I disagree. I think it’s more helplessness than apathy.

I don’t approve of all the spying, but I don’t “own” any congress critters, so what can I do? I can’t even opt out of the spying by cancelling my Internet plan and smashing my phone – there’s still tracking through CCTV, face recognition, license plate scanners, etc. I’d have to move to some remote middle of nowhere and live as a subsistence farmer – and even on the way there, I’d be thoroughly tracked. There’s no escape, it’s like we’re all in a giant digital cage.

I just hope they actually have their social security card. A quick googling told me that you need a current ID to get the social security administration to issue a replacement card. Talk about a vicious cycle!

I used to bike to work occasionally. It was maybe a 5 minute drive, 15 minute bike ride. I would bring a backpack with a change of clothes and change in the bathroom once I got to the office.

Bad phrasing. I read your previous comment as demanding an explanation from me for why the author wrote an article about simple design rather than about user testing.

Honestly, I don’t think the article would have been well-served by detouring into user testing. It’s long enough as it is, and again – NN group has written a LOT on the topic.

I’m not really sure why you brought it up in the first place. It seems like ‘beating a dead horse’ territory.

Why are you asking me? I didn’t write the article.

It’s not the point of this article. NN group talks a lot about user testing in other articles, IIRC.

Whoosh!

I see some of that in my job. We put encrypted data in settings files, and the keys for decryption are provided on the VMs where we deploy. The developers never actually see the keys.

I suppose it’s as secure as the process for managing the production VMs, assuming the encryption isn’t just md5!

Hmm, that makes me think we could adopt a tiered pricing system for things like water. The first 100 gallons are priced at 10 cents each, then usage beyond that goes up to 50 cents each?

You could tweak the rates & threshold to make more sense – I don’t know water rates off the top of my head, and that probably varies by orders of magnitude across the entire U.S. Also, I have no idea what water usage rates look like for different types of properties. A sports stadium, an office building, an aluminum processing plant, and a SFH with a rain garden will all have really different water usage details.

All this is kind of hinting at a broader “environmental impact” measure. That gets super complicated, though.

reoccurring set of usernames appear

In that case, I suggest the block feature. I use it liberally, and it makes Lemmy so much better.

Image generation requires no fact checking whatsoever

Sure it does. Let’s say IKEA wants to use midjourney to generate images for its furniture assembly instructions. The instructions are already written, so the prompt is something like “step 3 of assembling the BorkBork kitchen table”.

Would you just auto-insert whatever it generated and send it straight to the printer for 20000 copies?

Or would you look at the image and make sure that it didn’t show a couch instead?

If you choose the latter, that’s fact checking.

That said, LLMs will always have limitations and true AI is still a ways away.

I can’t agree more strongly with this point!

Some problems lend themselves to “guess-and-check” approaches. This calculator is great at guessing, and it’s usually “close enough”.

The other calculator can check efficiently, but it can’t solve the original problem.

Essentially this is the entire motivation for numerical methods.

Ni! Ni!

I’m curious, why do you write it “70ies” instead of “70s”?

The former always makes me say “seventy-ies” as I read it. Kinda funny.

The next project that happens

If you’re doing multiple projects where you need that same tool, that does tilt the scale towards buying. Rentals are best for one-off things.

Ha, fair enough. Yeah, a quick search shows low-end torque wrenches available for like $25. It’s hard to see a rental making sense at that scale.

Counterpoint: You go to the store to buy the saw you think you’ll need, come home, cut the first piece – boom, same realization. Same time-sink to go back to the store. I don’t think that’s a concern unique to tool libs.

need one weird tool

Well, yeah. We’re talking more expensive things that you only need for one project, or maybe a couple of times. Not the screwdriver set that you use for everything from box-cutting to adjusting the screws on your cabinet doors when they seem wonky.

No, conflating them doesn’t make any sense. You bring home the tool from the tool library, and you bring it back when you’re done. It’s one extra trip vs. going to the hardware store to buy the tool. The concerns about mismeasurements and extra trips don’t apply.

You’d have a point if the thread were about maker spaces, I’ll give you that. As it stands, though, I’d say your concerns are misdirected.

same price or cheaper

Ah, but is it? A quick search shows wood chippers ranging from $400 to $2400. If they’re renting out the $400 model, yeah, you come out ahead by buying even if you’re only chipping things on two weekends (and you could resell on craigslist or something).

But if they’re renting out a $2000 model, I’m not sure how fair it is to compare to the $400 model (I’m not a wood chipper expert).

Wood chippers might be a bad example. I’d think if you need one, you need one multiple times – chipping branches every fall at a cabin, things like that.

But overall, yeah, you make a good point that the rental prices can change the tipping point in rent vs. buy.

I give it a perfect 5/7