We don't have fully automated planes because they're already safe enough and the economics aren't there.
The probability of crashing with a plane is extremely low, even factoring in the higher risk of takeoffs and landings. The entire process is coordinated with Air Traffic Control.
Since planes are so safe already and pilots are relatively inexpensive, there's no strong financial incentive to fully automate planes.
Planes are also substantially regulated. I mean if there was a Vehicular Traffic Control on every intersection the same way there's Air Traffic Control we probably wouldn't have any accidents now, negating the main purported benefit of self driving to begin with.
Disagree on the economics. Pilots cost significant money and since the airline industry runs on low margins this can be a huge plus.
But the main reason we won't see planes without pilots is political and related to trust. I think for the same reasons we are less likely to see truly driverless cars.
> we still have pilots and humans behind the controller with 100% attention.
That really isn't true. Pilots, in particular, have huge challenges in keeping attention up between take off and landing. Likewise for trains, it turns out if you don't require humans to do anything but watch...it is much harder than if they were actually doing the flying/driving themselves.
The airforce is moving to unpiloted drones, though there is someone at a center to intervene as needed. It is only a matter of time before they decide that cargo can be moved in this way (think: fedex).
I love Swift and it's potential for use cases beyond just iOS ecosystem, but I think Apple never fostered or encouraged the open source community to involve in its development.
It's another classic example where it's simply not enough to open source something, you have to really allow and encourage the developers to contribute to increase the adoption.
I was active in the Swift language community for a couple years, and I think it was not just a lack of encouragement, but rather a sense of neglect of use-cases outside the Apple ecosystem.
For instance, maybe it's fixed now, but for years running the Swift REPL on linux would spit out a few error messages every time you ran it. It still worked, but it gave the impression of being poorly supported.
What really killed it for me was the rollout of features like FunctionBuilders (now result builders) and property wrappers. These were just basically crammed into the language in a half-finished state with no community review, to support the requirements for SwiftUI, despite many other features languishing for years and not being implemented due to concerns about how they would affect swift's "design space".
Following that, I had the impression that Swift was and would always be prioritized towards Apple's goals, and any use-case outside of this would be a distant follower.
I'm excited about a few projects bringing Swift to other platforms. SwiftWasm is surprisingly painless to get working [1]. Tokamak is an early stage SwiftUI-compatible framework for building web apps [2]. It also has the goal of supporting other native platforms and to that end there is early work on a GTK backend. I have no affiliation with these projects, though I would like to contribute to them at some point.
Theoretically if Swift was an extremely marketable language across many domains, there would be more qualified developers available to work on software for Apple products.
Apple is one of the most successful organizations on the planet, and yes they have plenty of developers in tow. I am just trying to give an example of how it could help their bottom line to push open source swift more aggressively.
If I had to guess, they don't do it because:
1. they don't think the resources it would take would represent a good ROI,
2. and/or they think it's good for them that developers who invest in their ecosystem have skills which are not transferrable to other domains
I'd love to see something like Uniswap for stocks. Essentially replacing the orderbook with an equation taking HFTs out of the equation and allowing regular users to make money providing liquidity.
Regulations make that more or less illegal. Executions must happen at the NBBO (national best bid / offer). You can't arbitrarily choose which orders to match.
IEX is an exchange with the goal of executing its trades without HFT firms in the middle. https://iextrading.com/
The harder part for the average person is ensuring their brokerage routes their order flow through IEX. I am not sure how the average person would do that.
I am not familiar with the legal aspect, but technically this is definitely possible. You basically just need to rent a server in an exchange colo center, and buy software certified to submit trades / consume market data on that exchange. Then build your brokerage app on top of that "direct market access" software.
You can directly route all your orders to an exchange, but HFT firms are active there as well, and they might even get paid for it by the exchange (which you have to pay much higher commissions than what retail traders are paying right now). All alternatives eventually end up reinventing what the HFT firms do.
But it must be possible to build an app which serves retailers as the customers vs these HFTs? For example, charging monthly subscription or paying micro fees per trade. What are the costs involved for trading directly in exchanges?
In order to process actual securities orders to actual exchanges, you'll need to file a metric ton of paperwork with your state government and the federal government, and comply with a lot of regulations.
If you want commission free trading then you need the HFT firms and payment for order flow. These firms hurt institutional investors much more than retail.
Let's say it's not commission free. What are the actual costs for paying per trade. What's the math for monthly subscription if we follow Netflix model?
We are solving these problems at - https://district.so. Dealing with trolls can be draining and it's a plague for a good community. We working on solving that.
@bredren Would you want to lead /Portland District?
Sorry, can some explain the ‘universe is expanding’ concept? So far I thought it only meant that the space universe occupies is expanding, meaning the matter keeps going farther from its origin point, but I didn’t know the ‘fabric’ of the universe is expanding. I’m not able wrap my head around this concept. Can some please point me a resource that dumbs it down?
"The universe does not expand "into" anything and does not require space to exist "outside" it. Technically, neither space nor objects in space move. Instead it is the metric governing the size and geometry of spacetime itself that changes in scale."
This was confusing for me too. As time passes, the less the universe is made up of "something" (observable matter), so maybe a more accurate analogy would be saying the universe is "diluting" rather than "expanding"?
My understanding is along the lines of, the surface of a balloon is the "fabric" of the universe: As the balloon is blown up it can expand and push things on it further apart, but the matter itself is always in the same place on the surface/in the universe (or moving slowly along the surface/in the universe). One big difference of course being the surface of a balloon is 2-dimensional, while space is 3-dimensional.
I'd love this to get to a stage of getting me consistent haircut. I like barbers but i have horrible time getting consistent haircuts. If I can rely on this robot, I'd switch instantly.
