I'm Irish, but I've built a website for an Australian client and they integrated something which did that. In the checkout, you could choose to pay with a system which would log you into your bank's website, where you could approve a payment, then return to the site on which you'd made your purchase, where it would instantly be marked as paid. I think that it may have taken a few days for the money to actually arrive in their bank account, but the payment was authorised instantly.
This stuff is very popular in the Baltics, there are many payment options and banks provide the necessary connections to be able to complete payments for the users using 2fa auth. Not to mention crypto. e.g. check out varle.lt as an example of an online retailer, the options are sort of normal and expected.
In Poland you would just say Hej! = I acknowledge you being there but I don't want to chat. But again, back to the point I was trying to make - the intent behind these sort of questions (and answers) can be cultural
Self-driving cars decrease the internal costs of driving (allowing you to do it without having to pay attention) while keeping the external costs (congestion, danger, pollution, noise, etc) basically the same. So we'll end up with more driving, with society at large bearing the cost.
Locking this future in for good because of "present infrastructure" would be short-sighted.
> keeping the external costs (congestion, danger, pollution, noise, etc)
Are there actually self-driving car services that aren't EV-based? Just that helps with several of those criteria, and they're substantially less dangerous than human-driven vehicles.
Yes, but this is about self-driving cars and the point being made is that those in turn are also all electric, not directly about EVs.
Unfortunately for all the improvements in the tech, self-driving is only now roughly at the level that Tesla claimed to have already achieved a decade ago with their "Paint It Black" video, which makes it difficult to say if we ever get benefits significantly beyond "emergency stops for things you didn't personally see":
Smaller parking lots because the car can drop you off at the door and then put itself somewhere without enough room to open doors? Dunno. Situational awareness and fleet communication to safely allow perfect bumpers-in-contact slipstreaming at 120 MPH, keeping down energy costs while also reducing travel times and allowing narrower roads with fewer lanes? Perhaps not. Using WiFi or whatever to directly contact other vehicles on the road, eliminate the need for so much horn honking? Not yet, that's for sure.
And so on.
I'd like self-driving to fix all the problems the sci-fi vision says it could, but even with a million times the experience of a typical human driver, current machine learning clearly just isn't generalising the way I expected it to back in 2009 when I was wowed by the developments and took self-driving cars seriously.
If self-driving does fix as many negatives as possible (and again, I know this is presently an "if"), what remains? I assume one thing would be the commuter belts get even deeper as speeds go up because the long-term historical trend is commute time is constant regardless of speed, but that's the only thing I can think of?
So far as I can tell, the problem with self driving has nothing to do with the infrastructure, but rather that machine learning doesn't generalise quickly from even "merely" a million times as many examples as humans get to experience.
I think this is the first article I've seen here which captures my practical concerns with AI, my moral concerns, my economic concerns, and also the emotional "true, profound, and guttural loathing". I hate it so much, and I immediately think less of anyone who uses it. It just feels so icky. And the times when I've been fooled into reading AI-generated texts I feel cheated. It's all so cheap and nasty.
I can actually understand this view even if I don't agree with it in the same way.
I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there.
I also have seen some product sites like walmart use AI images for products, and whenever I see such an image my brain kind of rejects it and doesn't want to look at it. Not sure what that's about.
All of that being said, AI has created things on my behalf that I find valuable. Whether it's code or images or text. So it's not all bad, but it's just a very strange place where I'm not sure how I feel about it.
That is a specific implementation of image models, not true for all image models. For example Civitai has a lot of realistic models that look like people took them, at least on first glance, as I'm sure with enough pixel peeping you can find discrepancies, point is the "flatness" look is with that specific ChatGPT model.
Magical editing of pictures is so wild to me. Most photos people take have a longterm have an audience of basically 1. That's why there's jokes about how awful it is when a coworker corners you to show you their vacation photos, the vast majority of photos taken by the average person are only ever going to be viewed again by the person taking it (and maybe their immediate family).
Memory is already this squishy thing and then when you go back to reminisce about {meaningful event} and go pull up your edited photos, what are you even looking at? Google used to play these ads constantly of editing stuff out, changing how the sky looks, etc.
It's present day you effectively gaslighting future you. What's the point of memorializing something and then immediately destroying the truth of what happened with a bunch of edits.
Maybe that's the goal. That picture you took last week with a Wendy's on the backdrop - was it a Wendy's or a McD's? Let me check. Oh, it was actually a Subway. By the way, did you know Subway has two new exciting foot-long offers?
Reality doesn't matter. If it gets in the way of money and or ads, we can just change it!
It should be a matter of shame, not pride, to the British that they followed a jingoistic US into a needless war in Afghanistan which achieved nothing but much senseless death.
The 2003 protests against the war in Afghanistan were the biggest in UK history. Approximately 1 Million people (1 in 60 of the UK population) made their way to London to protest, and hundreds of thousands protested in other cities on the day.
What makes you say that wars are unnecessary? You don't get to see what would have happened in the absence of a war. Keeping some countries like Iran in check by restricting their arsenal, or weakening their economies and military capabilities seems absolutely necessary for world peace for example.
The company I used to work for used AWS for the many CRUD websites they made for many small clients. Route 53, LAMP stack on Ubuntu on EC2, and synchronised the MySQL database to Elasticsearch for the search box on the front page of the site. That was it.
I suspect that they could have achieved that result far cheaper on a different provider.
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