exsomet

The process as it relates to a K1 Visa is a multi-step series of approval gates designed to state that someone is “admissible” based on certain conditions, which change as you move through the process.

The general logic has been that it’s really easy for people to say they want to marry a U.S. citizen, get approved to emigrate, and then change their mind after (the common term for this is visa fraud). So the government grants a series of visas for increasing lengths as you move through that process and prove that it is a bona-fide relationship.

A K1 visa is the last step before getting married, and stipulates that you get married within a short time after entering the country, after which you have to remain married for several years, prove you’re doing things normal married couples do (like live together), and then you can get your permanent residency.

So, in short, it’s not as clear cut as a one-time yes/no decision. You very much live within a prescribed framework for several years until the government is satisfied that your relationship is real.

(Source: personal experience)

> "Our approach is not 'AI replaces people.' But it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn't change … the number of roles required in certain areas. It does," CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said in a memo to employees.

“AI doesn’t replace people, but it’s silly to pretend it doesn’t replace people”, says man planning to use AI to replace people.

> I do wonder the prospects of any etsy-like outcome for largely hand crafted software though. While you can personally find stylistic expression in the craft i'm not sure how apparent the nuances of crafting code is to users of the product beyond the requirements of a UX design and vision.

The immediate example of something where good code DOES stand out to me is (one of my favorite games of all time) Factorio. There are lots of examples where I have been playing over the years and been amazed at the ability of the game engine to handle computationally complex operations at a really large scale. Coupled with a bunch of dev blogs explaining the little optimizations, its given me a ton of respect for Factorio as a piece of software.

That said, I am not sure it strictly invalidates your point. That’s the only example I can come up with, and it requires knowledge of the game’s design via those devblogs which the average user of a messaging app or something won’t have.

I think there’s probably a market for high performance consumer code, but the vast majority of what makes it to end users will just be good enough.

The two key differences to me are infrastructure and specificity of purpose.

Autoland in plane requires a set of expensive, complex, and highly fine-tuned equipment to be installed on every runway in the world that enables it (which as a proportion is statistically not a majority of them).

And as to specificity, this system does exactly one thing - land a specific model of plane on a specific runway equipped with instrumentation configured a specific way.

The point being: it isn’t a magic wand. Any serious conversation of AI in these types of life or death situations has to recognize that without the corresponding investment in infrastructure and specificity of purpose, things like this blog post are essentially just science fiction. The fact that previous generations of technology considered autoland and algorithmic trading to be magic doesn’t really change anything about that.

This isn’t an accurate interpretation. The UK is a _constitutional_ monarchy, not an absolute monarchy, meaning that the monarchy exists and acts in accordance with the constitution.

In the case of the UK, some of the rituals (such as the one you’re referring to with the prime minister) are based on longstanding traditions, because humans are weird and we like those sorts of things, but the requirement to do that stems from the constitution, not from the King deciding if he likes the PM or not.

Shift+Del and rm -rm are pretty hard to use by accident. Onedrive comes with the computer preconfigured to do some pretty unintuitive things.

For example, if a user does not actively change the save location, at least for office apps, the default behavior is to save to onedrive.

I’m not an expert by any means, but one of the major impediments I would imagine to flying taxis carrying people is safety; there’s a _lot_ that has to be done before people board an airplane in terms of checks, paperwork, planning, etc.

The dream of “order a flying taxi on your phone and it takes you wherever you want in five minutes” isn’t really compatible with aviation safety culture (at least at the pilot level in the US). That’s not to say it can’t be done, but you probably need a lot of really good PR people to figure out how to say “we want to remove the safety controls from this so we can make money with it” and have people buy it.

I remember getting an Xbox One and being excited about the concept of it being the center for entertainment in my house. The marketing promise was that it would integrate with TVs and music and make those things better in ways that were sort of nebulous and not super well defined, and that unfortunately came at the expense of it delivering a good gaming experience.

The first red flag should have been Microsoft trying to push the weird metro/UWP interface that it had with news, the store, movies and a tv guide, and more versus a library of games, and then of course all of the bad PR around Kinect and the DRM. It didn’t have backwards compatibility at launch and most of the games were things that were already out on 360, but for some reason we needed to re-buy.

