How can someone seriously propose I put a copyrighted symbol in my text to let them know it's sarcastic? [rhetorical question device] I'll bet the world will be a better place if they profit off every sarcastic sentence someone writes. [sarcastic sentence device] If you're too dumb to work out what's sarcastic, why should you benefit from my help? [friendly period]
(nb. There's a missing "sarcastic sentence device", but I don't know where to put it, when it applies to a piece of punctuation.)
The point was that being displayed on my screen doesn't mean I read it. For instance, I have a problem where sometimes I'll log in to my phone and an app will be active. I don't want that app; I need to do a bank transaction. But now someone thinks their message has been read, when so far from reading it I don't even know it exists! It was just displayed on my screen for half a moment when my eyes and my attention was somewhere else. (Another common problem I have is when I send a message, and then they reply so fast that the message arrives at about the same time as I'm trying to return to the homescreen to ensure I get a notification when the message arrives. Well unfortunately the message arrived first, got marked as read and no notification exists. After twenty minutes I realise what happens but maybe I've already offended someone by "reading" their message and ignoring it.)
Delivered vs read is only accurate if you have an eye tracker.
The notification and icon badges help hide when you're sleeping, but they advertise when you're interacting with someone. You're "unseen" for twenty hours. The guy you're cheating with logs in and sends you a message. Five minutes later, you log in and read it. You wait two hours, read it again and send another message. He doesn't check for an hour. You're so longing for his response, so every five minutes you're logging in "how many ticks? what color? has he read it yet??". Once he's out of his meeting, he (finally noticing the notification) logs in and sends a message. Your activity drops off now that you have your reply, but you nevertheless send yours...
I'm not by any means a Snapchat power user. But I really like the way my phone tells me where my normal photos are taken — it makes it very easy to find the photos. Also, any chat app would benefit because it's very easy for me to remember "i was talking about foo with Bar when I was over in Baz", but much harder for me to remember when that happened. So to me location tracking would offer many useful features. (They may not be worth it, and even the useful ones might not be available, but those aren't answers to the question you asked.)
It is not received wisdom. My argument is human learning entails recognizing an ever increasing amount of complexity, given infinite time, resources and motivation we can learn forever. But all axiomatic systems have a complexity limit, per Chaitin's incompleteness theorem, so cannot learn forever. Neither can a system add to its axioms. Therefore, human learning is beyond anything an axiomatic systems can do.
(4) is an interesting question. Unfortunately it's much harder to understand than it is to ask. For instance, to people really understand, rather than just providing a thin illusion of understanding? What does it actually mean to understand something? Can you make a test that can distinguish arbitrary systems which truly understand from those which provide a thin illusion of understanding?
This is a real problem for physics teachers - you want to find out if the students understand a concept:
Ask them to state it - they memorize the text book definition.
Ask them to apply it to a specified problem - they scan the problem for values of variables and look up a formula list to find one that has those variables.
Ask them to explain why their answer is correct and they form a grammatically correct explanation made by plucking phrases from the problem description and linking them to the answer with "so" or "because".
It feels like they don't understand but they actually can get a long way (ie. not fail) like that - it's certainly human level understanding, even if it's not what the smartest of us are capable of.
Personally, I think understanding is a continuum from special case memorization at the bottom, up to being able to link with a lot of other concepts at the top. There's no bright line between "truly understands" and "illusion".
Optical illusions (there's also physical ones) are often demonstrations that the problems aren't solved in humans either; they're just "things that work sort of, some of the time, with caveats about how you define 'work'".
More so if you include reasoning illusions like people being more scared to catch a plane than drive a car or thinking that a lotto ticket is a good investment.
Human intelligence doesn't really meet intuitive definitions of human intelligence. But it does work well enough as long as you ignore all the times it doesn't.
An emergent property is precisely one that obtains unexpectedly from simple components. For instance, it is supposed by some that the universe truly consists of nothing more than electrons and quarks and what have you which interact in relatively simple ways, and that subjective human experience emerges from that. We then have a situation that is easier for us to reason about using higher level concepts, but there isn't a chapter in the laws of physics called "subjective human experience". That's in the book called "diverse applications of the basic laws of physics".
In any case, I dispute your facts too. I don't think we have the ability to cross apply our heuristics. I can calculate fairly accurately a lot of mathematical problems when I'm riding my bike, but put me in a maths class and I'm stuffed. I don't have independent access to those hacks.
I hate both. If "ask" is on, it's constantly harassing me. If "ask" is off, I have to search hard to find the setting that lets me connect to a wifi network in a tool that also lets me change the language I'm using.
This isn't quite fair. It may be better to have a menu from the Wifi toggle in the Control Center, but it's two clicks (Settings, Wifi) to show the list of wifi networks. It's not that hard or obtuse to locate.
2 taps hardly qualifies as having to 'search hard' - and even that is only the first time you need to connect to a brand new network. This smacks of exaggeration for the sake of creating drama where there is none.
Yes. Apple used to be about empowering people. That's what ease of use was about. You can keep doing the same thing and you get the same result, but when you're ready you can finally press that button you've always ignored. You'll discover something new which you might want to undo. But that's fine too, because it's clear and obvious how to.
This meant they got a reputation for building easy-to-use tools.
This meant they got a reputation for building things for people who want their stuff to just work.
This meant that they believed their role should be to remove things that are ugly or powerful, hiding features.
This means that they're no longer building easy-to-use tools. You don't know what your phone is going to do any more. You can't predict if wifi is off or not. There's two ways to turn wifi off, one of them doesn't work. One of them allegedly works. There's no way to know this without reading documentation or relying on word of mouth.
There's a good reason to want wifi to only be pseudo-off, but there's other ways they could have implemented this feature that would have been empowering. They opted for this one not because it's the right option, but because they've given up on the spirit that made them great in the first place.
RTFM. It's the new motto of the Apple apologist. Soon we'll be saying "next year will be the year of Apple on the desktop".
(nb. There's a missing "sarcastic sentence device", but I don't know where to put it, when it applies to a piece of punctuation.)