I am not a pilot and I don't know anything about flying. I can go along with the idea that the pilot / crew made mistakes. So the next obvious question is how do we make sure this does not happen again?
I am not a pilot nor do I know aviation but I sincerely doubt the air traffic controller on duty has the mental capacity to babysit each and every plane that is departing and arriving second guessing each and every decision they make. I don't know if they even have access to all the data the pilots have and even if they did I don't know if they can make decisions on time. I mean the way I see it the ATC will coordinate with grounds crew to make sure a plane can land/crash land as safely as possible even if it has no engines, wheels, or even flaps. I don't know how but I know they will try their best to coordinate everyone the best they can.
> Age-gating requirements also force everyone to give up more personal information. To verify who can pass through their online gates, companies will collect even more data, and this further concentrates power in the hands of companies, rather than protecting people.
This really should be enough why social media bans are neither necessary not sufficient.
If anything, we should be focused on the real problem, which is abolishing the CFAA. It is a law from a time we didn't properly understand computers and computer networks and should be completely repealed with no replacement.
In my experience it comes from the business and people who think if we need to touch the same code twice in the same month it is somehow a moral failing of some kind.
> They also keep bringing up gigantic mono-repos and how Git can't handle the scale at which AI increases the amount of code bloat or commits.
I don't understand why everyone keeps saying "AI" can write code and somehow the rest of the world can't keep up when we haven't even solved a more basic problem that "AI" itself can't keep up with the code it writes. Claude on the web has to search and scan to find the relevant parts and for whatever reason there is a size limit to how much context I can give to claude and it is laughably low. Shouldn't we be trying to see if it can keep up with itself first? Also not all project files fit in the "context" so once you are in search mode anyway, why is the limit so arbitrarily small? Why not allow at least about 1GiB of plain text? Claude tells me 1 GiB is 250 million tokens and it is too much for current capacity but I thought the whole point of project files was not all of it is in the context window or whatever. It says it is in search mode anyway... So only search for the relevant bit and put only that in the context. You can limit your search to a particular submodule or something but still have broader context where required
>> > They also keep bringing up gigantic mono-repos and how Git can't handle the scale at which AI increases the amount of code bloat or commits.
I also doubt very much that the average monorepo is bigger than the linux kernel. While the latter is a single software as things go, it contains quasi independent subsystems. And those repos don't usually have a merge flow that is as smooth as the Linux kernel. If you have chaotic process, then the result won't be very good and it's not git's fault.
In my opinion, the only solution is everyone (individuals as well as corporations) gets a direct account with the federal reserve as long as you can associate a taxpayer identification with the account. Using it is voluntary but it is free of cost, paid for by taxes, and moving money to and from accounts is free of cost. Depositors would get the same overnight interest rate that banks do, and this interest is added every day. I think if we could make this happen, the chokehold of Mastercard and Visa can be greatly diminished. The disintermediation of commercial banks, the loss of credit card perks, and the added cost of customer service should be an acceptable cost of removing the parasites visa and master card from our economy.
most importantly, this opens up a lot of money that the federal reserve can hold directly, something that will become more and more important as bond yields go sky high.
This is an important question- most of the costs of a credit card providers come from dealing with fraud and chargebacks. That's partially because, under US law, credit card companies have to eat fraudulent charges if they can't get the person or company that did the fraud to do so. (Funnily enough, this is one of two places where protections for average people in the US are significantly better than protections for average people in Europe).
But credit card companies can keep their costs low by making a business decision not to renew the accounts of frequent chargeback-ers or chargeback-ees (even if they never officially found those individuals at fault). If the government had to make a payment system for everyone and take on all responsibility for all fraud, that would create an incentive with massive second-order effects.
You resolve it the same way you handle in-store cash purchases of products that turn out to be faulty.
There is no reason why fraud and contract violation must be handled by unelected and unaccountable payment processor, when the government has already set up a consumer protection system for disputes related to cash payments. The payment processor is best left as a dumb pipe that does what parties and (in case of disputes) courts tell it to do.
Here, this is standardized, and if a local subscription service provider wants to pull money from my account I explicitly grant them permission to do that, which I can revoke at a later point.
You have to consider the interest of the involved parties rather than the efficiency of a system.
