The approach to have a separate page for a website's menu and leveraging bfcache and the CSS view transitions API for a smooth experience is not that traditional though, is it?
I'm only used to seeing menus as separate pages in book-like websites and as comprehensive sitemaps. Or, for very small sites, a "homepage" that also acts as a menu, instead of an on-page MPA menu (think a portfolio website, or Space Jam).
I would caution against deriving too much of your philosophical worldview from a scifi book about posthuman vampires that has been deliberately engineered to make a philosophical point that is most certainly not a consensus.
For alternative viewpoints: Daniel Dennett considered philosophical zombies to be logically incoherent. Douglas Hofstadter similarly holds that "meaning" is just another word for isomorphism, and that a thing is a duck exactly to the extent that it walks and quacks like one. Alan Turing advocated empiricism when evaluating unknown intelligence. These are smart cookies.
Well at least the metal part of any type-C plug will inherently be more fragile due to the hollow design and manufacturing by stamping out of sheet metal. Whereas for Lightning, it’s a solid machined part.
But as soon as you get to the chip housing and the rest of the cable, it’s anyone’s game I suppose.
USB-C is very far from a perfect connector. The female side still has a fragile plastic tongue that can break. They also reliably wear out with use, both the cables and the socket. We've all seen them fail. Actually all the USB connectors do eventually, because they all rely on a thin piece of sheet metal not bending when lateral force is applied. And, reversibility notwithstanding, they are still hard to fumble into place compared to (say) RJ45, or 3.5mm TRRS.
I have no love for Apple and their proprietary nonsense, but even lightning is a strictly better connector than USB-C - easier to insert, less fragile, better wearing. Still too many wires though.
I wish we'd used something like TRRRS, and stuck to 4 wires. Very robust, any orientation, easy to fumble in blind.
TRRS might work for power, but it sucks for signal integrity - ergo no high-speed for you. And 4 wires is nowhere enough. You need two for each differential pair. No, half-duplex is absolutely not okay, it's the worst design decision in pre-SS USB.
Tangeant but then it means that framework's expansion card design for their laptop is a great idea:
When the expansion cards plug into the mainboard they are already on a rail that prevents lateral stress, plus generally don't un/plug them often and you let the cheap replaceable expansion card takes on the wear.
> USB-C is very far from a perfect connector. The female side still has a fragile plastic tongue that can break. They also reliably wear out with use, both the cables and the socket. We've all seen them fail.
Strange comment. My USB C cables have only ever failed around the strain relief after lengthy use, as with any cable that gets handled a lot. I've got a few where I can feel the resistance gradually lessening when plugging and unplugging, but nothing has failed. As someone who wants to keep devices for a while the greatest thing about the USB C power standard sounds a little like faint praise, but: pretty much all my laptops relying on USB C for power will allow me to plug power into a different USB C port if the one I habitually use wears out.
Lightning was more failure prone, not just wearing out the goofy plugs but with failures on the device side. Micro-USB was a nightmare.
I also haven't had any USB-C ports fail, so +1 to your anecdata.
Some laptops are picky about what port you use to charge them, unfortunately - I believe my laptop has only one that can charge it fast enough to keep up with full GPU use - the others are around 20W iirc.
I was also worried about the plastic tongue, but I have never managed to break one. In contrast, I have managed to irreperably damage the exposed metal contacts on multiple Lightning cables. If you'd asked me which should be more durable, I would have predicted Lightning, but my experience has been the exact opposite and beyond any doubt.
I have not in fact seen any USB-C sockets/cables fail, but I have seen a couple of failures with lightning (the fragile tongue on the male end can snap or get corroded/scratched).
There is no perfect connector. But a common, standardized connector across applications and manufacturers, which is available now, and has most of the useful features is the next best thing.
Audio 6.5 mm is as close as humanity got to a perfect connector. Unfortunately downsizing it to 3.5 mm removes the robustness of the female as it tends to eventually break
Here's a lifehack that will extend the life of the socket by ~1000x: you can buy a 3.5mm-to-3.5mm "adapter" that you keep plugged in to the female end. Now you have a wear part that is trivially replaceable.
Of course that doesn't work all that well for laptops where it would stick out and easily break when you put it in a bag, but for that one pair of headphones you like that is no longer being manufactured it's great!
trrrs is a wild thing to want as the universal connector... They are bad for any actively powered connection since the tip/rings hit EVERYTHING on the way out and shorting. Split keyboard users know that pain.
As with headphones, you can always just not wiggle it! Or arrange so that it doesn't rotate once it's fully inserted. There's nothing magical about the contacts in a USB connector.
You still have the problem of temporarily connecting every pin as you plug it in. USB-C has 24 pins and all are used. That would be a TRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRS connector.
E-ink price tags are not uncommon. Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets. Some stores even do scan-as-you-shop, where the customer scans the item at the shelf, rather than at the front of the store. There are certainly a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross, but it's hardly a theoretical impossibility - find the right store and you could do it today with no more than a software update.
> Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets.
Phones have been randomizing and rotating MAC addresses for a long time. With enough antenna arrays you could theoretically track an individual RF source through the store but you wouldn't be able to tie it to a returning customer or identity by itself.
