There are a variety of ways that democratic governments are structure that make this an inaccurate characterization of how things work.
The US, for example, apportions representatives and votes for President in a way that overweights less populated states, and there are various aspects of parliamentary systems that help avoid landing in a two-party system where a simple majority gets the say in everything—they force compromise and coalition building among disparate groups. Additionally, Constitutional systems will enumerate the rights of its citizens such that they cannot simply be taken away by a simple majority of any body.
Democratic countries are also basically never "pure" democracies where everyone votes on every decision as in your Plato's ship analogy—we elect people who audition for the role of running the ship, ostensibly those among the people who are best suited to the task.
I have not been following this whole thing closely, but this is where my mind went as soon as I heard there was some overlap in the popularity of this new un-sandboxed agent and people who are into crypto. It's like if everyone who is into buying physical gold started doing a Tiktok challenge to post pictures of their houses and leave their front doors unlocked.
Historically I've found sleepinginairports.net useful for this kind of intel—I was pleased to discover just now that it's still around! Nearly 20 years ago now it saved me from a night of awful sleep. My backpacking buddy and I had just arrived in Liverpool with an early Ryanair flight out the following morning, and no hostel reservations. We'd been traveling successfully without reservations for a bit, but it turned out there was some kind of event that weekend in Liverpool and there was absolutely nowhere to stay (or at least, nothing that cost less than, like, the budget for our entire trip).
We decided we'd just stay out late, then go to the airport and wait it out for our flight. After some effort trying to sleep on hard plastic benches in the airport Burger King (where Michael Jackson's Thriller was playing loudly on repeat, I do not know why), I pulled out my 12" PowerBook and found out via that site that the airport had a meditation room with dim lighting, soft carpet, and no Michael Jackson. Ahh.
Random events are the worst. I was driving through Bend, OR and planned to grab a hotel room but everything was completely booked. Ended up just driving up a random forest road (public land, legal to camp) and sleeping in my tent. Was walking around with my headlamp in the night and some cops came by and asked what I was up to since people are often doing drugs there. Great. They came by and woke me up during the night again and I asked them to please keep record that I'm not up to anything so I could sleep.
As a fan of text adventures who has played many over the years—Anchorhead is hard. It was kind of a white whale for me over many years until I finally beat it during the pandemic lockdown.
How does it compare in difficulty and scope to the original Adventure? I guess actually known as Colossal Cave Adventure? When I played it on my uncle's terminal in the 70s it was just called Adventure.
I stayed up all night and didn't get very far. I finally saw a solution online and I wasn't even close.
Historically retailers have employed buyers in charge of selecting products that would appeal to the store’s customers. A customer will likely have different expectations, and have an existing understanding of what sort of products they’ll find if they’re shopping at, say, Nordstrom vs Dollar Tree vs a guy on Canal Street in NYC.
Amazon sort of threw this out with the steady movement towards blending third party sellers in with products they sell directly. They made it less and less obvious and easy to filter based on seller over time, so now you have all sorts of junk from the digital equivalent of street vendors mixed with normal products, and it’s up to the shopper to figure it out. They tolerate tricks and fraudulent behavior from those sellers much more than they should.
Amazon could, if they wanted, make it easy to filter for products that have been selected by a buyer who has a relationship with the vendor, and are directly sold by Amazon themselves, but it’s seemingly more profitable to allow third parties to peddle garbage en masse.
For what it's worth, I evaluated Fly.io during a divorce from Heroku some time in mid 2022 (I think), found the platform was... way too rough around the edges at the time to want to migrate any real workloads. I kept it on my radar and shipped an MVP with it in 2024, found it was a lot more polished, and now have multiple production apps running there. I'm genuinely pumped about Sprites and have started building against the API—I did notice the weirdness with the docs, but you guys have been doing well on the "this thing that {was broken|I didn't like|was missing} now works the way I'd hoped it would" front.
Pure speculation, but I’d guess that an arrangement with Google comes with all sorts of ancillary support that will help things go smoothly: managed fine tuning/post-training, access to updated models as they become available, safety/content-related guarantees, reliability/availability terms so the whole thing doesn’t fall flat on launch day etc.
Probably repeatability and privacy guarantees around infrastructure and training too. Google already have very defined splits for their Gemma and in house models with engineers and researchers rarely communicating directly.
This is the thing that makes any conversation about broad categories of food difficult—there’s just a huge range of ways to package those carbs, and people eat a ton of “hyper palatable” foods. A few hundred calories of Smartfood popcorn with a day’s worth of sodium and addicting flavors is quite different in my experience than, say, a few slices of chewy, crusty sourdough bread.
Working on a system like this (mostly configured with complex yaml, but extended with a little DSL/rule engine to handle more complex situations) a long while ago, I introduced a bug that cost the company quite a bit of money by using `True` instead of `true`—something that would have been readily caught in a proper language with real tooling.
That's a pretty frustrating market segment to shop for in the US these days, given there are so many good options that just aren't sold here. I was looking for similar cars early last year and quickly ruled out Golfs (and a variety of others) over the total lack of actual buttons. So annoying. I wound up with a Mini Clubman—another fun premium compact that's now no longer being made.
Yeah, I also considered a Mini then, and just took my wife shopping for her new vehicle. She also likes smaller cars so we considered getting her a 2026 Mini Cooper S but they've gone the other way and done almost everything on a single center-screen, there's no actual instrument panel anymore, but there is a HUD at least in the higher trims. Ultimately this was a huge turn-off for her, and we ended up getting her a 2025 Lexus ES350 (which I realize is quite a bit larger vehicle than a Mini Cooper).
When I vehicle shop, my budget isn't endless, but it's fairly uninhibited because I keep cars for an average of 10+ years and I like driving and want it to be an experience I enjoy. That said, companies just aren't making cars I like much anymore. I /loathe/, utterly /detest/ crossovers, and that's the vast majority of new vehicles being brought to market. Even vehicle lines that I previously liked, such as the BMW 3 series, have become enshittified in weird ways that dilute the core concept of that particular vehicle line. I'd love an E92 M3 w/ DCT but made in 2025/2026, but that's not made anymore and I think the current G80 M3 is a much worse car in every way that matters to me, even though the S58 is in some ways a better engine.
It's really disappointing and frustrating trying to find a decent vehicle these days.
Ironically people are constantly surprised every time this comes up that I cross-shopped a Mazda 3 vs an Audi RS3, but if you put aside some of the cost difference (which isn't as large as you think, it's 50% more, not 2x the price), Mazda is trying to up its game and move into the Japanese Luxury space to compete with Lexus, Acura, and Infinity rather than the other Japanese brands. Some issues aside, I think the execution on the interior of the Mazda 3 Premium is pretty great, especially at its price point ($40k base).
The US, for example, apportions representatives and votes for President in a way that overweights less populated states, and there are various aspects of parliamentary systems that help avoid landing in a two-party system where a simple majority gets the say in everything—they force compromise and coalition building among disparate groups. Additionally, Constitutional systems will enumerate the rights of its citizens such that they cannot simply be taken away by a simple majority of any body.
Democratic countries are also basically never "pure" democracies where everyone votes on every decision as in your Plato's ship analogy—we elect people who audition for the role of running the ship, ostensibly those among the people who are best suited to the task.
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