This is easy to say if you can write, but, what if you are trying to write in a second language?
As an English person, I can write reasonably well without having to know what any of the technical terms for writing mean. I don't need to know any formal rules for writing in different tenses, and even Oxford commas just happen automagically. I can break the rules too, not that I even know what the rules are.
Over the years I have worked with a lot of people from other parts of the world that have English as their second language. They can't write in English purely on instinct, 'writing as one might talk', they are stuck trying to remember the rules and the billions of exceptions to the rules that English has, just to make it hard for the second-language crew. Of course, in Britain, we can slip into Cockney Rhyming Slang, Glaswegian or West Country Speak (tm), for not even the Irish or the Americans to understand us.
Hence, I wonder about the author. Is English his first language? We are in 'true Scotsman' territory here, and a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.
Put it this way, a true English speaker has absolutely no idea what a 'past participle' is. They have absolutely no need to know. Whereas the German, speaking his most humourous English, gained from many years of study and watching TV, absolutely knows what a 'past participle' is, but they haven't the foggiest if someone English says 'take a butchers'.
Um, er, um, the, um, real problem with writing as one talks is, er, you know, sometimes, we, er, put in lots of ums and ers. That is the real danger of 'writing as one talks', but, when editing the ums out, we dabble and wreck that flow of words that sounded great but didn't look too great on the page.
As a non-native English speaker, it sometimes takes me some time to write things because I am trying to put my thoughts in a concise yet simple-to-understand form.
> Hence, I wonder about the author. Is English his first language? We are in 'true Scotsman' territory here, and a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.
If he’s not, his writing indicates a native level of fluency.
There are absolutely native English speakers who write like this. Some of them even get degrees studying the language.
> haven't the foggiest if someone English says 'take a butchers'.
I’m a native English speaker and I have no idea what “take a butchers” means, so possibly not the best example. I assume this is a Britishism.
You're right. More specifically it's Cockney (east end of London) rhyming slang. Basic rule: find a phrase that rhymes with the word you mean, substitute the phrase, but leave out the rhyming word. So "butcher's" = "butcher's hook" = "look". So "take a butcher's" means "take a look".
I had a Cockney father-in-law, once upon a time, so a few phrases crept into my lexicon. I still use "don't chicken about it" = "chicken curry" = "worry", and a couple more.
You don't always leave out a word. Some of the more famous ones, that most English people have heard, are "trouble and strife" = "wife", and "apples and pears" = "stairs" - though I never heard anyone use those particular examples in regular speech, they're often given as examples / stereotypes / satires of the style.
> a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.
Yes, both Americans and Brits write overly verbose prose.
> Put it this way, a true English speaker has absolutely no idea what a 'past participle' is.
Plenty of true English speakers are educated enough to know what 'past participle' is. Like common. Just like plenty of native Germans can consciously analyze cases.
America is full of people that know what the 'past participle' is. Isn't it another country, like 'Africa' is a country, according to a worrying amount of Americans?
PGP was different then. In the 90s the internet was unencrypted and the only people using PGP were those that had a reasonable need for it. However, there were a couple of big problems that the armchair historian would not be aware of.
First off, communicating with PGP was hard. Imagine you are based in London and you want to publish something controversial without getting taken to court. You could email someone in New York and ask them to post your 'hot potato of juiciness'. But, how to you exchange keys without the beloved five eyes seeing what you are up to?
This was in an era when very little was encrypted, so anything encrypted would theoretically get flagged for the three letter agencies to take a look at. Again, this would depend on the person you are trying to reach, if they were working at the equivalent of 'the Iranian embassy' then yeah, good luck with that, you are going to get caught.
The next problem was that PGP was doable for the three letter agencies using what amounts to WW2 Enigma tactics. In period it was possible for them to man-in-the-middle attack an email, to ask the PGP using sender to 'use the right key and resend'. The sender does as told, even with the same, as provided, public key. However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
PGP was originally treated as a 'munition' with export controls. People weren't using PGP for their Uber Eats and Amazon orders, as per the article, it was only anti-government people that needed PGP, that being Western 'five eyes' governments.
Hence, even though it is a tedious NYT article, the author is right about PGP, in period. And, don't ask how I know about how PGP was hacked, there was a certain fog of war that went on at the time.
> However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
It was never trivial for TLAs to man-in-the-middle anyone, because PGP users were very much aware of the problem and nothing about key exchange was automated, for good or ill. Key exchange parties, reading out key fingerprints in their own custom extended phonetic alphabet etc.
A man in the middle attack would maybe work in rare cases, at great cost, and then you'd get one or two messages and immediately make people aware that they'd been attacked. It's not worth it. I'm confident the TLAs never bothered to do it against anyone with public keys on a key server, the minimum effort you could make to guard against MITM attacks.
Clearly they have sales and other teams as the important people within the company, with customer services being down the pecking order.
They don't need AI to automate their customer service requests, they just need decent forms with a standard issue helpdesk system. It takes some work to get right, but anyone with experience of building customer support services will be able to do that, to put most of the customer service team out of work!!!
