Honestly, even though I use computers for work all the time, I don’t think I ever talk about logging in or out or switching it off or restarting, other than when I’m getting some help from IT.
Chances are you were clothes with aglets a lot, and aglets keep the integrity of your clothes, but there is also a good chance that you don’t know what aglets are because the average person doesn’t talk about them until they lodge somewhere in their washing machine.
I can’t really sympathise with you here. You’re clearly an IT guy, so the difference between log out, restart and shut down is as natural to you as breathing. For the average person is not that intuitive. For many people the computer is “on” when they press the power button and enter their username and password. And the blurring of the distinction is increased by most people having a smartphone where just lifting it up to your face wakes it up and logs you in (technically) at the same time.
I know you’re explaining it to them, but if that’s not something that they live and breathe, they’re just going to forget the explanation. I’m a molecular biologist, so to me the differences between genome, transcriptome and proteome are bleeding obvious, but I have a colleague who’s not a scientist but needs to become familiar with these terms. I explained them to her last week in an meeting that lasted an hour, but this week I had to do that again. She’s not stupid, it’s just all very abstract to her.
Remember that there are biases at play here. There’s the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about geed things happening), and media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:
News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”. (…) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.
Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.
Me too, but there is one UK retailer (Co-operative) that makes it hard for you. They will have, say, a punnet of strawberries with 200g strawberries in it for £3.50 and another one with 300g for £4.50. The labels will say “unit price: £3.50/unit” or “£4.50/unit”. (No, really?) So you have to do your own maths. Luckily other markets are sensible enough to actually provide price per weight. And in Tesco, when a given product is cheaper for clubcard holders, it will even give price per weight twice, for both normal price and clubcard price.
Btw. I don’t work for Tesco. I just needed to vent about Co-op being dicks; Tesco just serves as a good counter example of how this should be done, in case any Co-op executive is reading this.
BTW, can a woman sue a man for using the ladies’ toilet?
I actually can’t complain. It’s not perfect, but I’m far from being as outraged as the OP. I used to love SwiftKey, it was amazing with text prediction, even when you had two languages on at the same time (I’m bilingual, so it was really handy). Since Microsoft bought it, it started going downhill and when I found that I can’t just transfer my settings when I get a new phone, I switched to Gboard. Again, not perfect, but not terrible either. I will try out some of the recommendation from this thread though.
Could someone ELI5 (if possible) what passkeys actually are?
Lol made me imagine firemen standing next to a burning house and drenching the one next to it with their hoses.
I’m a molecular biologist, but I’m into so many branches of science! I love maths (arguably not science) - the elegance, the consistency, and pi that pops up everywhere. Physics - the laws that actually govern the universe and it’s most basic level. Chemistry - the science of change where so much emergence happens. Biology - the science trying to solve the actual mysteries of life. Psychology, especially evolutionary psychology - understanding what makes us tick and how it came about. And linguistics - the science of the original sharing app.
Edit: typo.
I do the same things. Half of my conversations with people is me first rephrasing everything they said to me to make sure I understood them correctly before I answer their question or address what they said. And I also always want to give relevant answers but find myself circling around them more than I’d like. I didn’t study philosophy tho.
Wait… Did The Onion buy out CNN?
Oh. Ok then, we don’t have them in the UK in the city where I live.
Was it really AI powered? I’ve never used one (we’ve not had them in the UK) so I’m genuinely curious. I heard it just had chips in every product, so when you leave the shop through a gate, everything you bought got scanned, and you were charged automatically. But in my description there is no AI in the modern sense of pattern recognition based on vast training data.
Does uni count? I synthesised aspirin.
Does biochemistry count? I exponentially copied very specifically selected short fragments of DNA. From 1 to up to 1,099,511,627,776 copies in just 2 hours. I’ve also very specifically cut and glued together DNA strands.
And at home, I just extracted juice from red cabbage and played with changing its colour by adding lemon juice or baking soda.
10 minutes? Damn you’re a fast reader…
I use it as my travel agent. It planned my trip to one of a big US cities (did a really good job) and to advise me what I should know as a European driver driving on American roads for the first time.
Edit: Also, Claude by Anthropic is great at re-writing passages of generic text in the style of Donald Trump.
Haha that is such a good point!
So now both his feet are up his ass too 🤔
I come from Poland and yes, totally. When I started school, and missed lessons because I was sick or whatever, I could just take the phone book and find the surname of the classmate I wanted to get notes or homework from. If there were a few surnames on the list and I didn’t know their father (it was always the man of the house who was listed) first name, I could just go by who appeared to live closest to the school. Or just start calling all the numbers until I got the right one.