That adressing throughput not costs. If you keep costs contant, lower prices but acchive higher throughput, the only thing you acchieve is to lose money faster than you would have done otherwise by just lowering costs straight away.
> In the aftermath of 9/11, the government has to be seen doing "something". This was the something.
No, that might have been true then, but the real reason is the same that Airlines suddenly unlearned how to group people who book togehter to sit together unless they reserve booking. The security theator is expensive to run, but it's less expensive than what you make selling more expensive methods of avoiding the security theather.
Airlines don't want you to have a nice and easy travel, unless you've paid the appropriate primum. They are perfectly happing intentionally pissing off 98% of their travelers to maintain the 2% who pay extra. And when you zoom out, that also means that what you pay for the premium tickets isn't to pay for extra luxery, its to pay for the intentional annoyance of everyone else.
The more likely reason for the creation of the TSA was to prevent victims from suing airlines into oblivion for failing to provide security. The government knew that if the airlines were found responsible the entire aviation industry could collapse, so the Feds stepped in and said "it's our job" and created the TSA to make that responsibility clear.
The situation is not dissimilar to how power tool companies would not deploy SawStop technology because that would make it clear to consumers that said companies knew their products were unsafe and would expose them to millions / billions in liability claims.
> They didn't kill RSS - they introduced people to it.
For myself and most people i knew that knew of RSS feeds, we weren't introduced by google reader, we migrated to it because it was a great reader. Then once they had everyone onboard reader and there weren't really anyone competing becuause reader was great and universilly liked, they killed it, striking a gigantic blow to RSS in general.
It really just is not a case of google just "bringing people in then letting them go". They did the equivalent of offering free hamburgers at the corner between Burger King and McDonalds and then shutting it down after the two chains had gone bankrupt. And you might say "Sure, but people still enjoy fast food!" and that's true, but after that it's not burgers people are buying, it's burritos, because the burger market becomes a wasteland when someone does something like that.
>For myself and most people i knew that knew of RSS feeds, we weren't introduced by google reader, we migrated to it because it was a great reader.
Right, this is exactly my experience as well. I used all manner of desktop based RSS readers before Google reader appeared on the scene and became my mainstay.
I also think it's not wrong to note that Google Reader introduced a lot of people to RSS. But I don't think it follows that shutting down Google Reader was merely a net neutral impact on RSS. I guess I just don't follow the logic of, well Google elevated RSS, therefore there's no problem with shutting it down in the grand scheme of things. Shutting down Google Reader rolled back progress that had been achieved by Google Reader itself, but the fact that the RSS ecosystem had recentered itself around Google's offerings and integrations also made the shutdown uniquely damaging.
> Then once they had everyone onboard reader and there weren't really anyone competing
There may not have been profit driven companies competing and that detail is mostly irrelevant. There was no shortage of alternatives like software running on your computer and self hosting options.
RSS wasn't designed to help companies make money. The demise of Google's competitors is irrelevant to the long term health of RSS. It was thriving before such companies tried to make money off of it.
People who didn't use Google Reader were not at all impacted by its demise. The RSS experience remained the same. It's silly to claim Google played a role in killing it.
Google Reader was the predominant offering, and they integrated RSS into practically everything. The RSS ecosystem had Google as its center of gravity due to Google's strategy of embracing it. Shutting it down did a unique damage that only Google would be capable of doing. There are indeed desktop alternatives, but I guess the critical question is whether you believe losing any one of them would have an equivalent impact on RSS that losing Google Reader did. I think the main point at stake is that Google had a disproportionate role, and so it's perfectly true that RSS lives on and I'm grateful for that, but I don't think any other software, or company, or website, has had such a disproportionate role both in elevating and in rolling back RSS.
You could serve ads in RSS. Either has their own distinct items, or embedded in the content of the RSS feed. Although I suppose the point your making is that these forms of ads wouldn't be something that Google necessarily could control or monetize.
> It turned out the distribution (and to some extent, ownership) problems eclipsed every other problem in software.
I have a different perspective. I see it more as a question about runtime environment. We still have 20y old Delphi applications in production, and distribution is trivial, corporate machines have software that just installs the apps the users need based on their roles, and they autoupdate etc. My team still hates them and want to replace them with webapps, even with no distribution or ownership issues.
For us the big issue is the "it's not working for me, what could be wrong?" cases where you have to dedicate half a day or more of expert time trying to figure out which absurd corner of microsoft windows is causing issues on the particular intersection of that one application on that one entirely unique computer configuration (even after corporate management of software/policies etc), and of cause that one particular user, because what could they have done?
Web apps have the benefit that they don't run on microsoft windows, they run on chrome (even if you use edge), and chrome is a much better operating system than windows will ever dream of being. It even fulfilled java's pipedream of being cross platform (well effectively from a user perspective anyway).
We've had a similar issue even with our sass webapp. It started with one user at one client where a single UI in our large SPA started encountered odd bugs. And then other employees in the same department started having the same exact issue. We spent a considerable amount of time investigating the issue with our company pushing back claiming it was an issue on their side. Eventually it escalated and we did a call with their users and management. I was able to successfully debug the issue, but their management was not that happy! The issue: Fantasy football Chrome extension their employees had installed which their IT department obviously did not authorize!
