How Amazon Hooked America on Fast Delivery, Avoiding Responsibility for Crashes - <AUTHOR> https://features.propublica.org/amazon-delivery-crashes/how-amazon-hooked-america-on-fast-delivery-while-avoiding-responsibility-for-crashes/ <comment><USER2> I'm not really impressed by this article. The two main points:

> An investigation by ProPublica identified more than 60 accidents since June > 2015 involving Amazon delivery contractors that resulted in serious > injuries, including 10 deaths

A better investigation would count the number of miles traveled and compare the rate to the general population. Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do: 37k people died on the road in 2017.

I'd like to see actual numbers here--driving is an inherently dangerous activity, and therefore needs to be looked at through statistics, not character pieces (like this article does).

> citing agreements that require them, as one puts it, to "defend, indemnify > and hold harmless Amazon."

This sounds pretty standard. However, if this is the case, then

> often Amazon directs, through an app, the order of the deliveries and the > route to each destination

seems like it may be a problem. Either the contractors have the autonomy to do things like they need to to stay safe, or Amazon should take that liability themselves.

<comment><USER3> > _A better investigation would count the number of miles traveled and compare > the rate to the general population. Driving is the most dangerous thing most > people do: 37k people died on the road in 2017._

The alternative to Amazon's delivery contractors is not civilian drivers, so that comparison wouldn't be interesting.

The comparison should be against small-to-medium delivery trucks, as used by UPS, FedEx, and USPS.

<comment><USER4> Lots of stuff that I get from Amazon I otherwise would have gotten by driving to the store.

<comment><USER5> Yes - this.

I live an hour from Costco and Wal-Mart. I've gotten over the "guilt" of having Jermey, the UPS guy, bring packages to my door. In the weeks where I don't have something delivered he is driving right past my house - and I'm kinda in the middle of nowhere. It isn't uncommon for him to hit at least 2 houses out of the dozen or so that are past me.

If I (and everyone in the area) decided to drive an hour to get to a "real" city with stores, there would be so many more cars on the road. Why not let the big brown truck bring them to our area?

<comment><USER3> > _Why not let the big brown truck bring them to our area?_

The article and controversy are explicitly about how Amazon has been replacing the big brown truck with dozens of private vehicles, most of them the size of cargo vans or smaller.

People were not accusing Amazon of causing congestion before, when they were exclusively using UPS, USPS, and FedEx.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > An investigation by ProPublica identified more than 60 accidents since June > 2015 involving Amazon delivery contractors that resulted in serious > injuries, including 10 deaths.

Is that supposed to sound like a lot? Amazon delivers a staggering number of packages.

</comment><comment><USER7> This "contractor" thing has to be shut down. If someone gets all their work from amazon and is told by amazon when, how, and where to deliver packages, they're not contractors. It's just a completely transparent attempt to externalize costs and liabilities.

<comment><USER8> Are you going to legislate away all contractor work? Because every medium to large company and even government agencies utilize contractors.

You can't build and develop subject matter expertise on everything. And besides that, contractors are often used to scale when you have demand that you can't necessarily meet with your current capabilities.

I guess I don't understand how your "solution" to this problem scales to the regulatory world outside of Amazon.

<comment><USER7> That's not even nearly what I said. I said that if someone is consistently told how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear, then they're an employee.

If, on the other hand, they're asked to do something and have the freedom to set the price for the task, to accept or reject the task as they see fit, and perform it at a time, place, and manner of their choosing, and they perform this task for several different clients, then it's perfectly reasonable to consider them a contractor. Which pretty much is what the IRS says, as well, as linked by jcranmer above.

<comment><USER9> I contracted for 8 years in the energy industry. How, when, where, and what were standard requirements defined by the company I worked at. The main difference day to day was I didn't attend some company town halls or have access to the wellness facilities.

Are you proposing a massive overhaul to the legal framework around contractors or just wanting to target Amazon?

<comment><USER7> No, but I think you and the other commenter would not have been allowed to be contractors if the IRS rules were actually enforced. Have you read them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pretty sure this same argument was made against 30 minute pizza delivery in the past. And I think most pizza companies made changes due to accidents (or risk thereof). Something tells me a 16 year old pizza delivery person was much more dangerous than an amazon delivery driver. Purely based on how my friends and I drove when we were 16.

</comment><comment><USER11> >Amazon, the world's largest retailer, is famously secretive about details of its operations, including the scale of its delivery network.

Amazon is really the world's largest retailer? I thought that was Walmart.

Turns out they surpassed Walmart a couple months ago.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2019/05/15/worlds-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2019/05/15/worlds- largest-retailers-2019-amazon-walmart-alibaba/)

<comment><USER12> No Walmart had three time the retail sales of Amazon in 2018.

[https://stores.org/stores-top-retailers-2019/](https://stores.org/stores-top- retailers-2019/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article is mixing together car accidents and wage disputes to create the impression people aren't getting compensated for accidents, by, e.g., car insurance companies.

<comment><USER3> > _people aren't getting compensated for accidents, by, e.g., car insurance > companies_

Car insurance doesn't cover 100% of costs. There's the deductible and, for many low-income drivers, the cost of lawsuits. A fully-loaded insurance plan is pretty expensive, and the unit economics likely doesn't work for a lot of these people unless they're insured with the bare minimum.

That idea does fit into the low-wage argument, because you're creating a race- to-the-bottom market among your delivery drivers such that the ones who want proper insurance aren't able to compete on price with the ones who are willing to take risks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anecdotally when I lived in London Amazon delivery drivers always seemed super stressed. Like they had way too many deliveries to make in too little time.

It confuses me because it doesn't feel like deliveries would be that much more expensive if they were given say 20-30% more buffer.

Delivery drivers don't get paid much, and last mile doesn't make up all of the delivery cost anyway.

It almost feels as if a piecework pay model would work better because it would give the individuals the ability to decide that making $N an hour and taking their time is better than $N*1.2 and playing race car driver, running up stairs, getting signatures in 0.1 seconds etc.

Whilst a target based model is basically 'rush fast or get sacked'.

<comment><USER15> It isn't so simple. As a manager, it is easy to incentivize "deliver as many packages as you can" (e.g., pay per package). It is not so easy to incentivize "deliver 83%[=1/1.2] as many packages as you can."

Furthermore, people always optimize what can be measured, and measuring safe driving, on a day-to-day basis, is harder than measuring number of deliveries (not impossible, maybe, but much harder---also less transparent, easier to game, more intrusive).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not hooked. In fact, I think it's kind of obnoxious how much effort they put into getting me stuff so fast. If there was a "slow ship" button for Prime, I'd do it almost every time. I also don't need notifications of it being "almost here! Watch it on a map!" Completely useless information for most of my orders.

