We do have rules in place for animal testing in the pharma industry for more or less ethical reasons, so it's not unheard of use it as an argument to either stop or incentivize a company to do something. I agree that it is nuts from the point of view of actually changing anything, at least now.
Yes and if they were keeping mathematicians in cages that would be a good point. These are the same mathematicians who already agreed to work with OpenAI, who were apparently okay with how the models were trained but were concerned about how they night be used. Which sounds fair in the abstract, but concretely it means that they didn't care about intellectually property rights until it was their own jobs on the line. Many such cases.
It's just an identity and job security crisis for these mathematicians. Very similar to software engineers over the last 1-2 years.
They'll learn to accept reality sooner than later. Software engineers are still employed. In fact, I'm busier than ever since coding agents hit mainstream. My job is just different now but it's for the good overall.
These mathematicians will also figure this out.
Asking OpenAI to stop testing advanced math on internal models and stop discovering solutions is just crazy talk.
The lack of buttons is also extremely annoying on kitchen appliances. To open my microwave door, I need to make sure my finger is clean (it’s a kitchen!) and also adds a very annoying latency between the “pressing” and the door opening.
As I was reading I thought “hey my Skoda seems to be ok with most of these things”, having gone for it more or less for the same reasons. Skoda seems to get it better. Is it because being a non-luxury tier car, they value function over form much more?
That correlates with my research too (which is at the end of the blog post if you read that far - fair enough if you didn't, it's a long post!). Skoda's design philosophy is "Simply Clever" and I guess they actually believe it rather than being a marketing gimmick.
One of my most vivid memories from my childhood (around 10 years old) is trying to make a ticking analog clock using Logo, with the turtle drawing all the hands.
We had "no screen in the morning" house rule - we had to eat, play outside first while it was not too hot. I woke up and realised what was wrong with my code. And my mum made an exception to the rule and the fix worked! I am so grateful to her for understanding the importance of the moment and allowing me to do the fix. I guess I'll give her a call and tell her the story now :) Thanks HackerNews!
This is definitely not recommended but when I was a kid we also used floppy disk films to look at solar eclipses. That was far from the most dangerous thing we did in 90s in a post-Soviet country.
To this day, when I read or think about a solar eclipse, I have a visual image of floppies! My first instinct seeing this on HN was “is this because there is a solar eclipse tomorrow?”
Before opening the article, I thought it's about a shirt buttons and it reminded me one of my favourite thought experiments:
Imagine everything man-made suddenly disappears but not the knowledge individuals carry. How long until we have an iPhone (or a plastic shirt button)? Would it even be any faster than the first time around?
Almost certainly. I can go out into the woods behind my house and get into the iron age in a few days (most of that time would be waiting for clay to dry and charcoal pits to cool). That cuts out ~300k years of anatomically modern human history. Whether or not it would be possible to bootstrap the industrial revolution without easily accessible coal and petroleum is a bigger question.
We might lose electricity for a while. There's not a lot of utility for electricity in pre-industrial society. Like, given enough copper, I could make a wind turbine, but I can't casually make a useful lightbulb. Maybe a ceiling fan, but it would almost certainly be easier to run that off of mechanical power directly via a series of gears and belts. Electrochemistry would be a neat party trick, but I don't think my shoddily built wind turbine would generate enough juice to process aluminum.
Firearms would probably continue to exist. I could make a musket, and its utility for hunting and defense would make it immediately worth it. Black powder's not terribly difficult to manufacture from base ingredients.
Are we including domesticated crops as "man-made"? Because that would complicate matters. A lot of knowledge could be lost in the time it takes to rebreed the kinds of grains that allow for stable settlement.
We wouldn't need to re-invent writing, since that's just knowledge, and that would give a pretty big leg up in not losing a bunch of knowledge every time someone dies.
On the whole, if we keep selectively bred crops, I'd say we'd be bumped back to about the Middle Ages at the most. If we're losing the crops, then it would come down to whether we could preserve our more advanced knowledge long enough for agriculture to redevelop.
