tomwheeler

How do the police pull over a driverless vehicle? Who hands over the license and registration? How do you get it to sign the ticket?

At least this one was significantly faster than Cloudflare and required no action on my part.

Back in January, I was debating whether to buy an M3 Ultra Mac Studio or waiting for the M5 version, which many believed would be announced two months later.

The 192GB M3 Ultra was on sale at the local Microcenter for $200 below what Apple's own site advertised. Since I knew the RAM shortage would significantly increase the price of the M5 Studio when (or if) it finally did come out, I decided to buy the M3. Time has shown that was the right decision.

Temporal employee here. I'm very surprised by your comment.

It's true that we recently had a Series D and that VC firms recognize the value of what we do. The Temporal Server software is 100% open source (MIT license: https://github.com/temporalio/temporal/blob/main/LICENSE). It's totally free and you don't even need to fill out a registration form, just download precompiled binaries from GitHub or clone the repo and build it yourself. You can self-host it anywhere you like, no restrictions on scale or commercial usage. We offer SaaS (Temporal Cloud), which customers can choose as an alternative self-hosting, based on their needs. The migration path is bi-directional, so not a trap by any definition.

Regarding AI, Temporal is widely used in that space, but that does not negate the thousands of other companies that use Temporal for other things (e.g., order management systems, customer onboarding, loan origination, money movement, cloud infrastructure management, and so on). In fact, our growth in the AI market came about because companies who were already using Temporal for other use cases realized that it also solved the problems they encountered in their AI projects.

And to your last point, we've made dozens of enhancements to the product (here's a small sample: https://temporal.io/blog/categories/product-news). I'd encourage you to follow the news from next week's Replay conference (https://replay.temporal.io/) because we'll be announcing many more.

Bots are now clearly joining the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...) to hasten the demise of civil liberty.

> Wouldn't Baltimore be the first Waymo market that actually gets snow?

No, we have them in St. Louis and it snows a few times per year here.

> All of these tools ... will inevitably be subject to manipulation.

I have often wondered about the legality of such manipulation. As AI becomes used for increasingly important things, it becomes increasingly valuable to make a system serve the needs of someone other than its owner.

> When I was a kid, I would often sit on my bed and stare at the wall. My Dad would walk by my room and ask if everything was ok. I would always say "yeah", since I was literally just thinking.

Me too. And all I wanted was a Pepsi.

> I recently encountered `is_as BOOL` in an important table.

Sounds like a table designed by Forrest Gump.

Same here. Two decades ago, I was excited to install updates to commercial software I used because they fixed bugs and brought useful new features. These days I fear updates because they introduce new bugs, remove features I care about, and come with new anti-features that I actively do not want.

The macOS Tahoe release is a great example of this. I can't think of a single thing I prefer about it and could easily name ten things I hate about it.

Thank you, EU, for having the courage to pass the pro-consumer regulations that my own government lacks. Often, as happened when the iPhone got rid of the proprietary Lightning connector, the benefits extend well beyond your borders.

In other news, world's most popular browser was developed by a massive company known for advertising and tracking users across the web.

> I think many Americans do not realize how much is spent on debt interest payments, which are a tidy source of income for rich people.

Not to mention insurance companies and pension funds, plus local, state, and foreign governments

Sounds about right. The attorneys take $1.52 and leave the victim with $0.20. And then nothing actually happens that would restore a competitive marketplace.

The standard of proving someone's guilt in a crime or civil infraction is higher than the one for inferring that someone could plausibly be the person you want. This is the basis of parallel construction, wherein a government agency plays a game of "pin a crime on the suspect."

> Even if a failed agent activity retries correctly at the infrastructure layer, the LLM re-invocation produces a different output.

In Temporal, an Activity won't be executed again provided that Activity completion is recorded to the event history.

If the application crashes, its state is recreated using results from the history (i.e., the ones from the invocation that happened prior to the crash). Thus, the non-deterministic nature of LLM calls doesn't affect the application because each effectively only happens once.

Take it from someone who lives in the St. Louis area, Festus is by no means a snooty suburb. It's a small town that has become a distant suburb of St. Louis due to sprawl spreading south into the adjacent county over the past 20 years.

For comparison, an upscale suburb of similar size (Town and Country, Missouri) has a median household income of $202,974, as compared to $59,041 for Festus. The average person you meet in Town and Country is likely to be a doctor, attorney, or executive. In Festus, the average person likely works in a factory, farm, or lead mine.

As I understand it, this only applies to the three states in that district, all of which also have statewide bans against it.

My state (Missouri) has the most lax home distilling state laws in the nation, which allow residents to produce up to 500 bottles per year. Well, at least theoretically, since the federal ban takes precedence.

I totally get this.

At work, my OS is largely dictated by my employer. At home, the choice is mine, but largely influenced by the use case and application availability.

Thus, I do not use any one OS exclusively and and likely never will. I prefer Linux, but find macOS better than Windows for all but one thing: window management. Even Windows 95 absolutely trounces macOS there. I just don't understand how macOS can be so bad at it. Every attempt to make it better (e.g., Spaces and Stage Manager) takes them even further astray.