<comment><USER17> As mentioned, there is a button to ship it slower where they usually give you $1 or so for a digital purchase.

I think they slow it down by packing it up with other orders along the way which is more efficient yet slower to deliver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A bit off track but here in India I see, all sorts of negligence shown by delivery guys of almost all delivery companies - Swiggy, Zomato, Uber Eats, etc. Even cab drivers of Ola, Uber are reckless. It is high time these companies start taking accountability.

<comment><USER19> I worked with routing in a logistics company in India. The whole last mile delivery had so many special cases that we stopped trying to model them all. Drivers would take routes to avoid cops, or go toward a cop they knew (they had paid off in the past). Drivers would not go into each others' territories (so 2 drivers working for the same company would not deliver if their areas overlapped). For delivery people on 2-wheelers, all road rules were optional. They would go down wrong way on one-way roads etc. (we could track them, we called them 'dirty routes'). Drivers would prefer their own routes even when we gave better routes. Sometimes better was vaguely defined, since we might think this route save 10% time so is better, and he might think my favorite paan shop is on that route, so the other route is better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I fail to see why Amazon should be held liable in the cited accidents. A truck driver plowing into the back of a jeep killing a 9 month old in a car seat? That's 100% on the driver. Article refers to the truck driver with "he was running late and failed to spot the Jeep in time to avoid the crash".

I can see liability with things like Domino's back in the day, guaranteeing delivery in 30 min or less or something. They had to stop because their drivers were getting into wrecks left and right. But those drivers were employed by Domino's sent out for delivery from a Domino's store. These are third-party logistics companies. Why wouldn't they be held liable?

<comment><USER21> These "contractor" drivers are misclassified employees who are not trained to the safety standard of logistics providers like FedEx and UPS.

<comment><USER22> and FedEx/UPS have insurance that can deal with these situations. Here Amazon is pushing the liability down to smaller companies who could easily fold if their insurance premiums starts to go up. Amazon will then just move on to the next contracting company that tries to push it's way in on tight margins.</comment></comment></comment>


Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito - <AUTHOR> https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2018/Trial-wipes-out-more-than-80-per-cent-of-disease-spreading-mozzie?featured=F29EDEB1728C4A92B579C7A5DC28BAD5 <comment><USER2> > To address this challenge, Verily, an affiliate of Alphabet Inc, developed a > mosquito rearing and sex sorting and release technology as part of its > global Debug project.

Verily is formerly "Google Life Sciences" and currently Alphabet Inc's research arm for life sciences.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verily_Life_Sciences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verily_Life_Sciences)

<comment><USER3> If only Australia's CSIRO still had enough funding to do this kind of work itself rather than 'partner with' (i.e. contribute public funding towards the private investment goals of) for-profit companies.

Amongst CSIRO's earlier inventions are 1960s insect repelent 'Aerogard', polymer banknotes and major components of Wi-Fi as we know it.

<comment><USER4> I don't see what the problem is if the for-profit companies goals align with theirs.

<comment><USER5> It's more a reflection on the fact that our governments have successively cut CSIRO's funding again and again despite their demonstrated return on investment and notable achievements.

<comment><USER6> Really? It seems pretty steady although it has ticked down slightly as a percentage of gdp since 2012. And looking at spending as a percentage of gdp is a bit misleading, as funding may increase but not at the same pace as gdp growth. I think a more meaningful measure would be real dollars.

CSIRO funding over time

2012-2013 733.8

2013-2014 778.2

2014-2015 745.3

2015-2016 750.3

Do you think that high extra 28mm to attain that high water mark of 2013-2014 funding would have made the big impact?

Maybe 2017-2018 are dramatically lower and if they are, please provide a source.

[http://www.arc.gov.au/sites/default/files/filedepot/Public/M...](http://www.arc.gov.au/sites/default/files/filedepot/Public/Media%20&%20Resources%20Centre/Presentations/graphics/2016/Selected_research_agencies_2003to2016_million.jpg)

[http://theconversation.com/infographic-how-much-does- austral...](http://theconversation.com/infographic-how-much-does-australia- spend-on-science-and-research-61094)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for pointing that out and correcting me. I'd not followed it personally since the Abbott prime-minstership and didn't realise that Turnbull had actually reversed the inital plan to cut $115m over 5 years. The first year of that was the ~30m reduction in 2014-15 that your data shows. I hope the 2016-17 figure continues that trend.

Again, thanks for fact-checking me. I appreciate the correction!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _Aedes, Anopheles and Culex are found almost all over the world and are > responsible for around 17 per cent of infectious disease transmissions > globally. "_

If I understand that correctly, that is a _massive_ number. I really like what these sterilization trials are producing. In my mind, it's a lot safer than spraying chemicals across cities.

<comment><USER8> It gets worse. As I posted elsewhere in the comments, an article in Nature[1] suggests that up to half of humans ever to live have died as a result of mosquito-borne disease.

In light of those numbers I feel we are ethically clear to take drastic action. We don't have to kill all mosquitoes as fewer than 1% of mosquito species feed on humans. We have several tools which will target the specific species which impact us (such as the approach used in this article). It's time we do something about it, or accept the fact that millions more humans are going to die while we wring our hands.

[1] [https://www.nature.com/news/2002/021003/full/news021001-6.ht...](https://www.nature.com/news/2002/021003/full/news021001-6.html)

<comment><USER9> What are the negative outcomes? Presumably we leave a niche for other mosquito or insect species to prosper in, which species will they be. Which species predate the mosquitoes we're eliminating, or how do those particular species adapt the environment and so impact the local eco-system?

If we've not found any negatives then I imagine we've not tried very hard.

Australia is kinda synonymous with species-wide population control and not in a good way; hopefully this will change that?

<comment> joatmon-snoo This question comes up every time something like this makes the news, and in general the people qualified to have opinions are generally either ambivalent or believe the pros outweigh the cons.

One article: [https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html](https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html)

<comment><USER9> Your source appears to support the destruction of the whole Culicidae family; and doesn't appear to care if that puts the Carmargue martens, as an example, below replacement levels of reproduction.

>"They don't occupy an unassailable niche in the environment," says entomologist Joe Conlon, of the American Mosquito Control Association in Jacksonville, Florida. "If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over."

Is that entomologist in the group you're allowing to have opinions? Because "<shoulder shrug> could be better or worse" doesn't appear terribly enlightened.

We've regretted destruction of killer species before (I'm thinking of the deforestation that follows wolf annihilation and the desire by some to reintroduce wolves to Scotland); we should be very careful.

