Background for the uninitiated: the USA is not quite a real country. It's 50 states that agreed to cooperate in various ways, and share a common army/navy. While the US government issues documents that work for identification everywhere (called passports) approximately nobody living in the US actually has a passport. So when planes began to be attacked by bad guys some decades ago, the aviation industry (regulated at the federal level, because it doesn't take long to fly out of the state you start in) decided to use the identification document that everyone does have: the drivers license. But those are issued by the states, not the federal government. And the states don't all do a great job of the surveillance state stuff, so it's pretty easy for a budding Mr Terrorist to get a drivers license, and for his state to not bother keeping much in the way of records to find him if he ever hijacks a plane. The solution to this falls under the category of the US "trying everything before they get it right" -- the federal government (via congress) decided that only drivers licenses issued by states that get the surveillance stuff right to their satisfaction would be usable to get on a plane (passport always worked and still works, fwiw). Some states said "ok, that's fine". Some states said "nope, not doing it". <insert years of wrangling> The final solution was that the "not doin it" states were told they could issue two kinds of drivers license (real-id and...un-real-id). Since you have to explicitly request a real-id license in those states, which costs more, and because people are lazy and ill-informed, there are still people with no valid id document to get on a plane. So now we get to the present day where the solution to that problem is to not let them on the plane. Oh...wait, no, the solution is to charge them $45.
It was driven by privacy and on device compute. Anything you ask an Android device to do, or an Alexa device goes to their clouds to be 100% processed there. Apple tried to make a small and focused interface that could do a limited set of things on device without going to the cloud to do it. This was built around the idea of "Intents" and it only did the standard intents... and app developers were supposed to register and link into them. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/intents Some of the things didn't really get fleshed out, some are "oh, that's something in there?" (Restaurant reservations? Ride Booking?) and feels more like the half baked mysql interfaces in php. However, as part of privacy - you can create a note (and dictate it) without a data connection with Siri. Your "start workout" command doesn't leave your device. Part of that is privacy. Part of that is that Apple was trying to minimize its cloud spend (on GCP or AWS) by keeping as much of that activity on device. It wasn't entirely on device, but a lot more of it is than what Android is... and Alexa is a speaker and microphone hooked up to AWS. This was ok, kind of meh, but ok pre-ChatGPT. With ChatGPT the expectations changed and the architecture that Apple had was not something that could pivot to meeting those expectations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Intelligence > Apple first implemented artificial intelligence features in its products with the release of Siri in the iPhone 4S in 2011. > ... > The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence and the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 reportedly blindsided Apple executives and forced the company to refocus its efforts on AI. ChatGPT was as much a blindside to Apple as the iPhone was to Blackberry.
A lot of this is an issue of insurance no longer being "insurance" in the classical sense. Insurance covers all sorts of things, my HSA pays for all sorts of things that I never would have even considered, and while that sounds great, it helps to drive up costs. It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but if you dropped all government funding of healthcare tomorrow, healthcare plans would get cheaper. It'd also be total chaos, so I get why we don't do that. But the situatuon is a lot like student loans, colleges know they can charge more because the government will lend 5-6 figures to just about anybody, so the colleges do so. And once that person is educated, you can't just "take back" the education if they don't pay. Same deal with healthcare, government subsidizes it for most of the population in lots of ways, healthcare providers know this, they increase prices to match. And you can't just take back the surgery to fix that broken arm or undeliver the baby. There's not a single silver bullet that will fix everything, but there are definitely concrete changes that can be made to improve the situation. One of them would be to make people healthier. I know, easier said than done. But by God it would make health insurance cheaper. Same way in that if everyone was a safe driver, we'd all be paying less in car insurance. Another way would be to remove that regulation or rule or something that makes it so like a hospital can't open too close to another hospital. Another would be to just, train more doctors! What I'm trying to say is, just as the problem is multi-faceted, the solution must necessarily be as well.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
10 years of writing a blog nobody reads (flowtwo.io)
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