It's interesting that escalators generally run slower in the US since their inventor was American: Jesse W. Reno.
It does seem like a bit of a trend in engineering that the first to get there set slower standards that others then copy, speed up and otherwise improve upon. See Britain and trains.
On that note, the very same Jesse W. Reno tried to build a spiral escalator in London in 1906 in Holloway Road tube station, the shaft for which still exists today. It never made it into production aparrently, but goes with the trend.
In the south terminal at Seatac airport, there's a long escalator from the subway. Everybody crams onto the escalator, I just go up the adjoining steps two at a time and get there long before everyone else.
I just don't understand people who are content with just standing there on the escalator. And I mean able-bodied people, about to sit for hours on an airplane.
Of all the places to judge people for taking an escalator, you pick an airport? Where you have people with heavy luggage, people traveling in groups of mixed mobility, people who spent the entirety of the preceding days walking around looking at sights, people who didn't sleep well on an unfamiliar hotel bed?
Or given a non-airport station, I've found myself standing on the escalator during my morning commute ever since I ramped up my exercise routine. So when you see me, I'm standing because I hit a PR on my squats earlier that morning, or because I finished a 14k run less than an hour ago.
There are quite a few confounding factors at play in Britain with regards trains. The UK is quite small and infrastructure like railways takes up space and competes with roads and so on. There is the need for bridges and tunnels to accommodate crossings with other methods of transport or itself or to traverse topography.
A first stab at really high speed rail here called APT Advanced Passenger Train involved engines and carriages that tilted. It seems that the journalists on the demo run were so pissed (drunk) that it was given horrific reviews and the idea was shelved. That might have been our really fast railway links.
We did get HST 125 (High Speed Train) which in the early '80s did look pretty fancy compared to the older blunt nosed locomotives that they replaced.
it was a little tongue in cheek, but one concrete example of what I meant is the UK system being on a narrower gague than most of the rest of the world because it was built early and is next to impossible to change, meaning taller double decker trains aren't possible.
It's the width of a Roman Chariot - what's wrong with that 8) It was the first and that's the way it goes.
Not sure why you need a double decker train and I think you could if you really packed people in. You can just make them twice as long. Railways don't have the same constraints as nearly anything else.
I remember the carriages of the later half of C20 and each person had a huge amount of space. In one design you had a corridor running the length of the carriage with a series of bays with seating for up to four or five on each side, loads of leg room and a luggage rack above. Separate door to the platform for each bay. Obviously you had to puff furiously on your pipe or fags to fill the space with healthy smoke.
> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.
To be honest it is worse than this. Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do well which is just play the music I already know I want to play, which should be incredibly obvious from my play count and what I've downloaded.
Instead I'm regularly surprised by random noise such as popover in-product ads for extra features I don't care about, and simple AI features I might want like detecting I am in this certain place at this certain time where I usually listen to these albums or playlists so maybe weight them accordingly in a quick access list on the home screen or something aren't, for whatever reason, done.
I mean this doesn't even need LLMs it's just an algorithm, but you see what I mean. Using intelligence in the ways I should obviously care about from the way I use the product, instead of trying to get me to change the way I use it (I won't, I wish there was a way I could just definitively tell them this).
Alas, after years of annoyance with this it's still just about above the bar of useful enough, so I keep paying, and just can't be bothered to invest the time switching to some other service like apple music. So in a sense I'm probably encouraging this behaviour by not churning.
My biggest complaint re Spotify was poor shuffling, hearing the same song over and over. Finally resolved by using Spotipy to regularly re-order big playlists, and just disable shuffle.
> from the company perspective how do they, for example, have a tool call that gives the customer a discount, without it getting used when it shouldn’t?
I might be misunderstanding your point but I think you're in agreement with the gp, as in they are arguing for a locked down interface behind which the AI sits, narrowed to use within whatever particular operations the user can access, as opposed to a wide open AI interface with access to any operation (in principle).
So in your example there's no way to ask the AI for any old discount because the interface for doing so is locked down to just the discounts you can access, although the AI may be able to apply a discount you didn't ask for dynamically, if allowed, to give the customer a better experience.
Of course both versions can be implemented securely, it's just probably in general a smaller attack surface if you provide a tighter interface first.
the conjugation thing is really interesting and you're right you should just plow through with mistakes, even knowingly.
