If anyone doesn't know where to start - start in places you're stuck next to people. Like in line to check out at the grocery store. I have struck up dozens of conversations looking at the belt and guessing what they're making for dinner. People who like to cook love to talk about cooking.
I still use it on iOS, and I've tried to remove all other keyboards, but Apple still just seems to "make up" keyboards I don't know are installed. Or switch keyboards on me mid-typing a word to a weird native one I also don't show as installed. It used to be very occasionally this would happen but now it's so repeatable since 26 I can almost not use my keyboard.
One caveat, I have an Icelandic keyboard installed on there. Sometimes web controls will force an input box to a US english keyboard (or numpad), which is annoying but at least that's sort of covered by a spec. What really drives me nuts is when I'm mid typing on the swype keyboard and suddely it switches to a completely square grid keyboard with up and down quotes in the autocomplete (which is not actually autocompleting or correcting(which while technically correct has almost completely fallen out of popularity since the dawn of the internet)
Working for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.
As a Brit when I started doing deals in North America one of the things I picked up was that I had to be explicit about disagreement OR where a decision was not being made yet. In the UK during a negotiation a 'silence' is not equal to agreement or disagreement, it's a NO-OP. If I didn't do this then prospective customers/suppliers in the USA would believe that I'd agreed to their request when from my perspective I had merely noted that they'd asked for something. Has anyone else run into this?
The other one that's confusing is that "tabling" something means the complete opposite.
I would separate 'politeness' and 'indirectness' a bit. I generally agree about 'politeness', there are plenty social forms that Brits still follow. For example I found the language/manner of New York attorneys pretty 'aggressive' the first few times.
Indirectness, is definitely a thing - Brits speak to each other or signal disagreement in ways that's clear to another Brit, but maybe not others. The use of silence, but also some words that depending on tone can mean different things which I think is difficult for North American's to interpret.
best reasoning I've heard for this is that English is subtext heavy, like Japanese due to the history of the aristocracy. The populace were in thrall to their feudal lords and the aristocracy as serfs and servant classes for so long, that being indirect has been embedded into the language as a defense mechanism to not upset the pay masters. We get the subtext but people new to our culture might not.
I remember a technological mess being present at work and my team lead bringing out the classic:
> it's not ideal is it?
or the classic Jeeves and Wooster valet/aristocrat relationship with Jeeves giving it the:
> as you say sir
> very good sir
with both statements being flexible but often being delivered with the dripping subtext of "yeah that's complete bollocks".[0]
Obviously this doesn't apply to the real working classes but then those types are not the sort to gain a STEM education.
My stock joke is that one of these countries is a feudal warrior culture and former empire that's obsessed with tea and saving face, and the other is Japan.
Oh jeez, I've literally just typed out a message on Teams to describe a situation where someone deployed breaking DB changes without the accompanied app changes as "a less-than-ideal scenario". Sometimes I forget I have to translate from British for the benefit of everyone else on the team (half in India, half in US, one German)
Except the impact of even gas prices going up has added to costs in basically anything delivered by truck. Every tax you put on that just eventually ends up in consumer hands.
It was very much on and off for many years. It was intended to cover the costs then go away. Instead they installed stream lined overhead tolls to not have to wait at the toll booth anymore and now it's just a perpetual tax.
It's also partially owned by outside investment (specifically the skyway from Indiana)
Very interesting. That still doesn't imply the "poor bear the brunt" (the original GP's assertion). Likely the inverse - since again, businesses and wealthy individuals are going to travel by vehicle vastly more than "poor" individuals.
I had a similar issue living abroad. My wife had a work visa (which was the reason we we moving) and I was allowed to go being a spouse, but once there getting a permit to work for myself was impossible without a job, and a job was impossible without a work permit.
There were ways around it, but it took finding a job at a really big company to make it work - they had dealt with it and had HR people that specialized in it. Once "on paper", I was pretty free to move around. I would not be surprised if their method was just putting in all zeros in the system or something until the permit number came back.
I mean, as a hiring manager, a fresh grad with multiple bug bounties tells me a lot about their drive and skill, so I'd agree. It's a great differentiator.
I think it's just an unfair comparison in general. The power of the LLM is the zero risk to failure, and lack of consequence when it does. Just try again, using a different prompt, retrain maybe, etc.
Humans make a bad choice, it can end said human's life. The worst choice a LLM makes just gets told "no, do it again, let me make it easier"
But an LLM model could perform poorly in tests that it is not considered and essentially means "death" for it. But begs the question at which scope should we consider an LLM to be similar to identity of a single human. Are you the same you as you were few minutes back or 10 years back? Is LLM the same LLM it is after it has been trained for further 10 hours, what if the weights are copy pasted endlessly, what if we as humans were to be cloned instantly? What if you were teleported from location A to B instantly, being put together from other atoms from elsewhere?
Ultimately this matters from evolutionary evolvement and survival of the fittest idea, but it makes the question of "identity" very complex. But death will matter because this signals what traits are more likely to keep going into new generations, for both humans and LLMs.
Death, essentially for an LLM would be when people stop using it in favour of some other LLM performing better.
My point is that no one is a new user forever and so I think we need to come up with a better solution than UI taking up screen space for things people end up doing via shortcuts. Menus and command palettes are great for this because they are mostly invisible.
The other important thing is learning to fit into the conventions of the platform: for example, Cocoa apps on Mac all inherit a bunch of consistent behaviors.
I started out with gVim with menu and toolbars. I quickly removed toolbars and after a while longer menus, as I didn't need them any more, they had taught me—though I seem to recall temporarily setting guioptions+=m from time to time for a while longer, when I couldn’t remember a thing. I think I had also added some custom menu items.
Being a modal editor probably makes removing all persistent chrome more feasible.
The default should be a clutter for new users, and the customization option should be make the UI customizable by hiding things you won't ever touch because you use shortcut keys.
The other way around is yeah, hostile. But of course it looks sleek and minimalistic!
On the early iPhones, they had to figure out how to move icons around. Their answer was, hold one of the icons down until they all start wiggling, that means you've entered the "rearrange icons" mode... Geezus christ, how intuitive. Having a button on screen, which when pressed offers a description of the mode you've entered would be user-friendly, but I get the lack of appeal, for me it would feel so clunky and like it's UI design from the 80's.
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