But accessiblity on the frontend is to a large extend patterns - if it looks like a checkbox it should have the appropriate ARIA tag, and patterns are easy for an LLM.
It's just… a lot of people don't see this on their bottom line. Or any line. My awareness of accessibility issues is the Web Accessibility Initiative and the Apple Developer talks and docs, but I don't think I've ever once been asked to focus on them. If anything, I've had ideas shot down.
What AI does do is make it cheap to fill in gaps. 1500 junior developers for the price of one, if you know how to manage them. But still, even there, they'd only be filling in gaps as well as the nature of those gaps have been documented in text, not the lived experience of people with e.g. limited vision, or limited joint mobility whose fingers won't perform all the usual gestures.
Even without that issue, I'd expect any person with a disability to describe an AI-developed accessibility solution as "slop": because I've had to fix up a real codebase where nobody before me had noticed the FAQ was entirely Bob Ross quotes (the app wasn't about painting, or indeed in English), I absolutely anticipate that a vibe-coded accessibility solution will do something equally weird, perhaps having some equivalent to "As a large language model…" or to hard-code some example data that has nothing to do with the current real value of a widget.
Accessibility testing sounds like something an LLM might be good at. Provide it with tools to access your website only through a screen reader (simulated, text not audio), ask it to complete tasks, measure success rate. That should be way easier for an LLM than image-based driving a web browser.
Halving travel times would be really good, the problem is that supersonic never had the range to make the difference meaningful.
JFK-London in 3 hours vs 6 is pretty tolerable if you’re more comfortable for the 6 hours. SFO to Shanghai in 7 hours vs 14 would be a lot more compelling but Concorde could not do transpacific range.
That's the just flight time, but you've also got travel to/from the airport, parking, maybe shuttle bus/monorail, and checking/security/wait time at the airport as well.
So, add an hour for door-door travel to airport, and 2-hr before flight check-in, and now the comparison isn't 3 vs 6hr but 9 vs 12hr, which doesn't sound so worthwhile, although no doubt there are customers for it.
For longer flights it'd be much more attractive, but this is never going to be an affordable service for the masses.
A service where your limo drives out to the aircraft, with all searches and paperwork pre-done, would have about the same time gain as going Mach 1.7 vs. Mach 0.85.
Underrated observation. The low-hanging fruit is all in the office/home-to-takeoff and touchdown-to-office/home blocks on each end, not the time in the air. The commute, checkin, security, airport transit, boarding, and taxiing are the time-sinks worth optimizing.
That's a real service.
Some airports, including LAX and London Heathrow, allow a "tarmac transfer", where the limo goes directly to the plane. [1][2] Cost is $200 to $1000. That could save an hour or more at each end.
VIP Terminal Access: Skip the standard queues and enter exclusive VIP terminals where you’ll receive expedited passport control, security checks, and personalized services, all while enjoying luxury amenities. Avoid long security lines with expedited security processing, ensuring you spend minimal time in the airport.
Which already is a bad signal for the article's argument. We already have a way to significantly reduce that travel time and it's a niche.
Could Boom Supersonic or whoever actually survive selling only to a hundred Taylor Swifts? How are they going to keep the lights on for the 30 years those jets fully saturate the market?
But for the private jet market, the reduction would be huge. They're already paying a premium to save time. The top end will pay an even larger premium to save even more time.
I agree with you that for commercial, anything other than super long haul (which is technically very hard), the time saving advantages are much less compelling.
Past like hour 12 it becomes really draining. I used to fly JFK to HKG and that was an ordeal; I can’t imagine the newer super long haul like London to Perth.
Depends on the time zone change. From Europe to with Africa sure a 12 hour figggt is great. If I travel business London to singapore i get far worse jet lag than if I fly via the Middle East and break my journey for a few hours.
You could say that about the Chinese stock market in general. Neither the SSE Composite nor the Hang Seng correlate all that well with Chinese GDP growth.
A valuable exercise, I think, would be to figure out what parts of a social network you could make monetizable without ads. Facebook et al have everything under the sun but not all of those features are monetizable (arguably some of them probably aren't worth the squeeze)
I think a great example of a part of a social network that would be good is event organizing. Partiful I believe is attempting to make money in that particular space by offering paid super-user features for higher-volume party promoters and the like.
Tunnels are actually pretty safe in earthquakes, Japan for example is criss crossed with them.
A tunnel is actually the least likely to shake; if you shake a jello with fruit inside it, the surface moves a lot but the interior fruit won’t move all that much.
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