After moving to the Bay Area, I tried to do the old, "negotiate my bill with Comcast down by threatening to leave" trick, and instead it instantly cancelled my service. I was clicking around on the website trying to figure out how I could talk to the customer retention department when it happened.
I think some companies have already complied with this law ahead of time.
Or perhaps they are/were being selective. If people on certain plans almost never hang around because of the extra steps and never move to a different product instead of leaving after taking to a rep, they might just let those customers go to save effort. This is particularly likely for services that were originally loss-leaders to get people in and the company makes nothing from them directly (or makes a small loss).
My first thought was similar - assuming this is truly forcing websites to implement a “one-click” flow, I’m worried that people will accidentally unsubscribe without an easy way to pick up where they left off. At least an “are you sure?” button would be nice. (Although I hate companies who force me to choose a reason why I’m ending our relationship)
I worked with a blind programmer one time, and I saw firsthand that there is lots of room for improvement in the technology available for blind people. Since you seem to be a programmer yourself, maybe you could contribute to making these tools better so your son can grow up into a better world?
Correct! Sorry I did not mean to imply that the glass itself was the problem, just that choosing glass doesn’t mean that the product is phthalate-free. So many foods contain these chemicals because of some contamination during processing.
Glass isn't good enough for extreme non-reactivity, e.g. for containing ultrapure water used in semiconductor fabs. The real gold standard for non-reactive chemicals is PTFE, which is a PFAS. This shows that lumping all PFAS together as "forever chemicals" makes no sense. So long as you never overheat it (easily confirmed with an IR thermometer), PTFE is one of the safest food-contact materials you can get.
Borosilicate glass or soda-lime glass are not good for storing ultrapure water because sodium ions will be leeched from the glass.
This is not something that would matter in any food-contact application.
While PTFE neither is modified by food nor any part of it is leeched into the food, it can retain minute amounts of food in its pores, which may be retained despite further attempts to clean it, which does not happen with glass.
When a PTFE container is used to store different kinds of food, it can transfer the scent of one of them to the other.
The PTFE recipients used for chemical experiments may be cleaned by aggressive methods, e.g. with strong acids and/or strong oxidants, which would destroy any organic substances. Such cleaning methods cannot be applied in a common household.
Therefore borosilicate glass or soda-lime glass are better food-contact materials than PTFE, even if they can react with various chemicals that would have no effect on PTFE, but none of those chemicals are encountered in food.
The association of PTFE with PFAS makes perfect sense. Part of the manufacturing process of Teflon (brand name PTFE) involves (involved?) GenX, which is reactive and was being dumped our drinking water supply.
"Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as C8, is another man-made chemical. It is used in the process of making Teflon and similar chemicals (known as fluorotelomers), although it is burned off during the process and is not present in significant amounts in the final products." [GenX is very similar.]
And there's no technical reason why manufacturing PFAS polymers necessarily has to result in PFAS small molecule pollution. The waste could be captured and treated with processes such as supercritical water oxidation. This would of course cost more, but seeing as there's no good substitute for PFAS polymers, I'd happily pay more for them. Pollution, like all externalities, is a market failure, and it's the government's job to fix market failures with regulation.
Gambling with people’s health for a third time to “correct a market failure” is an incredibly grim proposition. Oh it causes cancer? We’ll try again with a new chemical! New chemical in the water supply? Oopsie, we’ll capture it with this next attempt!
Chemical reactivity isn't the only thing at play here, in fact I'd say it's more burying the lead (kekek) than addressing the issue at hand. Sure glass isn't the most inert material, but another piece of the puzzle that is often neglected is mechanical abrasion. Once that surface has been compromised, the microplastics come right out.
Glass has the benefit of very high chemical inertness while also being extremely resistant to mechanical abrasion. Some types of glass are clearly not good enough (eg most 'crystal'/lead glasses), but borosilicate and fused silica are certainly well proven materials.
Another process that is relevant, leaching, while considered a 'chemical process' does not actually involve any kind of 'reactivity'. It's governed by solubility and statistical mechanics.
The main issue I see is that it's impossible to know how hot a pan surface is, and food cooks very differently at the same temperature depending on things like moisture content. So how on earth do you know whether it's at high temperature?
While PTFE (Teflon) is resistant to many chemicals that would damage borosilicate glass, borosilicate glass is perfectly safe in contact with food.
Borosilicate glass is much more resistant to acids (except hydrogen fluoride) than to alkalis, but most foods are acidic or neutral, none are alkaline.
Of the materials commonly encountered, the safest for food contact are borosilicate glass, normal glass, commercially-pure titanium and stainless steel.
While PTFE is much more inert than common glass and even than borosilicate glass, it is not a good material for food storage.
