Comment by gremlinunderway

13 hours ago

What a completely asinine post. I'm sick of seemingly smart people in the technical world think they are being so clever by trying to literally rehash the continuum fallacy. You hear this literally everytime anyone even so much as suggests a standard, norm or god forbid a regulation. It seems especially common among libertarian types who think governance of any kind of simply impossible because of it.

Just because there is a gradual spectrum between two states doesn't mean we can't draw distinctions. For example, just because we cannot define the exact, precise color when blue turns into green, it does not mean that blue and green are the same color for any normal person discussing an issue publicly in good faith.

When someone says "X and Y are on a spectrum, X is good and Y is bad", the point is to highlight the differences. Pointing out that the spectrum or continuum might not have a precise boundary has literally zero weight towards the validity of the ultimate conclusion a person is making here and really is just a complete derail done by people who have no substantive points to make.

Agreed. If anything your comment is too charitable. This is just one of the GP's highly sophistic comments here. Considering how he is exploiting the sorites paradox, I wouldn't be surprised if he bases his sophism on Zeno's paradox from time to time.

Excuse me while I go count the hairs on my chin to see if they are >= MIN_BEARD_THRESHOLD.

Is your objection just to the bloat, or also to what the bloat is for?

  • Personally I'm pissed at both. A large jump in requirements without warning is bad, if I want to avoid it I now need to take immediate less considered actions or get stuck with the consequences. Plenty of decent software actually lets you decide what plugins to install for added functionality, chrome actually has a extensions store that they could have put this crap in.

    Yes it's also that it's AI and mostly that chrome is foisting off all the cost of that AI model to me and other users. Without warning and explaining what this model is, is my workplaces power cost going to be up 10% because of whatever they want to run it for? Who knows.

    There'd be a lot less complaining if they'd actually warned and less still if they asked.

    • I'm picturing a splash screen announcing the feature(s) it enables, with a Download button