Yes, but if there's an axe murderer in my house, I don't care how much he intends to murder me. I don't want him to murder me.
The government has a variety of aims and objectives. Certainly, shooting for a more healthy population is good. Convincing those that drink a lot to drink less would be one way. Permanently making the drinks awful for the entire population, no matter how many or few they drink, and ensuring what was once good never ever comes back... is another way.
But the government didn't make the drink awful. They only set the tax. Your position is that you'd have paid more anyway but now tis not an option. That seems like a business decision. Maybe the old version has so much sugar it was untenable with the tax... how sugary was it?
The government set out to reduce consumption of high-sugar drinks. They had choices on how to do that e.g. they could've targetted demand. They chose to target supply with a "sin tax".
Private companies then, for no reason whatsoever, of their own free will, decided to eliminate high-sugar drink options. They would not have done so had the government not imposed the tax. If you then blame the government for their action, they'll want to say "oh I only set the tax", despite knowing they set the tax intentionally to engineer this outcome.
> The reduction in Irn-Bru’s sugar content from 8.5 teaspoons to four, taking a can from just under 140 calories to about 65 calories
The old (2018) Irn-Bru had about 35g of table sugar per 330ml, it now has 14.85g. Coca-Cola has 35g, Pepsi has 15g. Both those multinational companies still sell their full-sugar drinks, at a much higher price with the sugar tax applied, though they also sell sugar-free alternatives (Max, Zero), as does Irn-Bru (Xtra). Coke and Pepsi have a much larger sales volume and can afford to make less sales on their full-sugar product, and keep them in their product line-up. I don't think Irn-Bru can.
The UK government ruined Irn-Bru. I still drink as much as I normally do, which is about 12 litres a year; I am well under the intended beneficiary of this war on sugar, the sort of people who drink >100 litres a year, but when I do have it, it now tastes of sadness and lamentations for better times in the past, and I just feel anger for those who wrecked it for everybody.
> I still drink as much as I normally do, which is about 12 litres a year; I am well under the intended beneficiary of this war on sugar, the sort of people who drink >100 litres a year…
It sounds like Irn-Bru was only viable _because_ of the sort of people who drink >100 litres a year. You were benefitting from that viability thanks to the very people you admit were being targeted by the tax. If they had stopped their high consumption for some other reason, availability of the original Irn-Bru would have suffered the same result due to the same drop in demand. The tax isn’t directly to blame here. The direct cause is the original motivation itself, regardless of how it was implemented. Considering only this specific example you cannot reject the tax without also rejecting the motivation.
> greed is normal and expected in a free market economy
OK, technically true, just like saying "water flows downhill" when someone's house is flooding. It isn't productive, the fact is well known.
"The system incentivizes this" and "this is good/bad" are two entirely different statements. One doesn't address the other [1], until you make a moral judgement about the outcome.
> You say this as if it's some deviant behaviour that needs correcting.
Is it moral and correct for infants to be fed contaminated baby formula? The mismatch between what is and what ought to be is deviance.
The point of "greed" here is when you are starting to cut corners to make more money to the point of impacting the quality/safety/honesty of your product. Thinking that no one would notice.
You could buy whatever random Chinese milk powder brand. But Nestle is advertising itself on the upmost quality and care for you kids. Especially the brand impacted.
It's like going to a restaurant selling the best homemade luxury food and you go to the kitchen and you find that they cook expired supermarket frozen food because they greedily were thinking that it would be more profitable.
So you're insinuating that importing from China automatically means poor quality? I don't believe that's true, especially for large companies who are able to manage the supply chain (as, AIUI, doing business with China famously requires).
I think you need to address that to validate your original comment. Otherwise there's no justification for your claim.
Uk, France and European product are big historical producers of dairy products. So you can't tell me that ingredients have to be imported from China because they are not available locally, or because China would provide a better quality for them...
And the proof that it is not the case is that indeed the contaminated ingredients are coming from China.
The point is that somehow someone made the decision that there was a few cents of benefit to make to outsource the sourcing in China despite the risk, the environmental impact and the violation of customer trust about the safety of the product.
Greed as a concept covers multiple ideas. One is principled self interest like you would see in an objectivist manifesto. The other is un-principled, short sighted, and stupid greed that simply grabs whatever gains they can without thinking about future consequences.
> It needs to be fast-updating for shared multi-user docs, like Google Docs/Sheets or Word/Excel 365.
In my experience, Google Docs has this, but realtime collaboration with Word is unusable. Which is interesting, because that means a huge number of existing Office 365 users have yet to experience it.
Imagine a fully statically linked version of Debian. What happens when there’s a security update in a commonly used library? Am I supposed to redownload a rebuild of basically the entire distro every time this happens, or else what?
Steel-manning the idea, perhaps they would ship object files (.o/.a) and the apt-get equivalent would link the system? I believe this arrangement was common in the days before dynamic linking. You don't have to redownload everything, but you do have to relink everything.
> Steel-manning the idea, perhaps they would ship object files (.o/.a) and the apt-get equivalent would link the system? I believe this arrangement was common in the days before dynamic linking. You don't have to redownload everything, but you do have to relink everything.
This was indeed comon for Unix. The only way to tune the systems (or even change the timezone) was to edit the very few source files and run make, which compiled those files then linked them into a new binary.
Linking-only is (or was) much faster than recompiling.
