There is an old parable about a frog and a scorpion:
>A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but it is my nature".
Should we accept that the scorpion will always sting its associates, and continue to allow them to hitch rides on frogs? Or should we prevent the scorpions from getting into a position where they can sting others once their nature is readily apparent?
Sergey Brin too, with company massage rooms at early Google.
As others have pointed out, it's also how Facebook was started.
Sometimes I look back at my youth, and think about how I used to view technology: as a democratizing force which could tear down artificial barriers. Then I look around today and wonder what happened.
It makes sense, though, if you look closely at the founding fathers of big tech.
This may be controversial, but I think software is suffering from shrinkflation.
We complain when tools like Photoshop or MS Word move to a subscription cloud model, but maybe they're just getting realistic about pricing.
You used to be able to buy these tools for a 3-figure range, maybe low 4 figures with all the bells and whistles. Today, creative cloud starts at $55/mo, Photoshop $21/, MS office ~$6/.
If you use a 10x annual revenue to price these, it'd be something like $6600, $2520, $720 respectively. Would you pay those sums for those tools? Would a starving student?
Software is still hard, and good software is still expensive. Calling it "undervalued" is probably accurate; if it weren't for the downward pressure of piracy and open-source, you have to wonder if we'd have software dealerships selling packages as expensive as today's cars.
How about your employer has to cover the rent or mortgage of an average single-family unit within a 30-minute rush hour commute of the office if they require you to come in?
Lots of sites would like to make the paywalls immediate, but they won't get ranked highly on search engines if they don't show the article's content to a web crawler.
So the usual approach is to load the content, then hide it as quickly as possible if an unauthorized human is viewing the page.
Good question - I'm even typing this with thumbs now!
Thinking back, it was during a time when most phones were small enough to fit comfortably in one small hand. People would hold it with one hand, and use the other to tap.
Modern phones are too heavy and bulky for that, so I think we use both hands to hold and use them. Or maybe the finger-pecking was unrelated to phone use, who knows.
+1 to offline computer labs. Our primary school had one in the '90s, but they only let us in for an hour or two each week.
The teachers didn't know how to use the computers, and the parents mostly felt that it was a waste of time which would rot our child brains. Still, the school had paid a bunch of money for it as part of an initiative to get rid of the library's card catalog system, so it had to be used.
The teachers tried to convince everyone to play math and typing games, but most kids played with a sort of photoshop-lite program, stuck magnets onto the CRT screens, or played Oregon Trail.
It wasn't an efficient process, but just about everybody in our district was a proficient typist by middle school. When I got to college, I was surprised by how many people typed on their laptops like they type on their phones, with rapid index finger pecks.
Of course solar panels cannot provide enough power to drive a car for any significant distance, but that doesn't make them useless.
I know, because I put solar panels on an ICE car's roof several years ago. They charged a recreation battery in the boot, which I used to charge my phone, headlamp, camp lights, laptop, radio, smaller power bricks...
Fantastic for camping, and it lets you jump-start your own car.
The article's prices are for first-party solutions; I paid $2/W and it's been zero maintenance over highways, bumpy tracks, heat, car washes, and frost. Using amorphous cells instead of monocrystalline can net you a bit of energy on cloud/rainy days too, even if they are less efficient in bright sunlight.
If you have roof rails or a pickup canopy, give it a try. The hardest part is finding a way to get the wires into the interior. Don't forget some soft cushioning washers in the mounting nuts and bolts.
Sounds like they should label it more clearly, but this story looks like a funny hack to me.
Some states only allow the sale of beer and wine in places like gas stations and grocery stores. You can't sell whiskey there, but you can sell spiced malt beverages.
Unrelated, I really like that NPR has a script-free "text.npr.org" subdomain.
That's why OpenAI will also sell support contracts to debug and fix what their tools produce. Some occasional broken code isn't necessarily a problem if it can lead to more sales.
I've always wondered, is Earth's electrical ground significantly different from that of a random planet hundreds of light years away?
If two spaceships from different parts of the galaxy were ever able to meet, would they experience the biggest static electricity shock in history?
Apparently this is not an issue with terrestrial space stations, because spacecraft only accumulate something like an 80V potential as they travel through the atmosphere. But what about another star system that has sailed through who knows how many charged nebulae?
You joke, but until the year 2000, open-source asymmetric encryption such as TLS was export-controlled as a munition under ITAR in the United States.
Apparently the government didn't see much of a problem with that classification until online merchants started wanting to encrypt credit card transactions in the mid-'90s, and the ball was slowly rolled uphill from there.
They did make a movie out of Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
But the director, Paul Verhoeven, lived through WWII and found the militaristic ethos so abhorrent that he threw out most of the story and made a comical parody of the book.
>A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but it is my nature".
Should we accept that the scorpion will always sting its associates, and continue to allow them to hitch rides on frogs? Or should we prevent the scorpions from getting into a position where they can sting others once their nature is readily apparent?