The game experience never improved and the home entertainment thing never materialized, so you were just left with something that did exactly what the 360 did and duplicated your existing DVR/cable box.

The X/S wasn’t better. First you had to fight scalpers to get one, and then my first experience with it was browsing the store and seeing that I had to pick between buying the Xbox one version of games or the X/S version. The entire thing was built around some new revolutionary concept of streaming cloud games, which didn’t work. Games are FPS capped and if you install them locally they require 15 of the 45 minutes you have to game to download updates that should happen while the thing sleeps. It got slightly better over time, but juxtaposed with my pc and steam it was such an unpolished experience.

What it really comes down to for me is that it’s a gaming console that tries to do a bunch of stuff I don’t care about and fails at the one thing I do care about it doing (playing games). There’s a larger commentary here about Microsoft, but this isn’t unique to them. I should have been a lifelong console buyer; instead I will probably not buy another one because for the past two generations the experience has been awful, and whatever they come out with next is going to be packed with a bunch of streaming junk and AI and other stuff I don’t want, and will not do the thing I do want in any way that competes with the old faithful PC and steam.

I’m certainly not an expert, but just based on my personal experiences, I think “character” is the distillation of a lot of different aspects of self, some of which are binary haves/don’t haves (“people listen when you speak”) and others that are more of a spectrum (a “willingness to speak up” is easier when the consequences are low).

That is to say, it’s really really hard to pinpoint exactly what makes up character and whether someone has it. So when we DO cross paths with those who clearly have character it’s all the more reason to network, communicate, and keep those people in our orbit, so that we might learn from them and maybe have a little bit of their character rub off on us.

This is a fairly defeatist approach to the issue (read that as a statement of fact, not an accusation or argument). The problem with taking this stance, for many people, is that you’re giving a mouse a cookie, except the cookie is marginally more and more control over your life in the form of the ability to control what you see, what communities you’re allowed to engage with, and what you’re allowed to do online.

This battle for online privacy and control is just that, a battle, and you are correct that it is not a fair fight. But engaging and pushing back, through advocacy, speaking out, and acts of noncompliance does three things:

First, it slows the progress of these measures and thus limits the amount of control over our lives we give up, hopefully until some more politically friendly people come to power.

Second, it provides a barometer (via its effectiveness) for assessing the state of that fight, and how dire it is becoming.

Finally, people voicing their concerns about these laws gives information that helps inform more powerful and potentially altruistic advocates with more resources (such as the EFF) in how those resources should be allocated.

Maybe those aren’t good reasons for you, and that’s okay. Lots of people just want to browse twitter and see sports scores and they don’t really care if they have to show ID to do that. For anybody else reading this though, there are lots of reasons why your involvement and engagement in this issue should not stop with “that’s just how the world works”.

Every time an executive says AI the number goes up.

The update thing struck me as slightly out of touch; if I were to make a list of my top 10 most used consumer products that can be updated, probably 8-9 of them have abused updates to make things worse.

We spend so much time training people that if you hit update, it’s going to suck: you’re going to suddenly get ads in your favorite app, or some new feature is going to get paywalled, or the UI is going to completely change with no warning. It seems counterproductive to accept that our industry does this stuff and then publish an open letter finger-wagging people for not updating.

The neat thing about all this is that you don’t get a choice!

Your favorite services are adding “AI” features (and raising prices to boot), your data is being collected and analyzed (probably incorrectly) by AI tools, you are interacting with AI-generated responses on social media, viewing AI-generated images and videos, and reading articles generated by AI. Business leaders are making decisions about your job and your value using AI, and political leaders are making policy and military decisions based on AI output.

It’s happening, with you or to you.

Maybe it is. Humans are weird creatures; we draw all manner of lines in the sand on different issues, some rational and others not.

I hope we get some interesting psychological studies out of this sort of story in the coming years. Maybe we can learn a thing or two about ourselves.

One of the major stories from the rise of AI tooling was when people cooked a recipe that included glue.

I don’t think it’s unfair to assume some non-trivial percentage of people use these tools in a very dumb way.