I mean at the same time, if it’s possible that regular people who actually shop around are shown lower fares and business travelers paid for by the company are shown higher fares, I’m all for that sort of subsidization, as unlikely as it is to be the reality

Consider how many millions of people use them. If their customer service fucks up 0.01% of the time, that’s still thousands of people having to put up with this shit.

I used to live 6 hours drive from my parents and drive to theirs after work on Friday for a weekend roughly every month or so.

If there’s somewhere around halfway I can get fed, go to the bathroom, and take a short break which also doesn’t push my midnight arrival time much later, then of course I’m going to do that instead of going out to a full service restaurant, or cooking myself and having to clean up from it, again pushing my arrival later? I’d be shocked if most people wouldn’t agree with this?

We hate “The French” but have no issues with French people.

I think it’s harsh on to call it erasure, but completely understand that in effect it’s the same thing, because to me it seems people are hostile because what you’re saying doesn’t match their lived experiences, and so they’re saying “that’s not how it is” because they believe that you’re pre-judging situations based on how you think people will react to neurodivergent people, when that’s not the case at all. I like to think it comes from a place of good intentions, but yeah in reality it’s no different to saying “just cheer up” to a depressed person, when it’s really not that easy or how it works. The most important thing is that as irritating as it is, harboring resentment over this kind of thing helps nobody, and the best thing you can do is accept that they’re trying (badly) to help, and that they just don’t fully understand what the issue is.

Yeah, I completely agree, but it also doesn’t mean that the people who don’t have that connection to you suddenly aren’t willing to help their community, it just means that you have trouble integrating into communities, which is very valid and I can completely relate and understand, as that’s kind of how being neurodivergent works.

As much as it sucks to hear, it’s absolutely an “it’s not them, it’s you” situation, and I’ve been in the same position, and still do get in the same position, where I’m feeling out of place, unsure what to do and unwelcome, and very sensitive to confirmations of that, which is part of at least my experience of being autistic, but I’ve learnt that a lot of the times you don’t actually have to pick up on social cues or whatever to make connections, as most people aren’t even that invested anyway, and to most people talking to someone, even if they’re weird, is better than talking to nobody. You may say “but everyone’s already got friends they’re always with” but even that’s just an autistic lens over it, as you’re just noticing when other people are having conversations but not you. And it doesn’t have to be everyone. Like you said yourself, being a friend of a friend goes a long way, so if you just have a few connections with people who are friendlier or more similar to you, then that just gets you into circles. You won’t exactly be neurotypical all of a sudden, but it definitely helps with feeling less different or isolated.

Thing is, like you say, they’re willing to help a friend of a friend, but frankly the bar for a friend is pretty low for a lot of people. As someone who’s also neurodivergent and has had approximately three friends on average for most of my life, but recently moved to America and so had a full reset, I’ve been reminded that the majority of people like to think they’re good people, even if they have questionable beliefs or cut you off in traffic or whatever, and thay extends to helping out people that they know.

Given I’ve been in the country a month, have autism, and live out of the city, I’m probably as in the group you describe as you can get, but I’m still fairly confident if I needed a neighbor to take me to hospital, or someone to help me move a couch, or whatever else, I could find them even through work or the neighborhood pretty quickly, as it just takes one connection to flip a switch in people’s brains from “fuck that guy” to “they’re in my tribe, I’ll help them”

I went and found it altogether dreary. The city feels like it’s trying so hard to be New York with nothing of what makes New York so good, then you go out of the city and find the bleakest landscape on earth. Even leaving isn’t a good experience because you’ve got to deal with getting to O’Hare. I’d take Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Boston or even DC, Phoenix or Philly over it in a heartbeat.

It’s not a saltwater issue, it’s a product quality issue.

1. if you’re expecting a natural chicken breast and it comes with way more salt than expected, it could mess with your dish
2. if I wanted to buy brine, I’d buy brine. As it happens, I’m buying chicken

PR are welcome

Frankly if more software was like that we’d have these issues so much better. So many maintainers are so protective that they won’t even read a bug fix PR and just close it.

In defense of the UK government, they didn’t ban protesting the genocide in Palestine, they banned expressing support for a specific organisation which protested the genocide in Palestine by breaking into a military base and damaging equipment. It’s an important distinction, and to claim otherwise is spreading misinformation.

That said, this ban is very short sighted and seems out of touch, I expect it’ll just create a social divide between those who find a way around it and those who don’t, which may be worse than the problem they’re trying to solve.

It can absolutely be both though. He knows his reputation, and it’s a performance to add to it, but it’s not exactly harmful or anything.

There’s a difference between intelligence and poor upbringing though. 500 years ago even the smartest person alive probably believed the first three of them, because anyone who said otherwise was crazy, and all the authority figures were saying it was objective fact. If you raise someone today from childhood, cut off from a lot of external influence, then regardless of how smart they are they’ll probably still lean towards believing them. Brains are weird, and the ability to process information, solve problems, remember things, and question things don’t necessarily correlate as well as you’d expect.

Equally though many European chocolates can’t be called chocolate in the US because they have too much vegetable or seed oil in as a ratio to cocoa butter.

Enshittification happens in both places, they just toe the line of the rules in each.

Ideally, yes.

In practice, if investors think the stock price will be higher in the future, they buy.

Dividends are such a tiny amount compared to the value of the share, that in reality it’s all just speculation on how people are going to speculate.

That’s the problem with all politics. People don’t like the status quo and so vote for “not this” without considering the ill effects of what they’re voting for, or historical precedent. It’s how we ended up with Trump twice, it’s how we ended up with Brexit, and it’s not going away any time soon.

I think it’s more of a “how you use it” thing, but you’re definitely right that AI agents can’t design systems properly.

Some people I know have produced way more code, removed tech debt, and all without introducing any bugs since they started using AI. That’s because they’re not using it to do anything beyond their skillset, understand everything it’s doing, and are using it to catch mistakes they otherwise would have made. Other people are using it without reviewing the output, or are using it to try and do things beyond their skillset, and that’s how you end up with infinite tech debt and a whole host of bugs.

Personally I’ve recently started heavily using the AI code review bot we have at our company, both for my own code and other people’s. While 50% of what it says is hallucination or wrong, that’s not an issue because I know it’s wrong or a hallucination so can just tell it no and to focus on other things, like catching bugs or issues that most reviewers would just glance past, and also gives you a rubber duck that talks back.

Same in English…

Can’t, won’t, you’dn’t’ve, and if we get into dialects then you get things like owt (anything), nowt (nothing), ont (on the) and int (in the).

I don’t even support blocking propaganda and fascism. Maybe you could block malware sites, but even that’s a push. Let moderators of individual communities figure it out, otherwise you’re just going to turn whole instances into echo chambers.

I mean it’s also kind of true though…

AI is taking some jobs, in situations where the limiting factor is the rate at which work can be done rather than the skills required to do it. Say you have five people in PR, of which three are responsible for trawling through sources to find out what’s actually being said about the company, and two are responsible for writing press releases. The jobs of two of the people trawling through sources could be replaced with AI, as the limiting factor is the amount of posts, documents and stories you can read. While you’d still need an overseer to fact check and collate, that sort of work can be done much faster than actually reading and finding sources. If the company also lays off one of the people responsible for writing press releases, however, that would be unrelated to AI as that sort of job isn’t replaceable by AI (right now at least) due to the majority of the work being something that probabilistic models just aren’t correct enough to do, so that’d be an unrelated layoff being blamed on AI, even if whoever orders it genuinely believes that AI has replaced the job.