> the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement
I think there's a difference between questioning your doctor, and questioning advice given by almost every doctor. There are plenty of bad doctors out there, or maybe just doctors who are bad fits for their patients. They don't always listen or pay close attention to your history. And in spite of their education they don't always choose the correct diagnosis.
I also think there's an ever-increasing difference between AI health research and old-school WebMD research.
> I'd love to know what the justification for replacing them in the first place was. I can't think of any device, appliance, etc. I own whose UX is _better_ for not having physical, dedicated buttons or switches and instead having a touch interface or buttons which require a complex series of presses or chords.
I can't speak for other manufacturers, but having lived with a Tesla I can say these are some justifications, beyond cost:
- Standardization. With some exceptions where hardware is different, once you've driven one Tesla you can drive any Tesla. I love physical buttons too, but I don't love finding the drive mode buttons in a different place every time I rent a car, or trying to figure out how this one does the windshield wipers, or headlights, or radio tuning, or parking brake, or whatever.
- Simplification. Along with the mandate to reduce physical controls, Tesla also pushed toward making everything automatic. I never have to think about my headlights (and they dim in a circle around any detected vehicle in front of me), and I don't have to think much about drive modes either. It does a good job of automatically picking the correct direction when you tap the brake, and has a good mechanism for auto-switching between forward and reverse as you manipulate the brake and wheel.
- OTA updates. When something isn't working out for people they can make adjustments. They can also add new features (AI assistant, more automation) without mounting new buttons.
There are some silly choices, like the glove box (which is tiny and not very useful anyway) requiring a voice command or the touchscreen. And some people don't like the touchscreen vents (I do, surprise surprise). But most of it makes good sense.
They have no meaningful choice. To the degree that this does represent consumer preference, however, what it tells us is simply that touchscreen phones are preferred overall: it does not follow that touchscreen keyboards, specifically, are preferred for text-entry tasks.
I feel like, over time, they have though. Blackberry was more than willing to keep the lights on well past the point of viability. Other competitors too. They kept trying to resurrect the physical keyboard popularity and it never happened.
You can still buy niche phones with a physical keyboard right now.
Doesn't look like the Clicks Communicator is actually available yet - the website says it's coming in February - but it's good to learn that there will soon be a physical keyboard option once again. (Or was there some other device you had in mind?)
Although cars have way more touch screens than before, they are not yet ubiquitous. With phones they have pretty much all converged on a single form factor with the only variant being size.
Well we still have demand in the equation. If demand for service workers grows, so will their compensation. (And so will the cost for those services.) So the possibility is there.
People with more disposable income (the high-productivity ones I guess) demand more services. The question will be whether that demand will grow sufficiently to raise the compensation to where we want it to be.
What I also don't know is how we will respond to service jobs being automated. "Premium" service usually shuns automation. Will we have fewer fast food workers and more massage therapists?
Ad delivery services don't care about the user experience because it's not their site, so anything goes. The host justifies their decision because hey, look, money. That money is quantifiable while user experience is less so.
You talk to an AI that goes incredibly slow and tries to get you to add extras to your order. I would say it has made the experience more annoying for me personally. Not a huge issue in the grand scheme of things but just another small step in the direction of making things worse. Although you could break the whole thing by ordering 18000 waters which is funny.
AI Darwin Awards 2025 Nominee: Taco Bell Corporation for deploying voice AI ordering systems at 500+ drive-throughs and discovering that artificial intelligence meets its match at “extra sauce, no cilantro, and make it weird."
I don't think GP disagrees. They are (I think) stating that AI-assisted TDD is not as reliable as human TDD, because AI will invent a pointless test just to achieve a passing outcome.
I lack the level of education and eloquence of the author, but I have my own notion that I think agrees with them: Specification is difficult and slow, and bugs do not care whether they are part of the official specification or not.
Some software needs formal verification, but all software needs testing.
On another subject...
> Tests are great at finding bugs ... but they cannot prove the absence of bugs.
Unless people therefore decide that testing unnecessary... Which has happened a lot in academia. One of the reasons testing is not being taught that well on some universities...
I think there's a difference between questioning your doctor, and questioning advice given by almost every doctor. There are plenty of bad doctors out there, or maybe just doctors who are bad fits for their patients. They don't always listen or pay close attention to your history. And in spite of their education they don't always choose the correct diagnosis.
I also think there's an ever-increasing difference between AI health research and old-school WebMD research.
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