> Think of the Game hits from the 90's. A room full of people made games which shaped a generation. Maybe it was orders of magnitude harder then, but today, it's multiple orders of magnitude more people required to make them.
I think this is more about rising consumer expectations than rising implementation difficulty.
> Most US states cap speed limits around schools at 15mph when children are present.
Are you sure? The ones I've seen have usually been 20 or 25mph.
Looking on Image Search (https://www.google.com/search?q=school+zone+speed+limit+sign) and limiting just to the ones that are photos of real signs by the side of the road, the first 10 are: 25, 30, 25, 20, 35, 15, 20, 55, 20, 20. So only one of these was 15.
Not OP but I interpret that as they are focusing exclusively on what happened after the car saw the kid.
And I completely agree that from that instant forward, the car did everything correctly.
But if I was the accident investigator for this, I would be far more interested in what happened in the 30 seconds before the car saw the kid.
Was the kid visible earlier and then disappear behind an obstruction? Or did the kid arrive from the side and was never earlier visible? These are the more important questions.
> people tend to drive their electric cars/trucks more gently too
Really? I tend to see much more aggressive acceleration from people in electric cars (including myself when I'm driving, though I try not to). I've been putting it down to people being used to how gas cars seem to be working harder when you ask them to accelerate heavily, while electric just goes with no complaints.
Not writing the feature makes sense, but pushing Firefox and Safari to add support would be pro-social if you're up for it. The most common reason for browsers not to add support is something like "this can be done in other ways, and it has maintainability/security/bloat downsides". Running into a feature you can't build is evidence on the "this can be done in other ways" question (but of course the other downsides could still be big enough that it's not worth doing).
Providing a web app with edit access to a local directory is really needed for this to be usable. Without that you're constantly managing downloaded files and manually replacing things. I do think this is a case where the File System Access API shines.
> Providing a web app with edit access to a local directory is really needed for this to be usable.
"This" what? sha256sum doesn't need read-write access for even one file to be able to compute a hash, let alone a whole directory. You're ignoring most of my comment, focusing on like 20%, and in so doing, missing (and/or deliberately misframing) 100% of the point.
We're talking about Simon's boosting of https://aifoc.us/the-browser-is-the-sandbox/ which is a prototype of Claude Cowork in the browser. That's what I'm saying needs read-write access.
Yup. That's the link, all right—the one we all read and that I'm citing examples from. Thanks for the reminder, I guess: it has been a whole 8 hours since I first looked at it.
What "we" are talking about here, in this subthread, is the fact that "Browsers have had widespread support for processing files" for a long, long time, and that although "Chrome team's new, experimental APIs [...] provide additional capabilities" which are undoubtedly useful for certain programs, they're overkill and don't offer anything new and/or strictly necessary for many, many programs that don't actually need that sort of access—including "A bunch of the applications in the original post [that] fall into this category. You don't need new or novel APIs to be able to hash a file, for example."
Which is to say, we're talking about POLP/POLA. And the point of my comment was to address the very worthwhile matter of POLA violations. But you seem insistent on shutting that discussion down with chatter that looks like it's an on-topic reply or refutation to something, but in reality doesn't actually meaningfully engage with what you're purporting to respond to, or at best comes come across as confused and not particularly attentive.
There are already and will continue to be plenty of opportunities to discuss the acknowledged upsides of the new APIs for the class of programs for which they are strictly necessary. There's a lot of them in this very comment section. It doesn't have to come at the expense of changing the subject in the middle of a different conversation—accompanied by undertones that you're putting some matter to rest.
Boy, this has been a really fun and rewarding experience.
> I agree we're talking past each other
You're exactly half right.
Let's make this dead simple: does anyone need any of these new APIs to compute the SHA-2 hash for a file? A simple answer will do. Simple, non-evasive, no "look thither" misdirection.
There are definitely less readable blogs, even restricting to ones that aren't intentionally hard to read. For example: https://www.lilywise.com/amusement (Disclosure: written by my kid, who was just shy of 7yo then)
Personally, I like Gwern's style and aesthetic a lot, and don't have trouble reading his stuff.
It's pretty unfortunate that the Yudkowsky-and-LessWrong crowd picked a term that traditionally meant something so different. This has been confusing people since at least 2011.
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