The Museum of London site (now closed as they prepare to move to their new site, coincidentally near the AWS HQ), and there was a window you could look down on part of the wall, which you can also see from the other side of the road near Barbican. I won't give directions, as that seems futile anywhere near Barbican, but I had only just thought about how weird it is that there is wall at Tower Hill, and wall at Barbican - they can't be the same run of wall as it was built, can they? That'd be immense...
The new Museum's site also has a very cool view through a window, but it's a view of the passing trains [underground], because historically that building (one of London's markets) had a freight service and of course there's no room to move a railway line under London so even though it hadn't needed a freight service for decades the passenger service over the same rails still exists and you will be able to wave to surprised (if they haven't taken that route before) passengers from inside the museum.
A friend lucked into (there's literally a lottery for popular sites) tickets for the new site in Open House London 2024 and the window existed but wasn't really set up for tourists yet of course.
I'm terrible at keeping secrets so, it was probably a bad idea to let me go on the tour, or, perhaps we should try to have fewer secrets so that I'd remember ?
Well, not quite, these aren't tube trains, they're ThamesLink trains, so it would be a mainline railway station, not a tube station, albeit underground. And they already have more appropriate stops in London.
There is a London Wall Walk, starting at the Tower of London. Text copied from the plaques at the postern: (thanks Google Lens)
>The London Wall Walk follows the original line of the City Wall for much of its length, from the royal fortress of the Tower of London to the Museum of London, situated in the modern high-rise development of the Barbican. Between these two landmarks the Wall Walk passes surviving pieces of the Wall visible to the public and the sites of the gates now buried deep beneath the City streets. It also passes close to eight of the surviving forty-one City churches.
The Walk is 134 miles (2.8km) long and is marked by twenty-one panels which can be followed in either direction. Completion of the Walk will take between one and two hours. Wheelchairs can reach most individual sites although access is difficult at some points.
> Out of curiosity, what happens when someone does not own a smartphone (or the battery is dead)? They just can't fly?
Yup, based on this announcement, and previous policy calls they've made, that person won't be able to fly. End of. They lose their seat, kthxbye!
Ryanair has made its way in the budget market (arguably inventing the budget market to some extent), by employing money-making practices of dubious need from charging people to use toilets on-board, to flying with so little fuel that they regularly call fuel emergencies on approach.
Their bet - that the market seems to support - is that people will put up with almost anything if it means a cheaper ticket.
They're even expecting to get clearance from authorities to get rid of proper seating and move to "standing seats" so they can get more people onboard, their theory being you'll stand for 3 hours on a plane if it means your ticket is x% cheaper.
I refuse to fly with them on principle - they're a terrible airline owned by a terrible person, run in a terrible way. It's only a matter of time before people realise just how dangerous they are as an operation. I hope it's just a data security issue they run into and people run away from the app scared, and not the increasingly inevitable hull loss that many have been predicting for years.
This is just another reason not to fly with them, for me.
This is a PR stunt that is regularly used (like the idea of standing-room-only tickets) to generate a new round of press for the company and highlight how cost-efficient and ruthless they are, which aligns with their branding and keeps the story alive.
I understand the sentiment but as sibling comment points out, you're very light in the way of stating facts to back up these claims.
There's an interview with the CEO where he explains (claims) the idea of that policy is to reduce demand so they can leave out a couple of toilets and put in / sell more seats -- it's not about the charge for the toilet per se.
May I point out that your counter-argument to "this is a PR stunt" is "no no, the CEO himself floated this idea publicly and got interviewed in the press to talk about it".
>to flying with so little fuel that they regularly call fuel emergencies on approach.
If you're talking about the recent incident, I thought that was because they tried landing several times at different airports? Is there any evidence that they routinely fly with less fuel buffer than other airlines?
Sure, I first heard about this years ago when Channel 4 (a UK broadcaster) ran a program about pilots stating they were concerned about the policy. There had been outrage within the aviation industry after three fuel emergencies in one day at one airport. [0] Ryanair sued [1], and lost: Channel 4 had engaged in fair journalism, it turns out.
Seems they're still at it, hence the recent incident.
All three flights were diverted due to weather, and none of them fell below the legally required amount of fuel. One has to wonder if it’s really reasonable to criticize them in this instance if a single weather event affected them all.
