Ever since Framework laptops arrived on the scene, I've been waiting for someone to create thicker bezels that piggyback onto the webcams' USB 2.0 interface via a USB 2.0 hub, to integrate a color eInk display facing outwards. Just for the infinite stickers.
Bonus points for integrating an outward-facing webcam dedicated to a continous background facial recognition daemon to change the stickers on the fly depending upon who is approaching while the laptop is running.
Some organizations’ leadership takes one look at the cost of redundancy and backs away. Paying for redundant resources most organizations can stomach. The network traffic charges are what push many over the edge of “do not buy”.
The cost of re-designing and re-implementing applications to synchronize data shipping to remote regions and only spinning up remote region resources as needed is even larger for these organizations.
And this is how we end up with these massive cloud footprints not much different than running fleets of VM’s. Just about the most expensive way to use the cloud hyperscalers.
Most non-tech industry organizations cannot face the brutal reality that properly, really leveraging hyperscalers involves a period of time often counted in decades for Fortune-scale footprints where they’re spending 3-5 times on selected areas more than peers doing those areas in the old ways to migrate to mostly spot instance-resident, scale-to-zero elastic, containerized services with excellent developer and operational troubleshooting ergonomics.
Maybe this maxim within our software world might help: "Be loosely coupled, tightly cohesive".
Decoupling (the kind of self-sufficiency you are envisioning) is only a distant goal for interplanetary colonization. Loose coupling is fine as baby steps. As long as within their community they are tightly cohesive, they will do fine.
The intent is sustainable resiliency baked into our systems.
I love libraries of all kinds, and wish LLM training development will drive even greater preservation and digitization efforts. I sure hope someone preserves this collection, installs a dry fire extinguisher system, and digitizes into the Internet Archive what doesn’t already exist online.
It would be something a whole organization and public campaign would need to be built around.
We have also already traversed, unwittingly, into a post-ownership world and the IP issue would need to be dealt with since it was not dealt with to this point and the thieves have gotten away with robbery by default. Books were one of the first steps into a world where you do not own anything you buy, you merely possess it until the IP owner decides to revoke their authority for everything you think you own. I recall the ironic incident in around 2013 where Amazon without permission simply deleted people’s copies of a purchased book from their Kindles due to some IP dispute with a publisher, without even providing notice. The book … 1984, by George Orwell.
It is why in understand if people “pirate” or maybe better put, seize their rights.
Something you cannot share, trade, exchange, gift, pass down, sell, or often even move… is not something you own.
all my Amazon books were dedrm'ed and my kindle does not connect to the WiFi. I've stopped buying from Amazon since they removed the transfer via usb option.
Lounges of U.S. carriers in U.S. airports serving international flights that are about as busy as overseas counterparts have a nearly universally poor showing when compared to those overseas lounges. I’ve read this comes down to the financialization of those U.S. carriers who dilute lounge exclusivity chasing those sweet credit card profit centers while overseas carriers are not under those dynamics; U.S. carriers don’t usually get to have a hand in the design and layout of airports so their lounges are less spacious and amenity-filled; overseas international hubs tend to cater more to long-haul multi-hour layover itineraries than the short turnaround domestic traffic that is more common in U.S. airports; and U.S. cost structures against wage stagnation trends are more prohibitive to the more lavish splash outs in overseas lounges.
> ...an AML form that needs filling in if the sales go through...If that’s not overreach, I don’t know what is.
Absent a complete dismantling of AML oversight (and I do have empathy for those free market purists who want to wholesale toss out KYC and AML, but for now in practice we have to deal with what are on the books), these are difficult use cases to address. These kinds of edicts don’t usually say, “any retirees buying even economy cars must fill this out”, it is usually broadly applied like, “all car dealerships must do this for all transactions no exceptions”. And these laws are often a lagging reaction to various sham transactions uncovered as a result of crime busts.
Once you start weaving “reasonable” exceptions to address the overreach, the scammers start to come up with sham transactions that fit the exceptions filter. It’s a pretty fascinating problem.
There are many who would still object to a system where your mother doesn’t fill out a form. Instead her banking app pings her to confirm that she is purchasing a Yaris from the dealership (looking at the other comments here, it seems anonymous large transactions scattered through many people with otherwise clean records are a common laundering pattern, so metadata on the nature of the transactions might be one way to counter that kind of structuring, but alas that’s overreach for many), and uses her financial history in the background as the AML controls rails.
I’d love to see AML professionals participate in this thread to help us learn what they’re really facing. Assuming we have to put up with it for the time being, might as well design and make its implementation as low friction for lawful people as possible.
I get what you’re saying. They probably only care about people coming in buying Lexuses paying cash. But to streamline things, as well as not discriminate Lexus buyers or cash, it applies wholesale.
I’m very critical of the system in general. It’s an extra-legal way to “fight” crime, that weaponizes private enterprises against their will, inverts the burden of proof, and at the end of the day just doesn’t work. Because, obviously the cash for buying the Lexus came from a completely legal casino payout.
This happens everywhere with lots of people in many different contexts. I call it the “‘why don’t we just’ disease”, or WDWJ Disease. When you’re in any leadership position, you have to stay especially careful to catch yourself from falling prey to this pernicious effect and behavior, and its equally debilitating sibling yak shaving when you over index on preventing WDWJ.
This form versus substance issue is a really deeply embedded problem in our industry, and it is getting worse.
Time and again, I run into professionals who claim X, only to find out that the assertion was based only upon the flimsiest interpretation of what it took to accomplish the assertion. If I had to be less charitable, then I’d say fraudulent interpretations.
Promo Packet Princesses are especially prone to getting caught out doing this. And as the above story illustrates, you better catch and tear down these “interpretations” as the risks to the enterprise they are, well before they obtain visible executive sponsorship, or the political waters gets choppy.
IMHE, if you catch these in time, then estimate the risk along with a solution, it usually defuses them and “prices” their proposals more at a “market clearing rate” of the actual risk. They’re usually hoping to pass the hot potato to the poor suckers forced to handle sustaining work streams on their “brilliant vision” before anyone notices the emperor has no clothes.
I’d love to hear others’ experiences around this and how they defused the risk time bombs.
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