You probably need to change the thought experiment to get at what you're really trying to get at. If all man-made things disappeared tomorrow, you're talking pipes, wires, streets, houses, antibiotics, the immediate effect is very close to 8 billion people die within a few weeks. The hundred thousandor so survivors may know what they already knew, but now they need to find a way to find each other, write it all down, without pens or paper, make more people, and teach those new people so the knowledge isn't lost within a generation or two, all while also building enough infrastructure to at least keep the tiny communities still around from also starving.
All of the post-apocalypse LARP scenarios other responses are describing tend to assume at least books and some small number of durable structures survive. If nothing at all makes it, the first thing that happens is most everyone not living on a ground floor dies instantly from falling. Everyone living where it freezes dies in a few hours from exposure. Most people living anywhere experiencing a heat wave die from heat exhaustion in the next day or two. Most everyone else everywhere else dies from starvation or disease in the next few weeks. Even if you're living on a farm, you've got no fences or tools, so you better hope it's a farm with lots of edible plants and it's near harvest season. If you live in a city, you have no hope at all. Even existing food stores will spoil quickly with no containers or refrigeration. The people who do the best will be Hadza and uncontacted tribes and what not that lose their spears and tents, but all they have to do to get back to their prior situation is make more spears and tents, which thankfully doesn't require a global transportation network or modern manufacturing techniques. They're not the ones who know how to build iPhones, though. I'm not sure anyone knows how to build an iPhone, really. The knowledge is probably largely digital. The chief engineer at Apple knows where to look and who to ask, but no single person has all of the knowledge in their own head.
> You probably need to change the thought experiment to get at what you're really trying to get at.
I am not really trying to get to anything except to have fun thinking about how society would organise itself. And since this is not an exam, everyone's free to think through different versions and enjoy the question as they like.
As for me, normally it comes up in a discussion and we develop and make assumptions as we go, but I've prefer to change as little as possible e.g. buildings/infrastructure do disappear but people "land" gently. And then most of what you said would be true: people in inappropriate climates, far away from a source of water or food die. I don't think it makes the thought experiment any less interesting to think about. In fact, the reason I like it is because progress may become so slow that some generations later we'd start believing or question in mythical iPhones and technologies.
I've always wanted to write a "How to make a peanut butter and jelly" cookbook that starts with "okay, first you're going to need to find a stalk of wheat that's ready to seed, but don't worry about germinating it because we'll do that in the next chapter.
> That's because they haven't came out with another small iPhone in more than four years.
I kind of agree with the previous comment. I think if you spend a lot of time on the phone, have a lot of apps then it makes sense to upgrade your phone more frequently and also makes sense to have a larger screen and better battery life. So conversely, there is a correlation between people who have smaller phones and upgrade less frequently.
I have my iPhone 12mini for 5-6 years now, and I'd upgrade it now if there was a new small iPhone. But I would upgrade it 3 years ago.
One of my best stranger conversations talking to a “Big Issue” [1] seller outside a supermarket. As I understand, they’re (close to) homeless usually.
When I asked about him, he mentioned he’s Irish but moved on to tell me about his plans. How he was saving to have a farm, planned what to grow, animals - 15m of quite precise description. His story was his future.
This was striking for me - when asked most people tell you about their past, where they’re coming from. It was the first time I realised that where we’re going should be a bigger part of our story and identity.
I try to keep that conversation in mind as a lesson, and as a reminder to talk to people around.
One of my best stranger conversations talking to a “Big Issue” seller outside a supermarket. As I understand, they’re (close to) homeless usually [1].
When I asked about him, he mentioned he’s Irish but moved on to tell me about his plans. How he was saving to have a farm, planned what to grow, animals - 15m of quite precise description. His story was his future.
This was striking for me - when asked most people tell you about their past, where they’re coming from. It was the first time I realised that where we’re going should be a bigger part of our story and identity.
I have found myself to be the only person in many conversations defending Ryanair. People complain about legroom, everything being a paid add-ons, you name it. The key is to treat it like a bus that takes you from A to B, sometimes cheaper than a bus, not some sort of luxury experience. The times when flying was luxury is over. And I benefitted from it greatly as a student, so have many shown by Ryanair's passenger numbers.
And I am also always confused about the non-transparency that people mention about their fees. When you do the checkout, you select the services you want and pay for those. There used to be a time when other airlines would have a lot of things included in the basic ticket price, but that's not the case anymore, so it's not different. And I think this was an inevitable in an industry with small profit margins where price differentiation would bring gains.
