Going on your Slavic username: as an American who moved to a country without forced-air HVAC, it’s been quite a revelation to discover how backwards forced air really is.
I fully agree that this was a big miss on the human operators’ part. But it’s a small business and I have repeatedly seen so much worse than this. Vendors charging money to allow customers to connect AI to systems must have a robust story for protecting them from disaster. Everyone involved needs to be working hard to limit the impact of mistakes and surprises.
That “but..” is a big key to the difference between Russia and the US in this conversation. The US has a severe cultural propensity for rule-following and reporting things, but in Russia there’s an interesting mix of people seeing society as a commons, seeing personal responsibility as foremost, seeing laws as guidelines that may or may not correspond to reality, and seeing reporting something as fairly extreme behavior. And this includes people at all levels.
1) Russia is generally very safe, and 2) I agree that the violence amongst children is crazy. It’s a great place to homeschool and free-range and I have not found a way to send children to school in a way that’s acceptable to us.
Good morning from Russia, where I moved my large free-range family (from the US) with the topic of free-ranging children very high on the list of reasons why.
My children cross town by themselves to attend classes, it’s normal to see children walking or riding public transport by themselves once they turn about age 7.
There’s crime and bullying — we have always homeschooled successfully and have had negative experiences with classrooms here — but in my opinion it’s not as bad as the places I’ve lived in the US.
And the streets are definitely safer. There are some risks like gopniki enjoying causing random trouble like pepper spraying strangers, but I believe that type of danger is a threat mostly to young adult men and almost certainly not children. Our daughters can safely do what they need to do with appropriate precautions (that do not include staying within single-digit meters of a vigilant adult at all times else CPS!!!).
- the possibility of only partial success creating an even messier situation than the existing one
Having a way to do the whole thing on a much smaller timescale and budget lets decision makers focus more on those externalities, and also can simplify them. This kind of bit rot is somewhere (often everywhere) in many fast-moving businesses, as a natural consequence of the value tradeoffs we have had up to now. Now there are machines that can speedrun the grunt work of clearing them.
I understand your point and have a long list of bitter grievances against Apple, but OS X triggered a large influx of geeks to the Mac world. It was a Unix that just worked, and there were all kinds of important ways that appealed to key tech people.