Can and want to or being efficient are different things. I "can" travel around in a city using public transport with 3 kids and all their sporting equipment, do I want to, no. Would any sane person want to? No.
see, this is the narrow minded view of so many europeans. Well just go to a closer sports club....is not an answer to the problem that thousands of people experience with small cars, and small roads.
Many more thousands have no issues with small cars or going to a closer sports club.
If the roads in cities are wide enough in cities for literal trucks, then they're wide enough for your car. Widening roads and making cars bigger makes pretty much everyone less safe.
Don't get me wrong, you're free to live in the boonies and drive 400km to your sports club, but don't call me narrow minded because I can load up 5 people in my VW passat and drive 500km for a 10 day vacation, or because I prefer not to get bulldozed by a car with a higher hood than me while walking to my local sports club.
That’s a bit of a strawman argument. Most journeys don’t consist of three children and all their sporting equipment.
As a practical example, in the UK, on average a young g child lives 1.7miles away from their school.
That is an easily walkable distance for most children, yet lots of parents choose to drive it because they feel the streets aren’t safe to walk on in rush hour.
If by redesigning streets to make active travel more appealing, you could reduce the number of cars on the school run by 10%; it would improve the traffic situation for the ones who still need to drive. Win-win
>This article gave an LLM a bunch of health metrics and then asked it to reduce it to a single score, didn't tell us any of the actual metric values, and then compared that to a doctor's opinion. Why anyone would expect these to align is beyond my understanding.
This gets to one of LLMs' core weaknesses, they blindly respond to your requests and rarely push back against the premise of it.
I read somewhere that LLM chat apps are optimized to return something useful, not correct or comprehensive (where useful is defined as the user accepts it). I found this explanation to be a useful (ha!) way to explain to friends and family why they need to be skeptical of LLM outputs.
I've come to the opinion that for the vast majority of apps I've built, it could all be built using HTML + CSS (all built server side). I can sprinkle in little bits of interactivity using something like HTMX. And I'll have a website that is very easy to optimise, has phenomenal backwards compatibility, and gets rid of a whole class of issues associated with SPAs.
I often regret in my career not pushing back more on "requirements" that ended up requiring a more complicated app, whereas the customer would have been happier with a simpler solution.
I guess you're right, but it's more of a curve, though. Once you get to any decent level of complexity, it actually helps to have a framework instead of just going all HTML+CSS. Also it helps having something standard as react (that every web developer should fundamentally understand) than doing your custom stuff if other people will be working on it in the future.
There's a lot to say about the side effects of frameworks but there's a reason why everything converges towards that.
I think it's the other way around, a framework will get you up and running quickly, but then it becomes technical dept, and if your app is complicated you will end up fighting the framework.
If you write something from scratch it will take a while to reach to the abstraction level where you can work fast. But then you have a fully custom abstraction layer that is not a "one size fits all" but custom tailored for your needs.
Good luck with hiring, onboarding, and maintenance of your bespoke solution. Also with your resume when seeking your next gig. For any serious project, ignore community and ecosystem health at your peril. To be clear, we're talking about framework selection, not leftpad vs DIY.
What you’re describing sounds like it was the customs check. Pre-brexit, if you were arriving from the EU, then there was no customs check since we were all part of the same customs union.
From a customs perspective, flying from one EU country to another EU is treated like a domestic flight.
If I (a British citizen) flew from London to New York, then on to Chicago; I'd expect to go through customs when I arrived at New York, but not when I arrived at Chicago.
I've come to the opinion that for the vast majority of apps I've built, it could all be built using HTML + CSS (all built server side). I can sprinkle in little bits of interactivity using something like HTMX. And I'll have a website that is very easy to optimise, has phenomenal backwards compatibility, and gets rid of a whole class of issues associated with SPAs.
I often regret in my career not pushing back more on "requirements" that ended up requiring a more complicated app, whereas the customer would have been happier with a simpler solution.
No need for HTMX, HTMZ can get you most of the way there if it is going from simple MPA to slightly more complicated. I used a variation of HTMZ to make a offline-first soccer app I use for myself. I thought I would need to use a front end for the match play page, but, nope, I used Morphdom with HTMZ and I was able to keep the simplicity of templating and a back end.
Follow the sun does not happen by itself. Very few if any engineering teams are equally split across thirds of the globe in such a way that (say) Asia can cover if both EMEA and the Americas are offline.
Having two sites cover the pager is common, but even then you only have 16 working hours at best and somebody has to take the pager early/late.
With self hosting email, if the digital sovreignty aspect is more important to you than the privacy aspect...
What I do is use gmail with a custom domain, self host an email server, and use mbysnc[1] to always be downloading my emails from gmail. Then I connect to that email server for reading my emails, but still use gmail for sending.
It also means that google can't lock me out of my emails, I still retain all my emails, and if I want move providers, I simply change the DNS records of my domain. But I don't have any issues around mail delivery.
I did all of those DNS shnigannas with spf, dmarc and others ones like 6 years ago.
I think I had problems with my emails like 2 twice , with one exchange server of some small recruitment company. I think it was misconfigured.
Ah there were also some problem with gmail at the beginning they banned my domain because I was sending test emails to my own account there. I had to register my domain on their BS email post master tools website and configure my DNS with some key.
In overall I had much more problem with automatic backups, services going down for no reason, IPs being dynamic and etc. Email server just works.
The custom domain is all you need for complete e-mail sovereignty. As long as you have it, you can select between hundreds (thousands?) of providers, and take your business elsewhere at any time.
Not OP, but yes. For personal use, you don't have enough traffic to establish reputation, so you get constantly blocked regardless of DKIM/DMARC/SPF/rDNS. Receiving mail is reliable though, so you can do that yourself and outsource just sending to things like Amazon SES or SMTP relays.