Indeed, webapps are not immune to distribution problems. Wayward and invasive browser extensions are a clear threat, as are 3rd-party dependencies (and their dependencies) loaded at runtime. Which is why companies like https://sentry.io exist. I think the difference is that webapps are "distributable by default" and it takes real work to break this. Versus having local desktop apps which require work to distribute. A potent example of the power of defaults.
Through the halls and chat rooms of every company populated by developers you hear constant groaning about software distribution problems (we call it deployment). Yes, we managed to fuck that up and a hundred other things along the way. So many hours wasted on that bullshit.
I left web development and have been having the time of my life. Web dev is nothing but stress and pain. The first relatively pain free web dev experience I had was using Vue3 (not counting Laravel ten years ago).
Despite the odd angle used throughout all the western media propaganda. It was an Iraqi group not Iranian group. The constant push to frame this as "USA vs. Iran" by calling it an Iran-backed group, instead of an Iraqi group, or be specific and state that it was "Islamic Resistance in Iraq" is just befuddling. It's like if the media was covering the current crisis in Palestine/Israel, while never mentioning Israel and instead writing headlines like "USA-backed group bombs hospital in Gaza".
As for why this Iraqi group is able to attack USA, it's likely much more to do with the 13 year old failed US Invasion of Iraq than anything to do with Iran. But It feels like USA is embarrassed enough about that whole thing that they have decided to just ignore that Iraq exists and instead consider this to be an attack all along the Jordan-Iran border, which for anyone geographically interested is just as long as the border between USA and France.
The attacks are attributed to Iran because the Iraqi militias that launched them are IRGC assets, in the same way that no security agency anywhere in the western would refer to Hezbollah as "a Lebanese militia". The chatter in mideast analyst Twitter (representative sample: Rasha Al Aqeedi, Oz Katerji, Nadwa Dawsari) mostly seems to be people dunking on Iran for trying to claim it wasn't behind the attack.
The sense I get is that this is looked at somewhat as Avon Barksdale had given all his crews orders to shoot any members of the Stansfield Organization on sight, and, after a bunch of bloody shootings, tried to claim "oh, I didn't order any of those attacks specifically". That argument wouldn't hold up in court, where the standard of evidence is relatively high; it definitely doesn't stand up in the court of USCENTCOM, where the standard of evidence is probably mostly vibes.
This is normal for US foreign policy thinking. No official enemy has any agency except a few top-tier foreign adversaries, who are all madmen trying to take over the world. If anyone has a grievance with the US it's because Iran or Russia or China told them to because we're so great what else could the reason be? We literally had Nancy Pelosi claiming that people who call for a ceasefire in Gaza are puppets of Putin.
I find it very odd that Americans seem to not be able to understand how a highly nationalist people may object to them staying past their welcome date and seek to attack them on their own accord, and that most of these groups existed well before acquiring Iranian funding.
Most Iraqis still remember tragedies like the Mahmudiyah massacre. The government of the time took them into account and promised to have American bases closed, but reneged. I think you can see how events like that being rampant might drive people to fight, even a generation later.
In large part she was probably not wrong given that a lot of calls for ceasefire and in support of genocide of Jews come indeed from Russian troll accounts.
Just looking at various Warner Brothers properties and it is pretty clear that you can do lot even in something that is somewhat similar in style. If not in substance.
> It feels like almost all the issues with self-checkout technology come from the attempts to minimise shoplifting, which don't even seem that effective at doing that. In theory, a system that let you scan products the same way checkout staff do without any weight checks or bagging area rules or other interruptions would be incredibly efficient. Especially if you could do things like scan the same product multiple times if you were buying multiple copies of it.
Our local supermarket has this. A phone app you scan things as you go, and when leaving you scan a QR code, swipe to pay, then you get a code to open the gate out and you leave. It's incredibly smooth. Also, this means you can just put your bags in your cart and bag while you shop, so you just completely skip checkout, it's a breeze.
I don't understand your point about scanning multiple times though. If I'm buying 5 of something I scan one of them, and just increase the count to five.
Many self checkout systems check for the weight of scanned items, so if you scan an item you have to put it down (“please place item in the bagging area”) in order to continue.
Thank god, finaly! I was getting so annoyed at my ice melting when cooking fish and the beeswax melting when cooking tenderloin. Why didn't anyone think of this before? /S
When you have a product you think is cool but you don't yet have a sales pitch. Wait until you figure out your sales pitch to release it. This might be a great oven, but the material just makes it seem like a really random gimmick that no one needs outside of filming TikToks about how random it is.
Human level means at the level of a human. Replace your 6 senior software engineers with 6 random humans, heck, replace them with 600 random humans. Let them lose on a problem and report back the results.
At the same time it seems to ignore the automatic absence of certain human features that are clearly net-negative for the human when doing "level" comparison with the bots.
I am thinking of things like: need for sleep or rest, need to eat, need to tend to relations and activities outside of work etc.
When he calls it "human-level" he is ignoring this. Perhaps intentionally.
Yes, it certainly means that there should be some structure in the work, but do we need 6 or 600 human level AI agents or instead all can be done by just 1 agent that would do the human intelligence level work just faster?
Imagine the same problem that happened with computation. One human can compute, but slowly, now this can be scaled up by multiple human computers, doing organized task of computing - but even the best large scale human computing efforts can be simply replaced by a single electronic computer.