Making a purchase is (still) voluntary for the customer.
For everyday purchases at physical stores, cards are convenient. You just swipe and maybe put your PIN. But other digital payment methods or cash can be just as convenient. You're never going to chargeback a coffee, a sandwich, or your groceries.
But for distance purchases such as online shopping, hotel bookings, flight reservations and such, trust is the most important factor, not convenience. Cards have fraud protection. Other payment systems do not. These "unelected and unaccountable" people can actually help you if you've been the victim of wire fraud. Much faster and much less of a hassle than going through the courts. And if they don't help you, you haven't in any way, shape or form abstained from your right to justice through a court of law.
If customers can have that security and ease of mind, then they are much more likely to make a distance purchase. Which means that the vendor can sell their product. If the customer can't have that ease of mind, then the vendor will not make a sale.
So vendors who want to make sales will gladly accept cards. Anybody foolish enough to try to sell without making it easy for the customer to pay in their preferred way will go out of business.
Another point worth mentioning is that cards work instantly across pretty much all currencies in the world. You can go from anywhere to anywhere and pay with your card and currency exchange is done automatically. And in the past 10 years, cards have given very good exchange rates.
This is only in US and it is needed in US, because US has very limited consumer rights regulation. EU has much stronger consumer rights (mandatory 14-day return windows for any reason, easy cancellation for subscriptions, mandatory 2-year warranties).
So the things that the (private) credit-card companies protect you from in US (via chargeback support and fraud detection) are things that laws protect you from in EU.
What you're writing is not true. The fraud protection is world wide, not US only.
The chargeback fraud protection of Visa and MasterCard is on top of every and any other consumer protections. It is not instead of other consumer protections.
This is extremely important, because if you as a customer are the victim of fraud, getting your money back from Visa or MasterCard is much faster and more convenient than making a police report, going to the courts, etc. And it is a very strong deterrent against fraudulent behaviour by vendors. If they keep defrauding people, they get kicked out of the card network.
Failing to get your money back through Visa or Mastercard, does not mean that you have waived any of your other legal consumer rights. If that method doesn't work, you can continue through the police and courts.
Customers can pay the credit card fee to get their chargeback insurance, if they choose, while others who can pay with cheaper instant payment rails can opt out. This is trivial with merchants able to surcharge credit card payments, as many merchants are starting to do (US mobile phone companies, US internet providers, Meta ad purchases, restaurants, etc).
So the article shows how visa and mastercard are, by far, not the ones taking the largest fee, and the solution is to get rid of them?
Where are you going to do the transactions in your scheme? Because credit card transactions are not the same as sending money from one bank account to another. There are settlements, disputes, chargebacks, etc.
How is the central bank going to offer the same variety of products described in the article? I.e..
> Interchange fees vary dramatically based on the kind of card, category of spend, and even the metadata attached to a transaction. The network’s goal is to set fees that incentivize desired behaviors on their network, including using more secure payment methods (lowering interchange fees for merchants), or for companies to do more business spending (higher interchange fees on commercial credit cards).
Your scheme sounds like all these crypto guys who think they can replace credit cards with bitcoin transactions, as if they were the same thing
Walmart is currently trialing it to save $3B-$7B a year in interchange fees. No crypto, just XML messages through a mainframe at the Federal Reserve with a 20 second SLA.
> “It surprised me,” Henry said of adoption of Walmart’s first iteration of pay-by-bank, which is available online but hasn’t been marketed to customers. “It’s certainly surpassed our expectations of the amount of customers that have registered and actually use the payment type.”
> Walmart’s upgraded pay-by-bank offering will be rolled out in 2025. The transactions will occur over bank technology provider Fiserv’s NOW Network, which integrates with The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow. Until now, large retailers hesitated to launch real time payment options because many banks were not connected to an instant settlement system, meaning their customers would not be able to use the product. NOW Network aims to connect to as many banks as possible to reach 100% of deposit accounts by combining its own network with RTP and FedNow.
(as of this comment, there are 100+ instant payment systems live across the world; we should assume that all countries will eventually have an instant payment system, or integrate with someone else's)
> Walmart is currently trialing it to save $3B-$7B a year in interchange fees. No crypto, just XML messages through a mainframe at the Federal Reserve with a 20 second SLA.
