About your second point, the site guidelines suggest assuming good faith and responding to the strongest possible version of what someone has written. I would interpret that to mean here that "they had no trouble understanding the post but had reservations about it, which felt important to them".
I will also add that I feel characterizing what they have written as nitpicking feels rude and uncharitable.
Personally I appreciated the parent comment because although I enjoyed the article, it didn't completely sit well with me, and the comment helped to clarify why. There are some activities in my life that I've poured years of blood, sweat, and tears into, and I'm realizing as I get older that my goals and dreams with regard to this category of work will probably never be realized. This feels a bit different to the snowboarding narrative, which for all I know may have been chosen not because the writer hasn't been in a situation like mine, but because it's easier to digest and doesn't require a level of vulnerability that would muddy the light-hearted tone of the post.
In any event, I don't feel your hostility is fair or warranted here
I agree that AI is likely a driving force here, but it is also likely not the only driving force. COVID likely played a devastating role, along with curriculum changes in high school, reactionary cultural shifts towards anti-intellectualism, and broader declines in literacy that have been in progress for a while now. It would be interesting to see data for the past 5-10 years or so.
> It's reading my requests more clearly than (for example) Google's search input ever did
I see this take a lot and it puzzles me.
While I think LLMs provide some advantages over traditional search in some modestly nontrivial contexts, they tend to be inferior to traditional search at its peak. I attribute this attitude to two things: the broad progressive enshittification and productization of search, and the fact that (re)search is a skill that most people tend to be bad at. Without massaging, LLMs spit out the most utterly braindead boneheaded queries, which are fine in cases where the problem is very well understood with minimum uncertainty or critical nuance. If your problem has either, God help you. But perhaps those queries are at least as good as the average human generated query
I think that the issue here is that the definition of search/results has changed (in my mind at least they were always - what knowledge are you looking for, followed by, here are the results that carry that knowledge OR point in the right direction, but I recognise that other people will hold more strict definitions)
AI has changed how I find and synthesise information in ways Google never managed - we've always had the problem with Google that we couldn't express exactly what we were looking for - that much I think we can both agree has changed dramatically for the better with LLMs
Edit: I have always held that searching for an answer (whether it be internet or human) has always been about asking the right person, the right question, at the right time.
LLMs most certainly improve that - I don't need to know the exact technical term I am looking to solve in order to get the results I want (eg. I can ask how to "stop (a) function from running too many times" instead of the industry terms "throttling" or "debouncing")
> Edit: I have always held that searching for an answer (whether it be internet or human) has always been about asking the right person, the right question, at the right time.
At the peak of search they're describing, asking a question was how you'd get subpar results. The best way to search was for things you expected to be in the results - like, for a simplistic example, you wouldn't search for "how do I...", you'd search for something like "How to..."
Yeah - the plan was to word match - having the right words in the query was the key.
It was also why (one) SEO was to fill the page in a hidden block, every word that could possibly be related (synonyms) to the page content.
On that note I am wondering how the poisoning of the content for AI is going to occur (eventually someone is going to work out how to make LLMs say "Eat at Joes - 1313 Mockingbird lane" whenever someone [else] asks some food related question)
The game very explicitly implores the player to question the ethics of monster slaying -- most directly through the character of Djura, who points out that the beasts were once people too. The game goes so far as to give you a dialogue box when talking to him, with the options to spare the beasts or not
There is also the romp through the Hunter's Nightmare, whose first act is replete with beasts cowering in fear at the sight of the player character. Even if you spare them you'll usually see them brutally slain by mad hunter compatriots anyway
And it's no mistake that all the "kin" type characters you encounter in the game, like Rom, Ebrietas, and Moon Presence, are all deeply tragic.
Thematically Bloodborne is deeply concerned with humanization/dehumanization and how those interact with violence, and it plays a lot with this in the narrative to subvert with the usual power fantasy of the soulslike genre -- the beasts cowering in fear in the nightmare seem more human than the mad hunters, Ebrietas appears to be grieving when you encounter her, and with Rom you might systematically murder her children before directing your blade at her. Like you can live out that power fantasy, but it won't always feel great.
So no, I don't think that Ebrietas being optional works against this idea at all. It just allows the narrative to explore different facets of this question -- it humanizes her, and if you choose to fight her it's because you chose to be the aggressor.
Only in Old Yharnam! You're right to call it out, I missed that, but I feel like even the BSB in Old Yharnam has a backstory motivating you to put it down.
Arguably, not much in Bloodborne is even actually happening.
(My confidence on all this isn't super high, but this is like the one video game I do play, and I've gone a little deep on the lore.)
This is not common in an in-person setting -- nearly "unheard of" outside of elite schools or particular faculty at particular programs. So it is the latter
I mean, given that belief in moral decline is essentially based on illusory perceptions anyway[1], it's not too surprising that someone handwringing about it would also hallucinate connections between two disparate phenomena they opted to characterize as examples of such.
If you opt to habitually rationalize human behavior in a manner that is detached from concern with nuance or driving forces then some amount of reality denial is probably inevitable
Anyone can access the web interface including attackers, so don't dump debug information there. Feel free to put the errors behind an admin interface or to local files that can be retrived.
You can certainly learn a bit about how a company thinks about UX, accessibility, and its users more broadly by looking at its error messages. Although I didn't care for much of the specifics proposed, I am glad about this post as I think it is important to think through error messages with intention and treat them as products in their own right.
Regarding the proposed "good" alternative, it has less actionable information than the original "bad" message, depending on what the product is and who its users are. In particular, you can't determine whether "fetch data" is impenetrable jargon without looking at the product itself and its users.
I also frequently see people use the designation of a user as non-technical as an excuse to dismiss their intelligence. It's true that tech folks generally underestimate how confusing computers and software are to the average person, but erring too heavily in the other direction also has negative impacts for accessibility. Either way, you can at least hide away that extra detail, with jargon and all, using that link tip she mentioned.
Finally, this writer seems to overestimate the extent to which most users view "contact Customer Care" as "giving them a way out" and not an invitation for further aggravation.
Why are you baffled? The most upvoted critical comments are mostly explaining themselves and I don't think their reasons are very technical. When the stakes are higher, we should generally be more critical, not less.
You are right that this happens frequently in the United States compared to Europe, but you are overstating the degree to which this culturally and legally acceptable. People who are doing this are not typically broadcasting it to others, and I can assure you that when they do, for the most part people will tend to "bat an eye" at the very least.
Note that motor vehicle insurance in most of Europe is more tightly regulated and generally more affordable than in the United States. Also, I suspect the car-dependent individuals in urban areas with robust public transportation in Belgium are generally vastly higher income than the typical uninsured compulsory driver in the United States. Happy to be corrected though
> you are overstating the degree to which this culturally and legally acceptable
In Florida it's a $150 fine [1]. If you do it again within 3 years, they charge you $250. If you do it again within that three-year period, they'll just charge you $500 each time. It's not even a crime [2].
I will also add that I feel characterizing what they have written as nitpicking feels rude and uncharitable.
Personally I appreciated the parent comment because although I enjoyed the article, it didn't completely sit well with me, and the comment helped to clarify why. There are some activities in my life that I've poured years of blood, sweat, and tears into, and I'm realizing as I get older that my goals and dreams with regard to this category of work will probably never be realized. This feels a bit different to the snowboarding narrative, which for all I know may have been chosen not because the writer hasn't been in a situation like mine, but because it's easier to digest and doesn't require a level of vulnerability that would muddy the light-hearted tone of the post.
In any event, I don't feel your hostility is fair or warranted here
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