online communication, city densities, very fast movement of people, immigration, inexistence of third spaces, helicopter parenting and so many other things
The British NHS now provides translators for about 200 languages for their patients. How many would they need in 1950? Twenty at most, even fewer outside London.
It's interesting how polarized the response to this idea is.
On the one hand, there are responses like that describe this as bizarre and tone-deaf, accuse it of LLM levels of fake empathy, or say how if they were laid off they would absolutely despise getting such a message.
On the other hand, there are responses from people who actually received such messages when they were laid off saying how valuable and meaningful even a simple "sorry to hear the news" message was to them.
Though, at least as I post this, there aren't any responses describing being laid off and disliking such messages in practice, it's all hypothetical hate. Not entirely sure how to interpret that. Maybe they'll appear as more comments get posted.
There's a lot of layers here and many reasons why such strongly opposed sentiments might arise. It would be fascinating to get a better understanding of all this. Is it a personality thing? Is it a past experience thing? Is it from how a person views their relationship to work and their employer? How do these opinions distribute across the neurotypical/neurodivergent axis?
One detail that specifically interests me is this idea that wanting to offer condolences, but not automatically obligate oneself to anything beyond that seems to draw ire. Those expressing this opinion seem to be saying there is a clear, stark line for what constitutes "enough" that this approach clearly falls short of. But where that line is is going to be pretty strongly influenced by social convention, which not all people are not tuned into to the same degree, for a variety of reasons.
Seems pretty self evident that many people would just smile and nod and mask thru these interactions in the past ..And that people are tired of this same saccharine pr corpo babble invading every aspect and niche of their lives. And this is the straw that breaks the back.
Say what you mean. Mean what you say. Otherwise get sorted with the other parasites.
It is far from that simple. It takes understanding how people will read between the lines of what you say, seeking unsaid meaning where there was none. I fight this constantly in my life. It would be so, so much easier and simpler for me if I could just say what I mean and have others understand that.
Not saying it's a good approach to solving the problem, but surely you'd want to do the filtering at the water utility level. It would be a lot more cost effective that way.
It probably can't be effectively filtered at utility scale. There are only a small number of effective filtration methods and they basically coalesce to either distillation or reverse osmosis, neither of which is effective at utility scale. The other side of that is that both methods concentrate contaminates when removing them, and distillation puts some contaminates into the air, which means neither is a panacea even at residential scale.
The largest reverse osmosis plant in the world produces 165MGD of water, which is less than is required for any of the top 10 largest US cities, while primarily being used purely for desalination (SWRO). At the levels of filtration and membrane size required for removal of PFAS, it would nearly be impossible to cost effectively filter 200MGD+ of water for a major city.
Some people find this process intuitive to the point they don't realize they're doing it, and others have to be actively thinking about it or it doesn't happen at all. Those with autism are more likely to tend towards the latter.
I was initially impressed with Lombok and then ran into all the downsides of it and it was institutionally abandoned at one particular firm I was with (100s of devs).
"to most developers who are most likely to interact with this code over its useful lifetime."
This means accounting for the audience. Something unfamiliar to the average random coder might be very familiar to anyone likely to touch a particular piece of code in a particular organization.
Losing out on 2.4% of profit isn't nothing. It's not an existential therat to the company, sure, but this seems a more real consequence for wrongdoing than many other penalties I've seen against companies over the years.
> only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
At a glance it seems this would only remain true so long as American interests and the interests of the corporation align. Which they do, up to a point.
The question then becomes where is the "triple point" between "A globally competitive USA", "Corporate oligarchy", and "Power to the people"? If such a balance can when exist
I'd never use hashids/sqids for anything secure. It's reversible by design.
However, it is fit for purpose if your purpose is showing user-facing ids that can't be trivially incremented. For example, in a url, or in an api response. It does, in fact, "protect" against the "attack" of "Oh, I see in the url that my id is 19563, I wonder what I get if I change it to 19564.”
Now, the system should absolutely have authorization boundaries around data, but that doesn't mean there's no value in avoiding putting an "attractive nuisance" in front of users.
If it's not a real attack, it's not worth protecting against even in the slightest. If it's a real attack, it doesn't matter if it's trivial or not, does it?
It very much can be worth protecting so that your users don't become dependent on thinking that increment IDs is a feature. It's not a security concern in that context, but it is a future maintainability concern where you don't intend to provide that as a feature in environments where you don't have a tight leash on how users are using your APIs.
Do we though? Sure, we communicate sequentially, but that doesn't mean that our internal effort is piecewise and linear. A modern transformer LLM however is. Each token is sampled from a population exclusively dependent on the tokens that came before it.
Mechanistically speaking, it works similarly to autocomplete, but at a very different scale.
Now how much of an unavoidable handicap this incurs, if any, is absolutely up for debate.
But yes, taking this mechanistic truth and only considering it in a shallow manner underestimates the capability of LLMs by a large degree.
Is this a certainty? I thought it was an open question whether quantum effects are at play in the brain, and those have a counterintuitive relationship with time (to vastly dumb things down in a way my grug mind can comprehend).
I think it's more that there isn't yet evidence against it. In other words, we're not sure or not if the brain has some kind of special sauce that doesn't just reduce to linear algebra.
"I think it's more that there isn't yet evidence against it."
We don't? AFAIK we have no proof of anyone being able to see into the future. Now maybe there are other manifestations of this, but I know of no test today that even hints at it.
What's obtuse about it? It's honestly a very straightforward statement. Every thing we think or say is a function of past events. We don't incorporate future events into what we think or say. Even speculation or imagination of future events occurred in the past (that is the act of imagining it occurred in the past).
It's really a super simple concept -- maybe it's so simple that it seems obtuse.
Because the other poster's point wasn't that it was a 'past event.' The point was that it's just predicting based upon the previous token. It's disingenuous to mix the two concepts up.
