On 'range', I'd say it's optimistic to proclaim 1,500 mile ranges.. Your cell phone example does show a rather dramatic advancement in battery tech, but moreso radio and other technologies. Cars' energy usage is dominated by more fundamental physics problems than what cell phones had.
Also, while the battery tech did advance a great deal in a short amount of time, it is the sort of thing that plateaus. We have headline-grabbing 'breakthroughs' trying to get investment dollars/grants, but overall it seems that our chemical battery state isn't advancing as quickly as it did when portable electronics first became a 'must have' in the market.
Of course, we have acceptable ranges in electric cars now, but energy transfer is much slower than petrol. This is really the sore spot now, and battery capacity won't fix this. Even in the most aggressive CCS charging (350 kw), 300 miles of range will take about 14 minutes. However home charging should make this only a long-drive sort of problem, and hopefully we'll have restaurant chargers, and I know I take longer than 15 minutes to eat, and after driving 300 miles I'd want to stop anyway.
There are generally three things about towing capacity weight: -Ability to *accelerate* at acceptable road speed. Note that in this case, they only accelerated it to slow walk speed. -Ability to *stop* the mass behind you, which is all about brakes and nothing to do with the engine/motor (here the 787 is responsible for stopping itself. -Tongue weight. This is generally specified separately, but there is some assumption about a trailer's tongue weight. Again, this is not about the motor/engine. Of course here there's negligble tonge weight.
This isn't an *anti* tesla view. The truck industry has *long* done stunts like this to 'prove' how much better than their ratings they are. This is the same sort of stunt as people pulling a train with their teeth, a very difficult thing to be sure, but more plausible than one would intuitively think.
Of course, I wouldn't call it an 'anti-ad', but it's also not 'only the model-x can pull this sort of weight' in reality.
I wonder how much that is as chaotic as people keep claiming it to be.
Sure, when I started my career, I bounced around a bit between a good job at a company that failed, to a horrific job at a failing company, to an ok job but with little chance for advancement and I would ultimately have to leave the company to make more money, but within 6 months out of college, I got the job I've been in for the last 15 years...
I don't know how typical this is, but I remember going into the workforce all the dire warnings that my generation can't expect the same stable career path the previous generation could expect, but thus far it has worked out for me. The main difference is that I have a retirement savings account rather than a pension, but with how so many pension funds have failed, and if I really wanted to buy an annuity when I retire for the pension experience, I don't think there will be a practical negative difference, but if I do have to move on from my company, I won't be as badly screwed as I would have been with a pension.
Well, that's true in a way, but one facet of the app store in this case is the "self-publish" that lands this in hot water. Sure you can have ppas in apt world, copr in fedora land, and just random 3rd party yum/apt repoes, but you are a bit more aware of who is 'vouching' for what in which repository. It's not perfect or perhaps thorough enough either, but to get to overwhelmingly more packages in a 'store', some amount of curation falls by the wayside compared to the core yum/apt repoes...
Doing a make configure && make && make install (or whatever version you prefer) will often fail after a long time realizing that there is one stupid library is missing.
Not really a contender...
RPM you can get the problem of recursive dependencies. Where Package A need Package B need Package C which needs Package A. And it is up to you to know witch one for force.
While it is possible, in practice such a packaging mistake would be a bug to fix. Generally speaking apt and yum/dnf give value based on the dependency.
Static Binaries, can get big, and also make doing a security patch near impossible.
A container-per-app is even bigger, and not much easier to patch when used as intended. Container based apps are basically the return of static linked applications and a bit more.
Install scripts are often not well configured to your distribution.
Haven't seen something like that in over a decade, save for some proprietary applications that also make terrible containers that don't work well either.
Well, responsible for keeping the data available I said, did not necessarily suggest they will behave responsibly with the data, which is a bit different.
Of course on a whim they could decide they don't like being in the business and shut down, so I guess google has that challenge too (as do *all* the providers, always have to be ready to at least in theory start up your infrastructure elsewhere without notice).
In this specific scenario, you aren't paying for disk space, you are paying for them to have responsibility for keeping the data available, and having it at a persistently accessible location. That means some chunk of electricity, network connectivity, and costs associated with replacing storage capacity, and various other requirements. In terms of paying for a decade, these providers are uncomfortable with the commitment of the service being available as the customer would like it more than a year out or so, which of course should be a warning flag that something may cause you to want to get a copy of *all* your data, and if you have not proactively been doing so, that may be impossible to grab your 6TB of whatever in time to react to whatever Google thing you don't like.
