Are you referring to the 5 or 9 digit variant? Presumably not the 11 digit one as that corresponds to your unique address. (It follows that the 9 digit variant corresponds to at most 100 mailboxes.)
I've never tried inputting my 11 digit code in an online form but at least the 9 digit one is readily accepted. In my experience the last 4 will usually be completed for me based on the street address and if it can't find a match it gives me an error.
It is extremely convenient when filling in online forms, giving an address over the phone, or when getting into a non-app taxi.
Web forms and the in-car navigation prompt first for the postcode, then present a list of the full addresses and you pick one.
Over the phone, "W10 6TR" also avoids needing to spell anything, and I encourage you to search Google for it.
There's also some human readable part. The W means West London, people who live in West or South West London will be familiar with some numbers - W10 is Ladbrook Grove. B is Birmingham, BS is Bristol, BT is Belfast etc.
"That One Time It Powered a Genocide" is just an older example of how IBM is happy to put profit over principles. They have a long history that includes happily selling to authoritarian regimes¹, knowingly selling technology that doesn't work², commercializing biometric data without consent³, age discrimination, and more.
I don't have a dog in this fight and if there are recent examples of this kind of crap going on, by all means publicize them. My issue is with people who drag up shit from 100 years ago and they go "see how bad they are?"
Go back far enough and everyone's had a skeleton in their closet.
We are on a well (rural area). The water is so hard here that when the house was built, they needed both a water softener and an iron filter to treat it.
I had an issue this winter with my septic system freezing up and in order to prevent an overflow before the tank could be pumped, I was told to put the treatment system on bypass (water softener cycles dump a lot of waste water down the drain). Even with the hard well water going through the dishwasher, it never failed to clean the dishes properly. This dishwasher is 22 years old.
"Lights out manufacturing" has been a thing around the world for literally decades. This is not new. The main "problem" is feeding the machines enough raw material and removing finished parts so they can keep running without human intervention. Not surprisingly, there are now robots for that.
reply