The left side of the first example picture looks to me like four columns laid out using a vertical flexbox each. In fact, it looks like the very example that I saw people using saying "Look how the flexbox layout on the left doesn't line up the text boxes, but on the right the text boxes are all neatly aligned, isn't that nicer?"
I realize that the difference is that the items are laid out horizontally, i.e. photos 1-2-3-4 are all across the top, whereas with vertical flexboxes items 1-2-3-4 would end up in the first column (or you'd have to rearrange your divs taking the flexbox layout into account, which is often impractical).
But the gain from CSS Grid Lanes is not immediately obvious from looking at the first photo, as it's so very similar to the old "left is flexbox, right is grid" examples from when Grid was new.
For negligence that results in the death of a human being, many legal systems make a distinction between negligent homicide and criminally negligent homicide. Where the line is drawn depends on a judgment call, but in general you're found criminally negligent if your actions are completely unreasonable.
A good example might be this. In one case, a driver's brakes fail and he hits and kills a pedestrian crossing the street. It is found that he had not done proper maintenance on his brakes, and the failure was preventable. He's found liable in a civil case, because his negligence led to someone's death, but he's not found guilty of a crime, so he won't go to prison. A different driver was speeding, driving at highway speeds through a residential neighborhood. He turns a corner and can't stop in time to avoid hitting a pedestrian. He is found criminally negligent and goes to prison, because his actions were reckless and beyond what any reasonable person would do.
The first case was ordinary negligence: still bad because it killed someone, but not so obviously stupid that the person should be in prison for it. The second case is criminal negligence, or in some legal systems it might be called "reckless disregard for human life". He didn't intend to kill anyone, but his actions were so blatantly stupid that he should go to prison for causing the pedestrian's death.
I sometimes fly out of a small, local airport that only has one commercial route, from that airport to Philadelphia. That airport closes down overnight and it's perfectly reasonable. (And they open up at 5 AM to start serving passengers boarding the 7 AM flight; again, perfectly reasonable since there are 50 seats on that plane and you get through security in 5 minutes). But a major international airport that has incoming flights all night long? I agree, they should have at least ONE customs location staffed somewhere in the airport, any time an international flight is scheduled to arrive.
P.S. It's not just America. I flew through the Middle East once on my way to eastern Asia. The flight landed at something like 3:30 AM local time, and the security checkpoint didn't open until 4 AM or 5 AM or something like that. There were so many people waiting in line for that checkpoint, it was getting dangerously overcrowded in that hallway, with more and more people arriving down the escalator all the time. Thankfully nobody fainted or fell, but it could have been a bad situation there.
I'll note that sunken cost is not always a fallacy, or perhaps I should phrase that as "things that look like the sunken cost fallacy aren't always that fallacy". In your specific case, for example, you didn't feel like starting from scratch, because that would involve paying a cost (in terms of time learning a new system) that you didn't want to pay. So it's not actually "I sunk so much time into this, I want to get my money's worth" as it is "cost of learning something new: high. Cost of sticking with what I know: zero." So not exactly the same as the sunk-cost fallacy.
> The fact that the licence cost is hidden in the hardware price doesn't make it free.
I appreciate manufacturers who make this obvious. For example, when I bought the Framework laptop I'm using now, the OS choices were preinstalled Windows 11 (default selection), preinstalled Linux (-$150), none/I'll install my own (-$150). Made it clear exactly what I would have been paying for the Windows license if I had chosen Windows.
Thirty years ago, I read a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, in which he made very similar points about broadcast television. I don't remember all his points, but I vividly remember how talked about how you'll be watching a news story about something awful, maybe an earthquake in which hundreds of people died, and then with practically no warning you'll be hearing a happy jingle from a toothpaste commercial. The juxtaposition, he said, was bad for the human mind, and was going to create a generation that couldn't focus on important things.
I suspect that the rapid-fire progression of one one-minute video after another does something similar, and is also equally bad for you.
I've noticed that I can read or see something very emotionally engaging - something that really resonates with me, so much so that I'm maybe even choking up over it - and while I'm still having that emotional response, move onto the next post. I almost always have a moment of meta-reflection that scares me - why wasn't I content to just sit there and process these big emotions? How is the dopamine part of my brain so much more powerful than even the emotional part, that it forces me to continue what I'm doing rather than just feeling?
That talking point - that rapid-form media creates attention deficit problems is honestly overdone and there's no evidence that it's true at all (that I know of). ADHD exists and is a mostly genetic condition, you can't catch it without something serious like cPTSD. Amusing Ourselves To Death emphasized way more the angle of densensitization.
I used to think doomscrolling broke my brain before I was diagnosed. Later I realized I was "doomscrolling" way before I got my first digital device, rereading the same fiction books late into the night.