Of course, if you were of the mind to do it yourself with hard drives, you would probably want the primary live copy of the data and two offline copies (one you take to work and stick in your desk, one that might be at home being backed up, cycling between the two. Of course such a scheme would be about $300 for 4 TB right now and it would take 15 months to be cheaper than using Wasabi, but egress is much easier. It is however a pretty technical solution out of reach of a lot of folks.
Right, similarly, companies that incorporate AI into their business will more likely have AI 10 years from now (some of those will fail to find an application for sure, but some of them will see success), startups that 'just do AI' are probably going to be gone within 5 years because it's the sort of function that will just be embedded into other businesses rather than be a business in and of itself.
The concept of bugs in 'proven correct' functions doesn't make sense. If a function is proven correct, it is correct or a mistake was made in the proof so it really isn't proven correct.. There's a relatively small domain of functions that are useful and can be proven correct, hence why proving a function correct in practice doesn't make sense in the real world, but it can during a college curriculum.
The concept of a bug in code that you can be 100% certain that only impact a single function is also not right. For something to be a bug that anyone notices, it's got to have an unintended side effect, incorrect return for given inputs, or crashing. Most of the time, the result is not even in theory useful so you can fix it in isolation. Ever so often, *particularly* with widely used code, there will be an unintended consequence that is clearly a bug, but someone in the world managed to write code that relied upon that unintended side effect. Microsoft is saddled with a number of these, for example.
While I know that some corps love subscriptions, I think the narrative has been dominated by software vendor who stand to profit massively from moving the industry away from transaction to subscription services as their products mature and upgrade revenue becomes challenged and the support burden is complicated with transnational (MS couldn't cut XP off as readily as they wanted to, due to perception problems).
One key facet, MS had subscription type licensing for a long time prior to O365. O365 is all about MS evolving their business model, not about customers demanding what they could already get (subscription licensing with upgrade rights). MS is not alone in this, but they are the most successful as their product is seen as a base requirement for doing anything professionally.
The fun bit is that Windows has had boring UI lbiraries that work, even before GTK was so solid, and they continue to exist. However at least for the Office products, they seem to do something.. different... nowadays, with various glitches. Skype seems the worst of the bunch, but I have seen other office apps experience weird drawing bugs from time to time.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Donald Knuth
The whole 'provably correct code' disappeared from reality as soon as I was half a step beyond academia.
I think I get his sentiment though, AI isn't programming so much as it is a data scientist thing. This is one of the interesting challenges as a technology, the vast majority of folks having deep engagement with the technology are not programmers, but currently the tools require a bit of programmer sensibility to use.
I suspect rather than being on the 'backburner' implying it will be dead, it'll just not require much investment and be 'boring' but still there. There is a fad aspect to it resembling the.com boom (There's a commercial trying hard to show the value of voice assistant + IoT by having someone feed there pet while driving around, which is really trying hard to solve a problem that pet owners don't have), but I don't think it's so burdensome as to warrant killing off even if the fad subsides and people stop talking to their devices as much.
Those I think illustrate the point. Of the 'web native' companies that entirely (5 of them) only 2 of them were in the 'dotcom' boom (amazon and google) and google was a much less overwhelming business pressure. The other 3 web-native all came later.
In the fullness of time, the place for the "web" is clear and permeates our world, but in the dot-com boom, the vast majority of the industry went bust, because the technology had a lot of promise, but all these companies were blindly applying the technology without a good idea of what they actually wanted to do with it. It has more of an influence than ever, but It's no longer "exciting" and is taken for granted. To compare to this story, at the time there was a rush of degrees for things like "webmaster" and similar such things that aren't really enough to fill a curriculum. Same here with AI, AI is an important set of techniques, but not enough to fill a curriculum. When it's "boring and everywhere", I expect this sort of degree to once again fall by the wayside and integrate and evolve existing degrees.
There is a 'hype curve' that almost inevitably leads to bust, and sometimes there's a recovery after the bust, but the irrational exuberance that overdrives interest subsides.
If I accumulate more than 20 conversations, the UI isn't able to handle it (missing conversation windows, solid white chat screen sometimes requiring I restart the client).
