> Great, so now GitHub can't change the structure of their IDs without breaking this person's code.
And that is all the fault of the person who treated a documented opaque value as if it has some specific structure.
> The lesson is that if you're designing an API and want an ID to be opaque you have to literally encrypt it.
The lesson is that you should stop caring about breaking people’s code who go against the documentation this way. When it breaks you shrug. Their code was always buggy and it just happened to be working for them until then. You are not their dad. You are not responsible for their misfortune.
> I find it really demoralizing as an API designer that I have to treat my API's consumers as adversaries who will knowingly and intentionally ignore guidance in the documentation like this.
Sounds like you’ve maybe never actually run a service or API library at scale. There’s so many factors that go into a decision like that at a company that it’s never so simple. Is the person impacted influential? You’ve got a reputation hit if they negatively blog about how you screwed them after something was working for years. Is a customer who’s worth 10% of your annual revenue impacted? Bet your ass your management chain won’t let you do a breaking change / revert any you made by declaring an incident.
Even in OSS land, you risk alienating the community you’ve built if they’re meaningfully impact. You only do this if the impact is minimal or you don’t care about alienating anyone using your software.
> The lesson is that you should stop caring about breaking people’s code who go against the documentation this way. When it breaks you shrug. Their code was always buggy and it just happened to be working for them until then. You are not their dad. You are not responsible for their misfortune.
Sure, but good luck running a business with that mindset.
> calling a delivery place was just easier than using an app
This is so much the polar opposite for me.
First of all: restaurant discovery. With a phone interface you have to somehow out of band learn that there is a place who delivers to you, that they are open and obtain their menu. With an app no matter where you are it gives you a list of places which are open and deliver to you.
Second is that you have all the time to browse the menu, do your research, contemplate, hand a phone around among many people, see your order, check your order, change your order, change your mind mid order. With a phone call a fast talking rushed person who often doesn’t speak the language natively talks to you from a noisy kitchen. And they expect you to get on with it fast because you are holding up the line. You better already know what you are ordering and be ready to make decisions about any substitutions as they come up.
Then comes the payment. With apps I’m only trusting my payment details to a large company who has the engineering resources to make the transaction secure. With a phone order you either pay to the delivery driver (does he accept card? Do i have enough cash if not?) or you read in your card details to the phone. Which is just bonkers unsecure on so many levels.
Then comes the tracking: with the app i see when the food is ready, and where the driver is in the delivery with a continously updated ETA. With a phone? You can call them again if the food does not show up I guess. Good luck.
Then comes the handover. With the phone if the food was pre-paid the delivery driver just gives the food to whomever. If it is paid on delivery they give it to whomever pays them. Hope it reaches you. With the apps i’m using the app displays a one time code which the driver ask for to check that you are who ordered.
Every element of the experience is better with an app in my opinion.
> and they could give you updates on when they were out of something
So can they through the app. But instead of telling every single costumer about what they are out of they just click it once on their admin and the items in question are stricken through in the menu. I see that all the time.
It doesn't have to be a desirable goal to everyone.
> The only driver that I can really comprehend is the desire for freedom and autonomy in less populated spaces.
You got one of the big ones. But not the only one. Other is survival. Here on Earth we are all one bad infection outbreak away from ending human society as we know it. We have all of our eggs in one basket. Even if we would have a stable foothold on the moon and mars we would still be vulnerable to gamma-ray bursts and crazy despots with nuclear armed missiles.
> We'll recreate the same problems we have here everywhere we go.
We do. There are still benefits to the people who are "taming the frontier". And that is enough for it to happen. We also see that even though human condition follows us different places have a different feel to them. Some places we got some things better while others worse.
> Compared to anywhere else we know about, Earth is an extremely unique utopia.
To a certain extent. We can adapt the environments to us. And we can adapt ourselves to new environments.
When I move to the arctic I leave my parasol at home and buy a coat. When I move to a gas giant I need to rethink more of my biology. Imagine if some of us can become a buoyant sail with manipulating appendages who feels as much home in the red dot of jupiter as a homid feels home on a dewy meadow. If we could I would for sure give it a go for a few hundred years, then come back and write a book about how it was.
The fact that this is not easy is part of the lure of it.
> I wonder what starts to break or not work properly at 110⁰ F?
Most likely the cooling of the actuator motors. You need to keep the magnets in the motors under their curie point or they stop being magnets. At the same time the coils right next to the magnets are heated by the electricity going through them.
Disagree, it was a bad move in two different ways. It was anticlimactic emotionaly and it didn’t convey the right message rationaly either.
Anticlimax because the first robot hyped up the entrance of the second robot. It was emotionaly conveying that “hey you think these groovy movements are great? Check out this guy.” But once it become clear that the next guy is just a dumb statue it deflated. How lively the first one was made the second one that much worse in context. A step back.
That is the emotional fail. But perhaps you don’t care about that. Think about what additional message the stage presence of the second robot conveys. The first robot estabilished that they can make a smooth robot. They drove home that the robot is usually autonomous, but in any way it is not pupetted by a guy in a motion tracking suit. The presentation covered how the robots will be used, who will be the first pilot costumer, how will it be introduced and how will it be manufactured. These are all great answers to a concern someone from the audience might have.
