It’s minor but can improve user experience if implemented well. I know several people who scoffed at the “need” for automation in car locking and unlocking. It just feels like the obvious way now.
Another use case would be access control in buildings. There are millions of insecure iClass type cards securing doors and elevators that would be easily and securely replaced by tech like this.
Another scenario is getting census/surveillance capability for security and evacuation.
Another is emergency response. If the tech was in a phone, integrate with 911 to find where a cell call originated within a campus or facility. I worked a project in an office complex where we worked with the fire department to improve response time. The Fire Department response was 5 minutes, but locating a caller in our facility could take 7-10 without a guide. In some cardiac scenarios, every minute without treatment reduces survival probability by 10%. You can easily cut that time by 50-75% if you know exactly where you are going.
In the case of that project, we deployed AED devices, created and drilled procedures for reporting emergencies (with a bias for using house or desk phones) we also required a buddy system for most after hours access. I think it lowered the average drilled response by 30-40%. That paid off when a vendor CE had a heart attack during a service event. Without that system, he would have almost certainly died. Very few companies have that kind of safety culture and budget so tech can have a huge impact.
That being said, most users can’t set up home assistant. But the reason for that is that HA lacks the funding to do the insane amount of work required to offer a near zero touch setup process, and other vendors have no incentive to play ball with them much either. (Computers are very hard to use and making them easy is a giant tar pit of grueling work.)
Going full circle, this is because the lock in and double dipping via surveillance is what subsidizes all these other products so they have the funding to make themselves this polished.
This is why ad and spyware encrusted smart TVs are so cheap, sometimes even sold as loss leaders.
It’s very hard for privacy respecting user empowering products to compete with the gigantic subsidy you get from being user hostile and privacy invasive. If consumers actually cared about privacy and companies that are not user hostile and were willing to pay anywhere from 2X to 10X more for these things, this would be different.
This economic dynamic is why we can’t have nice things in consumer tech.
It’s a variation on a well known economic issue with hidden subsides. Let’s say there are two pizza places. One sells pizza. The other sells pizza and meth under the table with a code word, like Los Pollos Hermanos from Breaking Bad.. Which one dominates the local pizza market? Obviously the one selling meth. They have a hidden subsidy, so they can either undercut everyone else or offer a superior product at the same price point. It’s almost impossible to compete with this.
I have had zero problems connecting pretty much all hardware to Home Assistant. But yea, if you have zero technical skills it is hard to self-host anything.
I always have the cynical take that the real feature is “more spying on users and more opportunities to make features pointlessly require a subscription.” The seemingly minor or pointless benefits are just to get the stuff out there.
It took a bit of digging but it looks like the ship can operate for 90 minutes without recharging:
> ... the batteries will power eight axial-flow water jets driven by permanent magnet electric motors. These will be able to keep the ship going for 90 minutes before needing to be recharged.
> The ship’s permanent home will be the Rio de la Plata estuary, where it will travel between the ports of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. The two cities are 60 kilometers apart, a distance Hull 096 is expected to travel in 90 minutes. Direct-current charging stations will be installed at each port and will draw energy from the two countries’ grids. A full charge is expected to take just 40 minutes.
It's going to be interesting how this kind of thing plays out.
There are some similarities between TFA and Conrad Roy's case[0]. Roy's partner was convicted of manslaughter following Roy's suicide and text messages were apparently a large part of the evidence.
"Grants and contracts revenue represents the largest component of University revenue ($1.5 billion and 38%)."[0]
Indeed. Many large US universities are more accurately labeled as research centers with schools attached.
Because those grants are extremely restricted in what they can pay for, it's not quite accurate to include them in anything like an "available operating revenue" number.
Yes, grant money must be spent according to the approved budget plan for the grant. But Duke is also one of the "elite" schools that charge over 60% "overhead" on federal research grants.
The 28% claim is wrong. It seems to be based on a common misunderstanding of how overhead rates are calculated.