Screen sharing for some folks ends up just giving a black screen fairly often. This has not yet happened to me, I don't know if it's something about their system or somehow misusing the feature, but haven't had the issue otherwise.
If I have to communicate with someone outside of my company, it's a crapshoot.
For non-Windows clients, it is busted or not there.
Unrelated note, but I hate how happily people have gone "oh, MS should get subscription revenue for every person who works in the world". Wish there were more push-back on the move from transnational to subscription services.
One thing I wish Pidgin would do is be better equipped to message with 'non-buddies' in an organization. Also,there are some people in my org I still can't figure out how I would find with the 'people search' dialog. Sign-out on screen lock would be nice in my situation, mainly because with the native S4B client they make a probably missed conversation into an email so I'll notice it more readily from wherever, which is nice enough, though I would prefer if it actually logged me out.. Additionally, some way to get at the ''mute a participant' functionality, which is so frequently handy, but I can't see it it Pidgin.
Those are some pretty big things, but other than that, I far more pleased by using pidgin-sipe under linux over the S4B client for Windows. You mention the speed, which is one thing, but also the S4B client has this peculiar tendency to occasionally stop being able to open new conversation windows. I still get messages (they show up in the notification area), but they are in no window whatsoever. I start closing conversation tabs and then on my last, I double check and there are only 2 windows, contact list and the conversation window I am looking at. I close that last conversation tab, a new window pops up with the conversation that I've been missing... Sometimes the UI just stops painting. I don't know if they are writing custom UI functionality or what, but Pidgin's "boring" use of the stock GTK UI elements has been much more consistent and reliable.
So many times we say "do you have skype for business" and they say "oh yes, I have skype", then we can't meet because they are trying to use skype to join the meeting not skype for business and can't figure out how...
On the UI, their quest for minimalism is a major culprit.
For example, we spent a long time trying to explain where the 'share screen' button is, and the person unable to find it, because we forgot he was not a presenter and so the UI elements are missing, not disabled with a tooltip explaining why it wasn't usable. Wouldn't want to clutter the guest UI with controls they can't use anyway, right?
In a large conference with a remote presenter, they spent a while searching for a button or menu to full-screen the presenter screen. Had to google search to know that you had to double-click the screen area, there was no button or anything.
It all runs in the face of the philosophy of discoverable UIs.
On the screen sharing glitches, have lost count of how many times someone has said "uhh, the screen is all black" to someone else who then would stop and restart sharing and it magically worked then. Or if they dare to dream to use the "share app" instead of desktop, which most people give up on after a few times (it *can* work, but glitches a lot more often than the screen sharing.)
Skype and Skype for Business are different products, not vaguely compatible with each other (which is part of the mess up that MS inflicted). Office Communicator was rebranded Lync (fine...) and then re-branded "Skype for Business" without changing the technology base (bad, terribly confusing).
S4B is generally dreaded even by microsoft users (though when it works and everyone has the software working *and* their respective organizations can talk to each other *and* policies actually allow the meetings to work... it's not too terrible most of the time, apart from some general UI glitchiness...) When you have an attendee using OSX... it almost works sometimes. When you have a linux attendee, well you are out of luck for anything but text (officially), unofficially you can get a plugin for pidgin which can sort of participate in calls and screen sharing (the UI is a bit challenged for pidign-sipe, but is actually more powerful for the functions that work).
For all the rhetoric about "oh Skype's ailing because of focus on business needs", S4B compares poorly with pretty much all of its business oriented competitors.
I think it's a valid point. I have seen jokes, puns, and colloquialisms derail a non-native English speaker from understanding what they are reading. What would *seems* to obviously be something in jest has caused me to have to spend a lot of time explaining that "no, don't worry about that bit in the documentation.. why not? because it's a joke... how is it a joke? well... you see in america...." which is all in all a sort of cultural exchange, but it's never entertaining to either party (anytime you have to explain a joke, it's not going to be funny by the time it is understood).
It's not a matter of unwilling to interact and learn cultures, it is it bogs down documentation and makes it harder to understand. It is rare that a person who didn't get it is ready to walk away without a full explanation about it so they are engaged, it's just that it's not the best forum for cultural exchange.
Slashdot Mirror
On 'range', I'd say it's optimistic to proclaim 1,500 mile ranges.. Your cell phone example does show a rather dramatic advancement in battery tech, but moreso radio and other technologies. Cars' energy usage is dominated by more fundamental physics problems than what cell phones had.
