And even when they let you type it in, sometimes it turns out that the website was made by Americans and so expects the bonkers date format of MM/DD/YYYY.
A good example of appropriate use of a calendar interface on a flight booking website is Aviasales. They show flight prices for each day right there, so if your travel dates are flexible, you know when it's cheaper by just looking at it! This should be a standard feature.
I have a suspicion — it has to do with instant messaging clients. The idea being that you want to type short one-line messages and send them as quickly as possible in most cases, but in a rarer case when you do want a line break, that's Ctrl+Enter or Shift+Enter. Probably the first one where I personally encountered "enter is send" is ICQ, but I'm sure it's older than that, I would be surprised if no IRC clients did that.
AI will not take anyone's jobs. I, for one, don't consider AI something serious, it's still a toy, a curious tech demo, and will always remain one, outside of niche applications like NLP (there's no denying that LLMs are really good at this). The idea that anyone at all treats it seriously is just appalling to me.
Mass-production and other optimizations that use economies of scale to their benefit do take jobs. There's a serious problem in the world's economy that there simply isn't as many jobs as there are people; the world simply doesn't need this much work because the need for work doesn't scale linearly with the population. AI has nothing to do with this. It's a fundamental problem we'll have to deal with either way as our society develops, AI or not. It started ages before the current tech hype cycle.
Whether you or I or any other normie thinks the tech won't leave people jobless is irrelevant. The C-suite in every company is foaming at the mouth to replace their most expensive asset, people, and companies like OpenAI are marketing to them on the premise that the tech allows them to do that. Whether it actually can or cannot do it is basically irrelevant, there's untold billions going into this bubble, so either way we're all fucked.
Either the bubble bursts spectacularly and the global economy is in the shitter because everyone is overleveraged and heavily invested into it, or it doesn't and the psychotic C-suite replaces people anyways so they can see the line go up a quarter of a percentage point.
I mostly agree. In a technological society jobs and money are kind of virtual. The productivity gained by technology in the last 150 years made lots of work redundant and we've been managed by economists to still organise around wage labour. This is nothing new with AI. We could have abandoned wage labour 50 years ago during the 70ies and got neoliberalism instead. So we'll get more of the same with AI I guess.
For me, the solution is simple: anything you download and run locally should not auto-update ever, period. Installing an update (or refusing one) should always be a conscious user action. Otherwise it's just a socially-accepted RCE backdoor.
I used to use Duplicacy for my backups. The author was hell bent on not allowing disabling auto updates.
The go binary would be downloaded automatically and silently periodically. I tried to fight it for a while but at some point he added checks (!) to ensure that nobody was blocking his RCE model. Meaning it would no longer run on one of my partially air gapped system.
I moved on, but many other software behave that way.
Most chromium-based browsers will show a big scary and permanent button if they can't update, for example.
> Most chromium-based browsers will show a big scary and permanent button if they can't update, for example.
Vivaldi which I use thankfully doesn't do that. At least on macOS it uses the common Sparkle updater, which would pop up a window in your face when you least expect it telling you that an update is available, showing a changelog and letting you decide when and whether to install it.
Even though it is an interruption, it's still much more respectful than what Chrome does. It insists on running a background service at all times and the only way I was able to neutralize it was to delete its .plist file and create a directory with the same name.
Yep, just like Anti-Virus back in the day. Sure, it might protect you from a virus now and then, but AVs actually caused more broken computers, and false positive triage work than they protected. In the long run it was never worth running an antivirus on your computer.
This is how updates are now. Sure, there are sometimes some security updates that you should have installed. But more often than not it's just some bullshit I don't want.
I literally have a rule to automatically mark as read any email that has "important update" in the subject, because 99% of these "important updates" are various types of inconsequential "lawyers made us do this" bullshit.
Moons get tidally locked because they're very close to their planet, so the planet's gravity is by far the strongest influence.
The planets have much more complicated gravitational interactions because in addition to the Sun's gravity, they influence each other. So you end up with things like orbital resonances instead.
A planet that's close to its star and far from other strong gravitational influences will tidally lock to the star.
wikipedia's explanation works for uniform bodies, yours doesn't. And since tidal bulges seem to be symmetric, there's no away to explain away the deformation as making one side heavier
I grew quite an appreciation of color TV recently when I made a software-defined SECAM decoder. It's mind-boggling that they were able to do this with 60s technology, to be honest. But then what do I know, analog electronics is witchcraft to me :D
edit: I watched the video. It only took them until the 13th minute of a 15-minute video to show something resembling a real video waveform, lol. That's, uh, not how you explain how TV works.
SECAM was pretty crazy because it required a delay line: a memory that would hold the previous scanline so it can be combined with the current one.
Without digital circuits, the delay line was a piece of glass. You’d convert the video signal to a sound wave, send it through the glass, and (hopefully) get it back exactly 64 us later so it aligns with the next scanline.
Yes I did read about these while doing my research. Also fascinating. Most (or maybe all?) PAL TVs also have a delay line to correct for phase errors. That ability is what differentiates PAL from NTSC, apart from timing.
A good example of appropriate use of a calendar interface on a flight booking website is Aviasales. They show flight prices for each day right there, so if your travel dates are flexible, you know when it's cheaper by just looking at it! This should be a standard feature.
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