I would like a non-native speaker to weigh in, but I gloss it as "there are ONLY a few and this is ONE OF them" and have never found that confusing or contradictory.

That's exactly the difference: "one of the few" necessarily implies scarcity, whereas you could say e.g. "one of the only grains of sand at the beach" while clearly there are many.

I wouldn’t use that phase for sand grains exactly because there are so many. If you added a qualification like “… that is colored blue” then it sounds fine again to me.

edit: this conversation is a waste of time. retracting my comment

It's not that I don't understand what they want to express and how they use the phrase. I'm arguing that it's a poor phrase for the job, when "one of the few" exactly and necessarily implies that, while "one of the few" doesn't necessarily.

In fact it's even more vacuous ("nothingburger") because sometimes it's not even clear which way the person means it; if I say "I'm one of the only people to do a handstand on a Thursday morning", do I imagine that I'm in a large group or a small one?

[Edit: this paragraph added to respond to post below saying I'm not going to win, which was edited out and I couldn't respond to for some reason.] I'm not trying to "win" any more than I would try to tell people that literally isn't a synonym for figuratively; I know that ship has sailed. That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to say it doesn't make sense, and I'm very aware that people get extremely angry about it for some reason, as if it's a personal affront. Not everyone has to buy into the cargo cult of descriptivism (particularly in the face of absurdity), differences of opinion are still allowed :)

Is your objection to the use of 'only' to refer to multiple things, or specifically the phrase "one of the only"? Would you consider "I am only five minutes late" to be valid?

(edit - for the record, this was in response to the first paragraph only, as the others were edited in afterwards)

My objection is in direct analogy to "could care less": it fails to rule out the very thing that is to be ruled out.

The grains of sand example should make it clear: it is not true that this grain is one of few at the beach, but it is true that it's one of the only. This makes it a poor expression for scarcity, and while obviously we know what was actually intended (as with "could care less"), that doesn't really make it any better.

I'm trying to understand but struggling -- so it is specifically the phrase "one of the only" that bothers you, but the example of "only five minutes late" is acceptable? And the issue is that "only" in that context doesn't mean a singular item, but rather a group of ambiguous size?

It doesn't really bother me, I just think it's not fit for purpose the exact same way as could care less to communicate not caring.

BTW thanks for the hot tip regarding the posting delay feature! Lord knows I need it, nothing induces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier like hitting that reply button :"D

edit: this conversation is a waste of time. retracting my comment

If the subject matter weren't somewhat baffling in the first place the edits and deletions certainly didn't help.

FYI for anyone reading this (not directed at you specifically): the 'delay' option in profile setting adds a delay before your comments appear publicly, giving you a buffer for edits and deletions before it goes out to the world.

Personally it helps a lot with ensuring I'm happy with the comments I make, and it helps avoid situations like this where multiple layers of retroactive changes make the conversation hard to follow.

I like how you edited your comment which simply said what I wrote is "completely incoherent" :) So you figured out the meaning now, very good.

You can't respond to fresh comments in a back-and-forth on HN, there's a delay of a few minutes before the reply button shows up when many comments are being posted in quick succession. (or maybe it has to do with depth? unsure)

"few" is one of the meanings of "only". "One of the few" is a perfectly normal thing to say as well.

as a nonnative fluent speaker, to me "one of the few" and "one of the only" mean the same thing, with "of the only" possibly being even less than "of the few"

It's a stereotype of his political opponents as adrift in selfishness, hedonism, and "gender stuff".

When you find your thought patterns flowing through tropes this way it is a good sign to consider logging off for a long while, as the author is doing. I wish him peace and perspective.

This is clearly done by AI and I am disinclined to draw any conclusions from the anecdotes or data here because it all feels "synthesized".

On one hand, I wonder if a gradual transition would work. Spend enough time over the years mirroring your conscious patterns onto a computational substrate, and they might get used to the lay of the land, the loss of old senses and the appearance of new ones. There might not be an ultimate "stepping in", but something like you might be able to outlive you, on a substrate that it feels happy and comfortable on.

On the other hand, the idea of "simulating your consciousness" raises questions beyond just cognition or personality. A mechanistically perfect simulation of your brain might not be conscious at all. Spooky stuff.

Been thinking about this. Do you have a snippet you can share?

ZSH plugin:

  _click_preexec() {
    _click_start_seconds=${_click_start_seconds:-$SECONDS}
  }

  _click_precmd() {
    [[ $+_click_start_seconds ]] || return

    if (( SECONDS - _click_start_seconds >= 20 )); then
      pw-play 'mouse_click.wav' &!
    fi

    unset _click_start_seconds
  }

  preexec_functions+=(_click_preexec)
  precmd_functions+=(_click_precmd)

Mouse click sound: https://freesound.org/s/223445

this is very smooth and scratches an itch I didn't know I had -- to use a windowed OS on my phone

was also looking for some KEST GAK stickers

I had the same thought - got some results for "GAK" https://www.alltext.nyc/?search=gak&page=1

Old school "COST" showed up for me as the first result for that word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Cost

Been awhile since I've been out to NYC - is KEST and RIBS still a big thing out there?

KES found some, I think the problem is that most stickers are layered

I have no affiliation with TOC; just thought this was neat.

Lovely. I've wondered about this for years but never knew quite how to frame a query to learn more.

WEI acts as proof that "this is a browser", not "this is a human". But browsers can be automated with tools like Selenium. I'd guess that with the advent of complicated, JS-based captchas, browsers under automation are already the major battleground between serious scrapers and anti-bot tools.

I also don't understand how WEI does much to prevent a motivated user from faking requests. If you have Chrome running on your machine it's not gonna be too hard to extract a signed WEI token from its execution, one way or another, and pass that along with your Python script.

It looks like it basically gives Google another tool to constrain users' choices.

> But browsers can be automated with tools like Selenium

And I will bet anything that if the browser is being instrumented via webdriver it will attest as such. You would have to automate the browser externally.

Will it attest that it's running an extension? I can intercept and modify web requests, redirect web requests, and send web requests to other domains through a web extension. I can also scrape the HTML and I can use native messaging or normal HTTP requests to send that information out of the browser. And I can also modify CORS headers to get rid of restrictions around sending requests from another domain.

I can't literally emulate mouse movements but the only place that matters is... captchas. If you're not watching for those kinds of behaviors, then a browser even without webdriver can be automated just fine. And if you are watching for those behaviors, then you're running a captcha, so what is WEI helping with?

Google claims this is not going to impact browser extensions, debugging, etc... but if it's not going to impact that stuff, then it's not really helpful for guaranteeing that the user isn't automating requests. What it is helpful for is reducing user freedom around their OS/hardware and setting the stage for attacking extensions like adblockers more directly in the future.