I interpreted the original comment totally differently - I thought they were saying that the programmers [who created these tools] should pay more attention to how productive [or not] power users can be with the tools [that they created]. And use that as an important metric for software quality. Which I definitely agree with.

Well, of course almost all information comes with an agenda, but perhaps the more useful distinction is whether the information is presented in good faith, i.e. is honest about the agenda (which actual advertising can also be).

I get that if you're distributing software to the wider public, you have to make sure these scary alerts don't pop up regardless of platform. But as a savvy user, I think the situation is still better on Windows. As far as I've seen there's still always a (small) link in these popups (I think it's SmartScreen?) to run anyway - no need to dig into settings before even trying to run it.

Are you sure? I had not used Windows for years and assumed "Run Anyway" would work. Last month, I tested running an unsigned (self-signed) .MSIX on a different Windows machine. It's a 9-step process to get through the warnings: https://www.advancedinstaller.com/install-test-certificate-f...

Perhaps .exe is easier, but I wouldn't subject the wider public (or even power users) to that.

So yeah, Azure Trusted Signing or EV certificate is the way to go on Windows.

The latter is what would be most useful imo. Even Matlab can type check matrix sizes with constants these days, but I often wish I could use variables to express relationships between the sizes of different dimensions of inputs to a function.

I can see that some of the categories are a stretch semantically; however, I didn't see the specific categories and their names as central to the point of the article. I think the goal is to demonstrate that 1) everyone engages in persuasion in some form; 2) there are various different styles of persuasion with different strengths and weaknesses, and it's useful to be self-aware about what style(s) you tend to use and whether there are other styles you might want to try out in certain situations. I think breaking it down into 5 somewhat artificial categories is a good framework for making this topic approachable and providing good examples to think about.

I think if you already have well-developed thoughts about persuasion and social interaction, it might not add much, but it was useful for me.

It's crazy to me that a significant number of people know "cos" and "sin" primarily though CSS. Is that really what this is implying? Or maybe people just find them hard in general, but it seems odd to think of them as features you dislike, rather than attributing the dislike to the underlying math, if you've ever taken a trig class before.

I take it as the second assumption, as in people who think "CSS has already gotten too complex, now this complicated trig shit is part of it too?".

Keep in mind it's only 9.1%, or 1 in 11, that actually had a "negative opinion" of it. This makes the phrasing/focus on "hated" seem a bit forced.

> In real life, when you have a dependency, you are responsible for it. If the thing that is dependent on you does something wrong, like a child or business, you might end up in jail, as you are responsible for that.

Isn't this backwards? In real life, if you have a dependent, you are responsible for it. On the other hand, if you have a dependency on something, you rely on that thing, in other words it should be responsible for you. A package that is widely used in security-critical applications ought to be able to be held accountable if its failure causes harm due to downstream applications. But because that is in general impossible and most library authors would never take on the risk of making such guarantees, the risk of each dependency is taken on by the person who decides it is safe to use it, and I agree package managers sometimes make that too easy.

How milquetoast... "Young people want to pay with cash more, and there might be interesting reasons for that, but ehh cards are convenient and cash is gross so still no cash for me!" What's the point of this?

I have a faint memory of Enter creating a page break rather than a newline on a school Mac when I was a kid. Maybe that was in AppleWorks?

I wouldn’t doubt it, the way some Mac keys are completely unintuitive.

I modern Word you can use Ctrl + Enter to create a page break.

Isn't the conventional wisdom "at least 2 backups, one offsite"? My lab gets by with 2 copies for most of our data: one on our Synology NAS and one mirrored to Box.

With the size of data we're dealing with, loading everything from cloud all the time would slow analyses down to a crawl. The Synology is networked with 10G Ethernet to most of our workstations.