Two primary use cases. Sitting on the train with the laptop in my actual lap it was often more convenient to reach for the screen instead of the trackpad, especially when I had someone sitting next to me on the right and I didn't want to stab them in their ribcage with my elbow so I could reach the trackpad. Second use case was often scrolling while reading, for some reason (phone-scrolling-indoctrination I guess) it felt natural to scroll using finger on screen.

The screen was never my primary pointing device but it was always an option. I think it was annoying a handful of times during the two years I had it, you point at something on the screen and end up clicking something.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536554

Points: 2

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Seems like Mona Lisa elicits an emotional response in you as a viewer ;)

I get what you're saying though. I always "correct" people that claims some piece of music is "bad", there's no bad music, only music you don't like.

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/ff-sergeys-search/

He went backwards and started with just collecting an absurd amount of data. Later while talking to a researcher he could confirm years of research with a "simple" search in his database.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46541874

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

I am convinced (no evidence though) that current LLMs has prevented, possibly lots of, suicides. I don't know if anyone has even tried to investigate or estimate those numbers. We should still strive to make them "safer" but with most tech there's positives and negatives. How many, for example, has calmed their nerves by getting in a car and driven for an hour alone and thus not committed suicide or murder.

That said there's the reverse for some pharmaceutical drugs. Take statins for cholesterol, lots of studies for how many deaths they prevent, few if any on comorbidity.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

"Since 2017, Microsoft is one of the biggest open source contributors in the world, measured by the number of employees actively contributing to open source projects on GitHub, the largest host of source code in the world." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_open_source

Pre internet age I worked in a store where one "unlucky" guy out of reflex asked the king of Sweden for identification when buying with a credit card (fully aware of who was in front of him, it was a toy store and the king used to shop there once a year for Christmas). A colleague told the story at dinner, the colleagues father worked at an evening news paper and wrote a small blurb about it. The following two days news papers from (literally) around the world tried to get an interview with the guy.

Anything can become international news.

Something in your comment made me remember a DOS based file "explorer". Screen split down the middle with a folder-tree and file list on both sides. I remember hardly ever turning on the computer without starting that for one task or another. That was some serious UI pleasure, at least for the time. Ha, found it:

https://handwiki.org/wiki/Software:File_Commander

Ah, the nostalgia!

I guess the path to Emacs was more of a possibility/probability earlier in my career and I might find it later but for now I'll alt+tab to the browser and/or open a new tab when I need to look up any etymology and stick to navigating around Visual Studio like a pro while they still pay me to do it.