Yeah, I agree - this sort of intermittent failure could be incredibly hard to track down, and will absolutely fuck with people's faith in their CI systems as well - a flappy test is the absolute worst kind of test.
WhatsApp is a fact of life in locales like Europe, India and Indonesia. There is literally no avoiding it if you want to have a job or function in society.
> It’s even easier to delete your WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook accounts.
Unfortunately, it's not, at least for Whatsapp.
That's a part of the issue - as there is no open access federation requirement, there are messenger islands. Whatsapp for the non-tech folks, Telegram for those who either are wary of Meta, want gambling, or a service decidedly not affiliated with the American judicial sphere, Signal and Threema for the utter nerds/journalists/activists, iMessage for the Apple crowd, or the now-defunct rich bro network of Blackberry. SMS, MMS or its replacement RCS that the carriers are trying (and failing) to push, I don't even count these given how faded to irrelevance they all are. Oh, and then there are (particularly in the Asian market) all the country specific "everything in one"-apps that Musk tried and failed to convert X to.
And particularly among the non-tech folks, no way to get them to use anything but Whatsapp. Network effects are a thing, hence the EU's push to break up the walled gardens at least a tiny tiny bit, but it will take years until it's implemented.
Ok sure, delete Instagram and Facebook then. That seems easier to start, no?
But you're assuming these messaging apps are something we need and have to have and then solving backward from there.
While I certainly recognize that a society may have made the mistake of going all-in on a proprietary app in order to participate in society (whoops!), I can tell you for a fact that it's not required for any given society to function because I don't have any of these apps and just use SMS and e-mail and I am able to work, coordinate events with friends, make dinner reservations, and send funny videos. I can also vouch for the United States, specifically that such apps aren't required.
So we can clearly separate out that we don't need these apps to function as a society - we can go back to the question of morality. In the US if you are "against" Meta or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, you can just delete the apps because you don't need them.
One of those counties is Rockland, which is in NY. I wonder if it's counting bordering counties for states, since the assumption may be that the closest essential services for some Rockland residents may be in New Jersey.
Ah! This looks like a bug with cross-border calculations. Ideally it would not show a Rockland County, NJ - it might cross state borders to perform calculations but they should all have a 'home state' that matches to the right county. Thanks for the example case, I'll work on a fix
I know at least in Rockland's case, their power utility extends slightly into NJ. Can see it on statewide power outage trackers like this one: https://projects.nj.com/data/outagetracker/
You have to trust it will actually get recycled though. I struggle to believe they'll be swapping out the batteries and reselling these as reconditioned. (I struggle to believe many people will even send them in for recycling tbh.)
The environmental benefit of sending it in for recycling is probably negated by transporting it all the way back to them for starters. Better to just drop it at the local ewaste collection facility. They'll be less specialised but there isn't a lot of material in it.
I guess there's a market for it and in the scale of things it isn't so bad: you could make 10 disposable vape sticks from the materials in one of these rings. And they're expensive enough that they'll never sell more than 100k or so of them. Relatively speaking it's no measurable impact.
For me it's more a matter of principle though. As a society we frown on disposable gizmos these days and for good reason.
I don't remember reading any Clarke short stories, though I do remember a few books favorably - but Asimov's stories were incredible, and stick with me to this day. I should get a few more of his short story collections for the kiddo, I think I have a few of his non-fiction ones on a bookshelf somewhere.
I had the app installed way back when, and it was fun. I reached my limit around 60-90 step solutions. The numbers are a little deceiving: in many cases there are sequences of moves 3, 4, or 5 (or more?) long where only one move is possible, and therefore in a sense they qualify as only one decision as a unit, even if they are multiple moves. I think this same aspect is sometimes true of Rush Hour, but less so.
As far as I know it was iOS-only. I think the author created the puzzle as a phd paper, and once I found the paper itself online. It was interesting reading.
It should be possible today to vibe code the mechanics as a web app, right?
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