I can buy the argument that rapid-form media consumption acutely creates symptoms like ADHD (for at most a few hours after exposure) because I see it even in NT people.
I have ADHD myself, so you're not telling me anything I didn't know. Rapid-fire media consumption cannot create the genetic condition, but as you said it can create the symptoms. And that's the important part anyway: a generation that has trouble paying attention to important things because they're getting habituated to rapid-fire video formats. Even if the symptoms (chasing the next dopamine hit) are only acute and not chronic, as long as people are addicted (behaviorally, not chemically) to phone screens, those acute symptoms will occur so often that they might as well be chronic for all practical purposes, because more often than not, people will be in that slightly-dazed state caused by coming off the addictive behavior. (I used to have that myself after a multi-hour gaming session, before I realized that I was displaying all the signs of addiction and quit computer games cold turkey. So I know what it feels like.)
Got it, very good point. Hope somebody studies this soon, I can imagine the title: "Creation of ADHD-like symptoms in neurotypical individuals after exposure to superstimuli/digital content".
The same is true with the "In other news..." technique of seguing to the next story: its end result is overall desensitization and passive consumption.
I actually credit Nadella with restoring some amount of Microsoft's reputation. It was Nadella who, on his first year after taking over from Ballmer, stood on the stage in front of a big "MS (heart) Linux" banner and talked about how Microsoft was going to be doing more in the Linux world (I don't recall details). That was also when Microsoft started publishing more things as open-source: VS Code, almost everything related to C# and dotnet... None of which, I believe, would have happened with Ballmer and his mindset at the helm. That was the point at which I stopped saying "Oh, it came from MS, it's going to be low-quality code". Some of their code is halfway decent. Of course, none of the code I consider to be halfway decent is part of Windows...
EDIT to add: I agree that they've been going downhill the past few years, though. And I don't think it's a coincidence that that corresponds with the tendency for some devs (not all, thankfully, but too many) offloading too much of their thinking to LLMs and uncritically pushing insufficiently-reviewed slop into the code review process. I suspect MS has the same problems as other companies with that, perhaps more because of internal pressure (I assume, I have no insider knowledge) to use Copilot.
I picked Linux Mint way back when, before snap was a thing, so I can't lay claim to foresight. But I was really glad when they announced that they were disabling snap by default (though of course allowing you to install it if you choose to). There days, Mint is what Ubuntu should be — and nearly all Ubuntu-based packages will run unmodified on Mint too, so if you want to run an Ubuntu version that's sane, then Mint is what I would recommend.
> ... I don't think that AI needs to mirror our own brains very closely to work.
Mostly agree, with the caveat that I haven't thought this through in much depth. But the brain uses many different neurotransmitter chemicals (dopamine, serotonin, and so on) as part of its processing, it's not just binary on/off signals traveling through the "wires" made of neurons. Neural networks as an AI system are only reproducing a tiny fraction of how the brain works, and I suspect that's a big part of why even though people have been playing around with neural networks since the 1960's, they haven't had much success in replicating how the human mind works. Because those neurotransmitters are key in how we feel emotion, and even how we learn and remember things. Since neural networks lack a system to replicate how the brain feels emotion, I strongly suspect that they'll never be able to replicate even a fraction of what the human brain can do.
For example, the "simple" act of reaching up to catch a ball doesn't involve doing the math in one's head. Rather, it's strongly involved with muscle memory, which is strongly connected with neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine and others. The eye sees the image of the ball changing in direction and subtly changing in size, the brain rapidly predicts where it's going to be when it reaches you, and the muscles trigger to raise the hands into the ball's path. All this happens without any conscious thought beyond "I want to catch that ball": you're not calculating the parabolic arc, you're just moving your hands to where you already know the ball will be, because your brain trained for this since you were a small child playing catch in the yard. Any attempt to replicate this without the neurotransmitters that were deeply involved in training your brain and your muscles to work together is, I strongly suspect, doomed to failure because it has left out a vital part of the system, without which the system does not work.
Of course, there are many other things AIs are being trained for, many of which (as you said, and I agree) do not require mimicking the way the human brain works. I just want to point out that the human brain is way more complex than most people realize (it's not merely a network of neurons, there's so much more going on than that) and we just don't have the ability to replicate it with current computer tech.
I realize that the difference is that the items are laid out horizontally, i.e. photos 1-2-3-4 are all across the top, whereas with vertical flexboxes items 1-2-3-4 would end up in the first column (or you'd have to rearrange your divs taking the flexbox layout into account, which is often impractical).
But the gain from CSS Grid Lanes is not immediately obvious from looking at the first photo, as it's so very similar to the old "left is flexbox, right is grid" examples from when Grid was new.
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