Yeah, a while back Google Maps sent out a cheerful "here's all you've contributed" email and i clicked through and found my complete history. It was a graveyard of rejected edits for things like closed streets, wrong business hours, and spam listings (IDK the payoff for the spammers but there's an ongoing cluster of fake hotels and businesses near my old apartment). Seeing the total record of incorrect stuff that i had fruitlessly spent my own spare moments to fix convinced me to quit doing any free work for Google.

Endless stream of "Your review was removed - place was closed down" is a interesting reward for reviewing places. I still wonder how can a beach just stop existing.

Somebody in his position (major crew chief, maxed out seniority) would've been making about 120k real dollars, plus his defined benefit retirement, plus flight benefits for him and family, for the past few decades. He spent his time off volunteering to fix museum aircraft so we can say he really really loved the work.

AWS is basically a utility. I think it's inevitable that their carelessness around billing will end up with them being regulated like one.

I can't think of another regulated utility that doesn't provide service to (essentially) all humans directly in their homes.

Everyone knows what water and electricity are, the vast majority couldn't explain what service AWS provides.

And utilities are typically natural monopolies. They're good candidates for regulation because they're essentials and they don't have competitive forces to keep them behaving reasonably.

AWS has plentiful competitors. If you don't like their behavior, don't patronize them!

I wonder what fraction of homes don't load anything from AWS on a daily basis. I suspect it's way below 50%.

(Of course, they don't know they're using it, they're using a service on it)

Electric battery storage is a better option, but also your home is a very leaky battery storage for conditioned air. At my last place i got a plan that was nearly free on overnights and ran the HVAC all night, turning it off during the peak period. This was in the worst part of summer when the overnight lows were 80F or above so natural ventilation couldn't help much.

Living in a warm climate US city i noticed roaches almost disappeared once off the first floor, i saw only one in five years in a 7th-floor apartment.

Whenever we get to talking about three letter agencies, i wish people spent more time thinking about their threat model. Is the TLA surveilling me because they're broadly interested in everybody? OK then, the return on investment isn't there to pull an evil maid attack on public randos. If the TLA is interested in you because of who you specifically are, the average individual can't begin to plug all the possible holes in their lives.

As a Honda owner (but the kind the company probably doesn't really really love since i'm still driving a 2006) i actually think it's better for the long haul that their cars are hackable given physical possession.

Everyone should have security robust against nation-state actors by default in the most popular consumer products, so that people who need it can hide in the masses. I hope LLM-assisted “offensive security research” makes insecure software fully unusable so that companies finally take security seriously.

I wasn’t making any comment on whether cars should be hackable or not, simply that saying “people with Civics are never targets of three letter agencies” is a little silly.

Not about the UA flight, but the grandparent's first point. I can see how it's not simply superstition or theater. Critical info gets communicated either over fuzzy radio or 220 character ACARS messages. You wouldn't want to introduce into that context any spurious usages of phrases that would result in wasted time disambiguating whether a garbled transmission was referring to the Very Serious Bad kind of "crash" or referring to something comparatively trivial like the ticketing system being down.

The problem is that there isn't a simple canonical way to disambiguate, despite that being the obvious and superior solution.

Taboo is a shitty communication feature. Taboo demands active silence in a system with too much entropy for that to be feasible. It would be far superior to train everyone to say "good crash" (and respond appropriately) instead.

Words only have meaning in context. The whole point of instating a taboo is that you control the context. Rather than use that control to introduce danger to words, we should use it to isolate danger from words.

That would not solve the problem. On a radio, you could have a moment of interference and only receive 'crash' when someone broadcasts 'good crash'. It is better to avoid certain words entirely. There is also no reason to use those specific words when you could describe, e.g. a software crash as a software problem, error, issue, etc.

If the communication medium is made ambiguous by high entropy, then the language needs to reduce that entropy somehow. The entropy we are taking about is temporal, like packet loss. The solution is for the speaker to be redundant and for the listener to be uncertain.

What you are advocating is silence, which implies confidence in the communication stream, which is the opposite of what we want.

We already knew that silence is hard to distinguish from signal noise, which is why we say copy instead.

I'm not advocating for silence, your reading comprehension is lacking.

Maybe you can work on yours?

I'm not making a distinction between silence as a pause and silence as keeping your mouth shut, because that distinction is irrelevant. In either case, nothing is communicated, because a pause is indistinguishable from a failed copy (something said that came through as signal noise).

You are advocating for the avoidance of specific words. That's a problem, because both the circumstances surrounding word choice and the signal itself have high entropy. You cannot reasonably expect the sound "bomb" to never be heard over a radio. It might be from a failure to obey the taboo, or it might be from a totally different and irrelevant signal that sounded to someone like "bomb". Signal and hearing simply don't work that way, and neither does society.

If you want to avoid miscommunication, the only feasible option is to accommodate the entropy of the communication system and the entropy of its participants.

Is it a taboo, or is it just reserving specific words to mean specific things and insist everybody be precise about it?

Same, i'm doing a kitchen reno and gave up on Home Depot because of this

Balancing out the other comment - there's two real supermarkets within a fifteen minute walk of me (another American). It's fun to leave meal planning up to whatever is on sale that night.

For people in the outer suburbs where that's not an option, I don't know why a service hasn't arisen where you can plug in, "we have X adults living here, they average Y meals per week made at home, we want Z grams of protein per meal, here's our dietary restrictions, solve that system of equations out of whatever's in your warehouse and take a flat rate for delivery and percentage for your overhead." The pure delivery services all seem to be plays to hide huge prices behind tricky introductory rates. Both my local supermarkets offer delivery and presumably have the data to make that possible but they want me to still pick individual items in a vastly worse interface (any website or app) than the experience of standing in a dry goods aisle.

You underestimate how hard people’s food preferences are. They are really locked into their set of brands for each item. Immigrants pay huge markups to just get the same brand of tomato paste or beans they know. These are some of the most commodity style food items

IIRC there's a legal distinction between mere unauthorized entry and unauthorized entry that involves circumventing any kind of lock