Can confirm. I zoom and pan on lots of websites in my daily browsing and would have no idea if toasts are popping in and out. I'll notice system level toasts though.
Have you tested this? Often click handlers are on some non-interactive ancestor element, it is not a good heuristic for something being interactive itself or what name it should have. Sometimes the listener is on the body element and we just parse out the triggering element and do something.
This piece of advice, to me, just feels like a piece of advice constantly repeated by a bunch of people, none of whom actually use the software for which the piece of advice is meant to benefit. That scares me; like we've all lost touch with the ground truth on this one; I'd love to re-sync with it, that's what I'm trying to do, I just don't have the first clue how to do it.
You can start with turning on eg switch controls on your OS, or the built in OS screen reader.
Also, a lot of professional accessibility devices by makers like Dynavox are expensive, so your best bet is seeing what documentation you can dig up.
This like WCAG guide accessibility standards, and coding to be in line with those is probably your best bet at achieving the goals of your website being accessible by assistive technology.
Everyone can guess what screen readers can do, everyone can also get a _basic_ idea of how they’ll actually work, but more often than not the people who will have the most experience are those with the least ability to affect change. Using elements for their intended purposes and coding to accessible standards is probably the most impactful way any of us as engineers can help ensure a smooth experience for the target audience.
The training data contains all kinds of truths. Say I told Claude I was a Christian at some point and then later on I told it I was thinking of stealing office supplies and quitting to start my own business. If Claude said "thou shalt not steal," wouldn't that be true?
You know that it's true that stealing is against the ten commandments, so when the LLM says something to that effect based on the internal processing of your input in relation to its training data, YOU can determine the truth of that.
> The training data contains all kinds of truths.
There is also noise, fiction, satire, and lies in the training data. And the recombination of true data can lead to false outputs - attributing a real statement to the wrong person is false, even if the statement and the speaker are both real.
But you are not talking about simple factual information, you're talking about finding uncomfortable truths through conversation with an LLM.
The LLM is not telling you things that it understands to be truth. It is generating ink blots for you to interpret following a set of hints and guidance about relationships between tokens & some probabilistic noise for good measure.
If you find truth in what the LLM says, that comes from YOU, it's not because the LLM in some way can knows what is true and give it to you straight.
Personifying the LLM as being capable of knowing truths seems like a risky pattern to me. If you ever (intentionally or not) find yourself "trusting" the LLM to where you end up believing something is true based purely on it telling you, you are polluting your own mental training data with unverified technohaikus. The downstream effects of this don't seem very good to me.
Of course, we internalize lies all the time, but chatbots have such a person-like way of interacting that I think they can end run around some of our usual defenses in ways we haven't really figured out yet.
> Personifying the LLM as being capable of knowing truths seems like a risky pattern to me.
I can see why I got downvoted now. People must think I'm a Blake Lemoine at Google saying LLMs are sentient.
> If you find truth in what the LLM says, that comes from YOU, it's not because the LLM in some way can knows what is true
I thought that goes without saying. I assign the truthiness of LLM output according to my educational background and experience. What I'm saying is that sometimes it helps to take a good hard look in the mirror. I didn't think that would controversial when talking about LLMs, with people rushing to remind me that the mirror is not sentient. It feels like an insecurity on the part of many.
> I didn't think that would controversial when talking about LLMs, with people rushing to remind me that the mirror is not sentient. It feels like an insecurity on the part of many.
For what it's worth I never thought you perceived the LLM as sentient. Though I see the overlap - one of the reasons I don't consider LLM output to be "truth" is that that there is no sense in which the LLM _knows_ what is true or not. So it's just ... stuff, and often sycophantic stuff at that.
The mirror is a better metaphor. If there is any "uncomfortable truth" surfaced in the way I think you have described, it is only the meaning you make from the inanimate stream of words received from the LLM. And in as much as the output is interesting of useful for you, great.
I think some of the most important problems get hidden if there is a culture where you expected to also want a specific solution before you complain. People avoid reporting difficult, complex problems without obvious solutions. Maybe they just see somethings as "the way things are" at that org or that leadership doesn't want to hear their needs.
Better to have a free, easy ability to complain about things, and if there is a good manager hanging around somewhere, they can synthesize the complaints and discover if there are solutions possible at the org level, which individual contributors might not know about or even be functionally able to own.
Mavo seems pretty similar, saves to github, allows flipping the UI to admin/editor mode https://mavo.io/
I really liked this when it was launched and thought it had a great deal of potential when it launched. I think the main difference is that it's more focused on content-editing, not updating the code of the page itself.
I fairly recently got to switch sides on this. I never take sales calls or want to get on demos as a developer ... but I moved roles a bit and needed to join some calls with the reps at my company for a product I now manage. It has no public pricing.
