Remember that there are biases at play here. There’s the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about geed things happening), and media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:

News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”. (…) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.

What is your 6 year old laptop’s make?

I actually can’t complain. It’s not perfect, but I’m far from being as outraged as the OP. I used to love SwiftKey, it was amazing with text prediction, even when you had two languages on at the same time (I’m bilingual, so it was really handy). Since Microsoft bought it, it started going downhill and when I found that I can’t just transfer my settings when I get a new phone, I switched to Gboard. Again, not perfect, but not terrible either. I will try out some of the recommendation from this thread though.

Could someone ELI5 (if possible) what passkeys actually are?

Molecular biology. 4 digits.

I honestly have no idea what your first paragraph is about. It might as well be in Chinese.

I’m a molecular biologist. I was recently surprised when I told someone that RNA is a thing that all living thing are brimming with. He thought that RNA was something scientists invented in 2020s to use as COVID vaccines.

I also once worked with someone who had a degree in biological sciences and was shocked to learn that female cows have vaginas. She didn’t explain where she thought baby cows come from, but we decided not to push the matter and changed the subject.

That was my thought when I started reading the piece. “Are we just going to call it XFT?”

Will Smith eating spaghetti.

This year? Bold prediction.

Could you elaborate? I don’t have a deep knowledge of the field, I only write rudimentary scripts to make some ports of my job easier, but from the few videos on the subject that I saw, and from the few times I asked AI to write a piece of code for me, I’d say I share the OP’s worry. What would you say is something that humans add to programming that can’t (and can never be) replaced by AI?

Thanks for explaining this. I’m a childless guy living in the UK in a big city, close to many big markets and specialty stores, so I guess my experience is totally different than what you’re describing and you gave a few pretty good reasons why there’s such a gap in how much the convenience of Prime is worth for someone like you and someone like me. I guess the article just isn’t aimed at people like me.

Wow, never thought I’d see a headline like this. I’ve never had Amazon prime except for the free month trial. I had no idea it was such a problem for others that there are articles written about it.

is overhearing and joining random conversations a business plan?

That really made me laugh. No, of course it’s not a business plan. I was just trying to make a point that there are benefits to people being together in the office.

I personally don’t have any of that but here’s what I would like to use it for. When I go away for, say, two weeks, I’d like to be able to randomly flick lights and TV on and off in my apartment to seem like someone’s home. Currently I do it by plugging floor lamps into timered power socket controllers, but they aren’t internet enabled so all I can do is program them to come on and off at specified times during the day, which an observant burglar could figure out.

I would also like to save on gas bills and turn the heating off when I go away. But if it’s winter time and I go away for 2 weeks, I hate coming back to a cold flat that take ages to warm up to comfortable temperatures. I’d like to be able to turn the heating off when I leave, and then back on, say, a whole day before I come back.

This is probably going to be an unpopular comment, but I wanted to present the view in favour of what I call WFW (working from work). I’m sure it’s always going to be different for specific cases, but I do see benefits of WFW. We have an open plan office and a lot of casual conversations between us turn into serious conversations about projects and sometimes they have important outputs. Sometimes you overhear a conversation that you realise you know something about and you make a valuable contribution to it. None of this happens when people are WingFH. I’m lucky enough that my only line report is a hard working person, so I let them WFH probably a bit more than other managers let their reports, but I still like when they are WFW because of the contributions that they make to those conversations I mentioned above.

I’m an introvert, so I totally get the argument of being able to focus better when you’re not surrounded by people and their conversations, but at the same time I honestly noticed that my productivity decreases when I WFH. I’m sufficiently honest with myself to notice that and feel bad about it and this is actually the main reason why I do commute for an hour every day just to WFW, even though our company policy says that we can WFH 3 days a week and my job is 95% desk based.

I think it’s often has to considered for individual cases because as I said, my report does 110% whether they WFH or WFW, but I know from other managers that some of their reports really stuttered and stumbled when they were asked “so you WedFH yesterday, what did you do exactly?”

I’m not trying to say “everyone should stop WFH”, but it seems to me that most of the comments in this post are aligning with “just let your employees WFH!” and I wanted to present the other point of view, from the perspective of a non-senior manager who also has some non managerial responsibilities himself.

I think you’re amazing. Having faced such tremendous adversities at such young age, you still think that the main message you need to share is that life is fucking incredible.

I’m not a blogger or anything, so I’m sorry for posting a comment without any answers to the question in the title. But if the outlet you choose ends up being publicly available, please share the link. I would love to read whatever you think is worth writing down.

What alternatives are there?

The new word for “whitelisted” is “allowlisted”?