Rust might be worth a look. It gets much closer to the line count and convenience of the dynamic languages like Python than Go, plus a somewhat better type system. Also gets a fully modern tooling and dependency management system. And native code of course.
I guess maybe they're worse for professional phone reviewers, who switch phones all the time, but I'm not one. In my experience, I think about two-thirds of the time I've gotten a new phone and wanted to switch to it, the SIM card size had changed, so I needed to get a new one anyways, which could only be done by mail order, so took a few more days. And about half of the time the same SIM card did physically fit, something else went wrong, like the APN names wrong, carrier didn't want to let it activate, RCS failed to work, all of which are virtually impossible to troubleshoot. IMO, the dream of universal SIM card portability has been dead for at least a decade, if not longer, and started long before eSIMs came out.
The eSIM on my current phone Just Worked as far as activating. I haven't tried switching to a new phone with it yet, so I guess I'll have to see how well it works when that happens.
Clearly there are cases when both are better. eSIMs are nice for being able to switch carriers immediately, get set up in a new country you're visiting smoothly, and recover the number from a physically lost phone. Physical SIMs are nice if you want to try out a different phone model, assuming they support the same SIM size and you can find the little tool. And also if your phone is seriously damaged but not physically lost. So not everyone necessarily loves them, but I don't think it's a case of the big bad big tech companies are enshittifying everything.
Most of the issues you described, such as carrier registration issues, are just as likely with eSim as they were with physical SIM cards. The difference is that you can't swap out the eSim physically, which was a pretty reliable way of getting around misconfiguration. This isn't really an indictment of eSim as a technology, but the reality is that Telco's are incredibly slow and inefficient, and by removing a workaround for their incompetence, it can make the problem worse.
I wonder if it's the opposite actually. When there is a human running a convenience store type of thing, people don't generally spend time trying to convince them of obviously absurd things, particularly if they work for the same company as you. Nobody wants to risk the employee refusing to sell anything to you because you're a time-wasting jerk or maybe their manager telling them to stop wasting time messing with their co-worker.
Having ridden a few of them in the area, I think they're worth it.
Waymos are 100% reliable. If you book it and it says it's coming at X time, it will definitely actually show up at X time. No more of, driver cancelled at the last minute because they don't actually want to drive to destination Y but Uber etc gave it to them anyways and they get dinged if they just cancel instead of claiming not to be able to find the rider etc. Or driver got lost or stopped for food or gas or something so is late.
It also gets to the destination exactly when it says it will. No weird routes because of the driver's whim or driving too fast or too slow. And no chance of bad music, loud conversation in some foreign language, annoying commentary, etc.
And I want them to be profitable to run too, so they have plenty of incentive to expand the program.
There is nothing in this world that is 100% reliable. The vehicles are new. Wait until they start clocking more miles.
> it will definitely actually show up at X time.
In what city and at what time of day? Waymo is just one vehicle in a sea of them. If traffic starts choking the city I don't see how they're not as vulnerable as every other vehicle.
I've come to think that adding halfway-typing to languages designed from the start to be dynamic is mostly not worth the bother. It may help a little bit sometimes, but there's always going to be holes. If you really want strong typing, it's better IMO to bite the bullet and move to a language designed for it. Let Ruby be Ruby, ditto Python, Javascript etc. Pick up some JVM, .NET, Rust, Go, etc if you really want strong types.
It sounds like the kind of job you really want is going to be a bit of a unicorn. That means those kinds of jobs don't get advertised in job boards and have professional recruiters running around looking for candidates that fit. That in turn means that finding such a job is going to be a lot of networking and shoeleather. You'll probably have to go to a bunch of conferences, talk to people, and make contacts, and hope you can discover a place where your unique skills are a greater value to somebody's project than anyone with expertise in only one of those fields could be.
Well put. The standard practice is to hire a scientist and a developer, both with deep expertise, and have them work together. For a successful collaboration, it's obviously desirable for them to have some cross-disciplinary skills or experience. Ultimately, you're still primarily doing either development or research.
In addition to the other sibling comments, I think there's also a factor of greatly increased computing power. Back in the 90s and earlier, we just didn't have the computing power generally to encrypt everything with super-strong algorithms in realtime. This probably also affects who can practically do development work on state-of-the-art algorithms.
I recall, when it was originally created, SSL was a rarity, a thing only for the your bank account and the payment page for online stores, because nobody could afford the CPU load to encrypt everything all the time. Now, it's no big deal to put streaming video behind TLS just to ensure your ISP can't mess with it.
This isn't about things that happened decades or centuries ago though. It's about how right now, today, the UK is arresting 12,000 people a year, 30 a day, for supposedly "offensive" posts on social media.
As your own article points out that stuff has been on the statute books for years (covering stuff which is generally illegal everywhere like death threats as well as stuff which was merely allegedly sent to cause others distress or anxiety) and convictions actually fell between 2015 and 2023. For all its much vaunted constitutional protections, the United States has also arrested a whole bunch of people for vague and difficult to call a crime stuff like Charlie Kirk memes or (nuanced or otherwise) criticisms of Israeli policy recently as well as more obviously menacing stuff that happened to take the form of social media communication.
Neither are quite the same thing as railroading a government critic for "sedition"
Thanks! This is a much better link than the OP, and better preempts the usual round of "why not my other pet language X instead"? questions. Clearly this choice and strategy has been in the works for a long time and the team has carefully thought out all options.
> Ban all advertisements. (I'm all for it, at this point.)
What would that actually look like though?
Take something that could be considered an ad, but probably most people agree is a good thing. Say you post on here that task X is such a pain in the butt to do all the time as a general gripe, then I say hey, I built a cheap subscription webapp to solve task X easily that you might want to check out. You sign up for it and use it and like it. Seems like everybody wins - you get a problem solved for a small amount of money, I make a little money and get my project used and my work validated etc. But it's still technically an ad.
Lots of stuff like that could be considered an ad. Every "Show HN" could be considered an ad. Suggesting people vote for candidate X or party Y could be considered an ad too - plenty of organizations do pay for actual ads just like that already. Product placements is a type of ad, but it's pretty hard to not do. I don't know how you even make a movie or TV show with people driving cars without showing a particular model of car.
I don't expect that's the kind of ad that everybody is complaining about. Okay, but then how do you legislate the difference? Can you, or anyone, actually write down a definition of the ads you want to ban and the ads you don't? And how will people distort or abuse those definitions? There's billions of dollars in advertising (maybe trillions?), it's not going to all just go away because somebody passed a law. What happens when all of that money gets poured into attempting to abuse such individual personal recommendations? That's already happening on Reddit now, though at small scales for now.
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