godelski

I'll highlight the gp's point here because it is subtle but important

  >> words that label parts of continua are useful

and I'll add one more point: there's a difference in how people speak colloquially and how words are used by experts. In fact, different groups of experts may use the same word to mean different things (e.g. a mathematician and mechanic both call things "manifolds", yet you shouldn't confuse them). Natural language is highly overloaded (which is a big reason we invented formal languages).

A problem with the word "intelligent" is that very few people look to see how it is actually used in different fields like neuroscience, psychology, or machine learning, which all use the word a bit differently, and none of them use it in the way that we use in natural speech.

  > "yellow" that isn't every color.

But I can ask you how "yellow" is the color green. It is certainly some yellow. Definitely more yellow than red is. Even more so, we might argue over if black is more yellow than white or not. Which in some settings black is more yellow than white and in other settings white is more yellow than black. Hell, the fact that you can read this and understand it is clear evidence of both utility and ambiguity. We haven't even mentioned that people may use the same definition but use a word to mark a certain threshold and disagree on that threshold (the root of so many painful to watch arguments).

Everything is just a bit fuzzier than you think.

I think everyone understands this already. But there's also a big difference between making it easy for industries to sway politicians and difficult. That's what actually matters.

To put it another way, I still put a lock on my door even though lockpicks exist. I still use passwords on my accounts even though people could guess or brute force them.

Don't trivialize things to uselessness

Mostly because Mail sucks.

  - Search is atrocious
    - I can't find emails from this week but it'll dig up stuff from 5 years ago
  - no tagging
  - no filtering (tbf, this could be a lot better in most platforms)
  - Mail automatically renders PDFs (helps spammers)
  - doesn't play well with aliased emails

And a bunch of other things. All minor but they add up

  > they ask you for a state-issued ID to appeal bans

Requires ID for "age verification" to ensure pedos aren't talking to children

"Move fast and break things" mentality, so IDs leak

Pedos use your leaked ID. You land on a list. Meta/Google/Discord/Persona/whoever pays you $20 and gets a slap on the wrist

IDs become useless, so Altman promotes WorldCoin and we all get our eyeballs scanned

Rinse, lather, repeat. Surveillance state grows. Terrorists continue to do terrorist stuff. Pedos continue to do pedo stuff. Normal people get random visits from gestapo because they are 110% sure you were involved in a crime despite proof that you were in a different state at the time.

We're really creating a great world...

Yeah that too! I've only had an iPhone for a few years but as soon as I used Mail I immediately understood why my parents got phished. Mail hid all signals people would normally use. Their spam detection is bad too. In my first week I got a PayPal used to buy bitcoin scam and neither Gmail nor Thunderbird showed it (both flagged as spam). Both also just showed it was an empty email with only a PDF attachment whereas Mail showed what looked like a normal email, including an address that looked like PayPal's.

I also notice it doesn't handle relayed emails well. I have a bunch of dummy emails and Mail doesn't show me the relayed name, which really hinders my ability to track and combat spam

Mostly because I have multiple email addresses. But I make good use of the filters (which could be improved) and tags. That really helps with searching through everything.

If I only had one email account I probably wouldn't care as much but that's not as common these days

I struggle to get it to search things. Even emails within the last few days. It'll show me irrelevant mail from years ago but not yesterday's.

I also don't like that it renders PDF attachments. Just seems to be enabling scammers

Most people don't like Zen (or Arc). Which is fine. I'm a big keyboard person so I love it, especially with the vimium plugin. But sometimes people get confused at my browser because they don't know how to navigate. Which is understandable

What I like about Mozilla is they made a hackable browser so we can have things like Zen, WaterFox, or whatever floats your boat.

I don't like pickles. So what? No one is forcing me to eat them and no one is forcing you to use vertical tabs. They aren't even the default so wtf is the point of your comment?

I'm with you and honestly I think most people are. Frankly, I'm pretty certain that for 90% of users of you swapped chrome for Firefox, replacing the icons too, then people wouldn't notice. I'd wager 80% of HN users.

It's such a petty argument when everything is so hackable and Google is eating the internet. I wish people would put half the energy they use to complain to solve the things they are upset about.

The man pages certainly tell you how to set your DNS to 8.8.8.8. You just have to do a bit more reading than what the agent would give you. But there's a side benefit to that extra reading, you learn how to do more things. Sometimes that's useful, sometimes it isn't. But you don't know if it is useful or not until later, you can only find out in time