The problem is that the Law of The Instrument applies:
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
So we have some AI 'hammer' going on here, and it is the wrong tool.
At a guess, 80% of the customer service requests are going to be billing related, with some need to provide refunds or free credits. Get the form right so it shows the right boxes and these 'easy wins' can show up as a big list that a customer service person has to glance over before hitting the 'refund everyone' button. You need the human there to take responsibility, plus they can work on the 20% of other tickets, once they have spent ten minutes clearing down the refunds/extra credits requests.
Google don't sell much to end customers, therefore no support. If I search Google for how to remove fonts from my computer that are not latin, and their AI bot gives me an answer that zaps my whole computer, I can't complain and ask for a refund because I never paid anything in the first place. Google do not need to speak to a single customer.
Meanwhile, Arsthropic have a commercial product with billing. They prefer not to do customer service, but they are stupid. Every contact with customers and friendly customer service is an opportunity to sell more to customers or to not have them hate you. This is why companies should do customer service, however, they also need to put CS at the heart of the org chart and acknowledge that a well run CS department raises revenue and is not a cost.
Why do American keyboards have that horizontal enter key?
As a Brit, with plenty of notionally British keyboards to choose from (with £ signs for the price and the '3' key), too often there is this wrong-shaped horizontal enter key. What is the thinking behind that?
As for the article, mystery key pressing games might be incredibly clever in the parallel universe of the Apple cult, and even quite fun, particularly if you press the wrong keys deliberately, but I prefer the Ubuntu way, where you just have the keyboard for your locale selected, with the option to change it, if you really want to.
Nature's machines, for example, for reproducing DNA or for photosynthesis, are in a totally different league of 'precision engineering' to anything that our brightest engineers have ever created.
At times we get all giddy because we have invented a quartz clock, a wheel, a straight line or a calculator that seems to be better than anything in the world of nature, however, we sometimes have to overlook nature or forget to question why nature didn't evolve such things. With the clock, every cell in our body has some 'timing circuitry' tied into day/night cycles, seasons and much else. We just insist on doing it our way and proclaiming it better.
Counterpoint: biology looks like vibe-coding. I would hate to have nature as a colleague, she's an arrogant fool with a mail-order degree. I'd rather maintain a Jeep than a knee.
Baking bread, albeit with a (Panasonic) bread making machine. Might not be niche, however, traditions of giving bread to guests runs deep and people are always delighted if you give them a loaf of extremely fresh bread.
There are different directions that bread making can go. During the pandemic there was a rash of people making rock hard sourdough, and sourdough is still the magic word for 'higher status' bread, even though almost every commercially available sourdough loaf is faked with enzymes added to a regular 'Chorleywood' loaf.
I gave sourdough a go but I prefer my bread making machines creations that are definitely not sourdough. I like to fortify my bread in two different ways, either with fruits and nuts to make a 'fruit loaf' of sorts, or with seeds and wholemeal flour to have bread that covers many a niche nutrient.
Commercial bread in the UK comes with government issued fortifications of folates, B vitamins and whatnot. This might be fine for pregnant mums that can't cook, but I am not one of them! So the challenge is to do a better job of the fortifications, mostly with seeds and choice of flour.
Commercial bread is also not very real, with lots of additives that I don't seem to need in my own creations. Emulsifiers, preservatives and everything else are needed for commercial bread, if it is to have shelf life and appeal, but my intestines are not crying out for these sorts of additives and I seem to still be alive without them, with improved digestive tract functionality.
Although we have more interesting things to eat than bread, our history in the West is the history of bread, we would not be here without it. Once you start baking your own, albeit with a machine, history becomes so much more interesting.
The other optimisation I try is cost. It is easy to produce a decent loaf with very expensive ingredients, however, on a budget it gets to have a different challenge to it.
I introduced my uncle to the hobby and he is a meticulous record keeper, so I wrote a simple app for him to record his bakes and ratings. This enables him to make fine adjustments to quantities so as to improve on his creations.
I did look for an app before I wrote my own, and the app was called 'Microsoft Excel'. I am sure that could be customised with recipes and whatnot, but I wanted to reinvent the wheel, hence my own app, just for myself and my uncle.
With some hobbies that is all you do and an obsession. Bread making is not like that, you can have plenty of more strings to your bow. As mentioned, people are always impressed if you give them a loaf, or if they learn that your sandwiches are made with your own bread. You can insist that it took three minutes with the machine, to downplay everything, however people stay impressed.
LG got it right with the original Nexus 4, although battery life was a problem for all phones in that era. That phone had everything in a small form factor and it also came with a glass back that enabled the phone to fall off a perfectly level service, which was rectified with a little rubber piece.
The Nexus 4 should have lofted LG into the big league and the Nexus 4 owner should have graduated to a LG flagship. But this didn't happen, in part because people stayed with Google and moved on to what would become the Pixel series.