Also, while the battery tech did advance a great deal in a short amount of time, it is the sort of thing that plateaus. We have headline-grabbing 'breakthroughs' trying to get investment dollars/grants, but overall it seems that our chemical battery state isn't advancing as quickly as it did when portable electronics first became a 'must have' in the market.
Of course, we have acceptable ranges in electric cars now, but energy transfer is much slower than petrol. This is really the sore spot now, and battery capacity won't fix this. Even in the most aggressive CCS charging (350 kw), 300 miles of range will take about 14 minutes. However home charging should make this only a long-drive sort of problem, and hopefully we'll have restaurant chargers, and I know I take longer than 15 minutes to eat, and after driving 300 miles I'd want to stop anyway.
Oh, I wasn't thinking in context... so self-whoosh...
how far behind ICE vehicles are when it comes to range, range, and duration.
Huh? One ICE vehicles have considerable range advantage, and you said range twice (you must like range).
You would stand a better chance than you think.
There are generally three things about towing capacity weight:
-Ability to *accelerate* at acceptable road speed. Note that in this case, they only accelerated it to slow walk speed.
-Ability to *stop* the mass behind you, which is all about brakes and nothing to do with the engine/motor (here the 787 is responsible for stopping itself.
-Tongue weight. This is generally specified separately, but there is some assumption about a trailer's tongue weight. Again, this is not about the motor/engine. Of course here there's negligble tonge weight.
This isn't an *anti* tesla view. The truck industry has *long* done stunts like this to 'prove' how much better than their ratings they are. This is the same sort of stunt as people pulling a train with their teeth, a very difficult thing to be sure, but more plausible than one would intuitively think.
Of course, I wouldn't call it an 'anti-ad', but it's also not 'only the model-x can pull this sort of weight' in reality.
I wonder how much that is as chaotic as people keep claiming it to be.
Sure, when I started my career, I bounced around a bit between a good job at a company that failed, to a horrific job at a failing company, to an ok job but with little chance for advancement and I would ultimately have to leave the company to make more money, but within 6 months out of college, I got the job I've been in for the last 15 years...
I don't know how typical this is, but I remember going into the workforce all the dire warnings that my generation can't expect the same stable career path the previous generation could expect, but thus far it has worked out for me. The main difference is that I have a retirement savings account rather than a pension, but with how so many pension funds have failed, and if I really wanted to buy an annuity when I retire for the pension experience, I don't think there will be a practical negative difference, but if I do have to move on from my company, I won't be as badly screwed as I would have been with a pension.
Well, that's true in a way, but one facet of the app store in this case is the "self-publish" that lands this in hot water. Sure you can have ppas in apt world, copr in fedora land, and just random 3rd party yum/apt repoes, but you are a bit more aware of who is 'vouching' for what in which repository. It's not perfect or perhaps thorough enough either, but to get to overwhelmingly more packages in a 'store', some amount of curation falls by the wayside compared to the core yum/apt repoes...
Doing a make configure && make && make install (or whatever version you prefer) will often fail after a long time realizing that there is one stupid library is missing.
Not really a contender...
RPM you can get the problem of recursive dependencies. Where Package A need Package B need Package C which needs Package A. And it is up to you to know witch one for force.
While it is possible, in practice such a packaging mistake would be a bug to fix. Generally speaking apt and yum/dnf give value based on the dependency.
Static Binaries, can get big, and also make doing a security patch near impossible.
A container-per-app is even bigger, and not much easier to patch when used as intended. Container based apps are basically the return of static linked applications and a bit more.
Install scripts are often not well configured to your distribution.
Haven't seen something like that in over a decade, save for some proprietary applications that also make terrible containers that don't work well either.
Well, responsible for keeping the data available I said, did not necessarily suggest they will behave responsibly with the data, which is a bit different.
Of course on a whim they could decide they don't like being in the business and shut down, so I guess google has that challenge too (as do *all* the providers, always have to be ready to at least in theory start up your infrastructure elsewhere without notice).
In this specific scenario, you aren't paying for disk space, you are paying for them to have responsibility for keeping the data available, and having it at a persistently accessible location. That means some chunk of electricity, network connectivity, and costs associated with replacing storage capacity, and various other requirements. In terms of paying for a decade, these providers are uncomfortable with the commitment of the service being available as the customer would like it more than a year out or so, which of course should be a warning flag that something may cause you to want to get a copy of *all* your data, and if you have not proactively been doing so, that may be impossible to grab your 6TB of whatever in time to react to whatever Google thing you don't like.
