The problem is that there is no indication for now that users want integrate AI experience - feels like people are just too much into app specific things like "I use this app for this".
> 2) housing costs and genera cost of living making police salaries unattractive,
A friend's neighbor in wine country is an early retired officer due to injury - their benefits pretty much match many tech workers.
Looks like in San Jose police salaries start at $111k and max out at $186k, BUT additionally SJ spent $58M on overtime. _Average_ overtime pay for officer, sgt, lt and captain were $38-68k and some earned as much $200k in overtime. So the salary is probably $150-$220k on average I'd assume. Not as bad as many think.
The German's have this saying - "Erstens kommt es anders, zweitens als man denkt.". So I think we may have gotten existential AI risk wrong.
Existential AI risk may not be about killer robots turning us into paperclips but rather AI companions leading to fertility collapse and the end of civilization as we know it. You don't even need AGI for that - OpenAI and GPT4o seems enough.
Wasn't the strategy to exploit the European dependence on gas a failure then though because especially Germany didn't really put up a fight against the sanctions to keep using the cheap Russian gas.
One can argue about how "painless" it was, but I would have thought that stopping Russian gas imports within a few months would cause a recession and a lot more havoc in the economy. And I always assumed that was what Russia was counting on, Germany's dependence and thus tacit support but I didn't see much of that.
As much hate as California gets, the CPRA and CPPA give me a little hope. Otherwise, maybe Europe might be better off with the GDPR.
But I'm almost more worried about what a company in such a position will do monetarily to its customers once it has reached a quasi-monopoly (or duopoly). I hope it turns out to be more like air-travel than Uber/Lyft, which afaict are now more expensive than cabs they replaced.
It is possible Google could run away with the game based on two moats: 1. Mapping data; 2. Driving AI. But that outcome is far from certain.
OTOH does Google really want to own all the taxis, vans, and busses on the planet? I expect that if Waymo matures into a product that can be used anywhere on any shared vehicle, the companies that provide the tech will have a supplier relationship with lots of different vehicle operators.
Booking.com does sometimes seem not to do a proper integration and just rely on emails or phone calls to confirm the bookings. I've used them multiple times around 10 years ago and the hotel would show me a printout of an email from them with my booking details afair.
A friend of mine recently had to sleep in the car because booking never confirmed her reservation with the hotel and wouldn't accept her booking.com confirmation printout.
That depends entirely on the hotel. They can use one of the many booking systems that integrate with booking.com through XML or they can choose not to. If they choose not to, then they will have to manually sync availability and receive their bookings by e-mail. A nightmare, but their own fault for not running their business properly.
> A friend of mine recently had to sleep in the car because booking never confirmed her reservation with the hotel and wouldn't accept her booking.com confirmation printout.
If the hotel has any booking system on their own website, there is a good chance that it integrates with booking.com and others. If they ask guests to book by phone or email, then they probably do not have any integration.
I don't necessarily think it is the equivalent. Maybe it's more akin to a high-schooler reading a single book and then being asked to write several new books that hold equal weight in teaching the next generation of children.
These new text books could be great at simplifying the subject matter and making the material accessible or they may just never have fully understood the materials and are misleading.
Now imagine that over and over again, imo it's pretty likely to introduce inaccuracies if just taking a naiive approach.
I use Bluesnooze [1] on my Mac for that reason, it won't even disconnect when suspended otherwise and you have to log back in to turn off BT. It's pretty easy to disable on phones/tablets otherwise.
Sodium batteries are on the verge of commercialization, they're better in almost every way but energy density, making them ideal for energy storage imo. My hope is that this and other steps like this will make battery storage sustainable.
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