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I've only done one return flight with Thai Airways (LHR-BKK) with a child seat, but it's only allowed by a window seat or in the middle seat in a 3x3x3 configuration. Probably standard but I didn't check for a while.

(Sorry, meant to reply to parent)

Thanks for sharing and engaging with the comments.

> Also, I am an IC, not a manager.

I think this understates the power dynamics involved. At your level, being an IC doesn’t mean you aren’t in a leadership position, and feedback from you can still carry substantial weight.

Psychological safety is a worthy aim, but it cannot be assumed, nor will everyone experience it equally. I’d be wary of relying on it too heavily here.

Author here. I used Claude and ChatGPT Images to help me write and illustrate a book for my daughter's fourth birthday. The images were the part I had to lean on AI hardest for, and they were way more challenging than I expected: five attempts at a bed that works in three dimensions before I gave up and went with an outdoor scene.

It taught me a lot about where AI helps and where it doesn't. Plenty of pitfalls, but I ended up with 25 printed copies at £3.32 each, and a personalised book that wouldn't otherwise exist.

It does raise the question of what it means to have "authored" it. For a one-off like this, and for the experience, I think it was worth it. Publishing at scale would be another matter entirely.

Also:

"...and your conversations are not shared with Meta's ad systems".

I think they missed off "for now".

The pricing page is dishonest. It says prominently £4.50/month but that's for an annual subscription (£54 for 12 months is in smaller text below).

If you want a monthly price you have to tab across to get the true figure of £5.40.

The higher price wouldn't put me off - it's still very low - but the deception erodes trust from the very start.

Not exactly news, unless this is aimed at naïve teenagers who don't know any better.

Personally I stopped eating at McDonald's 21 years ago and it's the easiest thing in the world to quit (although I don't live in the USA, may not be a perfectly fair comparison).

Tangentially, here in the UK many supermarkets have upped the ante for people who don't want loyalty cards by introducing differential pricing: non members can easily pay an extra 10% on each shop. So far I've managed to sign up with fake details and save the barcode to Google Wallet, but it's all rather dystopian.

Or just write a good covering letter and email it to yourself.

Completely agree, we can be edgy without being insensitive.

I have nystagmus (rapid, uncontrollable, rhythmic eye movements), so I couldn't see anything at first, just lots of small dots.

I had to zoom in (Mac accessibility tool) but then I could see the effect briefly. My eyes go everywhere, but I could see patches of moving shapes with stationary shapes further away, only that the patch moved around a lot!

This is why the only Apple device I'll buy is a MacBook Pro, and even then if they wall it off as badly as their other products I'll reconsider.

It's a great move by the Verge but I agree with the article that it doesn't go far enough.

Why not offer a premium ad-free tier?

For me, viewing web ads is non negotiable (print ads were much more manageable and didn't prevent me from enjoying the content).

However I only view about 4-6 Verge articles per month so I'll see how it plays out. If the best stuff goes behind a paywall then I can't justify subscribing, and nor do I want to hand over personal data to every site I read occasionally (for several reasons).

I've always wondered why publishers can't follow the Spotify or Netflix model for at least some of their content?

This does also raise the uncomfortable question of how much the content is worth. Yes they have some exclusives and unique content but in other areas if I stopped reading it I'd have another hundred reviews of the latest Apple products to choose from, and Reddit is much more realistic (albeit noisy) about the Sonos debacle than The Verge. The article about undersea cables was good though.

Sneaky paywall hidden below the fold.

I've experienced this for over a decade. If I like the music I'm renting, I buy the CD and rip it to FLAC.

Very well said. Just to add I have problems with my eyesight and the company I work at makes zero effort to accommodate this. It took me a while to be sure as I don't want to exaggerate, but for some tasks I reckon I'm only half as productive in the office. This includes pair programming - share your screen on Zoom and I can use my big monitor and accessibility tools, which gives me half a chance.

Oh, and the chairs make my arse* hurt.

This isn't a stupid little startup either, it's a listed and profitable company worth billions.

I stay because they know how bad it is so I just go in a few times per month to socialise.

(* Please forgive the lewd British slang).

Nauseating mode is the default, you'll have to pay extra for a tolerable personality. ;)

Seriously though, I'm sure it's an improvement but having used the existing voice chat I think they had a few things to address. (Perhaps 4o does in some cases).

- Unlike the text interface it asks questions to keep the conversation going. It feels odd when I already got the answer I wanted. Clarifying questions yes, pretending to be a buddy - I didn't say I was lonely, I just asked a question! It makes me feel pressured to continue.