IMO non-experts can add a needed objectivity to rational consideration that is often difficult for experts to tap in to.

That all said, and not that anyone cares, but I support targeted species-level eradication tests.

(Also TIL Arctic mosquitoes.)

<comment><USER10> One thing to remember is that many of these mosquito species are actually invasive species. A. aegyptus is from Africa, after all, so it really has no business in the Americas or Australia. Unless it's a prime food source for something else, and has also basically eradicated some other native species that served that role, I don't see how you could argue that it shouldn't be eradicated from those continents. Eradicating invasive species is almost always considered OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is theorized there is no adverse effect from killing mosquito species. There is always a counter-effect. Typically it's unpredictable. Mosquitoes FACILITATE transmission of bad stuff. I believe that if bad stuff is not transmitted, species evolve more slowly against pathogens. Species will still be exposed, maybe generations later through a scratch or otherwise. At that point, having never evolved a strong immune system the same animals will be less prepared. It's not whether the American Indians were to die from European diseases, but when.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. Ecosystems are a delicate balance. Who knows what chaos will be unleashed by tampering with them? Especially species facilitating horizontal gene transfer. Pathogen vector may be only one of the functions of the mosquito. Perhaps by simply existing and occupying so much of a certain pathway they are keeping other pathogens at bay or preventing other viruses from evolving, perhaps down paths that, after the pressure of not having mosquito as a carrier, selects for more powerful pathogens that can thrive without mosquitoes. Sometimes having a tolerable evil we know is better than one we don't. Perhaps what we are really doing with ending mosquitoes is putting selective pressure on the pathogens formerly carried by them to find innovative, and possibly worse-for-us, ways to evolve and spread.

<comment><USER11> What if some helpful antibodies are transmitted via mosquitos? What if this happens cross-species?

<comment><USER12> Exactly. I agree and think this is actually a thing. We don't know enough about what mosquitoes could be doing to help us. I think less-risk strategies like repellents / clothing / vaccines are better than ecosystem engineering. As 'impressively effective' as their results are, I do not think they are doing a good thing. So you better get your mosquito bites while they last.

<comment><USER13> You're not wrong, but you also have to consider that species-altering technology will likely save millions more lives in the next few decades than "strategies like repellents / clothing / vaccines" alone. There are careful tradeoffs and considerations to be made here.

Germline altering should only be done in extreme circumstances, and I think this is one of them. Even if mosquitoes do pass on vital antibodies (why hasn't this issue already been noticed in wealthy people who have never been bit and have never consumed something that was bit?) or malaria finds a new way to spread or their absence otherwise creates some kind of butterfly effect ecosystem chaos, what's easier to do in 30 years? Artificially re-introducing safer versions of these mosquitoes / mosquito analogs / isolated antibodies back into the ecosystem and finding new treatments for pathogens, or resurrecting the millions of people who needlessly suffered and died of preventable diseases?

And also consider the chance that maybe nothing bad at all will happen if they all die off. Obviously, this is a very risky hypothesis that's nearly impossible to prove or disprove in a lab, but it's just a possibility to keep in mind. Complex systems like ecosystems are fickle. Sometimes removing a tiny piece of a system wrecks the whole thing like a Jenga tower collapsing, and sometimes removing a massive piece has almost no effect at all. Eliminating a parasite species doesn't necessarily mean there will be significant negative consequences. But of course, there absolutely could be.

As long as this technology is tested extremely carefully and applied to smaller real-world ecosystems which can be studied for years before being deployed globally, it seems like the overall best answer is to avoid the short-term death and despair and deal with future problems as they arise.

Evolution by natural selection no longer holds all the cards. Humanity has, and will continue to, supersede it and override it to achieve things that would never otherwise be possible. We don't have to cower in fear of natural processes anymore, because we can intelligently shape our world, and soon other worlds, as we see fit. We still have to understand these systems and processes to prevent externalities, but that doesn't mean we can't cautiously venture into this kind of technology. It would happen sooner or later, so why not right now?

<comment><USER12> Yeah I think this is the right approach to thinking about these things. Careful consideration of the trade-offs and potential consequences. Rather than the "hey we have a new big weapon against X", let's deploy it everywhere! Maybe I was wrong to think people were suggesting this, but history has examples where humans have made these mistakes. So I think instinct to caution for systems we don't understand and can't easily fix (if we break them), is correct.

If we do it like the way you are saying I think it will work. At least I think that's the best chance we have. And I totally agree we must take these chances. And And I'm totally on board with the net benefit/ number of lives saves calculus, and also that we must go beyond natural selection to better our species.

We'll probably be okay because people as a whole have a diversity of opinions: some enthusiastic want to push forward, others want to move more cautiously. Put it together, hopefully we get the right balance. I guess this trait itself evolved, from hunter-gatherers. Only tribes that had the right mix of people: adventurers who want to explore new territory and cautioners who want to be careful, survive on average, I think. Hooray for careful progress.

<comment><USER12> But thinking about it more I really don't think we should be ecoengineering by deleting species. I think we can modify species, and in this case I think what we should be aiming for is modifying the pathogen, and we should not be deleting a species of mosquito. That is very bad I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> IIRC this is an Australian initiative: the basic work on the application of Walbachia to dengue, the formation of the world mosquito program, it's an initiative grounded in Australian science.

yes, you will find "we did it" in China and Brazil and Vietnam and other places: The roots of this work go back to 2011 and before, at Monash University:

[https://www.monash.edu/industry/success- stories/dengue](https://www.monash.edu/industry/success-stories/dengue)

[http://www.eliminatedengue.com/about- us](http://www.eliminatedengue.com/about-us)

<comment><USER15> The article says it's "an international partnership between CSIRO, Verily and James Cook University".

<comment><USER14> Yes. this story is. It would not surprise me if there are co-collaborators in CSIRO who came from the Monash programme, or if the WMP has funded this (which is run from Monash).

Verily brought mechanistic sex-sorting of mozzies. The CSIRO has a remit to get IPR into play, its government science for profit (I used to work at the CSIRO btw) and James Cook is right in the heart of the Australian mosquito belt. Maybe Monash is in a different sphere now.

No matter: the groundwork on Walbachia, the fundamentals stem from what they did. The cited 'happened here before' moments in this thread? most of them are WMP initiatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How long did they measure this for, and how long is that relative to the lifecycle / reproductive cycle of a mosquito? Is there any reason to believe the mosquito population won't quickly (or if not quickly, then eventually) bounce back?

<comment><USER17> Assuming they are like some flies that has been eradicated [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique) , the population would bounce back in a few years. You must repeat the treatment next year lower the population to the 5% of the initial population, and repeat the treatment the next year to reduce it to the 1% and repeat it a few years to reduce each time the population until it is completely eradicated. And then a few times to be sure.

