jholman

I have very few issues with Firefox. The two that I suspect are:

1) Google-owned sites seem to just chew CPU on Firefox. In particular I'm thinking of GMail and Youtube, both of which I'm a heavy user of, and also Maps. But no non-google sites seem to have this problem.

2) I'm constantly getting websites saying "This is your first time using this device, are you sure you're you?", and I haven't tried whether it's better on Chrome, but it's pretty crazy because I've literally never used your stupid site with any other device, and I used it with THIS device just last month you idiots. I'm just blind guessing that this is some kind of problem as a result of Firefox privacy choices, like maybe the site doesn't know how to use cookies in a way that doesn't trigger anti-tracking. For example banks.

But Firefox can keep thousands of tabs open at once (thousands. plural. not kidding, not exaggerating.), it has working uBO, and the frequency of "just because we wanted to" UX changes is much lower. It's just a better choice all around.

If you don't care about performance, we can make that code a lot shorter.

  float Q_rsqrt(float number) {
    return 1 / sqrt(number);
  }

The "fast inverse square root" is absolutely 100% all about performance. For it to make sense to use as a counter-example, you need to show alternate code that still meets the contract (the contract being: be as fast as this code), that is longer, and clearer.

> a bit dramatic. there has to be an adjustment of teaching/assessing, but nothing that would "ruin" anyone's life.

If you don't have the power to just change your mind about what the entire curriculum and/or assessment context is, it can be a workload increase of dozens of hours per week or more. If you do have the power, and do want to change your entire curriculum, it's hundreds of hours one-time. "Lives basically ruined" is an exaggeration, but you're preposterously understating the negative impact.

> is it spam if it's useful and solves a problem?

Whether or not it's useful has nothing to do with whether or not it's spam. I'm not claiming that your product is spam -- I'll get back to that -- but your reply to the spam accusation is completely wrong.

As for your hypothesis, I've had interactions where it did a good job of generating alternative activities/exercises, and interactions where it strenuously and lengthily kept suggesting absolute garbage. There's already garbage on the internet, we don't need LLMs to generate more. But yes, I've had situations where I got a good suggestion or two or three, in a list of ten or twenty, and although that's kind of blech, it's still better than not having the good suggestions.

Yikes, that's a grim story.

Yeah, the injury stats are way higher than death. I just couldn't find a fast way to disambiguate serious injuries from not-so-serious-but-we-still-care injuries from the sort of bite that really just merits a fake apology and everyone gets on with their lives.

At the other extreme, I've had first-hand knowledge of a case where someone taunted a dog repeatedly over many months (stupid kid, stupid dog-owners, lots of mistakes were made), eventually the kid got bit, didn't even need stitches, but they called animal control.

So. Non-fatal dog-attacks have a very wide range of impact, and I had no idea how to disentangle those.

Oh, after all that writing I just did, I went back and re-read your source. In 2022 there were 17,500 home insurance claims related to dog bites, at an average cost of $64k. That sounds like a pretty reasonable proxy for serious injury due to injuries from dog bites from pets, the sort of pets that could plausibly have been inappropriately not-on-leash (remember we're discussing whether or not it's "incredibly dangerous and irresponsible" to ever have your dog unrestrained).

Yes, I agree with you, and poorly-fed dogs might do things that a privileged pet might never consider. And, a fortiori, packs of poorly-fed dogs.

But the comment I was responding to was from a commenter whose bio says they're in Philidelphia, responding to a comment that I think was probably pretty developed-country, on a story from a Brit living in America. So I think we're talking about the developed-country context.

I'm not disagreeing with the text of what you wrote, though.

> The amount of children killed or injured by poorly restrained dogs is very high.

This claim is interesting, if true. Can you back it up? I spent 15 minutes on research, and my preliminary findings, using US statistics (I'm not American but it's just easier to google American stuff) suggest that:

a) about 42 Americans die to dog attacks per year (about 0.13 per 100k population) (very high confidence)

b) it looks like about half of those are kids under 17, with ages 1-4 over-represented (very high confidence)

c) most of those kids-dying-to-dogs deaths are not due to unrestrained dogs in public, but rather infants in their family homes, dying to dogs owned by the child's parents (low to medium confidence)

For example, WP gathers media/journal reports on dog fatalities, and has 16 records for 2023 (so presumably about 1/3 of the fatalities for that year). 6 of those are children. Of those 6 children, 4 died to the family pet, the other 2 died to neighbours' dogs while in their own home. Extrapolating from that that suggests that the number of American children killed by poorly restrained dogs, other than their own family, is roughly 6. Out of around 10k child fatalities per year in the US.