- Too much waffle by far. Give me short answers, I am capable of asking follow up questions.

- Unable to cope with the mechanics of usual conversation. Pausing before adding more, interrupting, another person speaking.

- Only has a US accent, which is fine but not what I expect when Google and Alexa have used British English for many years.

Perhaps they've overblown the "personality" to mask some of these deficiencies?

Not saying it's easy to overcome all the above but I'd rather they just dial down the intonation in the meantime.

By the time I was born Mickey Mouse was so embedded in popular culture that it would be unreasonable to expect me to avoid the character. I certainly won't be telling my daughter to choose which characters to like depending on the state of so-called intellectual property laws, that would be absurd.

All this adds up to the fact that established characters are already effectively part of the public domain. A perpetual monopoly on children's culture is both unnatural and unjust.

Disney still benefits from trademark law on their characters along with a generous monopoly on new creations. I would argue that extending this further would reduce the incentive to innovate.

I don't know what the parent poster had in mind, but in my view losing most control by now is absolutely right and proper.

One thing that really grates with this high percentage tip system is that it sucks the authenticity out of the relationship.

I don't want someone pretending they're my friend when we've only just met, or trying too hard to please, it can come over as being just an act and sometimes the interruptions are jarring. The difference is noticeable if you're used to dining outside of North America.

Sure, usually if they're not busy I try to strike up conversation with the waiter or at least ask how they're doing. People should be paid and treated as equals and not rewarded like a dog for performing tricks.

I honestly don't think the service is significantly different between countries with high and low tipping norms. But higher tips result in a higher BS factor overall.

One example: it now refuses to summarise books that it trained on. Soon after trying GPT-4 I could get it to summarise Evans DDD chapter by chapter. Not anymore.

Not a surprise, but a change nonetheless.

Much as I thoroughly oppose Brexit it's worth pointing out that other EU countries also made excersing the right to travel with a spouse difficult.

Before Brexit I gave up trying to take my wife on a couple of business trips in the EU as they were too short notice to arrange the supposedly free visa, which in theory shouldn't have been even needed but definitely was in practice.

The last four companies I worked at have spent a fortune on SaaS, not just AWS but a host of providers for observability, management etc.

They've all used Terraform extensively but always rolled their own means of deploying IaC, with solutions more clunky than CloudFormation which let's face it isn't brilliant.

Why did Hashicorp fail to win this business? I think their pricing just seems too outlandish and is based on paying for the value of software they've already open sourced rather than being tied to the cost of providing a good service plus reasonable margin.

Their strategy appears to have failed, exacerbated by the macroeconomic landscape. I doubt their chosen solution - Microsoftification of their open source project - is going to do them any favours.

Yes, and also StackOverflow is massively impacted by ChatGPT. Many developers are already using the latter in place of SO. It makes sense for them to try and keep those developers on board.

Generally agree although there's a case for "taking a different tack".

I seem to remember some tapes were designed to load faster or otherwise decrease the margin of error when reading the tones, such that it wouldn't easily survive the degradation of tape to tape copying. Probably at the expense of the original not being as reliable.

I was a kid at the time so could be wrong about this.

It was endlessly patient until they introduced rate limiting. :)

The problem is, people assume the tools they use are correct 100% of the time.

An early example: http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simul... (see Bugs and limitations).

More contemporary (I think): https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/resources/example...

Granted though, ChatGPT is confidently and convincingly wrong more often. I expect that will improve, but in the meantime I think it's an opportunity to question and evaluate the results rather than ban outright. That's a sticking plaster that hopefully needn't stay on for long.

Are mathematics students allowed to use calculators, or did they ban those too?

> But why do you think legislation should be the one forcing that choice on everyone, rather than the market allowing consumers to choose?

I see a lot of debate about market forces vs regulation. In my view, neither one of them will solve every problem; that's why we have both.

As others have mentioned, an issue with Facebook is that the consent was not informed and explicit.

Another group of related issues, and this is where I think the balance needs to tip to regulation, is the network effect/walled garden/near monopoly: choosing another platform doesn't just require signing up to another business model or UX, it also involves being able to communicate with a different group of people. This is compounded by their takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp.

As Facebook only offers one model (pay for the service by sacrificing personal data) it's an all or none proposition. This might satisfy the US market better than European ones.

Thankfully their UX is awful, which prompted me to switch to 1Password. It feels like they're milking a cash cow rather than trying to improve the product.