And later implement some kind of check to avoid the reintroduction. Some countries that have a nice natural barrier have checks to avoid the introduction of fruit that may have flies larva. With mosquito, I'm not sure how the larva can travel from one country to another...

<comment><USER16> In the bilge of a ship, since they lay eggs in water?

<comment><USER18> Pretty sure mosquito eggs don't survive in salt water.

<comment><USER19> Bilge water isn't consistently salty.

A ship which unloaded in the St. Lawrence Seaway would fill the bilge tanks with fresh water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> According to the WHO ([http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact- sheets/detail/malaria](http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact- sheets/detail/malaria))

* Malaria killed 445,000 people in 2016.

* Of those, 285,000 were children under the age of 5.

* There were 216 million cases of malaria in 2016.

That is a large city's worth of children dying every year, and a large country's population having severely reduced productivity.

And that is just one mosquito born illness.

The guaranteed human and economic benefits of wiping out mosquitoes, far outweigh any theoretical downside.

This group and other groups working to wipe out mosquitoes are truly doing humanity a great service.

<comment><USER21> _The guaranteed human and economic benefits of wiping out mosquitoes, far outweigh any theoretical downside._

I like how you just state that, like it doesn't even matter what the downside was. What if bird populations crashed and a pestilence set upon crops worldwide, and caused mass starvation & millions dead- kind of exactly like what happened during the Great Leap Forward?

I'm not saying that would happen, but we can't just say _" lots of people die of malaria, so don't even worry about the downside"_

<comment><USER22> There are literally thousands of species of mosquito which don't bite humans. Just one sub-species which kills hundreds of thousands of human babies is being targeted.

It's great to ask "what-if"?! This is a well studied problem of an _invasive_ species where the scientific answer to your question is: there is no downside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This was already done in China 3 years ago..

[https://qz.com/640394/a-chinese-mosquito-factory- releases-20...](https://qz.com/640394/a-chinese-mosquito-factory- releases-20-million-of-the-little-buggers-into-the-wild-every-week/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Initially I thought it was about using CRISPR and gene drive [1] to eliminated the gene that facilitates the infection.

But looks like we're not there yet.

1\. [https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2018/5/31/17344406/cr...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2018/5/31/17344406/crispr-mosquito-malaria-gene-drive-editing-target- africa-regulation-gmo)

</comment><comment><USER25> What happened to the other 20%? If this is the part of the population that is resistant to the trial, then good luck in the coming years.

<comment><USER26> While 20% of the population resisted the trial, it's not really because they're immune/resistant to the trial itself. It's not a viral, chemical or bacterial effect. What they're doing is a whole lot more clever, let me quote the article:

"From November 2017 to June this year, non-biting male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes sterilised with the natural bacteria Wolbachia were released in trial zones along the Cassowary Coast in North Queensland.

They mated with local female mosquitoes, resulting in eggs that did not hatch and a significant reduction of their population."

In theory all they have to do is keep releasing these males and hopefully eventually all the female vectors will have mated with these introduced males and that's it.

<comment><USER25> Interesting. Do you know how and why the 20% resisted?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I didn't realize that the CSIRO had its own 2LD within the .au TLD, that's neat.

[https://www.domainregistration.com.au/news/2014/1404-au- doma...](https://www.domainregistration.com.au/news/2014/1404-au-domain- trivia.php)

</comment><comment><USER28> I have one question...can we do this with fire ants?

<comment><USER29> Ants actually serve a purpose in the ecosystem. Mosquitoes are unique in that many ecologists believe mosquito eradication would not adversely affect other species.

<comment><USER30> Strong suspicion every member of the ecosystem plays a role in sustaining the ecosystem.

Mosquitos are still the deadliest animal as far as humans are concerned, makes me wonder what other populations they are keeping under control....

Ecologist hubris and ignorance of 2nd and 3rd order effects is marching with misplaced confidence towards the death spiral.

*Buys more SpaceX bonds....

<comment><USER31> Places with endemic disease tend to have higher fertility rates. Mosquitoes aren't keeping the human population under control.

The ones most harmful to humans are also fairly specific about what species they bite:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anopheles#Preferred_sources_fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anopheles#Preferred_sources_for_blood_meals)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Out of interest, does anyone know how this affects ecological balance. Are the insects replaced by another species? How does this affect bird populations which rely on eating the mosquitos?

</comment><comment><USER33> Will next generation of mosquitos be selected for greater fertility and more obscure sex-related features, thus making them harder to sterilize that way?

</comment><comment><USER18> I never understood why the U.S didn't just do the same sort of thing with poppies in Afganistan. Would have completely wiped out the Taliban funding.

<comment><USER34> In early 2001 the Taliban banned the growth of poppies and opium export plummeted to near zero.

> _The first American narcotics experts to go to Afghanistan under Taliban > rule have concluded that the movement 's ban on opium-poppy cultivation > appears to have wiped out the world's largest crop in less than a year, > officials said today. The American findings confirm earlier reports from the > United Nations drug control program that Afghanistan, which supplied about > three-quarters of the world's opium and most of the heroin reaching Europe, > had ended poppy planting in one season._

> _But the eradication of poppies has come at a terrible cost to farming > families, and experts say it will not be known until the fall planting > season begins whether the Taliban can continue to enforce it._

[https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/world/taliban-s-ban-on- po...](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/world/taliban-s-ban-on-poppy-a- success-us-aides-say.html)

Later that year America invaded and poppy production soon _exceeded_ historic numbers by a significant margin.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanista...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan#/media/File:Afghanistan_opium_poppy_cultivation_1994-2007b.PNG)

Make of this what you will.

<comment><USER18> Today I learned... thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Larger insects, small birds and amphibians eat mosquitoes. Shortage of food in a lower ring of the chain can escalate to the top as early as within a year and cause a severe depression in another part of the world for humans. As seen in all past instances, no matter how confident humans are, something goes awry when we try to cut something out of an ecosystem.

<comment><USER36> You misread the article. They are not destroying all mosquitoes, only a specific species within that Genus. There are plenty of other mosquitoes to take the place of Ae. aegypti in the food chain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Now we just have to wait a few decades to see if it has sustained impact!

</comment><comment><USER38> What is the probability of these sterile mosquitoes somehow evolving and reproducing on their own ?!

(So most of the batch is sterile and cant reproduce so cant evolve. But maybe just a single mosquito of the batch is "faulty" and can reproduce and is released anyway etc etc ?)

<comment><USER39> If it's not sterile, it's just a regular mosquito, of which they already have plenty in Australia...

