In the old days, airlines and power grids were incentivized by regulations to spend money to build extra capacity into their systems to increase reliability in times of crisis.
Now they're all deregulated and they are highly incentivized by their shareholders not to overbuild capacity because it costs money and provides zero return on investment.
The upshot is that these industries operate with zero excess capacity. They work fine when everything goes as planned, but the minute something breaks or a storm happens, everything cascades into a steaming pile of shit.
In the case of the airlines, competitive market forces previously provided some incentive to invest in reliability but so many airline mergers have been allowed to happen that there's effectively no airline competition in the US any more.
I think i once heard this referred to as *delicapitalism* (or maybe it was deli-capitalism)...which, if recall correctly, means capitalist incentives, behaviors/actions that over time result in a more delicate world/ecosystem, etc. Something like that i think.
Nothing. For the employers who are do debased that they would use this sort of tool, they deserve all the cheap low-parameter model outputs one can throw at them.
AI Loopidity is when AI is used to manage AI, like ballooning bullet points to an email which then get reduced to bullet points.
A classic example of worse is better. The Lisa was better in every way except price, but improving the underpowered Mac over time was a better business strategy than finding economies of scale with the Lisa.
It's true that the latter approach was never actually tried, but looking back on the tech trends it seems clear it would have taken at least 10 years before the Lisa became affordable. (Next is a reasonable proxy for Lisa-level technology.) By that time the market would have forgotten about it. The Mac captured a market from day one.
I was there starting in 86 and I can tell you that at least some of the Lisa folks were still upset about how the project was treated. I think there's an argument that preserving the Lisa as a high end product would have made sense. The workstation market remained a thing for some time (think Sun) and having a common application base spread across a consumer and workstation-ish product line could have been very lucrative, especially in the late 80's and early 90's when Apple really started to lose steam. Internal efforts to come up with a Mac OS that took advantage of memory protection hardware (available as an option starting with the 68020 and becoming built in starting with the 030, I seem to remember) ran into challenges and their failure limited Apple's ability to differentiate against Windows. (Heck MS ended up arguably beating Apple to a high/low strategy with 95/NT.) Also the Lisa folks I knew tended to be more principled designers than the hack-forward Mac team. Pushing forward with both sort of folks leading would have preserved an essential creative tension that the company kinda lost as a result of stomping on the Lisa team.
Yes this is exactly my point. The Mac was a semi-expedient branching point in an effort to get an idea to market, but that's not really the sum of it. Choices were clearly made for personal and political reasons, and it cost Apple 10 years later when it had no answer for Windows NT or Unix.
And I don't think it was about "worse is better" -- they shipped the org chart, really, forked a new team under Jobs to make a "like Lisa but cheap" but it wasn't just "but cheap", it was 100% incompatible, and sacrificed on basic engineering fundamentals.
It also makes no sense to me. The Lisa hardware was expensive, but I think LisaOS could have been made to run on less expensive hardware by jettisoning features, and then picked up again later. Instead because of personalities and org chart they went and made a completely incompatible other-thing that looked like LisaOS without being it, duplicating effort and creating internal ill will, and short circuiting potential futures.
Anyways, Jobs profited it off it twice. Ego satisfaction with shipping the Mac, and killing off the Lisa -- his grudge/nemesis. And then again when Apple was forced to come to him 10 years later and buy NeXTstep because of what Jobs had done in 84.
Another weirdness was that for the first couple of years of the Mac's existence you had to have a Lisa if you wanted to write code for it. The Mac had so little RAM that it couldn't run a Pascal compiler. For this reason, when I bought a Mac in 1984 I also bought a Lisa with a huge 5MB (!) hard drive.
You bring up a great point though: Whatever happened to LisaOS? Did anybody archive the source anywhere or did it completely vanish?
I briefly looked at it, it's a pile of Object Pascal and M68k asssembly. I haven't looked to see if anybody has managed to make it compile in any kind of available-today compiler yet.
The main reasons I don't have "smart" devices in my house:
1. They introduce new and fascinating failure modes that never happened with the old, dumb devices (e.g. if your router fails you lose the ability to control your lights).
2. They demand human attention at the slightest provocation (e.g. the microwave beeps loudly forever when your food is done, every app on your phone insists on interacting with you whenever the company would like to upsell you something, etc.)
Item 2 above is what TFA is about.
Yes you can often turn this shit off, but that's not the point. The point is you shouldn't have to. Useful technology should never call attention to itself in the manner of someone with narcissistic personality disorder.
But what about emergency situations? Glad you asked. Many airplane crashes in modern aircraft have happened because of "warning buzzer overload" which happens when one important system on the aircraft fails and then causes a cascade of secondary warnings, while giving the pilot no insight as to the root cause. A true AI assistant would reason about such situations and guide the pilot toward the root solution.
A true coding assistant would do the same kind of reasoning about program errors and suppress multipage error dumps in favor of flagging the root issue.
I'm sure your doc already told you this but chest pain while playing tennis that goes away quickly sounds more like angina than a heart attack. IOW your episode was not a heart attack but rather a strong indicator that a future heart attack was likely and that further tests were warranted.
A real heart attack (MI) -- the kind that can kill you quickly -- is usually not exercise related and the pain continues for many tens of minutes without going away.
PSA: If you experience either type of symptom above, call 911. Don't wait around and don't drive yourself to the hospital. Take an aspirin if you have one handy and you're not allergic to it. Real aspirin, not ibuprofen or tylenol.
I'm a good swimmer and the only time I've ever been scared in the water was when I was using one of those damn pool noodles. These colorful toys just love to turn you upside down in the water. They're dangerous as hell.
> And why the hell do we still fuel GA aircraft with a gasoline that's literally ILLEGAL to use anywhere else?
Unleaded avgas is a thing now. But it won't work with many legacy aviation engines. I hope this new rule will finally enable some engine (and thus fuel) innovation.
Now they're all deregulated and they are highly incentivized by their shareholders not to overbuild capacity because it costs money and provides zero return on investment.
The upshot is that these industries operate with zero excess capacity. They work fine when everything goes as planned, but the minute something breaks or a storm happens, everything cascades into a steaming pile of shit.
In the case of the airlines, competitive market forces previously provided some incentive to invest in reliability but so many airline mergers have been allowed to happen that there's effectively no airline competition in the US any more.
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