That doesn't seem "very high" to me, but that's just a matter of opinion. Do you have data that shows a different pattern?

My sense is that dogs prioritize pack/family togetherness ahead of freedom. They don't value all other people (and to a dog, "people" means dogs, humans, and sometimes other species), but also they do not only value their "owner". They value their family, their pack. They want to be with those they want to be with, in action and in rest.

After that, they value things like food, exercise, curiousity, and the absence of immediate pain.

Most dogs, that haven't been traumatized, seem to have a pretty reasonable attitude toward personal safety: you mustn't let fear rule you. But some dogs, that have been traumatized, can be inordinately concerned with what they perceive to be their personal safety, in some cases to the point of (understandable, tragic) derangement.

Maybe you know something particular about metabolic treatments. But if this is just a structural argument from more or less first principles, I think it's structurally weak. There's no reason to assume that your body's tolerance to starvation is the same as, or poorer than, the cancer's tolerance to starvation.

For example, chemotherapy is poison, just poison that is hoped to poison the cancer much more strongly than the patient. But it always hurts the patient.

Another broader example, fevers are bad for you. But in many situations, they're worse for a pathogen that has infected you, so your body tries a fever in response to some immune observations. This is why you should generally not treat a mild fever, unlike a too-intense fever. Not medical advice, I'm not a doctor.

But maybe, unlike me, you have specific knowledge of the medical issues and you have more-specific reasons to argue that metabolic attacks can't work on cancer?

I used to have a coworker, a senior dev of decades of experience, who insisted that MacOS was a real Linux, "just like BSD". Sigh.

Of course, this belief probably had no downsides or negative consequences, other than hurting my brain, which they probably did not regard as a significant problem.

It'd be more apt to write "fomented divisions", rather than "fermented divisions".

> Generally there needs to be some sort of intent.

Often yes, but often not.

Criminal negligence is a thing. That's a standard of mens rea that's lower than intent, or foreknowlege, or recklessness. And it's particularly a thing in the context of licensed professions.

I vouched your comment, because I think you're precisely making the relevant point in the first two paragraphs.

However, I think you're wrong, at least in part, in your third paragraph. I mean, I think the word "mostly" is wrong in that paragraph. Politicians from all political factions are (quite reasonably) under pressure to lower the cost of doing the work of government, and (quite reasonably) to raise the integrity of the process. Combined with some of the dysfunction inherent in agent-principal problems, I think that's more than enough to cause the problem you're talking about. I experience this firsthand in a jurisdiction that has much less of the "demolish the entire administrative state" that afflicts the American right wing (which I'm guessing is your point of reference).

Mind you, I am not claiming that the problem is not badly worsened by American right-wing politics. I wouldn't know. I'm just claiming that the problem is semi-intrinsic to the situation, and I strongly doubt that it's "mostly" caused by those particular political issues.

I'm confused. You're complaining about the use of the word "charity"?

Background: You make an argument that at least some people should consider putting contributions to society ahead of "making yet another few hundred thousand". I agree with you, at least broadly, and I think the up-thread poster is not disagreeing.

Summary: We're discussing the act of taking a personal financial hit, for the good of society.

The word for that is "charity". That's what that word means.

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I also am sympathetic to the GP's point, about which you are so "disgusted", but I think there's room to disagree there.

I am sympathetic because professionally I do work that many people think is "good for society", I currently earn approximately median income (below mean) for my age/gender/nationality, far far below software engineer pay, and I am treated with unbelievable disrespect by my employer, the government. If I was not trapped in this job by personal circumstance (for now), the disrespect part would definitely factor into my decision making about staying in this allegedly-virtuous job. If you're gonna pay people below market, and you treat them badly, that's not a combination that gets you quality employees. Even if there's some social purpose.