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Scent of Chicken can drive away Mosquitoes qz.com/739510

</comment><comment><USER41> What are the unintended consequences? Surely, these mosquitoes are someone's breakfast, lunch and/or dinner. What happens when that species can't eat?

<comment><USER42> They are an introduced species, so are already an unintended consequence

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> mozzie, lol

<comment><USER44> Here'y'are mate, if you thought that was a cracker, you're gonna have a ripper of an arvo with this:

        http://www.koalanet.com.au/australian-slang.html/

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Birds may miss a few meals.

<comment><USER46> I'd argue that this approach is better for the food chain than any chemical sprays. This way other bugs aren't indiscriminately killed as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> They should've paid for the full version to wipe out the remaining 20%

</comment><comment><USER48> As good as this is for preventing the awful scourge of human disease that mosquitoes cause - I still wonder what the knock-on effects of this will be, with respect to the overall loss of biomass and mosquitoes as a food source.

tldr: Mother nature does not like sudden vacuums in complex ecosystems, it gets ugly for somebody at some part of the food chain where we never expected it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Always interesting when a 300,000 year old species decides a 50+ million year old species doesn't need to exist anymore.

Tell me more ecologists...grabs popcorn.

</comment><comment><USER49> If this isn't the peak of human hubris I'm really not sure what is. What could go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER50> > In an international partnership between CSIRO, Verily and James Cook > University, scientists used specialised technology to release millions of > sterilised male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes

This is so stupid. A population will recover from this in a single generation, because the second you stop releasing sterile males, the remaining males (no matter how few) can repopulate the species.

If you want to make a species of mosquitoes extinct (and I'm in favor of this, they serve no irreplaceable environmental purposes), the more effective method would be releasing males that only have male offspring.

<comment><USER51> >they serve no irreplaceable environmental purposes

How are we sure of this?

<comment><USER52> We don't have to wipe out all mosquitos in one shot. There are many different species, not all of which transmit the deadly diseases of concern.

We can start with less populous species that share their ecological niche with other species that can replace them in the food chain - observe the impact of removing that one species then move on to others as warranted by the results.

Answer #2: It's worth the risk. Kill them all.

<comment><USER53> > It's worth the risk

Not really. Mosquitoes, both adults and larvae, serve as an important food source for many animals that humans eventually depend on for food. Many types of juvenile fish eat their larvae, for example, juvenile fish that eventually grow up and become a major source of protein for some groups of people.

<comment><USER9> >a major source of protein for some groups of people. //

But not for Westerners in temperate climes, so, y'know, who cares ... [that's deeply black sarcasm in case it's not obvious].

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The 20% that survived are immune to this and will now multiply unchecked.

<comment><USER55> It's not a virus. Rather than being immune, they might have managed to avoid mating with the altered mosquitos (by chance apparently, as there seems to be no perceptible difference) - for now.

Antiretrovirals fight HIV by blocking its multiplication in multiple ways, such that the virus would have to mutate in a few particular ways simultaneously to survive, which is extremely unlikely. Perhaps the mosquitos could be altered similarly.

<comment><USER56> What happens by chance in the first generation will happen by design in later generations. Unless the altered mosquitoes differ from normal ones in a new and unpredictable way every generation from now to the end of time, they will eventually be detected and avoided.

<comment><USER57> They didn't do anything to the existing mosquitos. They released sterile specimens. All of the fertile wild specimens were still going about their business making more Mosquitos, but the matings between the normal wild ones and the sterile lab ones didn't result in offspring.

If you roll a collection of dice, and remove all of them when they roll something other than 6, the other dice haven't "evolved" to only roll 6s.

<comment><USER58> No, but dice that roll sixes more often are contributing more offspring to the next generation. If the selection pressure keeps up, you will have most dice consistently rolling 6s.

<comment><USER31> The technique has been used against other species of insects since ~1950.

There should be a horror story by now.

<comment><USER56> Horror story? The "horror story" would be "the insects are still around".

<comment><USER31> Indeed, I was being flip. It's actually been successful at eradicating populations of insects, rather rapidly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sterile_insect_techniq...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sterile_insect_technique_trials)

<comment><USER56> I see that "eradication" has been declared in most of those trials, but I also see that formal "eradication" is often followed by renewal of the trial, recovery of the population, or "complete eradication". I'm forced to conclude that "eradication" in this context does not have its usual meaning.

That said, it does look like this is usually a pretty successful method of ongoing population suppression.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


2021 Cadillac Escalade has a 38-inch curved OLED display - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21024331/cadillac-escalade-2021-38-inch-curved-oled-screen <comment><USER2> Next thing you know an LCARS interface pops up!</comment>


What Will the World Be Like After Coronavirus? Four Possible Futures - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/what-will-the-world-be-like-after-coronavirus-four-possible-futures-134085 <comment><USER2> All these people predicting cataclysmic change because of the Coronavirus are missing the fact that this all happened multiple times already, including barely a century before. The Spanish Flu went and wiped ~4% of the world population, including the young, right after civilization spent the last 4 years shooting at each other in trenches. The result of all this? America and Europe experienced an age of economic prosperity known as the Roaring Twenties, with any radical government changes attributed to war debt over anything the flu did

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure that you can compare the global economic system of 100 years ago to today. Everything is much more tightly interconnected and we have consistently optimised for efficiency at the expense of resilience. We apparently did not learn from the 2008 financial crisis and are probably even less resilient. We are still represented by Figure 2, graph B of [0].

[0] Options for Managing a Systemic Bank Crisis [https://journals.openedition.org/sapiens/747](https://journals.openedition.org/sapiens/747)

<comment><USER4> Financial truth is merely ideology

Past societies have legislated it away, soberly realizing the literal agency of people matters more than conformity to emotional gamesmanship of men with little imagination but "watch me trick people into idolatry with appeals to authoritative knowledge they can't verify cause we won't educate them!"

<comment><USER5> We are really failing at this right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a lot to take in, especially not coming from any related discipline background.

Since I dont have the prerequisite background, I can only ask questions. I also believe that there are not right answers. Every decision benefits someone at the expense of someone else.

1\. This article does not cover the positive sides of an "exchange value" economy. Isn't this type of economy responsible for bringing once 3rd world countries out of poverty?

2\. Side note: I think the choice being made here is environment vs present suffering. For every person in a 3rd country on its way to 1st world, they need a fridge, fresh water, oven, more space (thus transportation beyond walking/biking), safety codes (more materials), etc. The environmental impact on providing these modern facilities must be huge, no?

3\. If a national-level economy values "exchanging value", wouldn't that culture prioritize making their lives better? Better is subjective, and alludes to the rat race, but at least in the USA, if you're okay not living in the coastal areas, you can live very comfortably for cheap.

