the world should consist 100% of medical doctors.
Yeah, and the big selling point for serverless is that you only deal with the code you want to run, none of that “server management” stuff. It’s a perfectly reasonable name based on what’s appealing about it.
From the point of view of the customer it is serverless. Maybe it’s being done on a server, but maybe it’s a magical genie in a bottle. You don’t have to care because from your point of view you upload code and that code magically runs.
This fits perfectly in with other “-less” words. Like many “priceless” museum artifacts were bought and sold before they showed up in the museum. To the visitor and maybe to the museum they’re priceless, but to the dealers who found it for the museum it had a price.
Not really. Serverless is “you don’t need to manage the servers”. For some businesses, even managing a VPS is too technical a task. So, you could either go out and hire someone who can do that, or you can go serverless and pay a bit more for that, but save by not needing additional expertise.
Not really. Serverless is OpEx. VPS is OpEx, but you also need OpEx budget for a person who can manage servers, not just a programmer.
VPS isn’t rocket science, so you can probably find someone who can both program things and do the basic VPS server management needed. But, it is work that needs to be done by someone. In some cases, like if you’re hiring scientists from academia who have never done any of their own sysadmin type stuff, it might be easier to just go with serverless so all they need to do is write programs.
It’s more like “it has servers, but you don’t have to manage them, or hire someone to manage them, and we will charge you a lot more, but maybe you’ll save money because you don’t have to hire someone”.
Assuming nobody else is immune and has the power to restart it. If someone else did have the power to restart time, I think the thought process would go:
Bob: “Aha! I have the power to stop time with the snap of my fingers”
[starts to snap]
Bob: “Oh wait! What if I’m not immune!”
[time is frozen]
Some dude elsewhere: “Weird, time stopped again! I guess I’ll take advantage and rob this bank.” Then, later “Ok, got all the money, now I’ll just crack my knuckles to restart time.”
[time is unfrozen]
Bob: “Wait… I just snapped my fingers and time didn’t stop! I guess I don’t have that power at all!”
You could say the same about a plant identification book.
It’s not so much that AI for plant identification is bad, it’s that the higher the stakes, the more confident you need to be. Personally, I’m not going foraging for mushrooms with either an AI-based plant app or a book. Destroying Angel mushrooms look pretty similar to common edible mushrooms, and the key differences can disappear depending on the circumstances. If you accidentally eat a destroying angel mushroom, the symptoms might not appear for 5 to 24 hours, and by then it’s too late. Your liver and kidney are already destroyed.
But, I think you could design an app to be at least as good as a book. I don’t know if normal apps do this, but if I made a plant identification app, I’d have the app identify the plant, and then provide a checklist for the user to use to confirm it for themselves. If you did that, it would be just like having a friend just suggest checking out a certain page in a plant identification book.
Generative AI: bad.
Other kinds of AI: mostly bad.
This headline sounds a lot funnier if you assume “it” means Signal, like I did.
Doubleclick has been Google for decades now. The difference is that (at least these days) most companies wouldn’t accept it if doubleclick ads had obnoxious pop-ups. But, they choose to have a Google sign-in form that has an obnoxious pop-up. Yes, it’s annoying that Google made an annoying login pop-up. But, much worse is that places like Reddit choose to go with that obnoxious pop-up instead of saying “we don’t want to force that on our users”.
What I mean by it not being a Google thing is that it doesn’t just appear there on its own, like it might if it were a Doubleclick ad or something.
This is something that companies like Reddit see and think “Yes, I want that obnoxious thing on my site”.
Yes but… sometimes, sometimes, a video is so important.
I was trying to troubleshoot an issue where something just wasn’t working. All the text-based resources just showed the commands people were running and the steps they were taking. But, while I wasn’t getting errors, I was getting different results.
I really needed to know whether the output from the command I ran matched the output from the command when someone else ran it, because for me things broke after that one step. Nobody posting in text-based stuff was posting the output of the commands they were running, just the commands they were running and the files they were using.
So, I found someone doing a tutorial who did a video. They also were talking through the commands they were running, the process they were following, etc. But, BUT, they were sharing their screen as they did it, and for a second I was able to see the output they got, and that it was subtly different from what I was seeing, and that was the key to figuring out what was wrong.
Most of the time videos suck, the output isn’t searchable, the pacing is mostly too slow, you can’t copy and paste, etc. But, every once in a while, the fact that videos include a full replay of every thing the person does means that you can see where what you did diverges from what someone else did.