In the supplementary table cited as the source, 72.1% of the total costs were awarded as direct costs and 27.9% as indirect costs (NIH, around 2020). That means an average overhead rate of 38.7% over all grants. Because some grants (such as equipment grants) have lower overhead rates, the average over grants with a normal overhead rate is higher.
At my (unexceptional public R1) university, the latest negotiated rates are 56.5% for on-campus research and 26% for off-campus research. The latter is lower, because many expenses that are normally covered by indirect costs become direct costs in off-campus research.
Unsurprisingly it appears the universities with the most advanced facilities/equipment and are therefore able to conduct the most advanced research have the highest overhead rates.
I would love to see a breakdown of what overhead is going to pay for that "most advanced facilities/equipment" and what is paying for the assistant to the assistant vice provost to hire a new assistant.
As someone who interacts with R1 research institutions as an adjunct and a prime contractor hiring professors as subs, they are far from efficient (like any large organization). My issue is that the people who are producing the actual value are paid and treated pretty poorly generally, and treated as cattle specifically by people whose contributions to anything of substance are extremely unclear but are quite well paid.
Agreed, totally a discussion worth having there. But you kinda point to my assumption on this: "like any large organization."
I'm doubtful that the organizations at the top end of the list are 4x more bureaucratically bloated than those at the bottom end of it.
I'm highly confident that much more sophisticated research has much higher indirect cost, because a defining characteristic of "sophisticated research" is that it entails exquisite facilities and equipment that cannot possibly be paid for under individual studies.
Another thing I'm confident of is that Harvard et al have much more talented negotiators than the smaller schools, and I'm sure that plays a role. I would be surprised if it explains the bulk of the discrepancy.
It really makes no sense for overhead to be calculated at the university level, but it sounds like that's how it is done?
Sophisticated research into particle physics, material science, and (for the last several years) AI does come with significant overhead costs for opex. Sophisticated research into most of computer science, mathematics, and other theoretical scientific disciplines does not, let alone humanities research.
I think a large portion of the difference in overhead rates is due to the last item you are confident of in your list (i.e. Duke can tell NIH "if you want our world class researchers to work on this problem, here are our rates", and some random school cannot).
I would think that calculating rates for a department would be more reasonable, or maybe have a few models to choose from could also make sense.
What doesn't make sense to me is to apply the same overhead burden to a theoretical CS or math research effort where someone basically just needs commodity IT resources and an office and one that requires significant time using a particle accelerator.
So you want more bureaucracy to determine rates and more personnel to negotiate and bookkeep for it? Because that’s how you get more bureaucracy.
The negotiated rate takes into account that not all research is the same. That’s why it’s negotiated based on the science they are doing. It’s a blended rate.
> Typographic decisions should be made for a purpose. The Times of London chose the typeface Times New Roman to serve an audience looking for a quick read. Lawyers don’t want their audience to read fast and throw the document away; they want to maximize retention. Achieving that goal requires a different approach—different typefaces, different column widths, different writing conventions. Briefs are like books rather than newspapers. The most important piece of advice we can offer is this: read some good books and try to make your briefs more like them.
This is somewhat ironic as, if I'm not mistaken, it is written by lawyers and uses Times New Roman. (Does the 8th circuit want the reader to read fast and throw the document away?)
> What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? ... for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure ... we shall endeavour ... to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week ....
- John Maynard Keynes, 1930 [0].
Keynes was an economist whose work had an enormous impact and is still discussed and taught today. He predicted much more leisure and much less work for the future and he was wrong.
Extrapolating productivity (hours of work required to create a fixed output) into the future, it makes sense that we'll need to work a lot less to make the same stuff. The missing piece is that we end up deciding we need to make other stuff/services. We fill in our extra time making new things. We're not satisfied with what we used to have.
If AI drastically increases productivity, leading to job losses, we will just make other stuff and provide other services and fill our time with that. People will create other jobs to satisfy that demand. For reference:
1700s: 90% of US workers were farmers. early 1900s: 40%, 1970: 4%
1940s: 38% of US workers were in manufacturing/factories. 2020: ~9%
As productivity improves, we come up with other things to make or services to provide that are higher complexity or "worth more".