4\. The international balance of power. If one country focuses on "exchanging value" thus enriching themselves, wouldn't that give that country a lot of international leverage? I personally believe we've had (generally) global peace for so long because there's been only one super power in the world for that time period (the USA). If we shrunk our economy (based on your 4 possible options), how would that impact the military budget? I personally think if there are multiple competing super powers, then war is more likely to happen

<comment><USER7> Is China not a super power? Europe?

<comment><USER8> They are superpowers, but the US is a hyperpower.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpower](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpower)

<comment><USER5> I think it's only likely the US has been losing power past few years. Our long-term potential for the US economy should have been reduced by our lifespans reducing educational and infrastructure spending reducing centralizing wealth in the wealthy, more in the 0.1%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> First we pretend to care about global warming and make bold promises about how in some distant future we'll cut emissions to a more reasonable level. Everybody understands that the emissions come from the growing economy and that the only real solution is to slow down the economy.

So the virus slows down the economy for us. Exactly what we wanted, right? Emissions are down, folks in India can even see Himalayan mountains. Everybody should celebrate this, but no, our only concern is how to restart the economy and get to the new heights of pollution asap.

<comment><USER10> We're supposed to be celebrating a global pandemic, because (if we weren't forced to shelter in place) we might see the mountains? Hardly.

Hopefully, technology will offer other options to decrease emissions than simply slowing economic growth, because that has real human costs.

<comment><USER9> I think you illustrate my point well: people are bought into the climate change talk, but when it comes to actions, they do what they really believe in.

<comment><USER11> Many of us are bought in to actions that don't include the death of millions of people.

<comment><USER9> Actions like switching to paper straws?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, people don't want to be inconvenienced. "Yeah, I've driven several miles today with my gas gurgling vehicle to see some nice view and destress a little, I would do it in electric car, but it's too expensive to buy, I'd rather do some small damage to environment". Avoiding small inconceniences multiplied by millions of people is what gives us the situation we have now. People want change but don't want to change. I see I am part of this problem too, but the big problem is that I'm only a very small part of a problem. If only I change, I make my life worse for negligible benefit of others.

How to change this? I still have no idea, but I believe this is THE source of our problems with environment. Every other problem loops back to tragedy of commons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll be happy if we get Medicare for all out of this. Insurance companies are not going to get people who have been laid off for 6mo to pay their crazy bills for Covid treatment.

</comment><comment><USER14> Url changed from [https://singularityhub.com/2020/04/03/what-will-the-world- be...](https://singularityhub.com/2020/04/03/what-will-the-world-be-like- after-coronavirus-four-possible-futures/), which points to this.</comment>


Ask HN: Can a contract provide the same legal protection that an LLC provides? - <AUTHOR>

I'm an in-house developer but occasionally do contract work about once a year (<40-50hrs total).  Because of the amount of contract work is so small I usually just go the 1099 route instead of setting up an LLC, I'm curious if I can draft a contract that when signed will provide me the same protections as having an LLC? <comment><USER2> you only have to set up the LLC once. they're pretty cheap to setup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't the way you pay yourself out of an LLC or S-Corp weird though if you only work a handful of hours?</comment></comment>


Does Software Understand Complexity? - <AUTHOR> https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/does-software-understand-complexity <comment><USER2> > _We might find that our field could benefit from mining math related to > mechanical and electrical engineering. Feedback and control theory, in > particular, looks like it i could have some utility._

This was all over the place behind the core theme of my CS master's degree, for which I happened to also have background in both mechanical and electrical engineering. There are a lot of things that felt quite natural to me but that were proving elusive and challenging to people I worked with who lacked an equally diverse background by being exclusively focused on CS.

Two points I raised were designing with, leveraging, and modelling feedback loops in component-based software using control theory (application was on auto-adaptative AV streaming across a network of varying quality† but the overarching theme was largely generalisable); and modelling execution flow using laws from electrical engineering (using high level concepts such as power potential and current intensity as well as qualifying code paths as being resistive, capacitive, and inductive) as an alternative approach to complexity and optimisation.

The resistance to cross-domain mixing was surprisingly high, entrenched thought processes are a remarkably deceitful thing, even when faced with provable results.

† Something I would find out to be implemented a couple of years later with zero-delay Xbox Live movie streaming.

<comment><USER3> Do you have a link to your thesis?

<comment><USER2> Here's the ref[0], I lost both the tex source and pdf output in a double crash (backup _and_ laptop basically simultaneously) and don't even have access to the full text anymore (oh the irony). My work on execution flow modelling wasn't referenced and is forever gone in that crash though. Bummer.

It's only a master of advanced studies (Diplôme d'Etudes Approfondies [1]) so it's way shorter than a doctoral thesis. Also, the thing is probably half- assed in some way, as there was some, dare I say, "lack of support" on challenging ideas which was highly non-motivational on getting a proper paper out (The moment I talked about leveraging AI/NN in component supervision I was outcast as a sci-fi author). It doesn't cover half of my work (had to cut it down to only the core part, enough to get the gist of things, but that's only the tip of the iceberg). And it's in French.

If you (or anyone else) can ever get the full text please forward it back to me so I can laugh at my arrogant young self!

[0]: [https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00000787](https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00000787)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Advanced_Studies#Fra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Advanced_Studies#France_and_francophone_countries)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >I've long thought that as we add code and dependencies to systems we approach biological levels of complexity.

According to Taleb: complexity is good for system reliability in the long term. (As well as redundancy in every aspect like head count, components count, technology stacks used in the same system) to mimic biological complexity.

But I strive to make everything as simple as possible, remove unnecessary components, etc.

I still cant understand contexts where complex is better than simple

<comment><USER5> Simple is better where you need to maintain control, because then a human being can understand the entire system and its behavior becomes deterministic from our perspective. Complexity--practically by definition--means that the system's behavior becomes harder to predict, when software development is (in most cases) explicitly focused on delivering _expected_ behavior. So for most practical software development purposes, simplicity is better.

But complexity can also be emergent from the aggregation of many small, simple components. E.g. the internet, which grew out of some relatively simple protocols connecting a handful of computers into the globe-spanning organism that it is today. So you may not design a complex system as a software developer, but your simple system may become a component in a larger, complex system. And that system will be more robust than the individual, simple components are. Such as the replacement of HTTP with HTTPS at the protocol level or fiber replacing copper in the physical system of the internet. Those simple systems have (or rather will soon) perish, while the more complex system that emerged from them survives.

<comment><USER6> > Such as the replacement of HTTP with HTTPS at the protocol level or fiber > replacing copper in the physical system of the internet. Those simple > systems have (or rather will soon) perish, while the more complex system > that emerged from them survives.