> as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.

And at least for me, frequency beats duration. I make more progress when I play consistently for even 10 minutes every day than when I play for 90 minutes on Sunday afternoon.

And as I have just explained in that other comment, they did not ask for a verification code when I bought the ticket. They also did not ask for one when I tested that I could pull up the ticket after I installed their app. They only did so shortly before the show.

Perhaps somewhere deep in the terms of service that approximately zero customers have ever read, it says "Use of this ticket is contingent upon having immediate access to the email address associated with your account." Regardless, it seems unreasonable for them to expect that every user will have connectivity. If that is a requirement, they should state it more clearly.

> Why would you sign into Ticketmaster with an email address you don't have access to and use it to buy tickets?

Because in the context of signing in, its role is that of a user ID.

Ticketmaster spams that address constantly. It's a valid email address, to be sure, but they've trained me over the years never to look at it. They certainly didn't do any multi-factor authentication when I bought the tickets, only when I was preparing to use them (despite having accessed them on that very device two days earlier).

And that's when you find out the app considers this usage pattern as a signal of fraud, so then you can't get into the event and have no recourse. Their app, their rules, your loss.

> I feel like phone tickets are anti-convenience because they rely on terrible apps like TicketMaster.

Case in point: I traveled from St. Louis to Houston for a concert a few years ago. Before I left home to catch my flight, I installed the Ticketmaster app on a phone and verified that I could bring up the tickets. When I tried it again in my hotel an hour before the conference, it no longer worked because the fraud detection in their app was apparently confused as to why I was now in Houston.

Fixing this took 45 minutes on hold to get a support agent and a frantic call to my wife so she could check the disused email address I used to sign up for Ticketmaster 20 years earlier and get the verification code they sent.

There are a lot of reasons to dislike digital tickets, but this is one of them. I used to go to dozens of concerts every year. Now it's such a hassle that I don't bother unless it's small venue that doesn't play these games.

> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.

Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone. Maybe he has dexterity issues that make using a smartphone difficult. Maybe he doesn't want to install their invasive app. Maybe he finds that paper tickets are easier to manage. Maybe he recognizes that the vendor made this change to benefit themselves at the expense of the fans, as it allows them greater control of the resale market.

I own a smartphone but prefer paper tickets. Luckily I can (and do) still get them at my team's stadium, although I have to pick them up in person.

It's possible to write a headline that directs blames at both parties: "Major Browsers Fail to Block Websites that Invade Your Privacy"

The fact that the website is doing this is a bigger problem than the browser not preventing it. If someone breaks into a house, it's the burglar who is prosecuted, not the company that made the door.

If you scanned LinkedIn's private network, you'd be criminally charged. Why are they allowed to scan yours with impunity? And why is this being normalized?

The best solution is a layered defense: laws that prohibit this behavior by the website and browsers that protect you against bad actors who ignore the law.

> developers don't control what platforms an enterprise would use

They might not control it directly, but they absolutely influence it. Linux was on the losing end of this for many years, as common end-user enterprise software was native and only available for Windows (or in the case of Microsoft Office, nominally available for Mac OS but with fewer features and lots more bugs). That was Microsoft's moat and it started leaking when web applications became ubiquitous. That leak later accelerated when those web applications had to work on mobile operating systems (namely iOS and Android) that Microsoft did not own and could not control.

> Vendors don't dictate the platform either - vendors sell to a customer, > and so it makes sense that the customer dictates the platform.

There are plenty of counterexamples here. I used to have two legacy SGI machines in my cubicle at work precisely because a vendor dictated the platform to that Very Big Enterprise company many years earlier.

Similarly, many people buy Macs solely to run Logic Pro or Final Cut Pro, because the vendor (Apple) dictated the platform by discontinuing the Windows versions. Apple doesn't have the market share Microsoft has, but unlike Microsoft, they can maintain strong control because of their breadth (OS and hardware for desktop, tablet, and phone, plus high-end creative software) and because a lot of their customers are all-in on Apple's ecosystem.

And even if you read the banner on the site, the email they sent, and the announcement itself, you would not see instructions that mention the specific thing(s) you must change in order to opt out.

Sure, you can poke around in the settings and find one that you believe opts you out, but in lieu of clear and explicit instructions from GitHub, you'll have no way to find out. Only the possibility of finding out later that you guessed wrong.

And I'd imagine that this decline accelerates as _developers_ begin migrating to other platforms, since the applications they created are what made that platform appealing to non-developers. That's why Steve Ballmer was jumping up and down, shouting, in a sweaty fervor. Say what you want about pre-Nadella Microsoft, but they definitely recognized the importance of having lots of developers writing software for Windows. And they treated developers like VIPs.

I'd say the two most important are the date of birth and document ID (e.g., driver's license number). Both are required by the AAMVA 2D barcode standard used for driver's license in the US and both are extremely valuable for identity theft.

Furthermore, the driver's license number is a primary key that could used to join records created by the scan with records in other datasets, potentially giving the company much more information about the customer than they ever realized or agreed to provide.