This comprehensive article goes over the problems of memory allocation, how programmers and educators have been trained to wrongly think about the problem, and how the concept of arenas solve it.
As someone who spends most of his time in garbage collected languages, this was wildly fascinating to me.
It's a proposed web standard, so ultimately yes, it could affect other browsers in the long run. And it would almost certainly affect other Chromium-based browsers.
Only other chromium web browsers that enable that feature. Safari and Firefox already said they're not implementing the feature, so unless they change their mind it's not going anywhere.
Firefox and Safari have both said "no, we're not doing that". And then chrome decided to move forward with it, regardless of whether it gets standardized.
The company that builds a robot that can do household chores will be very, very rich.
I want a bot that can do laundry (load washer, load dryer, fold, put away), do the dishes (rinse, put in dishwasher, put clean dishes away, wash pots & pans), vacuum floors, dust, clean up messes, empty garbage bins, take out the trash, mow my lawn, trim bushes, clean tables, mop floors, make meals, cleans toilets and sinks and bathrooms.
Currently myself and my wife split these duties, and kids help a bit. But it's still a ton of work for us. I would love to offload all that and more to a robot.
Exactly. And add one more thing: Help with the care of the elderly and invalids.
As it happens, I turned sixty-seven today. While I am in good shape now, it's reasonable to assume that I might need personal care at some point in the not too distant future. A humanoid robot assistant that could handle many of those tasks would be great.
I have no idea when or whether that will become possible, though.
If there was a smallish vehicle (thing? I'm thinking johnny #5) that could:
hold and carry things you give it (without spilling), and carry then set them down where you ask.
or pick things up from the ground for you.
Then that would probably be a great help for lots of older people.
I'm not that old myself, but I've seen lots of older people who are otherwise self-sufficient struggle with some of these things as mobility starts to suffer.
If it could also talk to you and give sass back, then that would also be a bonus.
I don't want to pay someone to clean up my messes. That is not the kind of relationship I want to have with another human. But I'd happily pay for a machine that did it.
I understand that this is coming from a place of privilege, but I was raised with regular maid service cleaning our home as a child and it's just something you learn to live with. You pick up after yourself for the easy things like throwing out garbage and picking up your clothes on the floor so the maids can do the heavy work like deep cleaning everything that's not in the way. And it's not necessarily unaffordable for biweekly cleaning.
You don't hire a maid service to clean up after you, you do it because they do a better job at all the stuff you really don't want to.
You would literally be making the same argument for any other breakthrough tech:
Why invent a dishwasher? You can have someone do it! Why have automated elevators? You can have someone do it! Why have automated farming systems? You can hire cheap Mexicans to do it!
We like to invent technologies to help make people's lives easier.
That person doesn't have a better job available to them though, so without that job, you're sentencing them to destitution, which seems like a worse outcome for them. Fortunately you don't have to see it though.
Human-sized robots (arguably needed for some of the tasks you list, being able to walk stairs, etc.) will be creepy due to how physically imposing they’ll be, and with a risk of being dangerous due to how massive they’ll need to be. For example falling over due to malfunction/collision/tripping, and potentially crushing a small child. I don’t see such a product happening for home use.
If a robot is adept at washing dishes and folding laundry, it suggests our technology is good enough that they should have a decent shot at remaining upright indefinitely, or falling gracefully and righting themselves afterwards.
Perhaps the entire kitchen sink could be redesigned with robotic dish washing in mind. No bipedal Boston Dynamics style robot washing your dishes and taking out the trash - just two arms built into the sink with automated drains and soap dispensing to wash dishes, put them in a rack, and do nothing else. I'd pay quite a bit for that.
How is that different than a dishwasher? The problem is collecting the dishes and putting them away, not washing them. Unless you’re imagining something to scrub pots and pans?
I think that in reality, most people do a very light pre-wash of many dishes, before loading them into the dishwasher. I know I do. I'd be happier if I could just stick the plates in the sink, and come back an hour later to find the dishes, pots, pans and utensils drying in a rack.
I don't think so. To my knowledge, nobody has ever been killed by a Roomba. The robot problem is a lot less scary if there are essentially no life-and-death consequences for random innocent bystanders.
a robot arm capable of doing the dishes is also capable enough to manipulate a knife (commonly found in kitchens) in a stabbing motion. Not intentionally, of course, but the sci-fi story of this going bad writes itself. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, I'll be the first in line to buy a robot arm sink dishwasher, but robotics is dangerous, even when not piloting a several ton vehicle down the road.
But poor people suffer much more from raised rent than rich people from losing little money on dubious cryptocurrency investments. If the punishment was based not on absolute dollar amount but on damage relative to person's total amount of money then it would be more fair.
Launching Copilot on my iPhone, I see an on/off switch "Use GPT-4", with it defaulted to off. Switching it on, Copilot says, "Nice! It will be fun with GPT-4 . Responses may be slower while being creative. What do you want to explore today?"
We at Microsft used this to build apps.microsoft.com. We're quite happy with the results. Shoelace is customizable, accessible, extensible, easy to use.
This is nice and all, but when I see what the big companies do, I always have this cave-at in my head - "is this one of the teams with enough resources to boil the ocean?"
I.e. it's proof that Shoelace, in this case, is not inherently useless. But it's hard to get a hunch for how good it is to a mere non-corporate.
Gotta give props though, the apps site is fast and slick.
That's a fair point. Big companies do have the resources to go all out, but that doesn't always mean their solutions are the best fit for everyone. I think Shoelace is pretty neat because it's more approachable for folks who aren't part of those mega-teams.
> "First, browser engine choice should become a reality on iOS in the EU in 2024, thanks to the plain language of the DMA. Apple will, of course, attempt to delay the entry of competing browsers through as-yet-unknown strategies, but the clock is ticking. Once browsers can enable capable web apps with easier distribution, the logic of the app store loses a bit of its lustre."
For in-app purchases of PWAs in app Stores, you can use the Digital Goods API[0]. It works for Google Play and Microsoft Store.
For non-free apps, one thing I've seen is app Stores launch the PWA with some flags indicating it was launched from the Store. If these flags are not present, the app is being launched via direct URL, in which case the app server can give a not authorized response.
I have a music player PWA published on Android[0]. It works pretty good, my users are happy (rated 4.5 stars), and I haven't encountered any significant issues with it.
For the file system access API, only the origin private file system is enabled on Android[1].
IMO, the file system access APIs are still a bit immature.
This comprehensive article goes over the problems of memory allocation, how programmers and educators have been trained to wrongly think about the problem, and how the concept of arenas solve it.
As someone who spends most of his time in garbage collected languages, this was wildly fascinating to me.