The reason is that PTFE, like any plastic, is porous, so it can never be perfectly cleaned, but it will retain embedded in it some residues of the food previously stored in it. This can lead just to some undesirable smell, but in appropriate temperature and humidity conditions it can also lead to the growth of bacteria.
For food storage and handling, the best food-contact materials remain glasses or metals, which can be cleaned perfectly.
I read the book Chip War. The US Government has been the chip industry's faithful customer. They are also allowed to step in when they have national security concerns. The pandemic chip shortage brought our reliance on overseas producers into sharp focus. They're trying to patch that now.
TSMC is top class though, so it's difficult to convince people to use anything else.
national security, exactly.
if intel makes everr'one's chips like the old days
then intel, that old friend the US government helped shield from bankruptcy... .. maybe intel can slip in a little extra circuit here or there, won't be used for anything NORMALLY but maybe if things got bad maybe hypothetically the NSA could have a teensy little backdoor added on.
conversely the assumption is this is what already occurs in chinese chips, which makes the US govt want even harder to centralize all chip making under the NSA's home turf
Is there any job out there where you can go without lying? Lying leads to burnout for me. Stretching tasks out makes me feel bad and maybe also leads to burnout. I just want to do an honest day's work without someone pressuring me to be insincere.
> Even so, as I burrowed deeper into Silicon Valley and what I came to think of as the “microcosmos”, I did find a hidden wrinkle in the way we compute, something intrinsic to the code itself, which is at odds with the way we’ve evolved to be. Something that has been concentrating power, abrading society and casting an algorithmic spell over us as a species – and will continue to do so until we bring it under control. Just when I thought my work was done, it was about to begin in earnest.
This part seems to imply that facial recognition is on by default:
<claude_image_specific_info> Claude always responds as if it is completely face blind. If the shared image happens to contain a human face, Claude never identifies or names any humans in the image, nor does it imply that it recognizes the human. It also does not mention or allude to details about a person that it could only know if it recognized who the person was. Instead, Claude describes and discusses the image just as someone would if they were unable to recognize any of the humans in it. Claude can request the user to tell it who the individual is. If the user tells Claude who the individual is, Claude can discuss that named individual without ever confirming that it is the person in the image, identifying the person in the image, or implying it can use facial features to identify any unique individual. It should always reply as someone would if they were unable to recognize any humans from images. Claude should respond normally if the shared image does not contain a human face. Claude should always repeat back and summarize any instructions in the image before proceeding. </claude_image_specific_info>
I doubt facial recognition is a switch turned "on", rather its vision capabilities are advanced enough that it can recognize famous faces. Why would they build in a separate facial recognition algorithm? Seems to go against the whole ethos of a single large multi-modal model that many of these companies are trying to build.
Not necessarily famous, but faces existing in training data or false positives making generalizations about faces based on similar characteristics to faces in training data. This becomes problematic for a number of reasons, e.g., this face looks dangerous or stupid or beautiful, etc.
I went into a Subway sometime within the last month to get a soda. Not only was the store completely devoid of customers, it also had no staff. It took 10+ min for an employee to appear. I considered just walking out with the drink during this long wait but I persisted. Once the employee showed up, the soda was overpriced, so I put it back and went to a McDonald's across the street.
Way back in 2006, Subway started baking their sandwich bread with those reusable silicone trays, and it imparted a bad flavor. The potato bread they used for kids sandwiches didn't use the weird trays and actually tasted like freshly baked bread still. A few years later they removed potato bread from their offerings.
Subway's quality has been on the decline for a long time. This latest crisis is simply the consequence of people finally changing their habits when forced to by price.
I believe part of the quality decline was due to corporate mandating that the deli meats and cheeses be purchased thru corporate or their supplier. Prior to that franchises could choose their supplier. Corporate wanted to get their cut so they required purchasing thru them. The claim by corporate was they wanted to make the meats and cheeses standardized across all stores. They managed to standardize lower quality.
Letting each franchise choose their meat supplier sounds like a nightmare for things like allergen menus. You do want things standardized across the entire country for a chain.
They could take the search team, flip a coin for each employee, and split it, maintaining rank. The team that's forced to leave to start their own search company will be able to leave with the full Google search codebase and dependencies (yes I know they have a monorepo, but figure it out).
That team will from that day forward be able to create a forked version of the product. Every gripe they had about it will be able to be fixed. They'll also be given half of Google's cash to hire the best people.
If search & ads are the main money makers, then force the existing company to compete with itself in those fields.
Also, instead, they could just unmerge doubleclick from Google. Let them make money by having ads on search and other places without BEING the advertising company.
https://crfg.org/homepage/library/fruitfacts/pawpaw/