Lifeguards have very short periods of diligence before they take mandatory breaks in an extremely controlled environment. Train conductors operate on grade separated infrastructure. Security Guards do not have to take split second action or die.
Putting a warm body in a mind-numbing situation and requiring split second response to a life or death situation at a random time is a recipe for failure.
Expecting people to be able to behave like machines is generally the attitude that leads to crash investigations.
Incognito mode (Chrome) and Private mode (Safari/Firefox) and InPrivate Browsing (Edge/IE) have had disclaimers/explanations for years, Chrome just expanded the disclaimer after settling the suit. Unfortunately for them the judge didn’t know how the internet works any better than the plaintiffs. Winding back the odometer on a car doesn’t mean toll roads don’t know you drove there, it just means “you” have no record of it.
Opera / Vivaldi offer an integrated VPN, but they’re about the only ones other than stuff like the Tor Browser.
Same, been kicking myself since I found out it was all gone a few weeks ago. Don’t know why I didn’t make a ‘just in case’ backup / export.
Still infuriating they can just go “oops all gone”. It came through the roll-out fine, I remember looking stuff up in February. As far as I can tell it was a later unrelated glitch.
Google also accidentally deleted a random amount of user’s timeline data if you didn’t immediately catch it and restore from back up last March before the affected backups were overwritten. If you didn’t keep a close enough watch on your timeline to know that that happened, everything before ~Feb 2025 is gone now.
Ask me how I know. Yes I kept up on permissions. Yes I had backups on. No I didn’t have a new device. I even have dozens of available gigabytes of paid storage on Google One.
I’m sure it will only get more stable due to maps and timeline being revenue generators that encourage investment.
I’m sure that there are examples of actually wasted money, but just putting it out there that planning is fucking important. There have been several high profile projects, like Texas high speed rail, where planning was the hard part and the project got canceled as they were ready to break ground because “there was no progress”. Cue* Republicans “the government does nothing” after they stopped anything from happening. Infrastructure cannot operate on election cycle timelines.
Digging in the ground and integrating with existing infrastructure isn’t just a plug and play operation. Leases and liens need to be sorted out. Estimates of current and future demand needs to be sorted out so you don’t install useless networks. Fiber isn’t that heavy, but “can the existing conduits under bridges/roads/etc support it and/or do they have room to without a complete replacement” isn’t a trivial question for backbone lines.
Winging it just causes more problems as you find things you didn’t anticipate and cause delays while having to continue paying contracts so work can resume once the delay is cleared. If you don’t, the contractor is on to their next job and unavailable for an effectively random amount of time. While everyone is mad at you that “no work is being done”.
It could be done faster, but it would cost more. Because planning is really important to keep multi-million/billion dollar projects accountable and on track.
Sure. But in the first Fast and Furious movie they’re not driving syncro-less transmission semis. They’re driving tricked out sports cars in a straight line and somehow having about 14 gear changes in a 6 speed manual.
I feel like using that statistic is misleading in terms of efficiency just from the factor of “gallons of gas per pound of food transported”.
Sure there’s spoilage from product going bad, but marginal efficiency gains there are so far down the list of things to worry about that they’re not really worth going into. The reason people don’t have food isn’t because enough isn’t produced, it’s because they’re not allowed to have it because they don’t have enough money. Less food spoiling doesn’t fix that problem.
If the message is “that circle of people in the back of the crowd are mumbling something”, it doesn’t matter.
More people checking out instead of getting involved means the more easily influenced are all that remain to campaign for.
And what I mean is that prior to the mid 1900s the etymology didn’t exist to cause that confusion of terms. Neither Babbage’s machines nor prior adding engines were called computers or calculators. They were ‘machines’ or ‘engines’.
Babbage’s machines were novel in that they could do multiple types of operations, but ‘mechanical calculators’ and counting machines were ~200 years old. Other mathematical tools like the abacus are obviously far older. They were not novel enough to cause confusion in anyone with even passing interest.
But there will always be people who just assume ‘magic’, and/or “it works like I want it to”.
“Computer” meaning a mechanical/electro-mechanical/electrical machine wasn’t used until around after WWII.
Babbag’s difference/analytical engines weren’t confusing because people called them a computer, they didn’t.
“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
- Charles Babbage
If you give any computer, human or machine, random numbers, it will not give you “correct answers”.
It’s possible Babbage lacked the social skills to detect sarcasm. We also have several high profile cases of people just trusting LLMs to file legal briefs and official government ‘studies’ because the LLM “said it was real”.
I think because it’s language.
There’s a famous quote from Charles Babbage when he presented his difference engine (gear based calculator) and someone asking “if you put in the wrong figures, will the correct ones be output” and Babbage not understanding how someone can so thoroughly misunderstand that the machine is, just a machine.
People are people, the main thing that’s changed since the Cuneiform copper customer complaint is our materials science and networking ability. Most things that people interact with every day, most people just assume work like it appears to on the surface.
And nothing other than a person can do math problems or talk back to you. So people assume that means intelligence.
That’s what config files are for. It would be a nightmare to hardcode weight and balance and have to recompile the HUD every time you change the loadout or refuel the plane.
Most code, algorithms, etc are not any more sensitive than the concept of desks and file cabinets. No, guidance programs for missiles probably shouldn’t be put on GitHub, but there’s a reason RSA and other encryption algorithms were open sourced. It’s better to have more eyes looking for inefficiencies, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities than to just assume it’s good because no-one on the team responsible is smart/engaged enough to find them.
A lot of functionality can be decoupled from anything that needs to be classified. A HUD is a HUD and no one should be hard coding in performance characteristics of the F-35 into it. I’ve also worked on government projects and holy crap does the code quality vary wildly, even before you get into “it’s still working so deal with the problems, it doesn’t have the budget for updates”.
Using ‘off the shelf’ parts/code can save significant time and money. There’s a reason subs use xbox controllers. Government websites and data interfaces at the very least should have the audit-ability that open source provides.
Also it’s Hard Rock Cafe, they have a burger with shrimp on it, what’s so weird about mix n’ matching patties?
The “magnetic forces do no work” thing is maddening.
The guy who is ‘the guy’ for that level of physics textbooks just happens to be determined to prove a non-quantum mechanics based explanation of magnetism so the book is written from that perspective without actually saying it. Of course.
In theory yes, but not a lot of people are uploading their family photo albums AFAIK.
I think it would be interesting to have some kind of global archive. Even if descendants don’t care “now” has the potential to be the beginning of the best documented era in history. Historians would kill for photographs by random average people from any other time.
A lot of people thought that that’s what the Internet would be, but that’s obviously not the case. And I know the “right to be forgotten” is a thing, and deservedly so, but at some point you’re throwing out the wine with the amphora.
Some of that’s cultural momentum right? Like I don’t know how many pickles it takes to make a Peck of Pickles despite hours singing about it as a kid. There’s not a lot of reason sans-nostalgia to read an analog clock or drive a manual car. (I love my manual, but they’re not getting any less niche with EVs on the way.)
And everyone’s going to learn something the first time, some time. But it is just nuts that for some people that is apparently after getting a job with a Bachelor’s, somehow. So much time, money, and energy was spent in the 90s/00s having computer classes in schools and now so much of it has been cut because the people in charge are so out of touch that watching youtube on a device designed to be easily usable is indistinguishable from “technical skills”.
Lifeguards take breaks every ~20 minutes, not just to look down or zone out, to get up and move around. And again, are in an extremely controlled environment looking for a very small number of specific problems.
Elon is making programmers sleep at their desks.