One thing you notice in kids in their native language is they get the trickier/irregular parts of grammar wrong all the time and repeatedly, as in they are corrected but just carry on making the mistake, I guess until one day finally the right pattern gets learned through sheer brute force of repetition. In the meantime, they're perfectly well understood by everyone anyway.
Obviously as an adult you can somewhat shortcut this because of better understanding of grammar and knowing how to learn, and being quicker to absorb and make the changes, but regardless I think the basic premise still applies - you learn the right way over time just by doing it over and over and over until you can't not remember it is the right way.
And, to be honest, if the wrong way is understood, how practically wrong really is it? (you will always always have tells you are not a native speaker no matter what, some of these can even be charming, I don't know if it should even be a goal to get this to zero at all).
Yes, you've understood me perfectly. Whether this works for anyone else, I don't know. But it made perfect sense for me to learn Spanish.
I'm sure there's specific contexts in which proficiency is important, but I think aiming for fluency - literally being able to communicate fluidly, without humming and hawing, - should be the goal for most people. You can do that with a very poor degree of grammar. Moreover, this probably gets you to proficiency faster anyway.
20% growth then 20% again still seems pretty good to me though. I guess compounded that is a 44% increase N3 to A14 which also starts to look much better if you zoom out a bit. I mean 44% more density since a few years ago seems, if not massive, not insignificant, like you will definitely notice it.
I wonder how much of this universal lesson will be rehashed to fit the aftermath of what's currently going on with vibe coding etc.
I think it's pretty likely that in, let's just go for the round number and say 80% of cases, everyone will conclude that just existing well used frameworks / code generator templates where everything's understood and most of the hot paths are well tested is pretty fast to build with (and more importantly, maintain and operate) and was really all we needed for most useful business software.
LLMs can abstract pretty well. They write quality code for obscure frameworks no problem, as longs as you take the time to set up tight feedback loops.
I find it so interesting how many comments about AI start with a disclaimer that of course it's very useful, before pointing out a negative of any sort.
I do it too so it's not a criticism, but I find it kinda interesting culturally. It's a reflection I think of the environment that we've created for ourselves, or has been created for us (or some combo) where somehow you can't point out an unqualified negative of this tech.
This to me is actually one of the clearest bubble signals, just because if it really were as good as all that, it'd be completely redundant to remind everyone of that when criticising it.
I think it might be a sort of weird collective psychological thing where we must not admit what seems pretty clear, just for fear of breaking from norms.
But, of course, yeah it's very useful for some stuff and I use it all the time :-)
Part of the problem is that there is so much overlap between GenAI's biggest boosters and people who reflexively welcome on any tech change as an unalloyed good. People can be really fanatical about this stuff. Any nuanced discussion of tradeoffs or negative externalities draws insults of being a Luddite.
My own general thoughts are that AI is extremely useful in discrete cases, will cause an immense amount of cultural and societal harm overall, and there's no clear political path to a healthier development trajectory. I don't think that's an uncommon stance, but people espousing something like that get a lot of hate in a lot of discussions.
I can easily imagine an arms control style series of agreements between the handful of leading AI companies and countries which are imperfect but still quite effective at mitigating the harms without stifling the upsides, but it seems clear that the current leading actors in this space have zero interest in that.
It happens everywhere with every topic on the internet. You need to let your fellow tribemates know you're in the same tribe before you say anything negative, otherwise they will discard your argument and flame you to death.
Go into any subreddit and you see the exact same pattern.
i think its cognitive dissonance. everyone is using it pretty frequently and so to criticize it creates this tension like "if its not actually worthwhile then why am i using it so much?" and the most prolific response to that dilemma is to write it off as saying "well of course its useful in many ways" ... with the unspoken second half of that sentence being "it's useful in the ways i use it"
It's a very wide technology, there's going to be use cases where it works well. I think without the "of course it's useful" then you'd just be flooded with examples of where it works well as counterpoints whether they're relevant or not. Critics have to set the stage that they're criticizing a particular use case or aspect of the technology and not the whole thing all at once.
Well I think theres a lot of social pressure to disclaim "yes of course its useful" because if all you do is say "hey AI has this problem," you'll have AI bros replying to you telling you about all the good and saying you're misrepresenting AI.
