> The site is not about solving your problem. The site is about answering your question.
The point stands either way, reread my comment. When you ask a question on SO and somebody posts a regular answer, you the asker decide whether they've answered your question/solved your problem/Xed your Y/whatever else. Until you accept it as correct, SO assumes the posted answer did not X your Y.
In contrast when random people flag your question as a dupe, they the random people decide that the other question Xes your Y. If they misread your question, tough luck, SO assumes they are correct even though you're the only one who actually knows. That's the point I was making.
> This fundamentally can't be measured.
Again, reread my comments. If SO let other people suggest that an existing question Xes your Y, and gave you a button to accept their suggestion, then SO would know roughly how often dupe flags are correct.
> So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well.
The point is who decides. If you ask a question and I flag it as a dupe, I might think the answers on the other question apply to yours, but only you know whether they solved your problem or not.
> I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed,
Sure, and neither does SO! They didn't even measure it. They only looked at the signal "does somebody with points think these questions are similar", and discarded the signal of whether the new user got any value out of the site, and I think that's what did them in.
I still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help?
Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing answer rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered.
Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.
I always find it strange how many HN commenters appear to have unconsciously added "exclusively" or "without exception" to the text of the comment they're replying to.
Related, Raymond Chandler says in his letters that he taught himself to write a novelette by copying one (by Erle Stanley Gardner). He took the original story and wrote a detailed synopsis, then wrote a novelette from the synopsis, compared it to the original, did rewrites, and so on until he understood what tricks Gardner had used to make the scenes work.
I disagree! It's easy to check that an AI program meets its specification, which is to process input tokens and generate output tokens. :)
If you're talking about verifying whether it produces the correct tokens, that's not generally something you can specify in advance with AI. I mean: if your task is one where you can precisely specify which output tokens are correct for a given input, then the task doesn't need AI, no?
I see what you're getting at, but I think you're focusing on the incidental. An animation is good if it's clear and intuitive in motion. It may often be the case that good animations also look nice in a screenshot halfway through, but (a) they don't always, and (b) working well in motion is obviously the more important of the two goals.
As such it makes no sense to worry about the latter thing - it's not a signal whether the animation is good or not.
Look at the youtube example - it has two pieces of UI animating from from a start point to an end point, and the paths are such that they momentarily overlap. There's nothing buggy or janky about it in motion; TFA is just saying that if you ignore the motion and take a screenshot mid-transition it looks odd. Same complaint as what GP describes, and silly for the same reasons.
> Placing an undue emphasis on civility is how bad actors control the conversation.
The load-bearing word in that claim is "undue", and it's not justified here. I'm not doing arcane rules-lawyering, I'm just saying people should avoid doing things the site guidelines quite specifically ask them not to do.
> I’m not advocating for this rule to change (I’d appreciate if you didn’t straw man and mischaracterise what I said),
I wasn't suggesting you did, I was suggesting the person I originally replied to might.
I'm fond of linguistic bugbears, and have actually sent that same article to people before :D But what you're missing is that the less/fewer debate is over their use as adjectives, and TFA's title uses "less" as an adverb. It's asking for AI agents to be less human, not for them to be fewer in number. Swapping it to "fewer" would make the title's meaning no longer match the article.
Now please sit a moment and reflect on what you've done. :P
Nice to have these all collected nicely and sharable. For the amusement of HN let me add one I've become known for at my current work, for saying to juniors who are overly worried about DRY:
> Fen's law: copy-paste is free; abstractions are expensive.
edit: I should add, this is aimed at situations like when you need a new function that's very similar to one you already have, and juniors often assume it's bad to copy-paste so they add a parameter to the existing function so it abstracts both cases. And my point is: wait, consider the cost of the abstraction, are the two use cases likely to diverge later, do they have the same business owner, etc.
"Heck no! I'm going to climb up a tree, cut the soles off my shoes, and learn to play the flute."
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[ my public key: https://keybase.io/fenomas; my proof: https://keybase.io/fenomas/sigs/Atl3PLLibVbXFjUYH5sW3DCzCxSf-YFzXh3DB2fqs6k ]