Either you got used to their evolved dark patterns or you haven't booked with them recently.
I was also Pro-Ryanair: they allowed to see friends and family across Europe with a student budget.
Now, it's an 8-step booking process where you try to figure out what is actually optional and avoidable and what's included in the advertised fare. Depending on the airport, they threaten to charge you if you don't print your boarding pass beforehand. Depending on the flight, they become pretty aggressive in weighing your carry on, mainly to try to catch you out and make an extra 50 euro.
The company went from no frills budget airline to antagonistic and aggro where literally anything is cranked up to 11 to extract value from you.
I used it once since COVID, last year, didn't seem too bad.
Given the mood in the thread, I do indeed think that I may have a high tolerance for such practices and pay careful attention to fine prints. After all, I had all the training while applying for numerous Schengen and other visas, immigration paperwork. After those, dealing with Ryanair that faces at least some competition and scrutiny is not that bad.
A bus is generally a far more pleasant experience.
When taking bus you are not herded like cattle into pens based on priority queue status.
When a bus has technical issue, they don't hold you hostage on-board for hours to avoid paying compensation.
in Europe, a long-distance bus has the comfort of a business class airplane seat.
Multiple lifetimes of thousands of the most brilliant engineers collaborating, sharing algorithms, protocols, mining, smelting, developing tooling to create tiny rocks that can think and blasting them to hover over the earth just so we can slightly annoy the person next to us with a conversation about the weird stuff growing between our toes.
From a technical standpoint, the ability to make VoIP phone calls from planes exists right now, at least on planes with newer and better internet connections. It hasn't been enabled because of ferocious customer opposition every time the idea is proposed. Which, frankly, is just fine with me. People can still send emails and messages from in-flight Wi-Fi, no need to subject everyone else to your phone calls.
Could? I flew a month ago on a flight with Starlink. I downloaded 10s of gigabytes of data without hiccups. Calling was not an issue. And it was completely free.
Not one time have I had a consistent internet connection whilst flying transatlantic on Delta, KLM or BA airplanes, to the point that I regretted having paid for it every single time.
I haven’t been to India for 7 years but I distinctly remember a very productive flight from Delhi to Heathrow on wifi while I was sshed into a machine and working on something for hours with no issue - far better than the signal I get on the train from London to Manchester.
Qatar/Virgin Australia, Sydney->Doha. I’ve never had really good connection either before this, and I tried many-many times. That was the exception when it worked as intended.
Having been trapped on a 2 day flight to Madeira via Madrid, Porto and Porto Santo, eventually your powerbanks and headphones run out of charge.
EU621 comp was denied because the aircraft could not land due to wind.
I did spend about 12 hours in a fancy all inclusive on ryanair's dime (a bus arrived at the airport un-announced to the airport staff or us customers) while some slept in airbnbs and on the floor.
You can reimburse your costs of unplanned overnight stay, even when it happened because of weather. So those AirBnBs were also free. Even the taxi to and from there. Ryanair was unlawful if they hadn’t given this information.
Btw, there are power banks and headphones which can easily handle 2 days.
Surely you can recharge them on the ground too. Do Ryanair not provide in seat usb sockets? Wouldn’t surprise me if they saw an opportunity to charge £5 for their use (log into wifi and activate them etc).
The infrastructure for air travel requires all that for safe travel
As a pilot myself I know why all the holds exist and while not perfect, the majority of complaints aren’t random bullshit they are flight safety issues
The fact that people demand luxury because it went from veblen good to commodity is the problem
Different airlines have different policies. e.g. others you don't get stuck waiting on the plane because they don't load passengers while a mechanic is still working on the avionics.
My one and only experience with Ryanair was that they were rude and hostile even in places where they weren't trying to fleece you. From in-your face rude signs (official, corporate designed ones, not something printed from Word by a random employee), to a UI where you needed to concatenate strings in order to craft a valid input (something like "enter your credit card number, followed by #, followed by the MMYY validity date"). Maybe that was to make people fail checkin and force them to pay for checkin at the counter, but I think it was early in the booking flow, i.e. where they had no incentive to make it hard.