I agree and I think there is also a more insidious meta aspect: for every comment like this there is the worry that some X multiple more people hold that view but won't say it.
Everyone else also thinks like that and so isn't normally unambiguously critical, so you end up not knowing who really thinks that way and who's just doing it because of the game theory.
It could even be practically nobody. There's no way to tell until the deadlock breaks.
I think you're describing political commentary habits becoming general writing habits.
It works with just about anyone but try and say something positive about Trump and, if you don't add a qualifier like that, the first reply is going to be something like, "I guess you like ICE murdering babies." And then the conversation you wanted to have gets completely derailed.
The majority of people's opinions on the subtopics of complex or controversial topics have to align with their opinion on the overall topic.
AI is bad so it must both be useless and be using up all the water.
> I find it so interesting how many comments about AI start with a disclaimer that of course it's very useful, before pointing out a negative of any sort
People have to post very defensively online, otherwise some "um ackshully" guy will be immediately jumping down their throat
If you write anything negative about AI without stroking the ego of the AI bros first by praising their machine best friends they will be all over you calling you a luddite
Yes, this is really stereotypical HN: You can't really post an unqualified generalization here, because someone will inevitably jump out of the woodwork with a canned "You said X is generally Y, but here is counterexample X0 which is not Y! Your post is incorrect!"
In situations like this the answer usually comes by flipping it and assuming they do understand, and asking why it makes sense now.
It's probably just the old 'fake loader' psychology, to be honest. Waiting without knowing when the elevator will arrive is boring/frustrating, where getting into an elevator that moves, even if the wrong direction, feels like progress.
Things are happening, and even if it takes longer ultimately that's a less frustrating state to be in.
> I find it amusing that people assume the worst for things they understand little about, rather than trying to learn.
I don't know if you intended this to be exclusive of the opposite, but I do often find actually the opposite thing is true. That is people tend to be wildly, inappropriately optimistic for things they don't understand well and more likely to be skeptical in the details of things they do.
I heard some advice recently, I think in an article here on HN, to just use a big company registry where it's not their profit center, indeed may even be netural to loss making, to drive other business.
This makes total sense to me. I'm not saying it solves all problems but it eliminates so many of them, including a meta problem: the risk of new classes of problems being unexpectedly introduced (by say a private equity acquisition or similar).
If domains themselves are the profit center, you are likely in trouble if there's really any incentive for them to make incremental revenue in such a competitive market. Doing 'the right thing' just of course will not factor in if there's really no reputation at stake.
The only problem with this is that having such a complex function as a non-core business unit makes it ripe to get rid of, or try to find a way to make it a profit center.
Cloudflare, for example, removed the ability to change the nameservers for all domains registered with them.
Google got tired of being in the business and sold it to Squarespace.
Being a domain registrar is a total PITA and is not for the faint of heart, so it's the sort of thing that any business that takes it on as a non-core function will eventually tire of.
> Cloudflare, for example, removed the ability to change the nameservers for all domains registered with them.
Cloudflare never offered that ability. From the time they started offering domain registrations, it was always with the caveat that the nameservers would be fixed to Cloudflare's.
Correct, I guess I should have clarified that I mean they removed the ability that most registrars have, in an attempt to make domains into a revenue driver for their primary product.
I think a middle ground could be to use a great "domain registrar" and be prepared to move to another one when the last one stopped being great or sold to someone not so very great. And so on. Luckily this doesn't happen every month, or every year.
The problem with that is, there's not necessarily a signal for "stopped being great or sold to someone not so very great" besides "they gave my domain away to a scammer because they asked."
There ares some. Their reaction to events, their ownership structure change, support culture change etc etc. There isn't a perfect way to find that out, but there are indications.
Most of us don’t interact with our registrars often enough to notice changes in support culture, and who has time to be constantly checking for changes in their ownership, if that information is even available? If you’re spending that much energy on your registrar and your work isn’t as a domain trader, something’s wrong.
It does seem like a bit of a trend in engineering that the first to get there set slower standards that others then copy, speed up and otherwise improve upon. See Britain and trains.
On that note, the very same Jesse W. Reno tried to build a spiral escalator in London in 1906 in Holloway Road tube station, the shaft for which still exists today. It never made it into production aparrently, but goes with the trend.
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