Funny you should say that w.r.t. to reliability.

I just got back from vacation today and have just had 2 SSL-related issues I needed to solve, not to mention one related with dependencies on smaller components, which when updated broke my chain of software.

All these would have worked more reliably 1. without HTTPS and 2. if everything were packaged together :)

In short, the simpler solution would clearly be more _reliable_ here.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but that's your experience as an individual developer on a small component of the system. If we're looking at the health of the system _as a whole_ (of which you, and the work you're doing to solve these issues, are a part), it's completely resilient to this change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a similar experience this past week at the ISSS conference in Corvallis.

I'm applying to the systems science PhD program at PSU this year and was amazed at the both the depth and breadth of the systems research and discussion to be had, but also noted the lack of software developers or computer/information systems discussion.

I'm looking forward to being able to bring some of my expertise to this field, while also mining the knowledge and concepts for use in better software systems design.

I'm going to definitely look into this conference for next year, though hopefully they won't be running the same week as the ISSS conference again.

<comment><USER5> I used to walk past the Harder House on SW 10th and Market every day, where I think the systems PhD program sits. They have these fascinating network diagrams stuck up in the windows, and I was always curious what they were...

<comment><USER8> Yep, that's the place... if it's the one I'm thinking of, then I think it's a diagram of a search through a set of potential models during a RA (Reconstructability Analysis) of 3 independent variables with 1 dependent variable.

It's Dr. Marty Zwick's favorite picture since he's the one who teaches DMM (Discrete Multivariate Modeling) which deals with RA. I haven't taken it yet, but he was at ISSS and gave a plenary on RA, as well as chaired a full day of RA related presentations.

Here is some more information, which also has the diagram I think you're referencing:

[https://www.pdx.edu/sysc/research-discrete-multivariate- mode...](https://www.pdx.edu/sysc/research-discrete-multivariate-modeling)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Software systems are the perfect data generating processes. They are often compositional and yet complex because of simple interactions blowing things up. And we have effectively infinite data so it's a good place to get started. It would be amazing if an AI could reverse engineer a backend of an app just based on using the product and maybe making some scaling assumptions. But we're not that good with loss functions yet.

Maybe someday we can have an AI watch our log streams and tell us the ideal architecture for our systems. Then the trick will be to generate fake log data for what we want to happen in general. Perhaps we can just keep it coarse grained and say the AI can fill in the rest. The future of systems architecture!

Even more interesting is Conway's law. What if an AI could tell you how best to organize your company?

<comment><USER10> _What if an AI could tell you how best to organize your company?_

Companies organize around office politics, in my experience efficiency is quite low on their priority list, especially in big enterprises.

<comment><USER11> Increased efficiency comes at the cost of lowered control. It took me awhile to wrap my brain around the mindset. If the company takes me up on my offer to rebuild their infrastructure at my current pay rate rather than hire a consultant to do it for $X00,000, note that hundreds of thousands of dollars is quite cheap for this kind of consultation, that presents an efficiency improvement at the cost of control. The CFO wants Magento and I'm not interested in coding Magento.

It's more rational from a business standpoint for it to introduce often- extreme efficiency _penalties_ in order to achieve the CFO's will. This is an actual scenario that happened to me by the way. I couldn't analyze it with quite this amount of granularity until recently.

Everybody in the company that could have formed an opinion agreed with me about the efficiency gains of doing it my way. But what I was wanting was _politically_ impossible. So me and the company parted ways.

Since then Magento's new version provides an API layer that makes it way way easier for companies with competent technical leadership to have their programmers use disparate skillsets and still get along. I can learn Magento well enough to work on it on the backend, and maintain the Rails frontend that I would have wanted to work on. If I had saw this coming at the time, I'd have stuck around and helped manage the replatforming. But all I was looking at was the extra $X0,000 I was going to make elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> super interesting topic. I'm currently also looking more and more into how UNIX and the network layers manage complexity in abstract terms. Would've loved if the article would've been a bit more specific in terms of what takeaways from the conference might be of interest for software.

<comment><AUTHOR> I may get a chance to write up more over the next week. If I do, it will be on the same blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can anyone here recommend a good introductory textbook for control theory?

</comment><comment><USER14> 1st sentence: "This past week I was at a ¿conference?..."

(Stories about the mystery conference)

2nd sentence of 2nd paragraph: "I was at ICCS2018, a complex systems conference."

Why is this normal now? It's ruining the internet. Everything I read lately is wound up into a desperate suspense-arc.

I understand not everybody has liberal arts degrees (and definitely not this person) but that might be all the more reason to not make such an attempt.

 _Introductions come first_. It's a lot like meeting a person for the first time. Creativity is not a bad thing, but if you're sacrificing respect in the process, you're blowing it.

<comment><USER15> Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?</comment></comment>


Strava Insights - <AUTHOR> http://insights.strava.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> If comparing cities, some of their insights should really be per capita.</comment>


Cobalt Robotics Raises $13M from Sequoia for Indoor Security Robots - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/30/cobalt-raises-more-than-16-million-to-bring-security-robots-to-the-office.html?ref=hn <comment><USER2> I recently had the chance to see one of Cobalt's robots on patrol at night in an office in San Francisco. It looks quite slick, like how Apple might have designed it. Well done.

The fixed hardware costs and limited capabilities have long kept robotics in the hands of academia and manufacturing. As those cost curves move, we're now seeing viable business models in non-industrial B2B robotics, like this one. I expect the self-driving car growth will also push down the costs of LIDARs and other critical enabling technologies that will eventually lead us toward practical consumer robotics.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hacking these will be the new frontier in industrial espionage. Imagine the possibilities: listen to employee conversations, video access to sensitive areas including computer screens, property damage, personal injury...

<comment><USER4> Yeah if anything this takes the attack surface and multiplies it quite a bit. Imagine if one could sneak something into a firmware update for all the Cobalt bots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> First of all, very nice engineering in here. Well designed, appealing look, functional and has a good feature set.

However, how is this bot better than current CCTV with some checkpoints, badge readers and all the same features that we current have? A CCTV guarantees coverage by design, while this robot has does sweeps that allows intruders and all to evade detection.

Of course, we have security guards walking around buildings with checkpoints, but they are usually added to CCTV, because people walking around is more of a deterrent than a recording.

I saw in the end of the article the idea that it would be less expensive than a CCTV, but they do not give a price point and I really doubt. Even high- quality colored cameras with infrared sensitivity are cheap as hell nowadays. Most of the cost is in the back-end services (monitoring and recording), and unless the company is working on improving this (the text does not mention), I don't see how they would compete.

