What you’re describing sounds like it was the customs check. Pre-brexit, if you were arriving from the EU, then there was no customs check since we were all part of the same customs union.
From a customs perspective, flying from one EU country to another EU is treated like a domestic flight.
If I (a British citizen) flew from London to New York, then on to Chicago; I'd expect to go through customs when I arrived at New York, but not when I arrived at Chicago.
I've come to the opinion that for the vast majority of apps I've built, it could all be built using HTML + CSS (all built server side). I can sprinkle in little bits of interactivity using something like HTMX. And I'll have a website that is very easy to optimise, has phenomenal backwards compatibility, and gets rid of a whole class of issues associated with SPAs.
I often regret in my career not pushing back more on "requirements" that ended up requiring a more complicated app, whereas the customer would have been happier with a simpler solution.
No need for HTMX, HTMZ can get you most of the way there if it is going from simple MPA to slightly more complicated. I used a variation of HTMZ to make a offline-first soccer app I use for myself. I thought I would need to use a front end for the match play page, but, nope, I used Morphdom with HTMZ and I was able to keep the simplicity of templating and a back end.
Follow the sun does not happen by itself. Very few if any engineering teams are equally split across thirds of the globe in such a way that (say) Asia can cover if both EMEA and the Americas are offline.
Having two sites cover the pager is common, but even then you only have 16 working hours at best and somebody has to take the pager early/late.
With self hosting email, if the digital sovreignty aspect is more important to you than the privacy aspect...
What I do is use gmail with a custom domain, self host an email server, and use mbysnc[1] to always be downloading my emails from gmail. Then I connect to that email server for reading my emails, but still use gmail for sending.
It also means that google can't lock me out of my emails, I still retain all my emails, and if I want move providers, I simply change the DNS records of my domain. But I don't have any issues around mail delivery.
I did all of those DNS shnigannas with spf, dmarc and others ones like 6 years ago.
I think I had problems with my emails like 2 twice , with one exchange server of some small recruitment company. I think it was misconfigured.
Ah there were also some problem with gmail at the beginning they banned my domain because I was sending test emails to my own account there. I had to register my domain on their BS email post master tools website and configure my DNS with some key.
In overall I had much more problem with automatic backups, services going down for no reason, IPs being dynamic and etc. Email server just works.
The custom domain is all you need for complete e-mail sovereignty. As long as you have it, you can select between hundreds (thousands?) of providers, and take your business elsewhere at any time.
Not OP, but yes. For personal use, you don't have enough traffic to establish reputation, so you get constantly blocked regardless of DKIM/DMARC/SPF/rDNS. Receiving mail is reliable though, so you can do that yourself and outsource just sending to things like Amazon SES or SMTP relays.
Depending on your mail flow, there's SendGrid and other options at a pretty reasonable cost to handle delivery concerns. I have one server set for sendgrid and another I've got setup for direct delivery... the only issue I've had sending from my own is to Outlook.com servers (not o365 or hotmail though). With DMARC/SPF, etc, gmail has been okay as well.
I never sign up for subscriptions anymore without using a virtual card. Once I've paid the yearly fee, I immediately cancel the card. When it comes to renew, they'll be very keen to let me know that my card needs updating.
The use cases in their videos are interesting, I suppose the world we live in is build for humans, so it makes sense to build a robot that is human shaped. So we don't need to buy new washing machines and redesign our house to get a robot maid.
The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like. If you're getting rid of the human and losing all the benefits of that, then just replace it with a kiosk (or mobile check in), which will do a far better job than a robot.
All factors of "it was Vegas" aside, one of the things that stood out to me was that the hotels have moved rapidly to rapid checkin/checkout systems where you punch in your confirmation code or name/dob and present a photo ID of some kind (passports can just be slapped against the reader) and it asks a few questions ("do you need late checkout", etc), directs you to the exact place your room is (and prints it, which was nice) and tells you where the bellhop station is if there's more than a little while before your room is ready and it can't dispense your cards.
All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans, but they "moved faster" because it didn't feel like queuing for a human, more... "waiting for a toilet"?
Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.
As for the washing machine bit: Why not push for more standards usage in home automation? We have Thread, which is really cool, and which is driving the home automation future that we're slowly getting. Once it's loaded, a homebot should't have to check the thing manually, it should get information about when, what, and how and be able to have "eyes in the back of its head" so to speak.
>All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans
Probably about 1% of the cost of the humans though...
>Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.
A robot would be less reliable than a kiosk, so if you're going to have some kind of machine replace the human, you might as well have a kiosk.
The ideal model (IMO) is a hybrid model, where you have lots of kiosks for the 90% of cases where there are no issues, and a few humans on standby to drop in and assist people who are having issues.
Or better yet, do away with the check in desk, and let people check in on their phone (some hotels already do this, and you tap your phone on the door to unlock)
> Or better yet, do away with the check in desk, and let people check in on their phone (some hotels already do this, and you tap your phone on the door to unlock)
So one more app to install that I'm sure would be a privacy nightmare.
