My crackpot theory: USB chargers and cables. Right now, a quality USB charger is cheap, but it's indistinguishable from a shitty USB charger, and there's a practical difference. And it's frequently on your desk. And it's got a lot of space for branding. A luxury USB cable would be identifiable and also (hopefully) also work well for whatever you might plug it into, until they invent the next new USB standard.

Of course, there are downsides. Nobody's gonna just walk away with your watch, but a cable on your desk that also costs $1000? And also, a lot of us would look at your diamond-encrusted USB adapter and think "this man is a moron."

> Google essentially only has Preview models.

It's really nice to see Google get back to its roots by launching things only to "beta" and then leaving them there for years. Gmail was "beta" for at least five years, I think.

Also, GCP Cloud Run domain mapping, pretty fundamental feature for cloud product, has been in "preview" for over 5 years now.

It's still unavailable in many regions.

> Removes the “Translate Selection” button from the right-click menu.

I don't want the Translate button to NEVER be there. I want it to be there if and only if the selection is not in English.

How would it know?

Have you heard of machine learning?

If you put machine learning into the loading of a right click menu, I want you to step on a Lego barefoot immediately afterward.

Right click menus should be instant. No fade in. No animation. No spinner. And certainly not any machine learning calls.

Have you heard of async? You can get instant menu with a delayed menu item

That is a recipe for pain too: menus shouldn't be morphing as the user is trying to choose an option.

Sure, but this also has an easy solution - don't morph, have an inactive menu in place (with an indicator of wort work in progress) that activates when the work is done

Thank you. There are sane, good ways to build UIs, and after 30 years of programming, my main complaint hasn't changed: "Stop doing what you're doing, and do what I want."

Be like TRON, fight for the user. Not the developer. Not the developer's politics or opinions, and certainly not for the computer itself. The user's wants are the #1 priority in a human-computer interaction.

Sure. If I select the word “Gift”, how much work does it need to decide whether it's English? How much more context does it need, and where does it get it? What if it guesses wrong and doesn't show the translation button?

Yes, and his point is that finding that algorithm was, to Knuth, the interesting part. Getting from that to a proof was the boring bit.

Yeah, and I'm not sure what the other guy's argument is. It's Knuth, the primary researcher, who is giving the praise here. I don't see a possible motivation he would have to falsely give accolades to a AI for a problem he presented, then cleaned up to solve.

That’s fair. Clearly Knuth himself thought it was impressive, that’s a strong signal.

And of course, the reason that ChatGPT sounds like that is that it's what a whole lot of explanatory expert blog posts did, and so when ChatGPT is told to talk like that, that's what it does.

It’s more a factor of how they structure the desired output. They follow a template instead of trying to come up with something on the fly

It was a beautiful attempt to reproduce a feeling of community that came from a bunch of kids collecting beetles in the woods for fun. Kids would need to get suggestions on where to go from other kids, and they'd show off the neat bugs they found and trade with other kids. The game was carefully designed to make kids work with each other and talk to each other. That's why you couldn't get all of the pokemon in only one game, and it's why some pokemon had ridiculous tricks to evolving them. It was wildly successful at that goal.

Roaming around the apartment complex I grew up, in with friends and a link cable meeting new kids and trading Pokemon were some of the best times of my life.

I'm still a Pokemon fan to this day. I play Go all the time, collect cards when they're not obscene to acquire, and I'll probably buy a Switch 2 when they come out with the upgrade to immerse myself in the online aspect of modern Pokemon games. Fantastic franchise.

Heads up that the switch 2 launched last May! (Depending on region) though they announced the next mainline Pokémon game won’t launch till 2027.

Above is probably referencing an "Upgrade Pack," a product allowing owners of Switch 1 games get them to work a little better on the Switch 2. For examples, the $10 "Pokemon Legends" Upgrade Pack slightly improves the frame rate and draw distance.

You know, it's an interesting question what happens when the commander in chief makes a pronouncement like this. PROBABLY everyone will just ignore it and go with the actual technical definitions of these things, but...I mean it is an order.

The pie calculation for spherical you would be 3*volume / 4*radius^3.