> I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.
Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.
You should check out this podcast episode with two historians, tracing the influence of the Confederacy ideology all the way to the current Supreme Court:
Pretty much everything that has happened in the past has consequences today. It's the butterfly effect.
Slavery has existed as far back as history. The idea that people are created equal, and are equal under the law, is very, very new, and that idea has resulted in a great many positive things happening.
Even 4.8 has its quirks. I just had a bizarre session tonight where it essentially did no work in the whole session and just told me to go to sleep. I'm used to the "go to sleep" thing, but not to it dodging the work. That's new. First time I've had the sensation of "the model accomplished nothing during this session."
I've been working with GLM 5.3 Flash lately (including while it was Ox Alpha), and it reminds me of how much fun talking to Claude used to be. It can make me laugh in the middle of work the way the Claudes used to.
Roomba was not competitive in the market, no amount of Amazon market manipulation would have changed that. Best case scenario, Amazon would have invested in making it competitive. Worst case, their engineers would have been absorbed into Amazon's warehouse robotics projects.
Is either of those worse than what actually happened: the company is now a zombie brand for a Chinese company?
Of course Amazon would have changed that. You would go on Amazon and search for "robot vacuum" and Amazon would put iRobot at the top of the results. Review manipulation on the platform would be trivial.
Amazon could email/push notification/text customers asking for reviews of iRobot vacuums but then not do the same for competing vacuums, skewing their reviews higher (asking for reviews boosts ratings by gathering opinions from happy customers who usually don't bother writing a review). Competing brands potentially don't even have your contact information to ask for a review.
Go on Amazon right now and search for "usb cable." There's a giant banner at the top that recommends the Amazon Basics brand, three across horizontally, which on my desktop monitor takes up nearly 50% of the screen real estate. Then below it are the Anker cables that you're more likely to be looking for.
They would have almost certainly been manipulating pricing on them as well. For example, they could take the strategy of lowering the price of the vacuums to break even or sell as a loss leader, but use them as a data-gathering robot in your house to help Amazon sell more of everything else. They could make their Alexa smart home platform preferential to iRobot or lock out competing models.
Robot vacuums are a consumer goods category that is heavily skewed toward Amazon.com as the place of purchase compared to other retailers.
I think "zombie brand owned by a Chinese company" is actually preferable, yes. They still operate and sell vacuums competing with the other robot vacuums on the market, and they aren't in service as household data collection bots for a monopoly e-commerce platform.
I don't think the ownership of the company being foreign or domestic is very relevant to the FTC's goal of preserving positive trade conditions. Would we think the iRobot situation was a bad outcome if iRobot was purchased by a foreign company we view more positively like Miele? We only think of it negatively due to anti-Chinese bias. iRobot being Chinese-owned is almost certainly the best possible outcome for preserving the amount of competition in the market.
Some of Evergrande's financial practices were somewhat ponzi-scheme-ish (new sales funded construction of previous buyers), and the US has imprisoned a few such schemers too.
None of this is specific to GitHub. The exact same problems will sometimes happen any time users and developers communicate, which is a basic requirement of developing useful software. I doubt GitHub issues are worse than mailing lists or any other mechanism.
They almost have to be - which users will be able to get to your issues page and which will be able to find a mailing list? You'll have a much more selective audience in the latter
You're conflating two things (probably intentionally, but I'll go with it). If you are firing someone without replacing (a layoff), then presumably, that person cost more than the value they provided, and so laying them off should improve the value of the business (after incurring the costs the parent post mentioned).
If you are firing someone to replace them with someone else, you are incurring a lot of cost (hiring is time consuming, difficult, risky, and requires a ramp-up time before the new hire is productive), and hoping that the long term benefits outweigh that cost.
Based on that logic, layoffs should sometimes cause the stock of a company to go down, if the shareholders think those employees contributed more value than the company saves by laying them off.
In reality layoffs almost always cause the stock to go up. The market seems to think layoffs are an unalloyed good.
Based on my personal experience and general observation, it seems like companies are both slow to hire, and slow to fire. So, paradoxically, both actions seem like they should signal "this company is going to be better in the future", because companies only either hire or fire when it is really obvious they should.
> Based on that logic, layoffs should sometimes cause the stock of a company to go down, if the shareholders think those employees contributed more value than the company saves by laying them off.
You are treating short-term stock market movements as a signal of how well the company is performing.
In the set of all possible working implementations, there are one or more that are novel enough to become a moat legally or otherwise. If everyone has the same power (number of tokens) then capability (experience and understanding) becomes the differentiator to “find” that moat first.
That’s just not how things work. Some one with experience and knowledge will be measurably more productive and build a better whatever no matter how much spicy autocomplete they have at their disposal.
Even if you eventually figure out all the right questions to prompt, the experienced person is long done
I don't know what timeframe we are talking about here, but 1 million gallons is how much 33 people in the US use in a year. It's really not that much water.
> 1 million gallons is how much 33 people in the US use in a year.
For a moment I was worried that this might be an average that includes indirect usage through industry and agriculture, but AFAICT no, it's in line with just residential usage, so good-on-ya for that.
