I said in another comment but basically the left have a tougher message to sell than the right. The right says that the system works but it's the foreigners/benefit thieves/refugees stealing your money/house/jobs. That is inherently quite easy to understand without much thought or critical thinking. The left on the other hand have to tell you all about Thatcher, Reagan and neoliberalism before we even get to the point of solutions which are usually incredibly radical like changing the fundamental economic model we've all been operating under since the 80s. Inherent in that is a fear that the left's solutions will take assets and wealth away from people. While the right promises that your assets, wealth and property rights are sacred and that it's the "other" that will have their assets, wealth and rights taken away. Again, very easy-to-understand messaging for the right versus the left.

I totally agree that neoliberal economics are essentially what we understand to be economics now. To be clear, I'm not blaming the left, I think it's a case of they have a more difficult message to convey. To explain the problems that neoliberal economics has and to propose a solution to them is a really hard task compared with "it's the foreigners at fault". It's a much clearer, more concise and seemingly solvable problem compared with "we need to overhaul the global economy".

My specific point here was about how this friend doesn't trust the results AND still goes to Google/others to verify, so he's effectively doubled his workload for every search.

I've had this argument with friends a lot recently.

Them: it's so cool that I can just ask chatgpt to summarise something and I can get a concise answer rather than googling a lot for the same thing.

Me: But it gets things wrong all the time.

Them: Oh I know so I Google it anyway.

Doesn't make sense to me.

It still works here. I for one have been avoiding prepping my next session for over 8 months now because of this!

Without the context of your understanding of the debate as you've outlined here we can only guess what you meant by "the debate" in your previous comment so thanks for taking the time to describe it. I absolutely agree that there needs be great care around the legitimacy of when someone declaring their gender should be taken seriously or not in some limited and extreme circumstances (prisons spring to mind). I think your characterisation of the terf argument if you speak to normal people is about accurate from my limited experience. The media and some outspoken terfs like JK are on the more extreme side of that where they say that it is already "too easy" to legitimately change their gender. Which is where I fundamentally disagree with them since I know the hoops some of my friends have had to jump through to even get the smallest amount of help from health providers.

(I'm using "legitimate" above as a sort of catch all for legal or what the person genuinely feels. I don't think legal and legitimate are the same thing in this context, hence the distinction.)

Again, this existed before AI. Typo squatting, supply chain attacks, automated package uploads, CI pipeline infection, they're all known attack vectors. That's not to say this isn't a concern, just that it's a known risk and the addition of "AI" doesn't, to my eyes, increase that risk. If your SSH keys don't require a password, you have taken the decision to make those keys less secure but more convenient to use. That's pretty much always the tradeoff in security.

The risk here is slightly overblown or misrepresented. Just because a fork exists doesn't mean that anyone has even read it, let alone run it on their system. For this to be a real threat they would have to publish packages with identical or similar names (ie typo-squatting) to public package repositories which this article didn't have any information on but which is a known problem long before AI. The level of obfuscation and number of repos affected is impressive but ultimately unlikely to have widespread impact to anyone besides GitHub.

Personally I rename them to something meaningful and they get merged if there are no other references. PayPal is especially bad for completely meaningless rubbish in the payee field and they tend to be ad-hoc purchases so I don't fiddle with them much. The category is the most relevant bit for me.

I agree it's a low-to-mid tier phone but as I'm only using my FP4 for calls, discord, email, browsing, youtube etc it's perfectly fine. Most people don't need a top tier phone these days.

I've heard the argument as a positive of learning vim and while it did finally force me to touch type I can't say that it had any impact on my programming speed.

I agree with those saying mailing lists are intimidating. I don't know if others are using dedicated tools or something but I find web based mailing list UIs just incomprehensibly bad and difficult to navigate.