I agree with the principle, but reality dictates that users and exposure is the real currency. So while annoying it is understandable that Anthropic subsidizes their own direct users.
Just to clarify. There is at least one chosen and contractually bound Mail Service provider in Denmark. Their terms are set in public tenders. The old state owned company - Post Nord - basically decide not to compete for the contract. A newer company - DAO - won the tender. What this means in legal terms:
Under law:
DAO must comply with its postal permit obligations (nationwide service where offered, pricing transparency, quality monitoring).
But there is no absolute legal universal delivery duty for all mail anymore.
Under government contract:
DAO has a specific binding duty to deliver blind mail as defined in the tender it won - this is a contractual obligation, not a general statutory duty for all mail.
Be mindful that in principle the service provider could chose to not cover certain parts of the country. That has to be clearly stated in their terms of service.
The Danish government are expected by the public to continue to subsidize delivery to people with special needs, in the contract identified as "blind mail"
In the Netherlands the post office is contractually obliged to deliver mail but they are LOSING money on it.
Even the government themselves went full digital...
Personally I think that if people think post services are a national priority it should be subsidised with tax money. Cannot expect a private company to burn money.
Canada Post is losing money on parcel delivery, not just regular mail. They are pretty awful as a service (for anything serious at least) and are constantly going on strike, so everyone is flocking to private competition. I've had 3 different packages end up in a purgatory in 2 different strikes and now I use Fedex instead.
Which is funny because parcel delivery has only grown over the last decade while Canada Post loses more and more money, while their union workers are demanding pay raises and job security.
They just get delayed. Pickup points stop accepting packages. Mail boxes fill up. But they catch up when Canada Post goes back to work. Goods don’t disappear but delay with no predictable end date.
Canada Post is a crown corp so they operate independently but have a charter they owe to the federal govt. The feds can and have legislated back to work, but it is very unpopular when they do, and tends to just kick problems down the road.
They need to majorly rethink and restructure. I know we can continue to just pay, it’s an institution and we are a rich country who can afford institutions. But it will lose money forever until we recon with how times have changed.
> Even the government themselves went full digital...
Not really. There is the ‘mijn berichten’ (my messages) app. You can indicate which government services should send messages through the app instead of by physical mail. I have checked everything, including the tax service. So now I get anything related to taxes through the messages app. And then they send a physical letter anyway which arrives 2 days after the digital one. Every. Single. Time. As far as I can tell it’s only the tax service that does this.
They claim the app is meant to save on paper waste, but if they keep sending things by mail anyway then what is the point.
I generally agree (my post history should back my anti-neoliberalism), but I suppose eventually the postal service becomes a relic that can't operate on the same terms. At what loss should we accept a letter to be delivered? Or should they charge the real cost of delivering it?
EU governments are cutting costs everywhere, this is the end result of recession-era policies.
Of course it could also be due to mismanagement. If Amazon is allowed to subcontract its own delivery people, and somehow that's profitable, public post companies might find ways to stay relevant.
I am for postal service being reformed and handle digital communication as well.
But let's not forget that network and electricity are not given once and for all. We may end up experiencing quite long periods without them. Country that would get rid of related infra and know-how would be helpless.
lots of people can notice that. my last job involved meticulously timing our software's input-tp-display latency, testing viewers' responses to it, and fighting for each and every ms we should shave off of it.
For my sins, I have recently been called upon to cold boot and then provision a few dozen Samsung tablets by hand. The "laggy Lagdroid piece of lagshit" pasta has been repeated a lot. I swear to God it just ignores ten percent of touch events if it's doing anything in the background.
I’ve been swapping back and forth between a MacBook Pro and a Linux workstation lately. The input latency difference is insane - macOS is sooo much worse than Linux. It’s gotten to the point that I’m porting code to Linux just so I don’t have to use my editor from macOS.
I don’t know how many milliseconds the difference is, but going back and forth it’s so obvious to me that it’s painful.
I definitely notice the difference between 10 ms and 26 ms. 26 ms already feel sluggish when playing drums, guitars or keyboard instruments. But there is no way anyone can feel a difference of 1 ms.
That’s audio latency, not musicians doing music. In my experience if you have two musicians that are supposed to be playing unison, 5-6 ms is enough to feel “off”
Fun fact, 1ms is the approximately the amount of time it takes for sound to travel 1 foot. Do musicians move all their speakers to be within one foot of their ears? Do people in a band notice a difference if they're not standing within 1 foot of their partners? No, they don't.
Anecdotically, 7ms vs 3ms latency is felt as weirdly heavy action when playing midi keyboard. It's not felt as latency, but it's felt. And I bet the difference could be reliably established in double-blind testing (3 samples, find an outlier).
1ms seems less believable, but I wouldn't be surprised, if some people could notice that too.
I suspect there is a substantial first mover disadvantage right now. The extreme investments will not be profitable, leading to the bubble bursting at some point in the not so distant future. This will lead to short term price increases for inference and slower innovation in a period, the tech will emerge more mature and stable etc.
As one who clearly see the huge potential of this tech this is an interesting outlook; make sure to make your products resilient to changing vendors and price hikes and it will probably be fine.
Side note: Google seems to be playing the long game..
It seems all politicians have to through this. Encryption is either-or. Either it has no backdoors or it does not work for anyone including our financial systems
There may be some middle ground: only allow encryption that's expensive but possible to decode without the key. That would at least make dragnets impractical. Political activists and those holding corporate secrets would still be at risk though...
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