I believe that’s what a write down generally reflects: The asset is now worth less than its previous book value. Resale value isn’t the most accurate way to look at it, but it generally works for explaining it: If I bought a tool for 100€, I’d book it as 100€ worth of tools. If I wanted to sell it again after using it for a while, I’d get less than those 100€ back for it, so I’d write down that difference as a loss.

With buying / depreciating / selling companies instead of tools, things become more complex, but the basic idea still holds: If the whole of the company’s value goes down, you write down the difference too. So unless these guys bought it for five times its value, they’ll have paid less for it than they originally got.

I wish you a speedy and affordable recovery

Which words do you mean? Because I understand them all. They convey information, the fundamental point of language, hence they don’t detract. Just because you can’t make sense of them doesn’t mean they’re nonsense.

If you’re talking about “Mach Yeet”, yeet refers to forceful movement. This specific combination then means really fucking fast. The exact speed doesn’t matter. The frivolity of the language underscores their excitement or might just be their idiolect.

Either way, so long as it’s nothing hateful or harmful (beyond hurting your linguistic sensibilities), trying to police other people’s vocabulary is narrow-minded and needlessly stuck-up.

Why don’t you yeet that shit (throw it far away) and come join us in watching the fascinating evolution of language?

For some character sets with a lot of different characters like the Han Unicode representation, that could be cumbersome. Granted, Han might not be a great risk for confusion so you might just whitelist them collectively, but my point is that the approach would have to be more nuanced and complex. Ultimately, humans are complex and so are their languages.

If AI constantly refined its own output, sure, unless it hits a wall eventually or starts spewing bullshit because of some quirk of training. But I doubt it could learn to summarise better without external input, just like a compiler won’t produce a more optimised version of itself without human development work.

To clarify, I meant that from the devs’ perspective: The effort of individually vetting every single character for possible confusion is immense, and the end result would still be just as western-centric. Imagine having a domain name in Greek where some characters are replaced because they might be confused for Latin characters. Or, conversely, having a few characters replaced by similar Latin ones for an attack, which your solution wouldn’t catch.

The result would also still be unreliable even for Westerners. If some other character set you didn’t vet also contains similar looking characters, there’s a new surface for attack.

To properly close that security gap would be an immense arms race… or you could simply shut down the entire attack vector.

So when you consider the importance of protecting gullible people from insidious attacks and the complexity of trying to allow non-Latin characters without creating openings, the question “How widespread are non-Latin URLs in my target audience and is it critical that they be rendered in their native script?” becomes a calculation of cost and benefit.

It’s a shit compromise to deal with the shit fact that some people being assholes ruins good things for the rest of us who aren’t.

Yeah but the compilers compile improved versions. Like, if you manually curated the summaries to be even better, then fed it to AI to produce a new summary you also curate… you’ll end up with a carefully hand-trained LLM.

Though I guess that would be a lot harder.

From the devs’ perspective, the relevant question will be this: How hard is it to map out all the lookalikes, and just how important is it to render foreign domains properly?"

As in, desgined to fail early? I highly doubt that.

Even if it were true, lightbulbs still last longer and are way cheaper. Whether I have to replace them every six years or every five years doesn’t matter as much.

You could just google it-

oh wait

Clearly if you arnt building your own web browser from the ground up, your a sheep. This is the only logical conclusion!!1!1!

Obviously. It’s the only way to be sure it has exactly the features I want and nothing else. Anyone recommending anything else has clearly been deluded to accept mediocrity. How else could they think something other than my exact tastes is decent?

Lol, but seriously every modern browser is basically crap ran or controlled by a large company that does fucked up or less then ideal things.

Yeah, it’s fucked that we basically have to pick what flavour of shit we’d hate least. And once we’re all settled in with our least disgusting brand, we obviously don’t want to move anymore. I’m sticking with Firefox and probably will for some time to come. Adjusting to a different UI, migrating all my bookmarks and finding equivalents for my extensions is an effort.

Maybe some alternative will eventually entice me enough to overcome my reluctance to mix up my digital environment. I just hope it’ll be by actually being good, rather than just “not as bad”.

You mean the one from the company that pays out their CEO a fat $6m salary, paid for by Google bribing Mozilla to be the default search engine?

I don’t trust your recommendation. Do you even realise you’re being herded like sheep?

(I actually use it too, but I won’t pretend they’re saints. It also occasionally has trouble with some websites, but I haven’t done any comprehensive testing to confirm whether it’s browser-specific.)

That was the joke I was setting up for :D

What’s your recommendation then?

Product packaging for non-foods

What, you don’t think 1cm² of product should be packaged in a 7×10 cm doubled-up plastic sheet?

The fact that you launch into some part of your day doesn’t change that it’s gauging your mood on her end.

Maybe not, but the fact that me launching into that is an accepted and expected part of the response does.

If a manager calls me about a project and asks how I am, they don’t want me recounting an earlier frustrating interaction. As you say, they’re trying to gauge my mood, but ultimately my mood or how it came to be are irrelevant because we’re here to talk business. If I omit my headache, they don’t care.

If my GF asks me, she actually wants a response. If I omit my headache and she finds out later, she’ll be upset: “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

That expectation is the difference.

Charitably, it sounds like someone highly competent in one field dramatically misjudging their competence in another: Just because you’re good at chemistry doesn’t meam you also know how that chemistry acts on an ecosystem.

Cynically, it sounds like someone coming up with a genius idea, hoping to make money and dismissing any shortcomings because they get in the way of money.

It was a really stupidly worded comment on his part. If he meant Big Tech and Little Tech spwcifically rather than Big Business in general and individual people, his choice of words and the claim that the tables had “completely turned” are really unfortunate. Tagging the annoying orange directly also doesn’t help make this look like it’s about the pick, rather than the picker.

As an aside, forgive me if I withhold my enthusiasm until I see her actually pull something through and not just end up another way to cripple ElMo’s competition.

If a colleague asks me “Hi, how’re you doing?” it’s small talk and I’ll respond something like “Oh you know, the usual.” If my partner asks me “Hi, how was your day?” it’s a genuine question and I will respond “That fucking dickhead at work that always plays nice and personable came around with another set of “urgent” requests and no fucking clue what he’s actually asking for, whether it’s possible or why I told him last week it isn’t.”

The difference is in how serious I take the question.