Of course, if you were of the mind to do it yourself with hard drives, you would probably want the primary live copy of the data and two offline copies (one you take to work and stick in your desk, one that might be at home being backed up, cycling between the two. Of course such a scheme would be about $300 for 4 TB right now and it would take 15 months to be cheaper than using Wasabi, but egress is much easier. It is however a pretty technical solution out of reach of a lot of folks.
Right, similarly, companies that incorporate AI into their business will more likely have AI 10 years from now (some of those will fail to find an application for sure, but some of them will see success), startups that 'just do AI' are probably going to be gone within 5 years because it's the sort of function that will just be embedded into other businesses rather than be a business in and of itself.
The concept of bugs in 'proven correct' functions doesn't make sense. If a function is proven correct, it is correct or a mistake was made in the proof so it really isn't proven correct.. There's a relatively small domain of functions that are useful and can be proven correct, hence why proving a function correct in practice doesn't make sense in the real world, but it can during a college curriculum.
The concept of a bug in code that you can be 100% certain that only impact a single function is also not right. For something to be a bug that anyone notices, it's got to have an unintended side effect, incorrect return for given inputs, or crashing. Most of the time, the result is not even in theory useful so you can fix it in isolation. Ever so often, *particularly* with widely used code, there will be an unintended consequence that is clearly a bug, but someone in the world managed to write code that relied upon that unintended side effect. Microsoft is saddled with a number of these, for example.
When can I register .luddite domains?
While I know that some corps love subscriptions, I think the narrative has been dominated by software vendor who stand to profit massively from moving the industry away from transaction to subscription services as their products mature and upgrade revenue becomes challenged and the support burden is complicated with transnational (MS couldn't cut XP off as readily as they wanted to, due to perception problems).
One key facet, MS had subscription type licensing for a long time prior to O365. O365 is all about MS evolving their business model, not about customers demanding what they could already get (subscription licensing with upgrade rights). MS is not alone in this, but they are the most successful as their product is seen as a base requirement for doing anything professionally.
The fun bit is that Windows has had boring UI lbiraries that work, even before GTK was so solid, and they continue to exist. However at least for the Office products, they seem to do something.. different... nowadays, with various glitches. Skype seems the worst of the bunch, but I have seen other office apps experience weird drawing bugs from time to time.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Donald Knuth
The whole 'provably correct code' disappeared from reality as soon as I was half a step beyond academia.
I think I get his sentiment though, AI isn't programming so much as it is a data scientist thing. This is one of the interesting challenges as a technology, the vast majority of folks having deep engagement with the technology are not programmers, but currently the tools require a bit of programmer sensibility to use.
I suspect rather than being on the 'backburner' implying it will be dead, it'll just not require much investment and be 'boring' but still there. There is a fad aspect to it resembling the .com boom (There's a commercial trying hard to show the value of voice assistant + IoT by having someone feed there pet while driving around, which is really trying hard to solve a problem that pet owners don't have), but I don't think it's so burdensome as to warrant killing off even if the fad subsides and people stop talking to their devices as much.
Those I think illustrate the point. Of the 'web native' companies that entirely (5 of them) only 2 of them were in the 'dotcom' boom (amazon and google) and google was a much less overwhelming business pressure. The other 3 web-native all came later.
In the fullness of time, the place for the "web" is clear and permeates our world, but in the dot-com boom, the vast majority of the industry went bust, because the technology had a lot of promise, but all these companies were blindly applying the technology without a good idea of what they actually wanted to do with it. It has more of an influence than ever, but It's no longer "exciting" and is taken for granted. To compare to this story, at the time there was a rush of degrees for things like "webmaster" and similar such things that aren't really enough to fill a curriculum. Same here with AI, AI is an important set of techniques, but not enough to fill a curriculum. When it's "boring and everywhere", I expect this sort of degree to once again fall by the wayside and integrate and evolve existing degrees.
There is a 'hype curve' that almost inevitably leads to bust, and sometimes there's a recovery after the bust, but the irrational exuberance that overdrives interest subsides.
If I accumulate more than 20 conversations, the UI isn't able to handle it (missing conversation windows, solid white chat screen sometimes requiring I restart the client).