Depending on your mail flow, there's SendGrid and other options at a pretty reasonable cost to handle delivery concerns. I have one server set for sendgrid and another I've got setup for direct delivery... the only issue I've had sending from my own is to Outlook.com servers (not o365 or hotmail though). With DMARC/SPF, etc, gmail has been okay as well.
I never sign up for subscriptions anymore without using a virtual card. Once I've paid the yearly fee, I immediately cancel the card. When it comes to renew, they'll be very keen to let me know that my card needs updating.
The use cases in their videos are interesting, I suppose the world we live in is build for humans, so it makes sense to build a robot that is human shaped. So we don't need to buy new washing machines and redesign our house to get a robot maid.
The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like. If you're getting rid of the human and losing all the benefits of that, then just replace it with a kiosk (or mobile check in), which will do a far better job than a robot.
All factors of "it was Vegas" aside, one of the things that stood out to me was that the hotels have moved rapidly to rapid checkin/checkout systems where you punch in your confirmation code or name/dob and present a photo ID of some kind (passports can just be slapped against the reader) and it asks a few questions ("do you need late checkout", etc), directs you to the exact place your room is (and prints it, which was nice) and tells you where the bellhop station is if there's more than a little while before your room is ready and it can't dispense your cards.
All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans, but they "moved faster" because it didn't feel like queuing for a human, more... "waiting for a toilet"?
Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.
As for the washing machine bit: Why not push for more standards usage in home automation? We have Thread, which is really cool, and which is driving the home automation future that we're slowly getting. Once it's loaded, a homebot should't have to check the thing manually, it should get information about when, what, and how and be able to have "eyes in the back of its head" so to speak.
>All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans
Probably about 1% of the cost of the humans though...
>Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.
A robot would be less reliable than a kiosk, so if you're going to have some kind of machine replace the human, you might as well have a kiosk.
The ideal model (IMO) is a hybrid model, where you have lots of kiosks for the 90% of cases where there are no issues, and a few humans on standby to drop in and assist people who are having issues.
Or better yet, do away with the check in desk, and let people check in on their phone (some hotels already do this, and you tap your phone on the door to unlock)
> Or better yet, do away with the check in desk, and let people check in on their phone (some hotels already do this, and you tap your phone on the door to unlock)
So one more app to install that I'm sure would be a privacy nightmare.
I was recently thinking about this dynamic about human-oriented vs efficiency-oriented innovation. We haven't really hesitated (in, I'd argue, the majority of cases) to pick efficiency over human-friendliness. This seems like it will be a big reckoning as robotics arrives. The argument for humanoids is that the world is built for humans, but as robotics start to be capable of completing tasks end-to-end, then suddenly there is no reason to keep the space human-friendly, and humanoids kinda lose their value.
An illustrative example is a warehouse. They're still partly designed for humans because they're not fully automated, but the need to make them human-friendly will disappear soon.
So I’ve ranting for years that hotels and car rental places should automate check-in - it should take only seconds to get your key with pre-filled data and a QR code.
This week, I had my first experience with exactly this at a car hire company. It was… not smooth.
It took multiple attempts (with requests for help to the employees in between) to get the system to recognise our code, whereupon we learned (by way of an unhelpful generic error message) that the system had somehow given someone else ‘our’ car. After another round of asking for human help, we had to wait while someone came outside, unlocked the machine, and put the keys for our new car inside. We then went through the code process again, and were finally given the keys.
The vision is somewhere there, but the execution isn’t exactly the future we’re hoping for!
The last two times I've rented a car have been with Avis, both times in about the last year. The first of these times they had rolled out their nearly fully automated workflow. Check in on my phone, it told me which car in the lot was mine, gave me a chance to report any existing damages. Rolled to the exit, had a QR code on my phone scanned, rolled through some camera tunnel, and I was on my way. There was a guy at the exit making sure things went smoothly.
The next time their computer system was hard down. Everything by paper in person. They didn't have enough forms for tracking it all, they were literally just writing things down on blank printer paper. No idea what cars were really in the lot. Show us your reservation and your id, we'll write it all down, and here's a key. Good luck finding the car. Was complete chaos.
Ridiculous, but ironically I think walking robots as self-relocating computers might be the most readily viable.
Small servers with console, PA speakers, field metrology or data acquisition machines, those things could have the lower torso or two for this and relocated as needed. The PhD guys can just park the truck and let those deploy wherever AI thinks >65% suitable for human use on their own, instead of users burning 15% of brain juice thinking and executing that. That would be immensely useful.
(also re: hotels that others are commenting, there were never technical reasons the door keycard readers couldn't ever had doubled as credit card readers - I think the reason why clerks are required is for sanity check, that the guests aren't in need of immediate safety/health assistance and ok to proceed to beds)
My initial reaction to the hotel scene was: Ehhh, I like being able to read lips, as I wear hearing aids.
But yeah, I'd happily just check in at a kiosk and get my room card that way. (And I'm sure phone-as-key, no-contact check-in is only going to get more common)
>> The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like
I would pay extra to avoid it - just let me download a pass like a boarding pass to my Apple Wallet as I walk through the front door and head directly to my room.
I mean standing there for 10 minutes and giving them my passport to give me a plastic card with a digital code has very little to do with human touch.
I want that human touch at a bar perhaps but not at a reception.
If your critisism is only about the reception part: There has to be a transition part and a 'let a human do it for a bit' or 'here is a complicated case please robot move aside i'm here'.
Designing a city that helps people make those journeys car free, makes it better for the 10% of journeys that do need to be made with a car.
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