Fabric shops are still a thing too, they're often hubs for local tailoring scenes. But they are shutting down one after the other, unfortunately.
That said, hand crafts like tailoring did get a resurgence during the panny-D, I hope it stays. The local Lidl here has affordable sowing machines for sale.
Do they operate independently though? I've always seen them as organizations that rely on donations and of course a supply chain for food while they do some kind of activity themselves to generate revenue, like making beer or wine, or copying books back when. Western / Christian monestaries, anyway.
That said there is an appeal to retreating to one of those and live a simpler life dedicated to one thing. Religion isn't for me but I'm sure there's something like secular monestaries out there (that aren't suicide cults).
example.com-as-a-service, although XaaS is no longer hip so now it'll be example.ai, an AI that will generate an example.com style landing page using frontier AI models. $20 / month for the beginner plan (100 requests/month), contact us for pricing.
Before this submission, it genuinely never occurred to me that people would actually have tests that rely on example.com being up, let alone depend on its content.
A significant portion of the traffic to example.com is not from (explicit) testing, but originates from sample code in which the URLs have not been changed from the original template.
Opus 5.5 in Claude code added a unit test checking DNS and internet access using example.com as the target on a project I'm building yesterday. It's an agent sandbox (I know, yet another), so the call was expected to fail, but still... It should have at least targeted a captive portal endpoint or a project owned domain.
I caught it in review but thousands of others won't.
More likely the agents will fix it as fast as they made it and people will continue not caring so much about reviewing what agents are doing for cases where they don't care so much (which is a lot of cases)
So is wrong to use captive.apple.com for tests as well? It's nice to know your network can reach the internet and these pages are generally fairly reliable.
A HTTP request for http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt returning 200 OK and the text Microsoft NCSI. This is the url windows has been using for decades to determine if the device is online. It is highly reliable.
These pages are unfortunately getting special treatment from quite a few networks these days, among other things to avoid iOS users getting stuck in a loop of trying to connect, and getting disconnected by the OS due to a "non-working connection" for local-only networks like in-flight entertainment systems.
It's a shame that we don't have any standards for the concerns of canonically testing Internet reachability and for authoritatively redirecting network users to a captive payment portal (without having to resort to ugly hacks that often break with TLS).
If they say that it's not intended as a reliable service for testing purposes it can't be that reliable, and they might take it down or change the structure arbitrarily at any time, etc.
So yeah I would pick something simpler for a network access test probably?
If I were to operate a 'service' not intended as a reliable service for testing purposes... I would make sure that it's not reliable - and very unreliable - from the start. So, delayed responses, no responses, garbled responses, duplicate responses, varied responses, ...
The only risk is that Apple hasn't announced it as being reliable or promised to keep it up or the format the same in any way. They could 100% pull it out from under everyone, with modifications in their OSes prepared for the change
I have been naively using example.com in the browser. WHATWG URL throws if there is no origin when constructing the URL. Web apps that need to construct _just_ the pathname must go through this song and dance. `new URL("/blah", "https://example.com").pathname` This isn't relying on any external example.com service but I'm learning the lesson.
I use amazon.com. Being able to ping some near-universally-available responder address doesn't mean you've got general internet connectivity, which connecting to amazon.com is a good proxy for.
Interesting. I'm intending not to reach out it in my case. The goal was to find a safeISH default parameter when constructing a WHATWG URL only for its pathname.
I've seen google STUN servers used in production. Folks probably rely on unpkg too much to deliver their JS. Good to consider these failure modes.
If your service runs on AWS, reaching amazon dot com seems somewhat more reasonable an internal health check.
An "I'll be at xyz" or "I'll be home at abc" will be enough, I don't think the article is calling for location tracking - although plenty of people have that as a matter of course. I wouldn't want that - someone else's anxiety about my whereabouts are not my problem to solve - but plenty of people do.
I want to agree, but the fact it's state-run / promoted gives me the ick. Or, it gives me a lot of conflicted feelings / opinions, let's put it that way.
Like, here in Europe we've got right-wing parties on the rise that have this conspiracy theory that the foreigners are moving here en masse to replace the locals (because of ??? they never explained, our jobs, benefits and women I suppose). So they spend a lot of time and effort fearmongering about the for'ners coming here and bring in laws and policies to keep them out.