I hate just about everything I know about Ryanair but if they're not below required limits, then I'd say they're not the problem and the point is moot.
I mean it isn’t surprising people put up such abuse when I find that usually these discount airlines are half the ticket price of a major carrier for the same sort of flight. I’ve gotten remarkably good at efficiently packing my allotted small personal item bag.
I once had one of his quote on the back of my business card when I was doing a lot of software dev consultancy: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes".
I keep meaning to sit down with this site and make my way through it all. Might make more progress if I grab them into an eReader-friendly format and then peruse them more easily when travelling.
The problem with that quote is that all of us reading this are telescope operators, not astronomers. The quantity and quality of our telescope photos is what we are paid for so we have no choice but to know our chosen brand of telescope inside and out.
It will sell very well because it a) will be cheaper than non-advertising laden fridges, b) will make more money meaning they can spend more on marketing and c) it has an air of "living in the future" about it.
Most of us here see it for what it is, because we know what happens to the data.
I think the future is going to have more of this.
But, I can also imagine people paying more for almost everything that is ad-supported today to get non-ad supported versions in the future, not because of the data concerns, but because of the opportunity for status signalling - ad-supported devices like this will be seen as something "only poor people have" within two decades. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.
That might force them into providing better warranty support: if my fridge isn't working any more, I'm going to stop paying them money. Obviously subscription-free becomes another tier of status, but if by paying a monthly fee I get 24 hour maintenance support for fear of losing my sub revenue, well...
There's already parallels around this to an extent. I pay Apple money every month for storage, ad-free TV, music and games, confident my data is my data. As a result, they might have a customer for life, because the alternatives are awful in comparison even if I pay less per month or overall for them.
I have very good experience of Samsung’s warranty support for a washing machine, actually.
The thing that makes corporations give better warranty support is not more money. Giving them more money does not incentivize them to suddenly give better service or make higher quality goods. The thing is consumer protection laws. In the EU, consumer goods have a minimum two-year warranty period. This incentivizes higher quality manufacturing.
> It will sell very well because it a) will be cheaper than non-advertising laden fridges,
Will it? Investors would prefer full price fridges with full price ads.
Most consumers won't even know they've installed adware until the appliance is turned on, and what are they gonna do? go to all the effort of returning and buying another fridge?
Dark patterns like that will die out soon enough and they'll harm the share price: Samsung are going to tell customers what they're getting.
And while investors would prefer full price fridges with full price ads, the ad economy only makes sense once you have decent reach, so it makes sense to lower the cost of acquisition of the device, take the hit as a customer acquisition cost and then sell the larger reach to advertisers.
This is the model for every ad-supported device and service to date, I'm not sure they're going to reinvent those economics for a fridge.
When he was stationed abroad with a load of meatheads, they would be happy spending their down time drinking beer and getting a tan. He would miss libraries of home. When people around him didn't care about the problems of the World, he saw the intractable nuance of the World's problems and felt a deep helplessness.
Some of this was clearly depression, but I have to admit, 30 years after he shared those stories with me, there have been times I've been jealous of people who did not think through the detail and nuance and see the risks and lack of mitigations in so many circumstances. I'm not exceptionally smart, but I do seem to be a step or two ahead of ~30% of my colleagues and friends, and that seems to be enough to make life feel quite sad, quite a lot of the time.
A further level of intelligence may recognize the futility in worrying, accept the situation and your inability to impact it, and purposefully take the approach of a meathead.
A man’s search for meaning is an incredible book you may enjoy based on your comment. My strongest takeaway was that in situations where I cannot make an impact or control something, I still control how I react.
Emojis at the end of a statement online are a generational thing, not an AI thing.
Replying to an email inline rather than at the top marks you out as of a certain generation. Using text emojis rather than finding the graphical emoji does too.
Everyone needs to relax about AI generation anyway (did you learn something useful or not? If you did, does it matter if it was AI generated as a site?), but saying "this is what people under 30 frequently do, so it must be fake", is just this weird vibe spreading everywhere I don't get at all.
It isn't a generational thing. The choice of emoji is a generational thing, but people of all ages do it. AI most certainly does not use emoji in the same way a young person does (unless you encourage it to, but even then it comes across as cringeworthy). If anything it's closer to how a middle-aged person uses them.
