I think it's more that you don't understand just how poor many people are. Most people will go for cheaper models (assuming they even know what a model is to begin with) just because the more expensive ones are ones they literally can't afford because all of their money is spent on bills and necessities. Supposedly the cost of using models will just keep falling forever but I have my doubts (since that's not exactly how an economy actually works, nothing is truly free unless the government is paying for the entire thing). If we take the mindset of the technical illiterate average person, they will go for whatever sounds the best (and whatever costs the least) because gas is $5-$7 per gallon, the price of everything continues to rise, and on and on. I think it's probably smart not to be so dismissive of the struggles of the super-majority of people who are barely able to survive because money is in fact an obstacle, and the only way you'd get them to use a mode like GPT-6 Sol or Astra is by making it pretty much cost nothing, and that isn't how the real world works: someone is always paying for it, and the question is who.
This doesn't actually change what I said. The imagined future is that people just use agents for shopping. Assuming the capitalistic economy we have constructed remains (and I've little reason to think it will vanish anytime soon), poor people, or people with low incomes, are certainly not going to be using high-end or even midrange models/agent providers. They will go for whatever sounds the best and which is the cheapest, regardless of it's quality or how gullible it is. So attempts like tfa to figure this problem out now are very useful indeed.
I love typst. It's about time we have an authoring system like it that also let's you publish HTML versions of things you write with it instead of just PDFs. Papers in Academia for the longest time have been PDFs, which screen readers are terrible with, mainly because the PDF format is an abomination, and makes accessibility (let alone interoperability) unnecessarily painful.
PDF serves an important purpose; it’s not an abomination. It conveys exactly what the author or publisher intended. HTML can not do this. It can serve as a reliable archive and be made (imperfectly) accessible, as described in the article. Of course all this comes with significant tradeoffs, including reduced interoperability, as you say. But there are good reasons for academic publishing, especially in math, CS, and physics (but also in some areas of the humanities) to prefer PDFs—it’s not just obstinacy.
I don’t have the data to answer your question. But I’d like to point out that it has little to do with my assertions. Note in particular the word “conveys”.
The word doesn't help without specifying the set of intents you meant.
But in general that would also be a mistaken post-hoc rationalization of the state of an ecosystem.
The "author's intent" could just be "I just want to fit the requirement". And the publisher's intent could just be "I don't want to change". None of which is about the deficiency of alternative formats re. "conveying [supposedly design] intent"
And PDF is an abomination because of the awful way it implements the "intent preservation"
I mean, I know why the format is used and what it does. That doesn't make any less of an abomination. Parsing it is an absolute clusterfuck, and accessibility for it is horrifically bad even in Acrobat. By contrast, something like HTML is far better, even if it doesn't necessarily display the document exactly the same way all the time on all devices.
If there's one thing to point to as an example of why we should make "smart fridges" and similar appliances not worth developing, it's things like this. Way way too easy for the company to just publish an update that breaks something like this. Imagine if you have a smart oven which gets an update and starts a very bad electrical fire because the company was stupid and decided it was a really smart idea to make an Oven that can connect to the internet. Wouldn't even surprise me if that's already happened.
Yes but we should not need an AI chatbot to solve problems which should be trivial for us to solve ourselves. Linux should just not have these issues, period.
OK, good luck with that attitude. Until the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop finally arrives, you can use the available technology to solve the problem in a practical manner.
I love passkeys. Really. They completely eliminate the need for a password and OTP in most cases (when actually used as they were intended and not as a second factor only), although I always set up both in case. Although I will never, ever like how Google does it. I set up my first Google account with them and now Google absolutely refuses to allow me to authenticate to it because it wants a passkey I don't have (and of course there's no way of not using said passkey) or it wants me to use an Android phone I (also) don't have (I traded it in a couple years ago). And, of course, it provides absolutely no way around that problem. So eventually I just gave up and created a new one for the (rare) times I do need a Google account for anything.
Passkeys are somehow 100% seamless for me, except for two services that have somehow screwed up the implementation: Google, and Okta. In Google's case, they have made it so that if you _ever_ add a passkey to their password manager, it somehow refuses to work with a third-party password manager going forward. In Okta's case, the admin policy UI makes it next to impossible to have passkey-only login without their Fastpass app or an oldschool password login.
> How much will you love them when you're locked out of something you can't do without?
I certainly wouldn't be happy if this did happen, but it would be my stupidity (or the stupidity of those who implemented it on the service/platform where the problem occurred) which I would blame more than the fault of the tool. I do keep all passkeys in Bitwarden now so that's something at least.
Security benefit appears strongly overstated. Compared to using a password manager (including generated secure passwords for each account), there isn't a significant security benefit. passkeys require using a manager as well, so there isn't much point.
> ...but it would be my stupidity...
All people are stupid sometimes. A security flow that doesn't account for this very well isn't a very good security flow.
(Related: everyone tends to be unlucky eventually, and, unfortunately, everyone becomes incapacitated/dies eventually. Security flows need to account for these as well. Not to mention that in my experience, no software company continues to offer a quality service at a reasonable price forever. You're lucky to get 10 years. Having access to my accounts tied to a single piece of software is likely to become a big pain at some point.)
I think this is probably one of the reasons people have very different passkey experiences. Hardware passkeys are great and software ones appear to be less great.
Please explain how it is "unclear" that agents "can be self-aware"? As Wikipedia would say, citation needed. Just because an agent can write convincing enough to convince you that it's "self-aware" doesn't mean it really is, in fact, self-aware.
Birch, The Edge of Sentience (2024), ch. 16 - "simply no way to assess sentience in an LLM"
Schwitzgebel, AI and Consciousness, (2025) — "we won't know before we've already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI".
Butlin, Long et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness, (2023) — "no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators".
Claude for me absolutely loves to be overly nitpicky. Granted, I told it to push back on things that I suggest that are stupid and things like that, but it took that and transformed it into "nitpick everything I say down to the minutia. If I write something that isn't exactly true down to the precise wording, nitpick the wording and claim that I wasn't as precise as I should've been". Idk if it does this for anyone else but it does this to me all the time, and it's absolutely infuriating. And here I thought English was supposed to make programming and doing what I wanted to do easier. Never thought my own computer would nitpick my linguistic precision!
I absolutely love system76. Never owned one of their desktop machines, but I have a couple of their older laptops and they work fantastically for me. As in I can easily get a decade out of them and replace the batteries every few years. One of them is almost a decade old ironically enough.
The solution is to make the common features a part of a statically-linked library that you can pull into your apps. A web app is, IMO, never the answer when you want to address multiple audiences. It is bad for accessibility (because 99.999 percent of web app developers never consider accessibility) and it doesn't solve the problem that web apps are trying to solve (having 8 code bases all that have to remain in sync) because you will inevitably need your code to handle platform-specific differences, standards/conventions and whatnot.
reply