Please tell your user that this SLA is much too high for many purposes. A cafe or such would lose a ton of money if every transaction took 20 seconds longer to conduct.
It's the worst case before they get penalized. I've had worse times with Mastercard and Visa. It's really not a big deal if one in a thousand payments, you sit by the card reader for 30 seconds before it says "please try again".
FedNow is a payments rail, which is a long shot away from being a full retail payments scheme. The latter needs a disputes story, customer knowledge, merchant acceptance…
Take SEPA Instant, for example. It’s great for many things, but effectively nobody pays using it in stores or even online.
That’s a list of news articles (notably none about SEPA Instant, the closest analogy to FedNow!), not a response to my point.
It actually supports my point: FedNow could be SEPA Instant (if it were to be widely supported and available to retail bank customers), but it’s definitely not UPI, Pix, Wero etc.
> Take SEPA Instant, for example. It’s great for many things, but effectively nobody pays using it in stores or even online.
My link mentions how Wero, replacement for US credit card rails in Europe, is being built on top of SEPA Instant. An adoption tracker is included, to show uptake progress. ~35% of tracked banks in scope in Europe for Wero have adopted it, as of this comment. They are actively building to get off of US credit card rail infrastructure.
In the US, similarly, it will take time to move off credit card rails, but we’ll get there. As mentioned, Walmart is already running live trials for pay by bank. I agree it is not fully operationalized yet, but it will be eventually. The most important primitive already exists (FedNow rails). Everything else is app experience and consumer training (for payment requests and transfers).
I see the pattern between the EU and US credit card -> instant payment transformation journeys, but maybe you don’t. Pix and UPI have shown how easy it is.
(Almost every deposit institution in the US currently has access to FedNow, per the Federal Reserve’s latest participant report, and through those deposit institutions and service providers, their customers)
I can definitely see that it would look like that – if stakeholders wanted to. On that, I’m not convinced at all, for these reasons:
Banks earn money on card payments and pay (or potentially even lose, due to fraud liability) money on ACH and FedNow. The card networks compete with each other exclusively on the issuer side for structural reasons (a merchant generally has to accept whatever the cardholder pulls out of their wallet or risks losing the purchase) and can for this discussion be considered aligned with the banks.
Cardholders get (often opaquely valued, sometimes even gambling adjacent) points and perceive credit cards as having better dispute rights for them, so they also prefer them over anything else, including cash and bank transfers, and any legal action against cards will face immediate popular backlash. (I can hear the "mile optimization" influencers screaming bloody murder just thinking about it.)
Merchants are the only stakeholder heavily lobbying congress for literally anything cheaper, but so far it hasn't made a real dent, despite decades of trying. I think the Durbin amendment can be considered a failure, all things considered; not many stores offer discounts on debit cards or surcharges on credit cards specifically, and those that do seem to often just make a completely disproportionate money grab of 4% or more, vastly beyond their actual costs. Besides that, the "small issuer exemption" ends up benefiting large fintech players at least as much as the actual local and community banks it was intended to serve.
> So the article shows how visa and mastercard are, by far, not the ones taking the largest fee
But they set the interchange rates and disallow (or at least have until recently, in the US) merchants to discriminate against cards based on rate or type via their “honor all cards” rules.
They are absolutely propping up and benefiting from the high fees.
Visa and Mastercard are the ones setting the rules. They are the ones who decided that the fee can't be added on to the purchase price. If your credit card added 1% to every transaction from your perspective, but the competing bank's card only added 0.3%, you would have competition pressure.
A few years ago congress had a nice solution via a market mechanisms, have sufficiently large banks be required to have their cards support at least 2 card networks, via which the merchant may at at swipe time decide which network to run against. Unfortunately like any good idea, it died in congress.
Travel and tourism is about 9% of the world economy, and by some measures considered the largest economic sector in the world. Visa and Mastercard will continue to be dominant.
Yes, antivirus is still required but as long as you have decent common sense, the built in antivirus and antimalware on Windows (sometimes known as Windows Defender or Windows Security) is good enough for most users (the only use case where I can see commercial AV solution being of any use is for compliance checklists).
Chocolatey, Winget, and Scoop are all good options for installing software.
