For those not familiar with US appeals courts, this is an unpublished order, which means that it's (broadly speaking; there are subtleties) not precedent and applies to this case alone.
I'm not 100% sure I understand your first question but this opinion is not "precedent" in the legal sense (i.e. future 9th Cir. courts must follow it). Of course, that doesn't mean that it will have zero influence on how future judges may decide similar cases. If a later judge finds the reasoning in this opinion persuasive they are free to adopt it. But they are not bound to adopt the reasoning like they would be if this were a "published" opinion that is precedential.
I'm only a law student and not a practicing lawyer so my intuition for decisions to litigate are not strong. That said, my understanding is that there were some pretty notable assumptions and questionable doctrinal maneuvers in the opinion that a future judge might be hesitant to also adopt. An example of each: (1) the court states that users who submit an email during registration assume they will receive TOS amendments by email and (2) the court doesn't seem to distinguish between TOS formation and amendment. These, and others, might be correct assumptions and reasoning, but the opinion doesn't convince me of that, so maybe another judge wouldn't be convinced either.
The Hugo and Nebula winners (and shortlists, do not forget those) aren't perfect, but they're almost always worth a look. Pretending that they're total garbage is doing yourself a disservice.
Related, on the country drop-down front: please put the United States (or whatever your customers' main country is) at the top. You can probably tell I want the US from a combination of, you know, 99% of your sales being to the US and my language being set to English. And, sure, put Canada and even the UK next to it. Go wild, have the top ten English-speaking countries there if you like! It makes things so much easier.
The trick, then, is that you don't remove anything from the alphabetical list. With modern computer technology, we can have two places to find something! So if I miss your fancy shortcut, or it's not applicable to me, everything will still be in the regular old familiar place. It just works.
This generates a really annoying features with some browsers. Suppose I want to select "United Kingdom". I open the drop-down and there are all the countries in alphabetical order, plus "United States" at the top of the list. I hit the 'U' key. It does not take me to the alphabetically listed countries beginning with 'U', it takes me to the "United States" entry at the top of the list. I might be able to type 'U-N-I-T-E-D-K' and get to the "United Kingdom" entry, but there are browsers where that does not work. (Nor does repeatedly hitting 'U' bring me to the later 'U' entries.)
I have come to hate Android, but every time I seriously look at switching to iOS, it seems Apple has chosen that time to make things even worse. Unfortunately, there's no Linux equivalent for phones. (Or at least, nothing that's easier than gentoo was in 2004. That was great for learning, but for daily use of a critical device, not so great.)
> winter just doesn't have enough daylight to think you can get everything done with sunlight
That's the perfect way to say it.
The other piece that a lot of people are missing is the whole larks (early risers) vs owls (late risers) divide. I think the best illustration of that is to ask, if you got your pick, which shift you'd take, based solely on your own body and habits: 8-4, 9-5, or 10-6 (or perhaps even further in one direction)? My guess is that the answer to that question predicts your desire for Standard or Daylight time pretty well.
My guess is that both owls & larks get their preference logically backwards.
My guess is that owls will say they prefer permanent daylight time and larks will say they prefer permanent standard time.
But their revealed preference is the opposite -- owls wake up well after sunrise and go to bed well after sunset. Yet permanent daylight time will shift it so they'll be waking up closer to sunrise and going to bed closer to sunset.
Larks revealed preference is more like permanent daylight time yet I think they're more likely to say they want permanent standard time.
I'm definitely in the night owl camp and I'd much rather have sunlight in the mornings because I already am going to have trouble waking up each morning, making it so I can't even set my circadian rhythm properly is just adding insult to injury.
It amazes me that we actually argue about this based on vibes. We know that people are better off the closer the time between waking up and sunrise.
for both those groups it doesn't matter because society is going to change times. That is their sleep habits are not driven by the sun but by the activites they do in society and those will change too. Maybe I'm wrong, but that is what I evpect to see.
Which, as the article and other comments here make clear, has been changing back and forth over the decades.
In a situation like that, I think you kind of have to acknowledge the original drawings as the preferred state for things. Especially when just about anyone with training in this area would readily agree that that design aligns with what they'd all consider usual or correct.
Sure, it has been changing back and forth which makes the pristine version the least historically correct because few, if any at all, ever experienced that.
What is the location of the (clearly unstable) equilibrium/fixed point there?
The obvious trick of computing the eigenvectors didn't seem to work (I got 20%/40%/40%, which does not look right) and I'm out of time for this particular nerd snipe.
I disagree. Articles written by AI are inherently less trustworthy (they're notorious for fabrications and hallucinations) and often have a very low content density. "Write me a 10 paragraph article about high hardware prices for my blog" is the sort of thing that expands to a lot of fluff with not a lot of content. I don't really want to read that article.
Even if AI might (might) be justifiable as an editor, it's still such a negative signal for "is this worth reading?" that in my opinion it is worthwhile to point out and discuss.
This case is interesting, because it seems obvious that the AI accusation is just plain wrong. The article is riddled with the kind of grammatical and spelling mistakes that humans regularly make but that a modern AI would never make.
It's also very easy to paste a paragraph in to a chatbot and ask it to revise it. Or ask it to write an introduction.
I don't really have a problem with that use of AI.
But one of the costs is reputational: potential readers are now going to assume AI wrote the whole article, fairly or unfairly. That's a consideration writers have to weigh before choosing to do this.
That could easily be part of their prompt. I just did a quick test telling Copilot to "add a few spelling and grammar mistakes to look like a human wrote it" and it does a reasonably convincing job.
The errors are more than superficial; few authors would be willing to have AI screw up their work enough to invert the meaning of some of their sentences. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169256
I agree that AI-written text often has a low content density. I wonder if it's a matter of information theory.
Information theory defines the information of a symbol as being related to how often it occurs and how often it is expected to occur. Something that isn't expected carries more information. (Usually "symbol" is defined as one character or byte, but it could be a word or word part.)
Well, if you think about LLMs that way, they give you the most-probable next word (or word part). That means that they give you less information than normal writing. I suspect that's why it reads as bland, low-content - because it really is low content, in the information theory sense.
Now, it doesn't always give you the most probable next symbol. There is some randomness. And you can increase the randomness by turning up the temperature. But if you do, then I suspect it becomes incoherent more quickly. (Random gibberish may have high information from an information theory standpoint, but humans don't want to read that either.)
That's not really mentioned in the article, though. As far as the article is concerned, the right side of that slider is valid-but-possibly-too-rare-to-be-interesting, when in fact it's just garbage. This does not sell the concept well.
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