These is a sincere question - the company is obviously doing at least somewhat well and it's not my intention to be the next BrandonM. As a hardware engineer, I would even work for them, as the project seems really cool and there are lots of room for new ideas. But it looks very expensive and this is a crowded, cost-oriented market.

Edit: Also, is it common in the US (I'm Brazilian) for security personnel to walk inside offices while people are working, as depicted in this video? Here I only see this during off-hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cobalt founder here.

I was initially skeptical... but Cobalt was a problem-centric creation. We started the company after speaking with security practitioners who were clamoring for after-hours coverage & insisted that cameras & access control just couldn't provide the responsiveness & customer service that their organizations demanded. CCTV cameras are great for entry and egress. But they suffer from a host of issues: extremely costly to install, upgrade, maintain, and monitor (upto $75/mo/stream); are seldomly upgraded (analog cameras are still common!); huge bandwidth consumption to cover large areas; provide no real-time responsiveness; and are only used after the fact for investigations. But guards were just so expensive -- so companies just left major gaps in their security coverage.

We see the robots as a compliment to existing static infrastructure, where the systems automatically communicate & work together. In fact, some of these systems are built into the robots too: cameras (obviously), access control badge reader, and a heck of a lot of compute & other sensors. The concept is quite simple: Mobility is becoming increasingly cheap, and enables you to reposition your most-capable resources to the right place at right time. It's the most capable edge sensing & computation feasible, and the human-in-the- loop lets you provide a host of other capabilities too. In effect, we're allowing a single, remote person to be in _many_ locations at once -- particularly during the low-utilization after hours (nights, weekends, & holidays). It's similar to the force multiplication that CCTV provided decades ago!

<comment><USER6> I am completely failing to see the "security" (as in "security guard").

It seems a clearly smart way to "keep an eye" over an area, but more like in "surveillance" than "security".

I mean - pardon me if I am still skeptical:

1) how would the robot deal with (locked) doors (or even with doors that need to be opened through a pushbar or handle)?

2) What happens in a multi-storey facility? (I mean can it go up and down stairs or use a normal lift)?

3) Is the communication protocol between the robot and the control unjammable and uninterceptable?

4) How - besides sending an alarm to a human-presided control center with an intervention time (I presume) in the order of magnitude of several minutes - can it deal with an intruder?

<comment><USER7> Security guards also don't deal with intruders. They call the police.

<comment><USER6> >Security guards also don't deal with intruders. They call the police.

Well, it depends on where (which country/state) and on the "kind" of security guard.

I was thinking of the kind that carry a firearm, handcuffs, and similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Night & weekend guards (almost universally!) do _not_ carry firearms or even non-lethal weapons. Their job is exclusively "observe and report", and they are not permitted to physically intervene -- as a matter of policy to limit liability.

<comment><USER6> >Night & weekend guards (almost universally!) do not carry firearms or even non-lethal weapons. Their job is exclusively "observe and report", and they are not permitted to physically intervene -- as a matter of policy to limit liability.

Yep, and those are generally called not "security guards", but rather "night watchmen" or "night guards".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congrats! I love how Cobalt's robots are super friendly-looking, and also how they can make big, empty buildings feel safer and less scary for people who have to work nights or weekends. I've definitely been nervous working in those situations, and would have loved to have a Cobalt robot as a comforting presence nearby.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is great news! Congrats to the Travis and the team.

</comment><comment><USER10> Congrats Travis! Some say one roams the slack offices at night...

</comment><comment><USER11> Looking forward to seeing how this turns out!

</comment><comment><USER12> cant wait to see the A round for the law firms specialized in robot litigation.

popcorn time.

</comment><comment><USER13> Gosh, does it ever look like a Dalek!

<comment><USER14> More like something Aperture Science would build.</comment></comment>


Critical vulnerability Kubernetes: CVE-2018-1002105 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/71411 <comment><AUTHOR> Heads up, this is a critical Kubernetes security vulnerability that can be exploited without any credentials via a network vector and without leaving a trace.

It fixes Kubernetes issue 71411 [1]: CVE-2018-1002105: proxy request handling in kube-apiserver can leave vulnerable TCP connections.

[https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/71411](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/71411)</comment>


Renraku OS: Road to v1 - <AUTHOR> http://daeken.com/renraku-road-to-v1

<comment><USER2> Renraku is an operating system. More information here: <http://daeken.com/renraku-future-os>

</comment><comment><USER3> God I hope this doesn't end up like the _Shadowrun_ Renraku D:

<comment><AUTHOR> It won't be put in charge of any large buildings, don't worry.

<comment><USER3> Keep all children far away!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Every time I see a story like this, I wonder how much we are being held back by the fact that it's hard to get several such projects to combine their efforts. Isn't that an awful waste?

<comment><AUTHOR> The current open source managed OSes are really very different from each other, with only small bits of overlap. You really only have a few contenders at the moment: SharpOS, Cosmos, and Renraku. Of those, SharpOS (GPLv3) and Cosmos (BSD) are C#, and Renraku (CDDL) is Boo.

SharpOS's goals were never particularly clear (they seemed to be building a full OS), but the project seems to be largely dead; they're now a part of MOSA (I'll get to that part in a moment) though, so I'm curious to see where that goes. Cosmos is making progress, but it's not intended as an OS, but rather a set of components you can connect together to make your own OS. Renraku is still fairly new (about 7 months old now, although it's fairly far along) and is intended to be a full OS, when all is said and done.

MOSA is the Managed Operating Systems Alliance, and originally was intended to be a compiler (JIT and AOTC) and a set of specifications for managed OSes to work together. However, at this point they're building their own default kernel into it. Interestingly, they're diverging greatly from the existing managed OSes by using separate address spaces.

At this point, the field is young enough that I think the more people trying things in different directions, the better. There are a lot of unanswered questions, but the more approaches people try to take, the better off we'll all be.

I will say that the primary reason that Renraku is not MOSA-based (despite me being involved in the very early days there (although I didn't end up doing much)) is that they're solely C#-focused, like SharpOS and Cosmos. Renraku is pure Boo, which gives us a flexibility that's we believe to be impossible using C#. Even though we have to do many things ourselves, we think this gives us an advantage that will carry us through to v1 in a few months, and a usable managed OS in 2011.

<comment><USER5> _Interestingly, they're diverging greatly from the existing managed OSes by using separate address spaces_

Doesn't that more or less defeat the purpose?

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems to, in my mind at least. But who knows, perhaps it'll have some big benefits. Again, the more experimentation, the better off we'll all be.

<comment><USER5> I couldn't glean much from the MOSA site. They must have something else up their sleeves for IPC.. actors?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>