Taxis (and Uber etc) also take up space on the road when they only have their driver and no fare paying passenger on board, so I don't see that a Waymo is any worse than that.
Both human-driven and robo-driven taxis are financially incentivised to spend as much time as possible carrying fare paying passengers and as little as possible driving empty to pick someone up.
Anyway, I agree that walking, cycling, and public transit, are all IMHO preferable to any form of taxi.
In type system theory I think what you're looking for is "effect systems".
You make the type system statically encode categories of side-effects, so you can tell from the type of a function whether it is pure computation, or if not what other things it might do. Exactly what categories of side-effect are visible this way depends on the type system; some are more expressive than others.
But it means when you use a hash function you can know that it's, eg, only reading memory you gave it access to and doing some pure computation on it.
You might be referring to a different period, but I'll note that the anti-war protests in early 2003 (immediately before the invasion of Iraq) were quite literally record breaking.
For one of my projects my server needs a private key, and it reads this from a file descriptor on startup and then closes the fd. The fd is set up by the systemd unit, which is also configured to restrict filesystem access for the server. So the server reads a key from a file that is never visible in its mount namespace.
I don't doubt you're correct about the incentives, but one point seems amiss...
> If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business.
You don't think that spending £4.1 million on this garbage might reflect badly on someone?
Nope. They followed the process, they bought from an approved, respected, supplier. The site meets the specification they drew up. There will be meeting notes from a few hundred meetings to document that everyone did their job properly.
For us techies who know the tech (or even the law, in this case) this is a disaster. But for the folks in those meetings this is what they understood to be the brief.
If enough of the public gets ahold of the story so that a politician has to get up on their hind legs and issue a statement, then harsh words might be had. But otherwise, this is business as usual.
If you scroll down slightly you get a low contrast button "○
PREFER STILLNESS? READ AS PLAIN TEXT
→", which takes you to a plain text version with a rather patronising introduction that says "You chose the quiet version. No animations. No counters ticking up.
Just words. That's a valid choice."
Edit: to be just slightly nicer about it: having a plain text version is great, that's a really good thing. But the "that's a valid choice" paragraph is unnecessary and just distracts from your actual article. If I pick the plain-text version it's because I want to just get straight to the point (other people may have other reasons), and I certainly don't need your validation.
"Good instincts on choosing plain text—you're asking exactly the right questions, and it cuts to the core of what makes traditional blogging so compelling. It's not just the medium—it's direct access to the thoughts and personality of the author! Let's delve deeper into exactly why the blogging model is so powerful.