The problem with smartphones is that they are ultimately 'hand rectangles' and the average customer only needs adequate rather than super-deluxe. For a while it was possible to compete on features, battery life and mega-pixels, for people to queue outside phone retailers to be first with the new status-symbol-gadget. But times changed as the tech matured.
Most people couldn't care less about their phone specifications, so long as it works. Getting the latest and greatest phone makes as much sense as on insisting on the latest model of hand basin or the most hi-tech garden trowel. Who cares apart from reviewers or people with little going on in their lives.
> it also came with a glass back that enabled the phone to fall off a perfectly level service
I used to put mine on my wallet, and it took ages to figure out why I kept dropping it: the moment you set it down, it would start sliding _incredibly_ slowly.
Agreed, however, what do you think about my 'dream bicycle bell'?
I replaced my bell recently because mine had developed a form of 'tourettes' after a bit of plastic fell off. So I did survey the marketplace for something 'more me'.
This made me think about what the ideal bell should be. I reckon that you should be able to buy tuned bells, as in A - G with 440hz 'C' being in there somewhere. Maybe there could be different colours of the rainbow for each frequency.
This would be quite tuneful if I was riding with family or friends, with them also having a tuned bell on their bicycles.
Obviously no use for penetrating noise cancelling headphones, however, I don't think these are an issue. If someone is zoned out on headphones then it is on them if they have no spacial awareness. If they don't hear the bell, then that is on them.
I also think big auto is patronising, to think they have anything to offer the cyclist apart from death and pollution. What would the car dependent ones know about shared path etiquette?
Nowadays the biggest danger to me on shared paths are the Uber Eats delivery guys with their electric motorbikes. Early evenings can be quite risky with those zombies, particularly within half a mile of a McDonalds. They pose a true 'kinetic' risk that the jogger wearing headphones does not.
In the UK, an important market for VW group, there are two types of bicycle, one for the proletariat and the other for the bourgeoisie. Due to the k-shaped economy, the proletariat bicycle died a long time ago, to evolve into the 'Lime bike' in places such as London. In the past, companies such as Raleigh provided excellent proletariat bicycles, and the working man could afford them for his kids and himself. Of course, he would prefer a car, because cars are high status whereas a steel/aluminium bicycle with straight bars is not.
The bourgeoisie bicycle is a relatively recent phenomenon, and anything totally impractical and made of carbon fibre qualifies as bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie bicycle is also too expensive to lock up in town, plus you need all the clobber to go with it (lycra).
Every bourgeoisie bicycle is owned by a car dependent person. They don't begin their ride at their front door, and their journeys are not useful or with purpose beyond cycling. Their bicycles get strapped onto the back of their car, or placed in the trunk, with wheels removed. These people don't need locks for their bicycles as they have a two tonne steel box to secure their bicycle in. You also get things like power-meters with these bikes, plus the owner has to wear a special polystyrene hat, at the insistence of their mother.
Skoda are selling to those people that spend £5K+ on their toy carbon fibre bicycle. They know the realities of car dependency.
Why would somebody transport a bike on car to London and ride on the streets crowded with pedestrians? And attach a massive bell to a carbon bike to facilitate that? The video shows that they have given these to delivery riders, which seems to be the target audience for a device like that. Seeing that this story is going viral everywhere it appears to be a quite a successful PR campaign. I doubt it's a real product though now I imagine similar devices will appear on Alibaba and Amazon.
From what I understand, most profiles in dating sites are ghosts or bots of some sort. As for what is left, there will be those photos of six foot tall men that happen to be five foot and exaggerating somewhat. As for age information, isn't everyone lying about that?
All considered, I can't think of a worse database to train facial recognition on.
This is easy to say if you can write, but, what if you are trying to write in a second language?
As an English person, I can write reasonably well without having to know what any of the technical terms for writing mean. I don't need to know any formal rules for writing in different tenses, and even Oxford commas just happen automagically. I can break the rules too, not that I even know what the rules are.
Over the years I have worked with a lot of people from other parts of the world that have English as their second language. They can't write in English purely on instinct, 'writing as one might talk', they are stuck trying to remember the rules and the billions of exceptions to the rules that English has, just to make it hard for the second-language crew. Of course, in Britain, we can slip into Cockney Rhyming Slang, Glaswegian or West Country Speak (tm), for not even the Irish or the Americans to understand us.
Hence, I wonder about the author. Is English his first language? We are in 'true Scotsman' territory here, and a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.
Put it this way, a true English speaker has absolutely no idea what a 'past participle' is. They have absolutely no need to know. Whereas the German, speaking his most humourous English, gained from many years of study and watching TV, absolutely knows what a 'past participle' is, but they haven't the foggiest if someone English says 'take a butchers'.
Um, er, um, the, um, real problem with writing as one talks is, er, you know, sometimes, we, er, put in lots of ums and ers. That is the real danger of 'writing as one talks', but, when editing the ums out, we dabble and wreck that flow of words that sounded great but didn't look too great on the page.
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