Just a quick point as an American living in Denmark, one of the reasons government programs like this work so well is everything is delivered digitally. We have "e-boks" https://en.digst.dk/systems/digital-post/about-the-national-... official government facilitated inboxes so when they need to notify you of vaccinations or whatever else, it arrives to your inbox. And basically 100% of residents use these systems.
This HPV vaccine was part of the children vaccination program (børnevaccinationsprogram) which kindly asks the parents to vaccinate their children.
While we have some anivaxxers here in DK, most people (90%, I believe) are sane and follow the recommendations.
The vaccinations start while the children are small and continue while they grow up .. the last one is when they are 12.5 years old.
The notifications are delivered in eboks or by mail if you don't want to use eboks. Everything from the state is delivered like this. There is nothing special about how the information is delivered. The SMS/e-mail notifications are just about hwo sent you something and not about what it is. At least for me.
I don't see how the use of eboks makes this work better. It would work just as well without eboks. People listen to doctors and the MAGA like shitheads we do have don't have a lot of influence.
This is why I posted it from the perspective as an American. We don't have anything remotely comparable. Vaccinations are delivered by private doctors and public schools often require vaccinations or exemptions but the system works entirely differently. If you homeschooled your kids and if your doctor didn't mention it, you'd never even know that vaccinations were available.
I fail to see how e-boks makes this work. Younger people check their e-boks less frequently than average, so sending a physical letter to their address would work just as well if not better.
e-boks sends a text message to the phone, so I see it much faster than a paper mail.
e-boks is like gmail (and others) in that it keeps your old mail. So you can easily find old stuff, a great improvement on paper mail.
I don't even check my physical mailbox once a week.
Denmark is one of the very most digital countries. Physical mail is very much on the way out. We no longer has mailboxes to send mail, you have to go to a shop to send letters, which now cost at last $6 per letter due to the low amount of mail sent.
It is only a matter of less than 10 years before letters will be fully gone.
Okay, well Ireland has similar vaccination rates, broader childhood vaccination coverage, and no central medical records at all, so while e-boks may assist administration, it's certainly not necessary.
Which is bad, we definitely should have them. Referral data appears to be managed through Healthlink, which may just be a privatised not always used medical record system.
I'm a proponent of EHRs but not necessarily of centralised medical records, which have not been shown to improve outcomes and which do impose serious privacy risks on patients.
HealthLink is a messaging system and stores no EHRs at all. eHealth is the National EHR programme aiming to roll out EHRs by 2030 nationwide.
It will be a no-opt-out centralised EHR and combined social care record.
In high-trust societies these things work, yes. Not all societies are high-trust. Often, they once were high-trust but are no longer thanks to sociopathic, non-empathetic actors.
I do think people put too much stock in how many things RCV would fix in the US, but I am a big fan of it and it would certainly be a big first step improving representation in this country. Unfortunately, multiple states (all Republican dominated) have already outlawed RCV as an option. So in order to do it you would have to overturn the existing ban as well. It’s ridiculous.
Trump rode to the White House pitching that the government is broken/corrupt and as an outsider he would fix it. A significant part of his appeal is that he was a big middle finger to the establishment and current system writ large. This is well studied, documented, and easy to see in our daily lives. How many campaign ads begin with “the system is broken” or “Washington is out of touch”? Nobody ever lost voters for saying the government isn’t doing enough for them and isn’t trustworthy.
You can look at any Gallup or Pew poll or whatever sources you prefer and you will likely see that Americans have been steadily losing trust in their government. It has been in steady decline since the post-war era with some notable brief increases, but they don’t last.
>citation needed
I disagree as it is incredibly easy information to track down. But here you go anyway:
Obviously social trust in the US has declined and Trump benefited from that. But this is not evidence that the primary cause is sociopathic, non-empathetic actors. Theoretically it could also be things such as increased diversity, loss of shared identity, people acting in good faith but failing to adapt to social media.