I was surprised by how much the people who show up for demos seemed to like them and have good relationships with their reps. They thank us for saving them a lot of time they would have spent reading docs and marketing materials to learn the specific things that applied to them, or for us talking about roadmap stuff they don't get to see in the public materials.
Sometimes the price is a surprise to them and it needs a bit of context. Customers who are used to buying software this way seem to read between the lines really well and ask suitable questions about discounts or whatever, when they are surprised by pricing. Often we are able to make something work at a different price than the typical quote, or we can connect the dots so that the rationale is more clear, or the value requires some customization to be done.
My reps tell me this sorta thing is difficult over email, that nobody makes $10k+ purchases without talking to somebody, so if we can't get you on a call the deal falls over.
So I dunno. I'm not a big fan of the requirement for calls really, but I can understand why reps don't just throw quotes around without some conversation.
I've come to the opinion now that if something in sales doesn't make sense, you're probably not the target market. Sure _I_ don't want to have a demo with no price guarantees, but I'm not the target market - big companies with dedicated purchasing teams and big lists of requirements are. And those companies write big, ongoing cheques. So in some ways the obscure pricing and convoluted sales process is doing it's job which is qualifying good customers and diverting bad customers (people like me)
The problem is that a lot of companies all want to sell those $10k+ purchases but then forgot that their products are actually useable to the "common man".
So they then lack any easy to see price overview or reasonable models for small dev teams or small companies. Demo's are not worth it for somebody going to spend a few hundreds, so you get often ignored.
What they then forgot that if you tie in a customer at the low end, that customer may grow and become a 10k customer down the line.
This is why companies need to get it in their stick skull, that you NEED fixed pricing for the folks that do not want personalized quotes (or the lovely no-response emails if asking for a quote as a single dev or "small" company).
And getting customers early on, even if they are not mass profit generators on their first purchase, are a good source of future money as people really do not change infrastructure or tooling without a good reason.
Seen a lot of good products, that we ignored because they lacked proper simplified pricing on their website. If its "contact us for pricing", its just like advertising "we do not want to deal with your poor ass" advertisement. So those customers go somewhere else, get a product they like and then grow. But then its too late / difficult as changing that customer to your product is 10x harder.
That presumes that it's worth the cost and headache to even serve you. It's called the long tail of small customers for a reason: you have a huge amount more customers to satisfy when combined they might be worth less than a single big customer.
A surprising amount of services are held together by duct tape and human hands.
Appreciate the other perspective. I'll even admit there's been cases where the demos have been useful and sparked other questions, but in those cases I hadn't heard of the product before or was coming in blind.
Most of my cases now (and I may be an outlier), I'm looking at something because I both have a need and someone I know recommended it or uses it so I'm already familiar, but at that point it's not so much a sales process and more so "I already know I want this, and I already have the budget and approval, let's get this buying process over with as quick as possible."
Related gripe: Requiring people to sign-up--or worse, to already be a customer--just to view API documentation.
Y'all're crazy if you think your API is so awesome that it needs to be a trade secret, and without it I can't get a good idea if you product is something that would actually solve our problems, or whether it seems like something worth integrating-with.
A major change in my field over the last few years is the rise of Ignition, a SCADA suite that's taking over everywhere. And sure, it's got simpler and cheaper licensing than it's rivals. But for our projects, licensing cost isn't generally a factor.
What Inductive Automation did was open up their documentation, offer good online training for free, have an endless demo mode that can be reset indefinitely, and a "maker" version that can be used for free. Oh, and it's scripted with Python instead of some janky BASIC knock-off. All features that appeal to integrators but that don't matter to the end users.
Putting these walls up also makes life harder for actual customers, who now have to prove they are such every time they need to access said docs for whatever reason.
As an individual engineer, if I have to jump through hoops just to login and view docs... yeah. I won't be going out of my way to make sure you get considered in trade studies at my next job.
This is super interesting, thank you for the reference! Agreed the pricing is not transparent. There are many intangibles related to pricing b2b products that can affect the negotiated price of a specific line item.
Miravete's work still looks interesting though, "Firms engage in foggy pricing when the menu of tariff options aims at profiting from consumer mistakes". I'm not sure the cell phone plan study really translates to this context, but maybe he has other more relevant work. Definitely interested in learning more about pricing.
It doesn't change the "Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth" premise of the article, I don't see any hidden motive needed to explain this.
"To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to “public.”"
It leaves me with a lot of questions.
What even constitutes a social media profile? For how long do you have to mark it public? What if marking all your social media profiles public exposes you to harm? Is it acceptable to delete all your posts (that were previously _private_) before making a profile public, or to delete whole profiles, or would that desire for privacy be seen as concealing some threat? How is it known if there are non-public profiles? Would govt believe somebody who has no social media presence at all?
"screening visa applicants for threats" is a very simplistic summary of the situation. I think visa applicants are just gonna go eleswhere.