But what is the concern to which the second robot is the answer for? Did you doubt even for a second their ability to make the same robot you can already see on the stage but in blue? Because i didn’t. Not before they shown the static demonstration. If they just said “we are working on a production optimised, and streamlined v2” i would have totaly accepted that they can do it.
The only message the second non-working robot communicates is that they are having trouble with their production model. They couldn’t even make it stand in one spot and wave politely! Something is cooked with it and badly. It adds nothing positive to the message of the presentation while introduces the very visible sign that something is wrong.
Now, do I think they won’t be able to solve the problems eventually? Of course not. Heck maybe it will be up and running within days. But why show something which is not working? It is such an unforced error. The first robot could have just done the dance then pointed at the screen and then walked out and nothing would have been less about the whole presentation.
I'm not trying to say you're wrong. I'm trying to say that it did not kill the "vibe" for me, so to say. For all I know they _wanted_ the second one to move, but it wasn't ready in time, and situations like that are completely legitimate. I still am very impressed by what they _did_ demonstrate. Can't win them all!
> Decisions will not be made based on emotions from a demo at CES.
Sure. It is not a mistake with grave consequences. Something can be a mistake and not matter much in the long run. Like the CEO could have went on stage wearing mismatched shoes, or wearing a red clown nose. It wouldn't ruin everything. Wouldn't bankrupt them. If the robots are good they will be still sold. But it would just undermine the message a little bit. For no good reason whatsoever.
The fundamental questions will be: Do the robots work? Are they cheaper than the equivalent labour from humans? (including all costs on both sides of the comparison.) Nothing else matters in the long run. They could have just never went to CES and it would be all the same.
> Im sorry, but this is just too much.
ok :) if you say so. But then tell me. What did the stage presence of the second robot add to the show?
> Because th green light isn’t controlled by software. The LED is directly wired to the camera power.
You got a source for that? Or a clarification about which iphone version you are talking about? Because on my iphone 15 the green indicator light next to the camera is not an LED but a UI element on the screen. Source: I put my phone under a microscope just now and can see the individual pixels in this supposed "LED". Happy to provide the image if interested.
Consider that not all malfunctions of a car leads it to crashing into things. The fuel system, the engine, the transmission and even the steering can completely break down and the car will still came to a stop. They are equipped with redundant brakes, and are always supported by the ground.
At the same time an aircraft is much more precarious. If anything in the fuel, engine, transmission, props, or control surfaces go wrong it will come down and fast. They have much more potential energy than a car (because they are high up). They also typically have much more kinetic energy because they have to move faster to maintain lift if they are fixed winged, or they have to have fast rotating parts if they are rotary winged.
> trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.
Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
Dumping people on the tracks is not the solution here. Going beyond the station and stopping there (which is always safe in the "other trains are not going to run into yours" sense, that is what signals are for) then letting the signallers set the points for you to reverse back into the station is the solution.
>Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about.
Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.
Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of track isn't something the parties involved don't know how to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail network every day for some reason or another. It's a supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.
> Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.
Okay. But we are beyond that. The people who were there handled the situation and we both seem to agree that they didn't handle it well. We just seem to disagree how they should have handled it differently.
Your proposal is that they should have dumped people on the tracks. My proposal is that they should have done more to get the train next to a platform.
> This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about
Tell me where do you disagree. Have you looked at the track layout of the station? Have you looked at images of the platforms?
I'm confused about what are you asking. Are you asking if I have looked at the layout of the station and the images of the platforms? If so yes. That's how I'm describing it in my first post.
You can look at satellite images of the station via google maps, or you can check the track and signalling arrangements on https://www.openrailwaymap.org/
You can't be honestly claiming that the people exercised poor judgement when their freedom of action is constrained by the fact that they are hemmed in by all manner of rules in a highly rule following culture and that that poor judgement is justification for further reduced autonomy?
They ("ze germans" broadly speaking) should've handed this 300yr ago by not heading down a path (in their defense it probably wasn't obvious) to a culture that create obvious failures by following rules to the point of absurdity.
The train is just an example, and unfortunately there's no control train. If not the train then the absurd and trivially avoidable failure will be something else.
It sounds like you are an expert on DB rules and how they affect the decision making of the various entities in this story. So I will leave that part to you. I personally don't form opinion on things I don't know about.
What I know, and what I'm repeating now in the third comment, is that it would not have been safe to let the passengers out on the platform-less track there. Not because of rules, but because of common sense.
That's between Waymo and their investors at this point. They claim it's not, but it's not there's any way for them to actually prove they aren't, like the moon landing.
FSD on the other hand works fine without sleight of hand techniques, since I’ve taken it up to rural Maine without any cellular connectivity and it worked great, even in irregular rural traffic situations.
And that is all the fault of the person who treated a documented opaque value as if it has some specific structure.
> The lesson is that if you're designing an API and want an ID to be opaque you have to literally encrypt it.
The lesson is that you should stop caring about breaking people’s code who go against the documentation this way. When it breaks you shrug. Their code was always buggy and it just happened to be working for them until then. You are not their dad. You are not responsible for their misfortune.
> I find it really demoralizing as an API designer that I have to treat my API's consumers as adversaries who will knowingly and intentionally ignore guidance in the documentation like this.
You don’t have to.
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