The days of easy external phone tracking are long over.
Your scenario is more than just a software update and dotting some i's. Pulling this off would require a lot of hardware and compute.
The best you could do is force everyone to scan prices through their phone with an app registered to them. You probably won't have many customers left when everyone gets tired of pointing their phone at everything to see their custom price.
You're already watched by security cameras, it's not hard to do facial recognition anymore. And you have companies literally lining up to sell such facial recognition databases. It's conceivable they could determine what price you pay for groceries while your car is on the way to the store, thanks to Flock.
Disney Parks patented tracking via shoes and groups of people/families based on scanning their shoes upon park entry to build an index of guests. Not sure how and where it was all applied during park visits for guests but you're definitely correct that facial recognition upon store entry to kickoff a live dynamic profiling of a customer is what's currently being beta tested/deployed by some retailers.
I still don't understand how that would work. Yes, e-ink is great for updating prices, I welcome it at grocery stores.
But if both me and another person are standing in front of the prosciutto and cured meats fridge, we're seeing the same prices, even if I'm poor and they're rich.
I think they're conflating/confusing a bunch of different things here. E-ink tags let stores run sales more often, offer "happy hour" time of day discounts, etc. It's not so much individualized (other than probably some demographic targeting, like raising prices 5-6 pm when well employed people are picking stuff up on the way home).
The personalized pricing is usually by having everyone pay through an app. The app knows your buying history and tracks everything you do so they can fine tune their deals for you, surfacing discounts on things that pull you into the store, running e-coupons when it knows you're price conscious, etc. etc.
Both systems are fair on the surface but exploit the asymmetry of billion dollar information systems vs the average consumer. All of these tweaks ensure they get the maximum amount of money that they can out of their customer base which means on average everyone ends up paying more, all while being very hard to point to exactly how you got screwed.
The economy requires companies to be mind readers to function optimally [0], which is impossible, so they choose the less invasive option of harvesting all your data.
[0] One of the core foundations of neoclassical economics is unbounded rationality which includes the ability to predict the future.
The UFCW's defense is that e-ink price tags "take away skilled work". I have no clue what intense high-ELO skill is required to stick a sticker onto a shelf, but I'm sure they can figure out how to stick an E-ink tag up instead and how to replace some batteries.
In my state there are laws requiring the price charged at the register to mark what's displayed on the shelf, with the store paying a penalty (price * some multiplier) to a customer who has been charged more than the displayed price. If the prices were constantly changing there would definitely be some people trying to game the system or suing because they feel the store had been doing something unfair. I can't see automatic price gouging working out in a physical store at all.
This already exists at Target - scan each item as you put it in your card, and note the ones that are "cheaper when ordered online for in-store pickup" and complain at the register and get your discount.
IME there usually isn't much contention looking at the same section of shelf. If I'm looking at the cured meats, I'm the only person looking at any shelves within 6ft either direction. Other nearby people are walking past, looking at shelves on the opposite side of the aisle, waiting for me to finish before checking the meats, etc. The algorithm doesn't have to optimize for literally every person/sale to still have a lot of impact.
They don't have to be that specific. They can look at you and the other customers in the store in aggregate, and raise/lower prices accordingly.
If you're poor and you're a in store full of millionaires, you'll end up paying millionaire prices, unless it's for an item the millionaires rarely buy.
This arms race accelerates quickly. The question becomes stopping someone observing from a distance. It would have to be very tight to go unnoticed, and it seems likely to me that when detected it would quickly become a costly PR SNAFU, in addition to the cost of all the tech you need to deploy. I'd guess that grocers have little disposable capital anyway, given how low profits tend to be.
In my town of 100,000 people there are four options. A universally high priced grocery, a dirt cheap, goods at our near their sell by date with the expected low quality grocery, a gas station convenience store, or a bunch of mid-tier grocers with a few different names all owned by the same parent company.
Oh believe me. If that parent company was dumb enough to remove prices from items, and if that is even legal in your state, then a competitor would enter very quickly, making a big deal advertising about how it displays prices, and everyone would start doing their shopping at that competing mid-tier grocery store. Because that's how capitalism works.
You are making the fundamental mistake of thinking that the current equilibrium of local stores will continue to persist once some of the stores make a deep and fundamental change to their business. That is obviously not the case. It would create a gigantic strategic opportunity for competitors. And competitors really like finding strategic opportunities where they can make a bunch of money now where they couldn't before.
On the contrary, I think a "simulator of common objections" that reflects all the blind spots and biases of wider society is an extraordinarily valuable tool for exploring and evaluating new ideas. You might find that, in neatly summarizing what "everyone" thinks and justifying it as best it can, the LLM inadvertantly shines a spotlight on common misconceptions. Look there for the novelty.
In this case - the concept of using automated computing devices to manipulate numbers that represent ideas at arbitrary levels of abstraction was, by 1930, nearly an entire century old. Talkie's myopic viewpoint does not represent the most farsighted viewpoint, merely the average. So if, in 1930, you had read the writings of Ada Lovelace, gotten very excited, and wanted to figure out how to pitch it to investors - Talkie might have been very useful.
Yeah, it shows.