Physical mail, too, is a source of gatekeeping and bureaucracy. It is labour-intensive, expensive, and you are trading your false positive rate of digital impostors for a false negative rate of legitimate businesses struggling with unreliable mail delivery.
I have started several small businesses and never had problems with mail delivery except when the business moved. The only thing labor intensive about it is the amount of junk mail, and if you have a P. O. Box then checking that can be labor intensive. What else am I missing?
- Post office clerk offered to fill in cheque details for me. Recipient didn't receive the payment and sued the broke 18 year-old me. The clerk likely pocketed the money. This was over a decade ago, but coincidentally a Czech post office clerk was sentenced this week for pocketing ~$140k over a 2-year period.
- The recipient's lawsuit letter didn't reach me in time and was automatically considered delivered, causing further complications.
- DVLA refused to send mail to non-royal mail PO boxes even if the address is the official business address (UK), preventing international travel with the vehicle.
- On a separate occasion, striking Royal Mail workers prevented me from travelling internationally by delaying the delivery of my driving license.
- I used to live in an apartment with an awkwardly positioned letter box. My mail would end up in random places, usually the neighbours' more easily accessible letter box.
- Every now and then my mailbox contains mail addressed to adjacent buildings.
I also help manage a small B2C family business that is on its third address at the moment. We're renting a small section of a larger shop that is within a commercial estate. We don't have access to mail delivered to the official address. It could probably done, but it may be complicated.
> What else am I missing?
Royal Mail is one of the largest employers in the UK.
If you don't have reliable mail delivery, you don't have a business. This is especially true for your online presence in Germany where an address at which you can receive mail is a legal requirement.
This accent is common among Czech people who learnt English by reading without much exposure to English audio. Some of Danyk's apparent pronunciation idiosyncrasies used to be common among English teachers in Czechia. I presume they learnt English pronunciation from written descriptions of it. It is fairly rare today thanks to internet streaming. Danyk's blog is older than YouTube.
To my native Czech ear, this sounds like the English accent of a native Czech speaker who learnt English primarily by reading, back when English audio wasn't readily available.
The side-by-side comparisons are not a good signal because the models vary across multiple dimensions, but the user isn't given the option to indicate the dimension on which they're scoring the model.
The recent side-by-side comparisons presented a more accurate model that communicates poorly vs a less accurate model with slightly better communication.
I appreciate the simplicity of a system that allows you to provide your own API key. All the complexity of authentication, rate limiting, cost capping, scaling, is offloaded to someone else, and you can just focus on the essence of the thing that you're building.
It's Google asking for an API key to a google service. "Simplicity" here would just be them letting you run the demo. Like yeah, all of the "authentication, rate limiting, cost capping, scaling" is done by Google, it's a Google page running a Google service.
It's perfectly ok to take what you like from them and leave the things you don't.
Is something that has 7 useful things and 3 things you disagree with merited to be buried from public view because of the 3 things you personally disagree with?
One day, I will be working with someone who will have read this article when they were learning Go, and we will disagree about these three points. I was hoping someone would add their own opinion about these, so that when it happens, I can go back to this thread and have enough information to decide whether to change my mind or not.
Gemini being confused by distinct concepts that share the same word is akin to people being offended by and trying to prohibit the use of certain technical terms. The machine is mimicking its moderators and their flaws.