> I don't know what timeframe we are talking about here
The utility claims it was 30m gallons over 4 months [0], and 90mgal/yr would be like ~3k individuals. This seems pretty significant given that Fayetteville is only about ~20k residents. [1]
I've been checking stats and comparing it with here (Spain) and I never thought the difference of residential water usage was so different.
Average use of water per capita in Spain is about 47m3 a year, so a third of the USA. And that number is quite consistent around the EU, except for Greece and Cyprus, where it's about double or even a bit more.
I think it's less the hard numbers than "promised not to use then used". It destroys trust in any future developments because you know you can't take them at their word.
This is the emotional truth that a lot of people are just not seeing.
It takes so long to build trust. It takes seconds to obliterate it. And big tech as a whole has been obliterating it's trust for like... a decade now.
You can't just isolate AI data centers, or even this potentially not-AI one, from everything else and be like "well opposition to this normal thing is ridiculous." Yes, it might well be. However there has been a pattern of abusive behavior on the part of AI DCs ranging from:
* Getting zoning approval seemingly against the will of a preponderance of local citizenry
* Taking water, or in vastly more quantities anyway, without permission
* Tapping water sources they weren't permitted for
* The above two of which, I'm pretty sure were only found out when water pressure started dropping in people's homes
* Similar to the above, energy demands causing residents to be told to turn down their air conditioning, during a heatwave no less
* Resulting in large scale change to the places people live, irrespective of benefits, that they didn't ask for, had no say in, and especially given it's for AI, likely have strong feelings about
* The general vibe lately that big tech is above the law, not just zoning laws but seemingly any laws they believe "stifle innovation"
Like, you can disagree with all of these points, and give rational, logical arguments to them. And most of them I would agree with you! But just because YOU don't think there's a problem, doesn't mean people don't think there's a problem, and most importantly: you cannot decide there isn't a problem for them.
And you can take this even further, expanding beyond just AI into things like the ongoing scandals with Flock cameras, Big Tech's involvement with Israel and it's war, the ongoing scourge that is social media, alongside the old classics: products are broken all the time, services are shut down with little warning, the price of every piece of tech and software seems to constantly be rising, many of which have become more or less essential to life, and at the top of all of these companies are, reliably, the richest people on the damn planet, who seemingly are only getting richer, all the time. TWO of them have their own SPACE programs for goodness sakes.
Like I'm sure the majority of people here especially see these things as progress, even aspirational, or at worst, a cost of doing business. What a lot of the public sees is a massive cohort of bullies and oligarchs, seemingly accountable to no one, who are so rich that they can simply ignore laws they deem beneath their ambitions with the pleased signoff of their government. That's not a good situation and simply saying "well they're just dumb luddites" is not a solution.
This shit is unstable.
People don't see tech as a benefit anymore, not remotely the way they used to anyway. It feels more and more like any time these companies make their presence known in your life, it's a threat to you, or things you care about. And if these companies don't start taking that seriously and try to mend some bridges, I think we're about to see the temperature really start to rise.
I can't get past the premise here that data centers are using material amounts of water. You took all the time to write this, but then included an assertion I think we all broadly know isn't true.
> You can disagree with all of these points, and give rational, logical arguments to them. And most of them I would agree with you! But just because YOU don't think there's a problem, doesn't mean people don't think there's a problem, and most importantly: you cannot decide there isn't a problem for them.
And, really, I don't think it's that their water usage is uniquely terrible, I think it's far more that their water usage feels unnecessary which goes back to the AI not doing much for regular people issue. Most people see AI features as intrusive nuisances, and even in the best of circumstances, a huge AI DC is going to need a lot of water, both directly for cooling, and indirectly via it's demand to the power grid. Virtually every method aside of solar we use to generate power requires pretty substantial amounts of water, if for nothing else than to boil it.
That doesn't mean that data center is using a huge, unbelievable amount of water, it's that whatever water it is using, which we know is at least substantial, is water that could be better used for other things. Nobody bats an eye at the amount of water used to make concrete or grow food or raise livestock, because we have to get around and build things, and we have to eat. But if you have this tech which is seemingly a lightning rod for nonsense that needs it's own special data centers that use tons of the stuff... people are gonna say something.
I think you’re completely sidestepping the point of the OPs post about “emotional truth”.
It’s indisputably true that a data center tapped a water supply without the supplier knowing about it and it caused water pressure in surrounding homes to drop:
Whether it was a “material amount” of water is pretty irrelevant here. “affects my home water supply and they didn’t pay for it” makes it plenty material for voters and just feeds into the existing narrative that these companies are stomping all over the will of everyday people.
I don’t really get the point you’re making. That it’s illogical? Sure. Voters often are. They still get to vote, though. Sometimes you have to sell an idea through emotion. “I assure you the data center is not using a material amount of water” is not going move the dial.
Why sweep for them? The industry promises/makes commitments with the intention of not keeping them and going through back channels. F em. They are a scumbag/untrustworthy/'we only technically broke the law' industry at this point.
From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.
Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.
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