I was recently thinking about this dynamic about human-oriented vs efficiency-oriented innovation. We haven't really hesitated (in, I'd argue, the majority of cases) to pick efficiency over human-friendliness. This seems like it will be a big reckoning as robotics arrives. The argument for humanoids is that the world is built for humans, but as robotics start to be capable of completing tasks end-to-end, then suddenly there is no reason to keep the space human-friendly, and humanoids kinda lose their value.
An illustrative example is a warehouse. They're still partly designed for humans because they're not fully automated, but the need to make them human-friendly will disappear soon.
So I’ve ranting for years that hotels and car rental places should automate check-in - it should take only seconds to get your key with pre-filled data and a QR code.
This week, I had my first experience with exactly this at a car hire company. It was… not smooth.
It took multiple attempts (with requests for help to the employees in between) to get the system to recognise our code, whereupon we learned (by way of an unhelpful generic error message) that the system had somehow given someone else ‘our’ car. After another round of asking for human help, we had to wait while someone came outside, unlocked the machine, and put the keys for our new car inside. We then went through the code process again, and were finally given the keys.
The vision is somewhere there, but the execution isn’t exactly the future we’re hoping for!
The last two times I've rented a car have been with Avis, both times in about the last year. The first of these times they had rolled out their nearly fully automated workflow. Check in on my phone, it told me which car in the lot was mine, gave me a chance to report any existing damages. Rolled to the exit, had a QR code on my phone scanned, rolled through some camera tunnel, and I was on my way. There was a guy at the exit making sure things went smoothly.
The next time their computer system was hard down. Everything by paper in person. They didn't have enough forms for tracking it all, they were literally just writing things down on blank printer paper. No idea what cars were really in the lot. Show us your reservation and your id, we'll write it all down, and here's a key. Good luck finding the car. Was complete chaos.
Ridiculous, but ironically I think walking robots as self-relocating computers might be the most readily viable.
Small servers with console, PA speakers, field metrology or data acquisition machines, those things could have the lower torso or two for this and relocated as needed. The PhD guys can just park the truck and let those deploy wherever AI thinks >65% suitable for human use on their own, instead of users burning 15% of brain juice thinking and executing that. That would be immensely useful.
(also re: hotels that others are commenting, there were never technical reasons the door keycard readers couldn't ever had doubled as credit card readers - I think the reason why clerks are required is for sanity check, that the guests aren't in need of immediate safety/health assistance and ok to proceed to beds)
My initial reaction to the hotel scene was: Ehhh, I like being able to read lips, as I wear hearing aids.
But yeah, I'd happily just check in at a kiosk and get my room card that way. (And I'm sure phone-as-key, no-contact check-in is only going to get more common)
>> The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like
I would pay extra to avoid it - just let me download a pass like a boarding pass to my Apple Wallet as I walk through the front door and head directly to my room.
I mean standing there for 10 minutes and giving them my passport to give me a plastic card with a digital code has very little to do with human touch.
I want that human touch at a bar perhaps but not at a reception.
If your critisism is only about the reception part: There has to be a transition part and a 'let a human do it for a bit' or 'here is a complicated case please robot move aside i'm here'.
One Login is an "authentication" system, an oAuth provider with identity added on. This means you can prove your identity once (to various levels of confidence, as defined in GPG45 [1]), and use that same verification across different government services.
When people talk about a national ID system, they're often talking about some form of "authorization", i.e. proving that you are entitled to certain things.
There currently isn't a system in the UK that can definitively prove that you have access to every service. For example, even being a British citizen and having a British passport doesn't automatically entitle you to access the NHS.
No I get that but you could eg link your passport to the One Login and it'd make the UX much better for many services. For example, if you linked passport, driving license and NI/tax account, then I think for 99% of services you wouldn't need to fill anything in.
FWIW I was impressed with the DVLA driving license process, where you can type your passport number in and it pulls your photo from the passport. Very smooth. Could be even smoother if it could link automatically your passport.
Go back far enough at London was 01 and the rest 02-09. London, Birmingham, Manchester and a few others were 7 digits (041 xxx xxxx for Glasgow)
Then London changed to 081/071, then all changed to 01xxx (eg 0564 to 01564, 081 to 0181), then finally London, Southampton, Belfast and a few others mixed to 02x and 8 digits.
03 became national geographic numbers and things like 0345 and 0500 were phased out, 0800 remained free but not always with mobiles, 0845 was “local” but was basically premium, 0870 was even more, 0898 was super premium etc
But as phones took off in the 00s everyone just had 07 with 9 digits. Not sure when that will fill up, but it feels like a billion numbers is enough for now.
What you’re describing sounds like it was the customs check. Pre-brexit, if you were arriving from the EU, then there was no customs check since we were all part of the same customs union.
The usual flow is
immigration check -> baggage collection -> customs check
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