It will be placed in a default folder under a default name until you rename it / and or move it somewhere else.

What a nightmare.

For this one aspect, compared to a program that implements autorecovery, there is barely any practical difference. Autorecovery has to imply some kind of autosave, just behind your back in some program-specific “hidden” default folder.

Maybe you really like the “old-school” document GUI with no recovery, where you train your muscle memory to, e.g., ctrl+s every minute; and when something crashes, that’s the point you go back to. But this is a punishing workflow for beginners.

And this is not “in theory”. I’ve countless times seen real, smart, computer-literal, people lose significant amounts of work precisely this way to software implementating this paradigm.

I don’t want some program choosing when and where to save something for me, because it is extra work finding all these garbage files I didn’t ask for.

I realize the tone of this conversation may make it sound as if I want to force this on you all the way down to, what can it be - vim? I’m mostly picturing LibreOffice, Inkskape, etc., software that to some degree try to appeal as “desktop software” to fairly normal users. I think in these cases the “you are editing the doc itself”-paradigm would be vastly more friendly to new users.

Didn’t you save your document? What does that mean?

It means I want to keep it. I don’t think that is a broken metaphor at all.

It will not come natural to people who are used to work with physical documents that you need to remember to “save” an edit, or the document reverts back to the state it was when you opened it.

in the real world I do not need to name anything to make scribbles.

No, but you need to have a physical document to scribble on, which, after you have scribbled will remain in the state you left it until you take the active decision to throw it away.

I also do not have a paradigm where there is a fork between versions and create a new document that goes off in one direction while the other document goes in another.

Have you never used a copy machine?

At the end of the other documents time, why can’t I just get rid of it if my what if scenario didn’t work out?

Just throw it in the recycle bin? Another real-life metaphor. Do you often find objects in your physical world disappearing without no action from you?

I also have to choose where to keep something if it is going to auto save

Following the typical cloud implementation, you do not. Just start editing. It will be placed in a default folder under a default name until you rename it / and or move it somewhere else. (These operations are usually provided in more convenient ways than in “save paradigm” software, e.g., the name is shown as a title, just click to change it)

They are taking a document that sometimes can take several minutes to load, and might take many minutes to process. They might be excel sheets, they might by python pandas projects, they might be painting projects or 3d renders.

All of these – except the Python Pandas project (see below) – could still (and probably should) work according to a “you edit the doc itself, no need to save” paradigm. The larger the underlying file, the less sense does it make to forcibly have to work on a copy; either in RAM (if it fits) or if it doesn’t fit, the software has to create an on-disk copy of your huge file behind your back, in case you decide to not save. Leading to all these messy “recovery semantics” that no one likes.

Now, the context of this whole thread is IMO GUI software. When it comes to programming/programmatic tools, e.g. Python Pandas, R, Matlab, etc., that is a different thing. There you have a choice to work in RAM or on disk depending on your needs.

Comparing with the physical world makes sense when we have built these applications on physical world metaphors: “documents”, “folders”, “desktop”, etc. We use those words precisely because they convey meaning based on the similarities with their real-world counterparts. Broken metaphors are both more difficult to learn and tend to trigger incorrect assumptions leading to operator error (“Didn’t you save your document? What does that mean?”).

What is worse is that, like it or not, the world is increasingly moving towards cloud services. The “edit + save” paradigm is less suited to that environment, so there we almost exclusively see the “you edit the doc itself (no need to save)” paradigm. It is difficult to see the gain of insisting on keeping both these quite different paradigms around, when the “you edit the doc directly” is no problem to implement also offline.

Now, about the practicalities: I also get fundamentally annoyed when presented with the “document recovery” dialog that brings me out of my flow. However, I interprete the situation differently. Had the software used a “you edit the doc, no need to save” paradigm, there would never be a need for “recovery”. The edits I did are stored in the file I edited.

As for “I just want to scribble”. Why don’t you just scribble in a file called “Scribbles”? Why is that concept so offensive? You’ll be happy the day your computer loses power while you are in the midst of scribbling, since you will be able to pick up exactly where you were.

“Saving” is a legacy that was introduced because of limitations related to storage in the early days of computing and makes no inherent sense within the metaphors most software operate. Broken metaphors makes things difficult to learn.

When was the last time you scribbled onto a physical document and the changes “didn’t save”? Do you also hate “autosave” in the physical world?

There should be no save button. All software should auto-save continuously while you work. There should be a “duplicate”-type menu item or button that allow you to make a copy of the document into a new file.

Almost all cloud software already works like this.

Oh, that’s no biggie:

Seems like a weekend hack to set up a fediverse-backed categorized market that, when you want to buy something- forwards to a “buy our download” link of the seller’s choice. Rabid moralists would have to challenge each producer/indie developer individually to take things down.

