@[email protected] ah, my apologies, I had misremembered. And that's disappointing on the phone experience side, I'm not a fan of phone calls. Especially as in the UK I had a non-zero number of occasions where I needed to ring on my wife's behalf because they weren't going to respond to the female voice with a foreign accent 😡

@[email protected] Unless that's now his UK experience? I have been away a few years now, I suppose

@[email protected] Yeah, joys of culture shock. In the UK, making sure everything is in writing is a way of prompting action by creating a paper trail. Here in Italy, and by what I've seen in the US, the call is needed to get action (although still suffers from making the whole conversation undocumented most of the time)

@[email protected] it seems a mostly US thing? As a Brit, I was slightly horrified at the number of US services that offered, or even suggested I paid more for, the option to have a robot phone me rather than send an email or text. But... why? Even if I was blind, I'd trust my text to speech over an auto dialer.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I think in both cases there's also a practicality aspect: having taught tech skills to primary school children I can tell you that a sizeable percentage (verging on a majority) have at least some access to devices where they are logged in as one of their parents to at least some services. More than 10% so far have devices they carry with them that are logged into a parents email account, meaning they can (if they know how) reset the password on most online services and then delete the evidence of having done so.

Assuming my experience isn't unusual, and I have no reason to believe it is, I cannot see any way to target restrictions by age that isn't nonsense; a sizeable proportion of children are browsing the internet with completely legitimate 'adult' accounts out of a combination of convenience and lack of knowledge already.

@[email protected] @[email protected] ...I think this is, unfortunately, the second time in as many days I've been wanting the "dislike - but agree" button.

@[email protected] "Give me money for my AI removal AI" is right up there on the offensively brazen stakes I have to admit.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Also, if a slight aside, I'd argue that from a formal point of view if finding out more information changes the answer you can't really claim you had complete information. That's more of a 'my Bayesian priors make it seem most likely that' territory 😊

@[email protected] @[email protected] Hmm. My turn to be on the "other" side: to claim something is true in a formal mathematical sense while not holding complete information seems straight up incorrect to me, even though I have no issue with it being used for "best guess with the information available" in general conversation.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Fair. I suppose I associate a level of intent with honesty, while (maths + programming background) I use true/false in a formal sense all the time. I wouldn't claim to be the one true arbiter of correct use of true however, and I would disagree with anyone claiming that the statement was a lie regardless of whether you consider it 'true'.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Honest, but not true? Covers a surprisingly wide range of well meaning communication, especially when you start taking unconscious bias into account.

Inside every tester there are two wolves: the confused one, the surreal one, and the one that always goes one step further than expected. #qa #testing

This is something that has bothered me for a long time. How did we end up in a timeline where we're all continually agreeing to contracts that are allowed to change their own terms and conditions, even while everybody agrees huge swathes of them are unenforceable on either party? We've achieved all of the paperwork with none of the benefits.

mastodon.social/users/Richar...

@[email protected] @[email protected] The weirdest part of the whole thing is that based on your longer description the headline was really an uncommonly clear and accurate description of the study. And yes, interesting study idea even if a somewhat unsurprising and depressing result.

@[email protected] What @[email protected] said - I was going to respond with something much more angry and sarcastic, but it's probably more important to reinforce there's people out there who think what you're doing is really valuable, and that I personally have appreciated the couple of occasions you've directly pointed out I'd mis- or partially understood something from your field of expertise.

Also: he was being an arse. Sorry that happened to you 😞

Next week is the start of our five week online courses courses for 11-16s; one on how to build a #visualnovel in VisualInk, and the other on how to produce your own assets for gaming projects (visual novel focussed, but we'll also be talking a bit about 2D sprite animation).

Find out more at thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/... #gamedev #CreativeWriting

@[email protected] @[email protected] The BBC nailed this as a children's show decades ago: "Maid Marian and her Merry Men"

I didn't realise at first it was SF rather than real SF news until I got to the bit where the SF member at the SF competition yelled "Orange! Rising Dragon Fist!" and punched his opponent out of SF.

wandering.shop/users/JulietE...

@[email protected] On the third hand, playing with squirty cream is fun. This has very little to do with how good the strawberries taste, but is also a truism of life worth bearing in mind

@[email protected] This, also, is true. That said, while really good strawberries are really good, this technique has the advantage of helping okay strawberries also taste really good 😊