Haha it’s just that the things these devices enable for us are so valuable. But life is full of suboptimal things just because that’s how it is. Some other constraint causes it.

I was at Oren’s Hummus years ago with a friend and I remember thinking that there was this heat lamp outside by the window that was very close to the glass. We were halfway through our meal when we heard a loud snap and a large crack formed in the glass. Error in process, my failure to report it, and costly consequence. Bug, eh?

It’s just that the world is full of detail and things are full of interactions. And complexity is something we’re all constantly grappling with.

Every time I do the 5 finger gesture to bring up launchpad (I think that’s what it’s called) on a Mac the text field doesn’t focus fast enough for the text. Every time I type then backspace backspace backspace and type again. That’s just life. Somewhere someone shipped something that does this. It didn’t use to be this way but it is now. I can’t really change it so I just live with it.

The world of software is complexity upon complexity created from the fact that the virtual world admits arbitrary amount of interaction at much lower cost than the physical world. Yep, the world is full of bugs. But you really have to care a lot to stop them and no one really wants to pay you to do that.

It is definitely true though that enterprise software for nonprofits (like education) sucks even harder than usual, because nonprofit IT departments don't even have the profit motive to align IT department and end user interests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(microarchitecture)

I guess many would like to use stock vLLM to run inference on affordable P100...

But I also think that it is often more-useful and much, much safer to know how to de-escalate when that's possible. When I took martial arts classes, they taught me that the first step towards winning a fight was to avoid fighting to begin with, and always calm things down one notch at a time. If, and only if, that becomes impossible, then: Kick the snot out of them until they stop being a threat.

And running away can be useful: An attacker's ability to do harm decreases with distance. When I took army basic training, we trained a lot on running. They taught me that being able to run reasonably-quickly for reasonably-long distances was a skill that most people lack. Just keep running and the attacker will probably get tired and give up long before you do, which generally resolves the threat. If a fight is necessary after running away, then: Use the element of surprise and just turn around and stab them until they stop being a threat.

---

This is not an exhaustive list of methods and it is possible for any of them to go wrong. It's also possible to do nothing at all as a response and still have a very bad time of things.

It's a complex world. We've got billions of other people with different backgrounds, different problems, and different ideas of how they're going to get a little further ahead today than they were yesterday.

If we all had all of the answers, then we wouldn't have the kinds of desperation that leads to these problems to begin with.

But we don't all have all of the answers.

Personally, I’d suggest avoiding Chinese smartphones as much as possible. Setting aside the cybersecurity risks for a moment, just look at how they cheat and manipulate benchmark scores—they will do whatever it takes just to look good on paper.

Also, consider how phones in China can't use GMS (Google Mobile Services), so they build in countless "workaround" backdoors. Do you really think buying the global version makes it safe? As a software developer, let me tell you: we rarely maintain two completely different codebases for what is essentially the same OS. Those backdoors are still there—they're just disabled. That alone should set off alarm bells.

If anyone is interested in diving deeper into the software issues behind Chinese phones, I can talk about that next time.

Pixel’s raw performance is honestly terrible. But if you don't game, its day-to-day fluidity easily blows other brands—including Samsung—out of the water. It’s a phone you can actually use with peace of mind: practically no backdoors, near-stock Android, timely security updates, and an advanced OS. It really is the best option for daily use.

That said, Google, I’m begging you: can you please take your hardware seriously? The current performance and overall state of Pixel phones are just embarrassing.

"When you are confined within the civilized scientific discourse and can't cry out 'It's the biosphere, stupid!'"

Please read what Anastassia Makarieva had to say on "the kid" 2 years ago: https://bioticregulation.substack.com/p/seeing-forests-throu...

Could we stop chopping down trees from primary forests in the Amazon to save the planet for us humans? Could we manage with a little less beef and soy?

This seems a weird thing to believe given that we know there are such things as black UI patterns designed to keep users from doing things they might want to do, but which the company might not want they do yet still are obliged to provide the possibility of doing.

As a general rule I think I am pretty good with finding out things about software, for example in pretty much every company I've worked at I'm one of the only devs who learns Jira's query language, and how to make my own dashboards to organize things, but I do at times experience UIs that I either must believe are malicious or buggy, and I stand by that interpretation no matter how they people who work at the company like to claim it is working as intended.

But I have also experienced some times when I think the way this UI works must be a bug, because otherwise the people who designed it must be incompetent idiots and also, given laws about accessibility requirements, potentially on the hook for some monetary payments in court soon.

My interpretation has been that I am often to quick to think things are bugs and not worthwhile using because I am familiar with how buggy things can be and still "work" somewhat, and also that normal uneducated users will try to soldier through things I just give up on because they don't realize that a thing should not be working the way it does, they think it is them that are wrong - as evidently you do as well. I think it is frankly a strange viewpoint to have in the world of software development, which world I assume you are a part of?