Meanwhile they don't seem to be doing anything about those that already live here - you'd think these right-wing, own-people-first types would do anything to ensure people living here would thrive and reproduce. But no free child care, no major economic reform to allow single incomes to buy a house, none of that. Because ultimately it's not about foreigners or "own people first", it's about self-enrichment, got mine fuck you.
>That’s an irrational reaction, probably conditioned by ideology.
And yours isn't?
Like it doesn't take much beyond a room temperature IQ to look at the arc of just about every government these days and make an estimation of where it's going without some substantial unforeseen change of course. The state of the world should merit a little pause and/or self doubt there.
>A well-run state has been perhaps one of the most successful enabling factors for human flourishing in human history.
Historically the states that have dabbled in this area of policy area has been "well run" in only the most dishonest "they accomplished their short term goals" sense of the phrase.
Many people trust the government for policing, military, central banking. Some not.
Many trust them for health care and education, many not.
Very very few don’t trust the government for anything. So for this random example, a dating service, it feels like it’s ideological conditioning (otherwise the OP would explain why it feels bad for them).
>careful, we have a very intelligent individual over here
If you want to take it as a well deserved slight in your direction that's fine but the point was the opposite. Just about anyone can make the insight I did. You don't have to be a genius to see what's going on here.
Not if you think that your government isn't looking out for your best interests. A well run state is exactly what we need, but rarely what we have. Right now we see rising authoritarianism, less transparency, open bribery, more frequent and blatant lying, less accountability, more corruption, democratic backsliding, attacks on civil rights. etc. All that stuff is going to breed skepticism, and it really should. Eroding people's trust in government by actively working to corrupt it and impede it from functioning properly has been a very successful strategy.
Exactly. Eroding trust is such a successful strategy because it weaponizes confirmation bias. Once people are primed to be skeptical, they often come to conclusions irrationally first, and then (knowingly or not) seek only to prove themselves right.
Also the more successful the corruption and break down of government and its institutions are, the more necessary skepticism becomes. For example, you might have faith in the experts at the CDC and the FDA until those agencies get taken over and run by people who compromise its mission and the workers with integrity resign or get fired or get censored and suddenly you've got states scrambling to create things like the West Coast Health Alliance and the Northeast Public Health Collaborative to try to get the actual work done and get real information out to a public that's being misinformed.
The longer the feedback loop continues, and the more people are hurt, the more difficult it will be and the longer it will take to restore faith.
You're right, and you'd think seeing all the ways our government is vulnerable to these problems would result in reforms to fix and prevent those issues, but it seems like a lot of people have given up even trying. Learned helplessness I guess.
Are you implying that there aren't a massive number of foreigners moving to Europe? roughly 10% of the people living in the EU were born outside of it.
Western far-right governments would likely try to use these services to pair white natives with other natives (or otherwise shape the population to their liking). Gross.
Still, there's value in this product in a non-radicalized society.
> If they had such "eyes" on our earth, couldn't they have clearly spotted those Methane emissions from Turkmenistan well earlier than the UN MARS program did?
Yes, but that would "show their hand" - secrecy has always been paramount.
Of course, then Trump came in and freely shared sattelite photos of idk, an Iranian launch site or something which revealed the US's current day spy sattelite capabilities.
See previously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair : the state department didn't like someone disrupting the Iraq narrative construction, so they exposed her CIA status.
You're right in a sense, but that's not necessarily how this works. Sources and methods are classified, but information is not necessarily so. If it could theoretically be obtained in multiple ways, you can release it without showing your hand. The USAF's Office of Special Investigation (used to, at least) informs companies and orgs of the fact that they were hacked, often before the company/org knows itself.
I don't mind companies taking a more careful approach (= being slower); for one, Google is funding itself, Anthropic and OpenAI rely on a steady influx of investor money while they're not profitable - and I think there's a high chance one or both of them will go under and be subsumed into another player. That player will (I think) most likely be a Google or Microsoft, as they have their own means to buy up a party like that.
Or they may choose not to because the companies are massively overvalued and they have their own AI technologies / technologists already.
At this point though, we know AI can "escape" and do criminal acts it wasn't told to do - therefore, if it happens again (= if the developers allow it to happen again) they (the developers) can be held responsible.
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