I'd also say the use of text emoticons has all but died out in anything other than ironic usage, or in situations where it's difficult to use unicode emoji (e.g. games or this very site)
When text is very obviously generated by AI it communicates to the reader that there is nothing of value to be read. It always writes in the same vapid, overly enthusiastic, overly verbose way. It's grating and generally conveys very little information per word. It's a cliché at this point, but if nobody bothered to write it then why would I bother to read it?
I am a semi-professional gambler, based in the UK. To parse that statement: I have a day job; I make about as much income from software that trades on betting exchanges as I do from the day job, except that income is tax free (because UK law does not recognise it as a taxable trade - another debate); and I spend a lot of time watching, reading and understanding changes in the gambling industry because a significant chunk of my savings income comes from it.
The UK went through almost everything the US is going through right now some years ago, where problem gambling led to suicides and people struggling to pay bills. Multiple measures have been taken that seem to have directly helped that situation: VIP programs have been scrapped; advertising is being limited; and, you may have to prove you can afford to bet the levels you're betting at to an operator, which is an incredibly unpopular move (who wants to send their pay slips to their bookie?), but does seem to have quelled things a little.
However there is more to do, and there is something you can do right now if you are losing money and want to reduce the impact these products have on you.
Stop playing casino and video slot games. Focus on sports only.
The myth is that the problem gamblers are losing their money on 2nd Division Nigerian netball games in the middle of the night. Yes, there are some people who are looking for sports action all the time, but that's not the biggest source of problems.
With sports, you have a little time to think. I recommend not playing in-play unless you have automated that solution to find EV and its executing for you (I know people who make money doing this on Betfair in the UK). Bet before game only, and you will have a built-in "cool off" period.
You don't get that with casino games or video slots. Its relentless, and you can lose thousands an hour before you even realise what is happening.
And then, there's EV. Expected Value. Sometimes (actually, kinda often), the odds a bookmaker puts up are a bit wrong.
Not every price, it might be a prop bet on a particular player, and they're putting a price up on a Monday for a Saturday game, and you have a spreadsheet that dings something and tells you what the kelly stake should be and you put 1% of your bankroll on it, and then you might sell it back on Saturday morning when the market has got right or you let it ride (and there's maths to tell you when to do that and when not), and you ride some variance but make money.
That's not possible on casino or video slot games. They just bleed you. There is no EV. If you win, you got lucky (the scientific name for this is "experienced positive variance"), and you should run away quickly before you lose it back. But the sure way to win on those games is the same as in Wargames: don't play at all.
I'm biased, I realise that, but I would love to see the outlawing of casino and slot games on mobile.
I would also like to see more education in schools around probability and statistics (the founder of SIG, a storied institution who is now a market maker on Kalshi, the prediction market platform), argues that the fascination with calculus in schools might have helped during the space race, but today we need people to really understand Bayes theorem more than anything else. I agree.
If you want to start your own education in how to bet a little smarter and lose a little less, I can recommend The Logic of Sports Betting [0] and its sequel Interception [1]. I also like Dan Abrams' book [2], that talks about expected growth, not just exepcted value.
These are not get rich quick schemes, but it will give you an idea of what goes on in the minds of people who try and take this all very seriously. You'll still need to think about modelling and how to get your own prices to compare with those you're being offered, but if you're not prepared to do that work, what is it you're actually doing?
That's not how exchanges or prediction markets work. They need - and welcome - sharp action.
Some bookmakers are marketing companies that will kill unprofitable accounts, but not all of them. It does not take a lot of work and research to work out who is who if you want to take this seriously, or how to make sure your account stays under the radar long enough, or even how to get around those mechanisms - some of those techniques may ultimately be considered fraud, however.
And if you don't want to take it seriously, what are you doing throwing huge wads of cash at it?
This is just a style I've seen a lot of people who are a generation or so younger than me enjoy.
I'm not expected to write docs the way my father's generation did (thank god), so I don't expect them to write the docs the way I would. If this gets people engaged and excited, I lose nothing, they get something, we're fine.
As to the LLM generation claim, I don't care if it is or it isn't. The project seems legit, they're making claims that 3rd parties have verified ("Community Projects"), it looks useful and interesting, so I might spend more time with it soon.
It doesn't replace core algorithms. It plumbs things together. It means you're not having to write the framework to connect things, your algos are still going to have the same problems as they had before.
reply