Screen sharing for some folks ends up just giving a black screen fairly often. This has not yet happened to me, I don't know if it's something about their system or somehow misusing the feature, but haven't had the issue otherwise.
If I have to communicate with someone outside of my company, it's a crapshoot.
For non-Windows clients, it is busted or not there.
Unrelated note, but I hate how happily people have gone "oh, MS should get subscription revenue for every person who works in the world". Wish there were more push-back on the move from transnational to subscription services.
One thing I wish Pidgin would do is be better equipped to message with 'non-buddies' in an organization. Also,there are some people in my org I still can't figure out how I would find with the 'people search' dialog. Sign-out on screen lock would be nice in my situation, mainly because with the native S4B client they make a probably missed conversation into an email so I'll notice it more readily from wherever, which is nice enough, though I would prefer if it actually logged me out.. Additionally, some way to get at the ''mute a participant' functionality, which is so frequently handy, but I can't see it it Pidgin.
Those are some pretty big things, but other than that, I far more pleased by using pidgin-sipe under linux over the S4B client for Windows. You mention the speed, which is one thing, but also the S4B client has this peculiar tendency to occasionally stop being able to open new conversation windows. I still get messages (they show up in the notification area), but they are in no window whatsoever. I start closing conversation tabs and then on my last, I double check and there are only 2 windows, contact list and the conversation window I am looking at. I close that last conversation tab, a new window pops up with the conversation that I've been missing... Sometimes the UI just stops painting. I don't know if they are writing custom UI functionality or what, but Pidgin's "boring" use of the stock GTK UI elements has been much more consistent and reliable.
So many times we say "do you have skype for business" and they say "oh yes, I have skype", then we can't meet because they are trying to use skype to join the meeting not skype for business and can't figure out how...
On the UI, their quest for minimalism is a major culprit.
For example, we spent a long time trying to explain where the 'share screen' button is, and the person unable to find it, because we forgot he was not a presenter and so the UI elements are missing, not disabled with a tooltip explaining why it wasn't usable. Wouldn't want to clutter the guest UI with controls they can't use anyway, right?
In a large conference with a remote presenter, they spent a while searching for a button or menu to full-screen the presenter screen. Had to google search to know that you had to double-click the screen area, there was no button or anything.
It all runs in the face of the philosophy of discoverable UIs.
On the screen sharing glitches, have lost count of how many times someone has said "uhh, the screen is all black" to someone else who then would stop and restart sharing and it magically worked then. Or if they dare to dream to use the "share app" instead of desktop, which most people give up on after a few times (it *can* work, but glitches a lot more often than the screen sharing.)
Skype and Skype for Business are different products, not vaguely compatible with each other (which is part of the mess up that MS inflicted). Office Communicator was rebranded Lync (fine...) and then re-branded "Skype for Business" without changing the technology base (bad, terribly confusing).
S4B is generally dreaded even by microsoft users (though when it works and everyone has the software working *and* their respective organizations can talk to each other *and* policies actually allow the meetings to work... it's not too terrible most of the time, apart from some general UI glitchiness...) When you have an attendee using OSX... it almost works sometimes. When you have a linux attendee, well you are out of luck for anything but text (officially), unofficially you can get a plugin for pidgin which can sort of participate in calls and screen sharing (the UI is a bit challenged for pidign-sipe, but is actually more powerful for the functions that work).
For all the rhetoric about "oh Skype's ailing because of focus on business needs", S4B compares poorly with pretty much all of its business oriented competitors.
Also, MS is currently downplaying the significance of the ARM systems:
https://www.windowscentral.com...
This together with Qualcomm having to tighten it's belt all around, I wouldn't expect them to last long as a product line... again... (See Surface RT)
Asking for a friend....
I think it's a valid point. I have seen jokes, puns, and colloquialisms derail a non-native English speaker from understanding what they are reading. What would *seems* to obviously be something in jest has caused me to have to spend a lot of time explaining that "no, don't worry about that bit in the documentation.. why not? because it's a joke... how is it a joke? well... you see in america...." which is all in all a sort of cultural exchange, but it's never entertaining to either party (anytime you have to explain a joke, it's not going to be funny by the time it is understood).
It's not a matter of unwilling to interact and learn cultures, it is it bogs down documentation and makes it harder to understand. It is rare that a person who didn't get it is ready to walk away without a full explanation about it so they are engaged, it's just that it's not the best forum for cultural exchange.