I've been conlanging since I was about 8yo or so. This hobby also has me randomly learning natural human languages too. I've always just enjoyed it. I could make up reasons for enjoying it, but I am not certain that any of those would be true.
Hard disagree. People care about animals because they have faces that trigger their empathy. Plant life is still life. The destruction of plants to feed people is no more moral than the slaughter of an animal. The cutting of a redwood to make a desk is not moral. Many people also lack any kind of principle and make stuff up as they go. They get angry at killing a butterfly, but they don't care at all about killing a wasp. Likewise, people get upset about a pig, but they don't care about carrots. The carrots lack a face, and the wasp lacks pretty wings.
I too have no expertise here, but I've known quite a few rodents. So... my amateur take:
I do not think that the area would necessarily need to be cleared of debris first. Rats can get places people would never imagine they could quite easily.
What I did find to be consistent with rodents is the difficulty in getting them to use set search patterns and such. Rodents go where and how rodents go, and I've never found it possible to teach them set routes. They get a whiff and tend to go right at whatever they smelled in contrast to dogs who can be taught to take set routes/patterns.
The "distance from the nose" wouldn't matter. Rodents can often smell stuff that's around a mile away... a few inches of dirt (most landmines are under fewer than 25cm of dirt, anti-tank mines under fewer than 30cm) wouldn't be sufficient to deter them.
Reliably signaling humans depends upon the particular rodent. Rodents have personalities, and they will often make very particular signals to their people in response to particular things. Reliably enough to bet a life on it? Not sure, but I don't think they'd be terrible in that regard.
Some time ago, I remember Microsoft having made a video for a "courier tablet" that was essentially an electronic notebook. Either side of the spine was, by default, just plain "paper" that could be drawn or written on. It had some kind of intelligence to recognize stuff, so if you started drawing out a grid it had basic capabilities that could be attached to that grid, like spreadsheets.
At least, these are things I think I remember. It's not quite what you're imagining, but it was cool and along the same lines.
The only Microsoft products I’ve actively heard people desire within the last 5 years are VSCode and Excel. Microsoft have so severely damaged their brand that they’ve finally shed the image of oddly gray Dell midtowers running XP on Pentium 4.
The last company I worked for had copilot pretty well integrated into M365/Sharepoint/Teams. It didn't really help me get more work done but it was pretty clutch at finding information. "What meeting did we discuss such and such for X project?" And it'd get me the meeting with the notes and recording. "Which SharePoint site do the docs for that live in?" Etc. That was about all it was good for though.
Not sure if it qualifies as a "product", but .NET is (these days) uncharacteristic for Microsoft as well. It's community-driven, very active, and quite liked by the people who use it.
Somewhat more niche, I'd also add Access to the list. There is worryingly little development going on these days, but after all these decades there is no other product who came even remotely close to its quality. For quick local RDB stuff and some RAD, nothing is as quick and reliable. I still use it for all of my personal collection tracking, data modeling and prototyping for hobby projects, etc. The speed at which I can set up and adjust is unreal. I appreciate that LibreOffice are giving it a try with Base, but every time I try it, it takes me about 2 minutes until I find a basic, essential feature that's severely broken. (I guess I know which project I should start contributing to if I ever got into the mindset of doing some open-source work.)
I work in big financials. Everything used to be built on Excel. A lot still is but Python/Jupyterhub or custom applications has taken over a lot of the complex stuff. Excel isn't really essential any more.
While less necessary with AI, Excel is still the king of data entry and basic data manipulation (sorting, filtering, updating, etc.). I’d say that SQLite with a GUI for visualization is a far stronger competitor than Jupyter at those sorts of things. You can do that stuff in Jupyter, but it’s easier in Excel.
Jupyter also has a janky execution model. It doesn’t track dependencies so you have to be very careful in how you separate cells from one another and just running the whole notebook every time seems kind of pointless vs just writing a pure Python script.
I don't think you can add a new paragraph style in Docs. However, 99% of people I've known to use a word processor have never used that feature. Heck, I'd bet the majority of users don't even understand what a 'style' is; people just change the font size directly.
You are right on both counts and that is a bad thing.
World has had ctrl+b for bold forever, so people can start to use it and then upgrade to styles when they run into the limitations. Alternatively someone knowledgable could set Word to only allow a selection of styles.
Open and Libreoffice has had style support since forever. Its only docs that kneecaps its users learning journey like that.
this is true only on HN. in reality, if you wanted a job where you did not use microsoft products you’d probably have to get a wrench and start doing plumbing work :)
possible, sure. easy, I would disagree. starting with government and any government contracting through most enterprises. startups etc perhaps but avoiding msft severely limits your options
Similar job. My solution was a single 4k monitor and Stage Manager. I can tile viewing a log and having a terminal open, and then just pop back to a browser when I need to. Plus, terminal can have tabs.
When monitors were 1024 by 768, I needed more than one monitor. Now that everything is designed to be one’s only window at 1920 by 1080, I need a 4k monitor. I imagine that when 4k becomes the default, I will need a 16k monitor.
I had used Linux since mid-1990s and gave it up for Apple Silicon. Not fighting my hardware/software has been great despite the diminution of Apple’s software stack.
All value is subjective and thus at the whims of wild animal spirits.
Gold seems stable largely because the price must rise to make mining significantly more of it economically viable. Yet, were it truly stable, prices measured in terms of gold should have seen price deflation from the Roman era to now. That this is not the case proves that gold has zero intrinsic value. It may have some inherent utility, but that is not the same thing. As people want more gold for use as a conductor, or in alloys for dental prostheses, or for adornment the price will go up. Speculative demand can make the price go up. Demand for trade without USD can make the price go up.
Gold and USD prices are independent of one another. That they can be used to measure one another is also a human invention and an accident of history.
The article mentioned the tax incentive, and I’ve seen many do the same. I’ve rarely ever heard anyone talk seriously about how much the USA spends on oil subsidies.
The USA began its military actions in Afghanistan in 2001. It was technologically superior to the Afghan forces in every regard. It fought for more than 20 years. Afghanistan remained in the hands of the Taliban. In that war, the USA could spy on its enemy from space, could observe all electronic forms of communication, had superior armaments, and still lost. The Yemeni Houthis resorted to messengers on motorbikes to keep their communications secret from US technological surveillance.
Outcompeting too is not quite a given. Sometimes, “technological miracles” are dangerous. Thalidomide, asbestos, micro-plastics, glyphosate… to again use a modern example: the USA has been innovative on many fronts, generated much wealth, and has now a population among the sickest on Earth, and one which does not seem intent on producing new humans. This has led the government to import population in the attempt to keep socialist policies functioning. That policy then backfired due to nativist, near-term, economic concerns. That divide now threatens the unity of the country.
People are more diverse in thought and in belief than they are in biology, and this leads to all kinds of social and political dysfunction, all kinds of beautiful art, and all kinds of marvelous discussion. Humanity has seemingly proven that humans cannot be well-governed, and our societies cannot be centrally planned.
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