There's already a project testing these. However the channels between the main islands in Hawaii can be pretty rough. The water gets pretty deep (900m - 3000+m) quickly and due to geography the winds and waves get funneled there and can easily hit 5-10m high. The short distances make it appealing despite the potentially rough sea state and waves.
I really liked this analysis - it echoes a lot of the comments here - to wit, as an engineer it's tempting to think that this is an engineering problem, but the program might get better results from funding third spaces and events and letting people match by what they want to do, not by what they think they may like in a person. https://www.singapore-samizdat.com/p/how-singapores-governme...
Aptera is getting pretty close to shipping first customer cars this year, or at least seems to be, while this is a one-off research prototype - I think your comment is not quite fair.
Yes, it's a prototype. But it's from a company that has built countless production cars, and which also produced a road-legal limited production run of a pretty similar car (just with ICE instead of electric): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_1-litre_car
I'm pretty sure they could bring this to market almost immediately, if there was a sizeable market for this kind of vehicle.
Aptera on the other hand has been around for a long time now, changing their product strategy every now and then, making announcements... I wish them all the best, I really do, but until they actually ship something, I will also stay skeptical.
I was at a trampoline park last weekend (regular kind of place, everything padded for safety, as you'd imagine).
A ten year old kid left in an ambulance, neck injury, one side of the body paralyzed at the time of the event.
I really hope the kid recovers... but I don't think I'll ever forget that image.
Yes, everything in life has risks, but I don't even want to imagine how I'd feel if my kid, or my kids' friend had a life-changing injury on a trampoline at my home.
There are many other factors to consider however. Such as time spent with friends, doing something physical, etc. Plus, there’s a spectrum of ways to use trampolines. You’re still allowed to parent…
> The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work.
That's not been my experience, tbh - in my view the deletionist fraction of the editors has essentially "won", if one can put it in those terms. I _think_ there is a (maybe small) group that have decided it is their mission to guard Wikipedia against what they view as cruft or non-notable, regardless of how many years of work these articles may have accumulated. They do not need to be paid for this - they enjoy it. Destroying is always easier than creation.
I seem to recall some study showing that the vast vast majority of edits/deletes on Wikipedia are the work of just a few hundred long-standing editors (citation needed) - which to me confirmed my gut feeling that most new editors bounce off and give up on contribution in short order.
I contributed for a few years, but gave up eventually - it was exhausting to spend time collating sources, collecting information, editing, rewriting, and then having someone come along and propose discarding your work with very little investment from their side.
Stackoverflow has gone through similar calcification - it's nearly impossible to contribute now, or build reputation as a new user, as posts get closed as duplicates or not-relevant.
> I seem to recall some study showing that the vast vast majority of edits/deletes on Wikipedia are the work of just a few hundred long-standing editors
I'm fairly sure I've seen statistics that say the opposite of that (citation needed), so I'd like to see that study.
Hmm, that seems to contradict the article directly - insecticides were used to try to battle screwworm initially and were not really effective - the solution was using sterile male flies to stop reproduction - which would work in South America just as well as it did in North (with sufficient scale)
Lemma 1: you want to protect your users privacy, and are also beholden to regulation enforcing that commitment (GDPR).
Lemma 2: you are obliged by other regulation to offer equal access to user data to third parties, so others can build equivalent functionality (DMA).
Lemma 3: malicious third parties will absolutely try to abuse the access and trick the user into sharing their data by all means possible. You will be held responsible in court of public opinion at minimum and legally at maximum if/when a malicious third party abuses said access.
This is a hard, possibly technically unsolvable problem no matter how much money you might have, because the root issue is not technical, it's the fact that you legally have to give third parties access and no way to control what they do with it - and as others have mentioned in the threads, it's exacerbated by the fact that the regulation doesn't say "this is okay and this is not", it is vague and judges things "by outcome", so you may spend all the time in the world implementing a solution you think will work, and then get hit by fines/lawsuits because the implementation is judged as not sufficient after the fact.
I am not sure this is as much of a tension as you make it sound: where is the obligation that a marketplace administrator will be blamed for any and all breaches of data privacy trust from a participating (likely malicious) third party?
According to GDPR, the app developer is the "data controller" and thus ultimately responsible. Only in the case where Apple knowingly participated in unlawful behavior is it likely to be held accountable, and even then, in addition to the app developer. Obviously, if we are not talking about leaks from the actual App Store system (eg. Apple account logins and user data).
So while it sounds plausible, the legal framework is exactly not what you describe here — Apple can claim to want better protection for customers by not allowing third party apps, but EU rejects that (it can similarly extend to app store itself) and pushes for competitive landscape with DMA instead.
Like they now hand over all your contacts, your location, calendar entries, microphone access, camera access. If you choose to do so.
Nothing holds them from having designed this as an API that others can use where the user has permission toggles of what data they want to share with the LLM provider.
This is clearly very different from usual permissions and access.
This would be unprecedented access to user data, enabling the most complete user profiling ever.
Ad companies, like Meta and Google, are going to spend huge amounts of money getting agents ready, because there will be a ridiculous amount of money behind all the data they're going slurp up, and the profiles they'll build for you.
Unless, Apple can figure out how to keep the leaches, that have consistently proven to be so, with court cases for receipts, at bay.
Interestingly, they claim to have done this and offer it as an API layer (Trusted System Agent) for other agents to use.
There is just this minor point that their own agent simply doesn't use it and goes directly to lower level interfaces nobody else gets access to: exactly the thing DMA was designed to stop.
1: If you want to protect user's privacy, you collect no personal information, so GDPR doesn't apply.
2: You do that.
3: Since your platform collects no private information, they get nothing from you. If they collect private information on their own, it's their job to comply with GDPR.
What you should do in case (3) is ask the user for permission to allow the 3rd party access to private data on their device. It's their choice (not yours) to allow it or not.
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