The products and services provided by a country are not static.
> I was trying to travel 35 kilometers. I was now 63 kilometers from my grandmother’s house. Further away than when I started.
Oh boy. There's something deeply human about the frustrations of state institutions and bureaucracy.
From the linked article:
> How are train cancellations and delays compensated when traveling with the Deutschland-Ticket?
> In the event of a delay of at least 60 minutes at the destination station due to a delay or train cancellation in local transport, you will receive €1.50 compensation per case.
> Amounts under €4 will not be paid out due to a legal de minimis threshold. However, you can accumulate multiple late payment claims.
Maybe worth mentioning that this „1.50€ compensation“ rule only matters if you use the „Deutschland-Ticket“ which is a fixed price ticket for a whole month, unlimited travel on the Regio lines (short distance trains, i.e. non IC)
If you bought a regular route ticket you get 25% and more than an hour delay, and 50% at more than two hours.
Not sure how it is with other multi-use tickets.
This, combined with the certain delays CAN make traveling by train quite affordable… /s
Happens regularly. And if you don't have a visa for the new destination, well, too bad.
E.g. on December 20 a WizzAir flight 4768 was diverted to Thessaloniki (Greece) instead of its destination Skopje (North Macedonia): https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/WZZ4768/history/2025... . Those with Schengen visas (or appropriate passports) got a bus to Skopje. The rest allegedly waited for three hours and then got returned to Cyprus (EU, but not Schengen), but to a different airport (Paphos instead of Larnaca). So if someone had a car left on Larnaca's parking, too bad.
Many people are, indeed, being forced to use AI by their ignorant boss, who often blame their own employees for the AI’s shortcomings. Not all bosses everywhere of course, and it’s often just pressure to use AI instead of force.
Given how gleefully transparent corporate America is being that the plan is basically “fire everyone and replace them with AI”, you can’t blame anyone for seeing their boss pushing AI as a bad sign.
So you’re certainly right about this: AI doesn’t do things, people do things with AI. But it sure feels like a few people are going to use AI to get very very rich, while the rest of us lose our jobs.
Why not both? When you make tools that putrefy everything they touch, on the back of gigantic negative externalities, you share the responsibility for making the garbage with the people who choose to buy it. OpenAI et al. explicitly thrive on outpacing regulation and using their lobbying power to ensure that any possible regulations are built in their favor.
Generative AI is used to defraud people, to propagandize them, to steal their intellectual property and livelihoods, to systematically deny their health insurance claims, to dangerously misinform them (e.g. illegitimate legal advice or hallucinated mushroom identification ebooks), to drive people to mental health breakdowns via "ai psychosis" and much more. The harm is real and material, and right now is causing unemployment, physical harm, imprisonment, and in some cases death.
Internet is used to defraud people, to propagandize them, to steal their intellectual property and livelihoods, to systematically deny their health insurance claims, to dangerously misinform them (e.g. illegitimate legal advice or hallucinated mushroom identification ebooks), to drive people to mental health breakdowns via "internet psychosis" and much more. The harm is real and material, and right now is causing unemployment, physical harm, imprisonment, and in some cases death.
I'm sympathetic to your point, but practically it's easier to try to control a tool than it is to control human behaviour.
I think it's also implied that the problem with AI is how humans use it, in much the same way that when anti-gun advocates talk about the issues with guns, it's implicit that it's how humans use (abuse?) them.
> Imagine:
> Your thermostat adjusting the temperature automatically as you enter the room.
> Your TV resuming your favorite show that you were watching yesterday as you sit on the couch
> Your car door automatically opening when approach the vehicle and adjusting its seat position and temperature based on your preferences
The vast majority of people want a thermostat that maintains a constant temperature everywhere.
Clicking one or two buttons to resume a TV show is minor.
Pulling the handle on a door and pressing a preset seat position button is a minor inconvenience if that.
Add the above to the possibly flawed assumption that folks may not actually want the automatic behavior makes the "value" negative in some cases.
None of this is worth internet connectivity.
The driver pushing this is that internet connectivity enables data collection that can be sold.
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