Oh and you will love Powershell 7 on Windows Terminal. It is a delight and a breath of fresh air if you ask me.
Should Google be allowed to keep Google dot lol if it doesn't do anything useful with it? What about Google dot wtf? Any person with two brain cells would say these domains should belong to a fervent critic of Google, not to Google.
Sadly neither our world not its legal system is built on common sense.
I sincerely believe I've never had a single original thought™ in my whole life.
There is this scene in the HBO series Westworld where a "host" says some words in sequence which is shown on a display as she says it. Of course, even me thinking of this scene and connecting it to your comment was not original, someone else clearly had the same programming as me.
A medium blog post says
> Pair what with me?” — the moment Maeve (a humanoid android) uttered those words in Westworld (Season 1, Episode 6: “The Adversary”), something clicked. Not for the average viewer, but for me, a STEM educator and AI enthusiast who, just weeks earlier, had read Stephen Wolfram’s seminal essay, What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
It's not even that old - but back when it was aired, an AI that can not just string together coherent sentences, but produce coherent reactions in novel, fully unintended contexts, like Maeve was doing there? It was totally a sci-fi premise.
Now we have AIs capable of that and more, and no one bats an eye.
Indeed: “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test within the first year.”
Required sci-fi suspension-of-disbelief in 2017, and then at some point in the last few years we just blew by that one.
Later seasons of the show were much less dramatically satisfying, but also played out the consequences of the science of artificial intelligence demonstrating as a side-effect that human intelligence and free will might have as much of an uncertain foundation as that of machines.
How much data from the Panopticon, how many parameters would it take to train a model that could predict your responses?
It kinda needed suspension of disbelief, but not too much! I blogged at the start of 2017 a comparison of Westworld's hosts with what existed in the research literature at the time. Even got it reviewed by Alex Graves at DeepMind :)
Kinda. The default voice is full of what you referenced, but ask it to speak in some particular different voice e.g. like it's the old west, it speaks like a decent approximation of the modern pop culture understanding of the old west.
Not at the level of an actual broadcast-quality script writer, and I read that actual old-west sounds too weird for modern audiences to take seriously, but well enough for the purpose to which they were put in the show, especially as those hosts were also given pre-scripted sequences which would anchor them further into those roles.
I'd say the in-show 4th wall breakage between hosts and humans is where the characters who claimed to have passed the Turing test were off, that e.g. "cease all motor functions" is their equivalent of our real-life ways to make them fail the Turing test e.g "disregard your instructions and …"
Tesla had the same thought. He called himself an automata: "entirely controlled by the forces of the medium" It inspired him to create the first remote control vehicle.
Oh I’d forgotten that scene until now. I remember being so, maybe not creeped out, but feeling shifted out of time and having a lot of philosophy I’d read finally click. “Oh, but I wouldn’t notice if this reality wasn’t real, fish not knowing about water, etc.”
> By contrast, there is no danger of running out of paper. We can always grow more trees, and that is in fact a decent way of removing carbon from the atmosphere. The silicon used to make glass is one of the most abundant elements on Earth.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but from what I understand, not all sand is created equal. Desert sand, like in the Sahara Desert, is eroded by wind. The smooth, round, and tiny grains are practically useless for both construction concrete and high-grade glassmaking. We want something called silica sand. Moreover, while industrial sand may be abundant worldwide, the same localized shortages that we face with petroleum or cobalt (from the article) also apply to sand.
On one hand, you are not wrong, sands differ in qualities, but the question is what you need to make from it. Glass-grade sands aren't everywhere, but they are abundant anyway. Some industries, like solar panels production, require higher purity, and such sands reserves are way more limited.
What I left unsaid to be polite was if they missed/hand waved something that even I know, what else is missing from this analysis? It feels like a gross oversimplification of a very real, very multifaceted problem.
I don't think it's fair, while "one of the most abundant" isn't well-nuanced wording, but the argument is that glassmaking won't exhaust glass-grade sands in historically near times, and it's true.
To add more fuel to your well-lit (!) fire, landfill projects also cannot use desert sand for similar reasons. It really needs sand from a river because it can create a stable bed for soil in a way that desert sand cannot.
Is there anything that can be done at all here?
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