Over 15 years ago, I think, and I have no idea if it was credit card numbers or something else. It was sufficiently crazy UX to stand out as crazy for a consumer-oriented website even in the much less polished web back then.
Yes, this sounds made-up/not Ryanair. I've used them for over a decade, paid with many different cards and have never encountered this with them (nor anywhere ever really).
> And I am also always confused about the non-transparency that people mention about their fees. When you do the checkout, you select the services you want and pay for those.
The lack of transparency is that it's hard to price compare. Your will almost never pay the ticker price at Ryanair, but at others you might.
The issue is sometimes I want to compare flying with x with bags and flexible fares. These days I have to click++++ multiple times to get to the stage when I can add bags, flexibility, etc to the ticket and then repeat with each alriline I want to compare. In the old days this was the price shown upfront -- nowdays it's hidden behind several layers. Not just Ryanair but many airlines do this.
I do appreciate tho it's a bit of a trade off. These days many airline offer choice so if you don't need the extras you do save some money. But the tradeoff is if you do need those extras it's now more expensive and less transparently priced.
Ryanair weren't just a bystander in this race to the bottom, they were primary drivers of creating it, along with Easyjet, undercutting competition and forcing everyone else to become a low cost carrier.
They're a total success commercially you can't deny it, but my god what a horrible experience for everyone involved, passengers and staff alike
I disliked them a bit, but then they stopped flying to a certain destination. I quickly realized that the other airlines were 3x more expensive. I realized I actually cared about price much more than any possible extra leg room or other perks, and that their super cheap flights are quality by itself.
Like the comment you are replying to said - if you don’t want super cheap prices and super cheap service, fly with a more expensive carrier.
Qantas, emirates, etc etc.
Legacy carriers run a hub-and-spoke model. Ryanair specialises in direct flights. If I can choose between a direct flight with Ryanair, or a connecting flight with a legacy airline, I'm going to choose the former to limit time spent in airports.
You can get point-to-point connections with legacy airlines all over Europe (the hub and spoke model means you can also get onward connections including to non-European destinations). Might not be exactly the same airport pair (and there are sometimes good reasons to prefer the second tier airport Ryanair flies too rather than the main city airport), but there aren't many city pairs you're forced to use Ryanair or a connection, provided you're happy paying more money and flying at a different time.
But yeah, you're not going to be flying Qantas or Emirates, you're going to be flying BA or Aer Lingus or Air France or even another LCC
Firstly Ryanair don't fly the routes Qantas and Emirates do, so you have no idea what you're on about comparing them
Second, Ryanair et al have dragged all the previous decent airlines down with them into the gutter and even paying more doesn't really get you service of years gone by. The only way they could compete was by slashing costs and prices to appear near the same ranking in the search results. You don't really get what you pay for flying short haul in Europe. Even business is mostly "low cost economy plus" rather than true business class in Europe
If by 'the gutter' you mean cheaper - thanks Ryanair! I don't like the experience of flying either, but there is no denying that it is accessible to anybody today, 20 yrs ago it was still a luxury.
Regarding the destinations, yes, Emirates does not fly from Memmingen to Stanstead. But why would anybody, unless they live in the village next to either.
>Second, Ryanair et al have dragged all the previous decent airlines down with them into the gutter
Ryanair didn't drag anyone into the gutter. Buyers preferring to spend less did that, which could be for a variety of reasons, one of them being increased wealth gaps in society.
Within Europe, I'm usually not in a big hurry or tight on budget within reason. But I understand that many are and it encourages race to the bottom budget airlines. Personally, I mostly do train within Europe even when it involves an overnight sleeper where they exist.
You can just pay more to have the old experience. Economy plus is what you used to get 20 years ago, and business is way more affordable than it used to be.
I’d rather have a cheap flight and spend my money at my destination though.
It is something odd about their branding or something, because people's perceptions do not match the reality. Somehow everyone knows Temu is going to be highly likely to sell you very cheap stuff, and it's ok because the expectations are managed. Lots of people still expect Ryanair to not be a cheap airline. I don't get it.
Your devils advocate position appears to be in direct opposition to multiple court rulings that forced RyanAir to acknowledge and remove dark patterns. And thus, may not be an opinion that others share for pretty obvious reasons?
