Xurinos

To all the folks replying that someone will fill the gap in front of you: that’s the point. It isn’t about reaction time. It’s about letting traffic flow easier, not fighting with each other.

It removes the need for your fellow drivers to feel a tension when it is time to switch lanes, to not have to make a risky maneuver. You get to relax when driving because now you aren’t competing to get to your destination, and you can feel more confident others are not going to accidentally hit you in a desperate attempt to go where they are going.

That impatient driver behind you? They will get around you and play the rat race. Let them. Most drivers don’t do that unless you are much obviously slower than traffic flow. Let people win the game they are playing. You are making it generally safer, and your consistency on the road helps them make decisions easier.

I’ve been doing this for about 10 years. No accidents, no cause of accidents, no angry honkers, none of that nonsense. Try it for a week! Give others space to move. Watch traffic jams ease up a little around you. It’s very neat. My space clears spaces so I can move easier after people get in front of me. I’ve seen others follow my example (or be their own example).

I am disappointed in this challenge on two levels: (1) A great many solutions fail to actually produce proper CSV: what would you do if any of the names or arbitrary credit card number inputs had quotes or commas in them? Big waste of time to roll your own, and you would have failed to prevent fraud likely without even realizing it. (2) Our JSON-dumping hackers didn't put quotes or commas in the strings to foil do-gooders.

Perhaps something like a Talk page on a MediaWiki platform? It would be out of the way but directly connected to the page you are on, a second set of comments accessible by a MetaTalk filter.

I can't speak for the other two systems compared, but to be clear, OP's examples involve more than "dictation and simple searches"; Siri also controls the device. Without entering the text messaging or email apps, one can tell the virtual secretary to read and write messages and emails. Assuming Siri understands your voice well enough.

Fun specific example at the lock screen after holding down the iPhone's button for a couple seconds: "Read the latest message from my wife to me." Then, still at the lock screen, "Reply to my wife I love you".

Maybe it's just my experience, but I did not care much for Siri until she allowed me greater control over my device. When she first came out, you could not ask her to read the screen; later, the program was able to toggle assisting configuration like VoiceOver by command.

No problem. :)

This sentence really clued me into my problem with the essay. As I read it, I found myself tripping over the sentences, especially this one. I had to reread it in order to understand what the author was saying.

Today's punctuation rules may have awkward beginnings, but the rules are standard, familiar, and subconsciously expected. This actually improves the speed at which I can read. The author's style had several places that were difficult for me because I have been mentally trained on one set of road signs and meanings.

1. I think we should challenge the definition of "global variable". In what context is the variable global? The traditional definition is that the context is the whole program. However, in imperative OOP [1] code, I find that people just learned to hide their global variables in class instances. The whole program cannot access them, right? but every method in the class can and does, and all those mutations and side effects can lead to the kind of spaghetti code we all hated when there was no OOP. It's just global variables with extra sugar. And we can make copies of them, so the code is maybe one step better.

Imperative OOP often feels like one is pivoting behavior around the data.

FP feels like the data is flowing from one transformation to the next.

There is the "functional" part of it, too... where functions are highly composable. One creates new functions by combining old functions, and these may carry along with them important context (closures).

2. From what I've learned of Haskell -- and I'm a Haskell noob -- it lets you work with the side effecty real world. You can alter your hardware state. The key is that it specifically flags such side effects and encourages separation between more "pure" code and code that is "tainted" with the side effects.

[1] OOP is an abstraction and compatible with pure FP. You can model your class instances such that they are immutable and get all the benefits of OOP. FP contrasts better with imperative programming.

> You shall know a tree by it's fruits.

Don't judge a book by its cover. Follow the money. A witty saying proves nothing.

2010 Stanford study. I updated my post.

I believe you may be saying that if your goal is to make somebody say "Yes", then the toolset adequate for the job is one based around manipulation. One may manipulate through direct force, emotional means, whatever it takes. It is a waste of time and irritating -- perhaps condescending in that it is an obvious manipulation? -- to say things like, "Let me first say I've learnt a lot from you, I really appreciated your view on this that and that. I think you are smart person blablabla" before getting to the point. Like you said, it distracts from the actual important points of the argument. In fact, such an approach towards discussion is, as you point out, counter-productive.

You're right. It's manipulation. Building consensus, too, is a form of manipulation. Some of it is irritating, especially if it is delivered in the form you quoted. My hackles rise, too!

From your comment, I am seeing that the real issue is when the manipulation is overt, when someone expresses something in a way that is clearly intended to push you in a direction rather than actually respect and accept your buy-in.

But that leads me to seeing that this really just another form of pathos. In a conversation, the average person wants to feel respected, that their opinion has merit. This is part of rhetoric. In fact, where action and tone are lacking, some people may genuinely need the additional words of appreciation that set you and me off. My point is that logos is not the only valid appeal, and I would propose that nobody is absolutely rational, meaning that degrees of the other forms of persuasion are acceptable and useful means.

To address your first point, all persuasion is manipulation. Somewhere I read that all speech is a form of persuasion, though the reasoning behind this assertion may be a bit contrived. Instead of elaborating on that point, I want to suggest instead that even if it is not "all", even if it is just "most", we could see instead that manipulation is not an evil in itself. Clearly there is nothing wrong with asking somebody where they would like to eat as your means to coerce them into joining you for dinner. Obtaining consensus or bringing someone to agree with you is not, itself, an evil or even irritating.

Armed with all the appeals of rhetoric and following these steps with respect to the audience's needs, I think the four steps listed at the top of the thread are acceptable means in polite society of persuasion, or, if you prefer, manipulation.

Addendum: I just tried the four steps. Was this post a successful example? Did I overdo it?

While true, I happen to have both kinds of devices (updated, not old), and we found the Facetime experience MUCH less pixelated and less jumpy than the Skype experience over the same network, back-to-back. In further tests, the Google Hangouts and other Google video offerings were just as pixelated as our Skype calls. Skype is a solution, but here is was case where we could objectively say one approach was better.

On the other hand, I did find that Skype over 3G was conclusively better-sounding than the regular AT&T voice stuff...when it did not lag out with weird chirps.

Every time I see the phrase "open source", I mentally add "but not open binary"; how do I know that the service that is run uses binaries that are compiled from that open source alone? with trusted libraries? After all, anyone can employ a site-specific patch in their build process that adds additional "features" to their normally open source project.

Is there a reasonable way to have trusted individuals intermittently audit the service?