The real crux is to build a nice user interface on top of it so people would actually use it.

I’m in this meme, and I don’t like it.

On server:

git init --bare ~/projects/project.git

On client:

git clone username@server:projects/project.git

One clip on Instagram, which has been viewed over 21.5 million times, shows a man ordering “a large Mountain Dew” and the AI voice continually replying “and what will you drink with that?”.

“Dude, Where’s my car” turning into prophecy wasn’t in my bingo card:

https://youtu.be/iuDML4ADIvk

Are you using x11 or Wayland? Is anyone running Wayland with NVIDIA drivers? Everything works well in x11, but I’m getting bad flicker in Wayland. When trying to track it down I was led down a rabbit hole suggesting there is some protocol mismatch between what the NVIDIA drivers implement and what Wayland expects.

I discovered that recent versions of the built-in photo apps on Android flat out refuses to do this. The UI for removing location info is there, but it is intentionally blocked if the exif info was added automatically by GPS (i.e., it only works if you manually have set a location). It seems so weird, and outright evil, to block one of the key ways for people to stay safe.

The only reason this is “click bait” is because someone chose to do this, rather than their own mental instability bringing this out organically.

This is my point. The case we are discussing now isn’t noteworthy, because someone doing it deliberately is equally “impressive” as writing out a disturbing sentence in MS Paint. One cannot create a useful “answer engine” without it being capable of producing something that looks weird/provoking/offensive when taken out of context; no more than one can create a useful drawing program that blocks out all offensive content. Nor is it a worthwhile goal.

The cases to care about are those where the LLM takes a perfectly reasonable conversation off the rails. Clickbait like the one in the OP is actually harmful in that they drown out such real cases, and is therefore deserving of ridicule.

Does the marketing matter when the reason for the offending output is that the user spent significant deliberate effort in coaxing the LLM to output what it did? It still seems like MS Paint with extra steps to me.

I get not wanting LLMs to unprompted output “offensive content”. Just like it would be noteworthy if “Clear canvas” in MS Paint sometimes yielded a violent bloody photograph. But, that isn’t what is going on in OPs clickbait.

And, the thing is, LLMs are quite well protected. Look what I coaxed MS Paint to say with almost no effort! Don’t get me started on plain pen and paper! Which we put in the hands of TODDLERS!

If someone is trying to do the most good with their money, it seems logical to give via an organization that distributes the funds according to a plan. To instead hand out money to people closest at hand seems it could be motivated more by trying to make me feel good than to actually make a difference.

Furthermore, there are larger scale systemic issues. Begging takes up a lot of time. It becomes a problem if it pays someone enough to outcompete more productive use of time that could, in some cases, pay, and in other cases, at least be more useful: childcare/teaching kids, home maintenance, cooking, cleaning, etc. In contrast, state welfare programs and aid organizations usually do not condition help on that the receiver has to sit idle for long times to receive help. Add to this that begging really only works in crowded areas, which may limit the possibility to relocate somewhere where living might be more sustainable. Hence, in the worst case, handing out money to those who begs for it could actually add to the difficulty for people stuck in a very difficult situation to get out of it.

This “analysis” of course skips over the many, many individual circumstances that get people into a situation where begging seems the right choice. What we should be doing is investing public funds even heavier in social programs and other aids to (1) avoid as much as possible that people end up in these situations; and (2) get people out of these situations as effectively as possible.

No shade on people trying to make sustainable choices, but if the solution to the climate crisis is us trusting everyone to “get with the program” and pick the right choice; while unsustainable alternatives sit right there beside them at lower prices, then we are truly doomed.

What the companies behind these foods and products don’t want to talk about is that to get anywhere we have to target them. It shouldn’t be a controversial standpoint that: (i) all products need to cover their true full environmental and sustainability costs, with the money going back into investments into the environment counteracting the negative impacts; (ii) we need to regulate, regulate, and regulate how companies are allowed to interact with the environment and society, and these limits must apply world-wide. There needs to be careful follow-up on that these rules are followed: with consequences for individuals that take the decisions to break them AND “death sentences” (i.e. complete disbandment) for whole companies that repeatedly oversteps.

Obligatory SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2009-12-11

That’s perfect. You already know your lines!

After having a lot of sysvinit experience, the transition to setting up my own systemd services has been brutal. What finally clicked for me was that I had this habit of building mini-services based on shellscripts; and systemd goes out of its way to deliberately break those: it wants a single stable process to monitor; and if it sniffs out that you are doing some sketchy things that forks in ways it disapproves of, it is going to shut the whole thing down.