But if I have to relink everything, I need all the makefiles, linker scripts and source code structure. I might as well compile it outright. On the other hand, I might as well just link it whenever I run it, like, dynamically ;)
Only because of the enormous efforts put in by debian package maintainers and it's infrastructure.
If you're a an indie developer wanting your application to run on various debian based distros but the debian maintainers won't package your application, that's when you'd see why it's called DLL hell, how horribly fragmented the Linux packaging is and why even steam ships their whole run time.
Everything inside Debian is fine. That's most of the ecosystem apart from the very new stuff that isn't mature enough yet. Usually the reason something notable stays out if Debian long term is when that thing has such bad dependency hygiene that it cannot easily be brought up to standard.
Then you update those dependencies. Not very difficult with a package manager. And most dependencies aren't used by a ton of programs in a single system anyway. It is not a big deal in practice.
> I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription.
There's a huge car finance market where people do exactly that. How much they pay a finance company monthly vs. how much they pay the manufacturer monthly makes little difference to them. It's all about the monthly fee and what they get in return for it.
> And all of this has to be done in a way that will hold up in court, therefore snail mail.
This needs to change. Snail mail is no longer reliable. Letters often get delayed by weeks or go missing altogether, but the law still assumes that justice is being done by it being sufficient to assume that a letter that was posted has been received within a few days. It's no longer true.
It’s your choice of course, but in the messaging world of gatekeepers and walled gardens, I think AGPL makes the most sense. It’s a key tool we’re going to need if we want to be successful at having a federated network.
Additionally, landlords don't benefit from the higher prices (ie. market rate rent) either, since that also pushes house prices up. A landlord entering the market has a higher capital cost that absorbs the higher rental return, such that typically rental yield remains about the same (at slightly higher that the cost of capital that covers their increased risk compared to a more stable investment).
Those who benefit are those who own housing at the time of market rate increases. That's just regular investment return and the risk/reward can be directly compared to any other form of investment. Current owner occupiers and current landlords benefit at the time of every increase (even if their capital gains are not immediately realised). And then every household, whether they are owner occupiers or tenants, have to pay in the form of higher capital expense. Landlords simply pass the higher rent through to pay for their higher capital expenses.
> Additionally, landlords don't benefit from the higher prices (ie. market rate rent) either, since that also pushes house prices up.
I like this thinking. If you buy a house on the cheap and rent spikes and your profit increases dramatically, you’re not benefiting because somebody will kick in your front door and force you to buy a crazy expensive house.
Besides what you said, it is also in landlords' interest to maintain (but admittedly with as little cost/involvement as possible) the perception that the real estate goods they're renting are (quality wise) reasonable options for their prospective clients. That means that they (may go to lengths to) fend off troublesome tenants and thus contribute to the overall quality of life for the community in the neighborhood.
The problem is in remembering the voice commands. I could never do it. Word the command slightly “wrong” and it won’t work at all (at least not in my 2014 VW).
I’m optimistic that the latest progress in AI will fix this when the technology matures in cars. I reckon this is still a decade away though.
Honestly, other than that one single command ("Climate control defrost and floor") I never really use voice for anything else while actively driving. The temperature knob usually does what I want when driving, and I'll be stopped again soon enough if I want to fiddle with something else.
And that one voice command is easy-enough to remember, and the resulting manually-selected mode is easy-enough to cancel with the Auto button (which is the entire middle of the temperature knob -- simple enough).
AI is too easy to get wrong.
For example: At home when my hands are full and I'm headed to/from the basement, I might bark out the command "Alexa! Basement lights!"
This command sometimes results turning the lights on or off. But sometimes, it results in entering a conversation about the basement lights, when all anyone really wants from such simple diction is for the lights to toggle state -- like interacting with a regular light switch just toggles state.
I simply want computers to follow instructions. I am very particularly disinterested in ever having conversation -- a negotiation -- with a computer in my car.
But I can see plenty of merit to adding some context-aware tolerance for ambiguity to the accepted commands. Different people sometimes (quite rightly) use different words to describe the end result they want.
That doesn't take an LLM to accomplish, I don't think. After all, a car has a limited number of functions. It should be mostly a matter of broadening the voice recognition dictionary and expanding the fixed logic to deal with that breadth.
I reckon that this should have happened 5 years ago. :)
> That doesn't take an LLM to accomplish, I don't think. After all, a car has a limited number of functions. It should be mostly a matter of broadening the voice recognition dictionary and expanding the fixed logic to deal with that breadth.
I think the most effective way to get this accurate and effective is to give an LLM the user’s voice prompt and current context and ask to convert the user’s request into an API call. The user wouldn’t be chatting with the LLM directly.
The point is that it doesn’t require a static dictionary to already have your exact phrasing and will just work with plain English.
That requires either an online connection to a datacenter somewhere or something that (at present time) is a fairly substantial on-board computing system, and those are things that I think are worth trying to avoid for tasks like adjusting the HVAC in a Honda.
Maybe some day.
Right now, when we do have substantial on-board computing systems, they're trying to drive the car -- not change the temperature. Adding in an additional computational timeslot for LLM voice commands seems both foolhardy and expensive.
Meanwhile: Broader dictionaries and static flows with greater breadth for voice recognition? We can do that right now.
(We can even use LLMs to help generate the static flows, along with people to evaluate and test them. Once implemented, they become cheap to run.
This is in-keeping with a fairly common theme here on HN: Don't use the bot to process the data. Instead, use the bot to write the data processor.)
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