Go and look around in former high-trust societies where this trust has broken down or is breaking down - my points of reference are the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and to a lesser extent the UK - and you'll get your citations. What you'll probably find is that in 'marginalised areas' people have trust in governmental institutions - those which provide social welfare, healthcare, schools and such - while they have little trust in 'other (groups of) people'. In other words they trust the state but distrust their neighbours, especially those from different ethnic groups. If you look in more well-to-do areas you'll find the opposite: people mostly trust their neighbours but they have lost trust in the higher echelons of the state which in their eyes has been instrumental in the dissolution of their former high-trust society. They'll still mostly trust their local police and fire brigade but they see academia and the social workers and soft-on-crime judicial institutions it produces as part of the problem. Any articles produced by academia which claim to provide proof of the opposite are seen in the light of the severe political bias in those institutions - sociology as a discipline has lost nearly all trust due to this - so citing those only feeds the fire.
Sweden is not a society were trust has broken down. Neither is Germany. Maybe the Netherlands can be argued to have a breaking down of trust. Go look at actual data, and don't rely on racist internet memes to form your arguments.
In neighboring Denmark, where they do gather and publish crime stats by the country of perp's origin, it turns out that some people (like Somalis) have up to 10 times more criminal convictions than the country baseline.
One would have to be crazy in order to extend exactly the same trust towards a random Danish Dane vs. a random Somali Dane.
Not every negative statement about non-white people is rooted in racism, and the ugly, fanatical attitude "everyone who has a negative observation about any sort of immigrants must be racist, stupid and evil" is what upended the political spectrum and brought the far right to power in many places.
I know you said or is breaking down. I'm telling you that its only for Netherlands you can argue a drop in trust. I'm sorry that you take the racist label as an insult. But the Sweden has fallen talking point is a racist lie, so don't perpetuate it if you don't want to be called out on it. Again I invite you to look at data on trust, and stop making stuff up.
Why do you think AfD is close to becoming the biggest party in Germany, why is (or was?) Wilders big in the Netherlands, why is Sverigedemokraterna close to becoming the biggest party in Sweden? Do you think suddenly 25% of the population of these countries has turned rabidly racist?
That 'racism' word has lost its meaning due to severe overuse, find another argument. As to finding 'data', that is easy enough if you ask people around you. I live in Sweden and I hear this every day, everywhere, both in the countryside where I live as well as in the more urbanised areas on the west coast where I work and where my daughter goes to school.
If you want to get a bit closer to the actual truth than your knee-jerk 'racism' accusation you should look into the clash of cultures - not races - which lies at the bottom of these problems. Go and speak to people from low-trust societies as well as those from high-trust societies and ask them where they put their trust, how they think about their neighbours - not just the ones in the house next door but also those in other areas.
It has fallen due to many reasons, some of which are related to migration, many others with no or only tangential relations to it. You already mentioned the 'housing crisis' which is partly related to migration - where asylum seekers with residence permits ('statushouders' [1] in Dutch) get preferential treatment and now stand for 8% of the total, 20% of the housing for 'first time renters' and 78% of the 'first time renters with children' [2]. This is only part of the problem though and not the largest one, that being the fact that there are simply too few housing units (apartments, houses, etc.) available. This in turn is partly due to the fact that it is hard to get permission to build something due to the heavy regulatory burdens and especially the rules around nitrogen emissions ('stikstofregels' [3], nitrogen oxide emissions by diesel engines used in construction put strict limits on what can be built when and where).
Then there are problems like the childcare benefits scandal ('toeslagenaffaire') - again partly related to migration by way of Bulgarian migrant fraud [4] - where the tax department made erroneous claims about benefit fraud without every really acknowledging they were wrong. I have some experience with the Dutch tax authorities making clear mistakes without accepting responsibility, instead they come up with mysterious restitutions which somehow exactly match the erroneously claimed taxes due.
The restrictive and SARS2 unpleasantness hit trust in public institutions hard which caused the universities of Rotterdam and Leiden to publish a report calling the Netherlands a new low-trust society ('de laag-vertrouwensamenleving', [6]). This trend has not reversed, especially among those with 'higher educational levels' [7] who used to have a higher trust in governmental institutions but now slid down to resemble the trust levels seen among those with 'lower educational levels' - this could simply be related to the fact that the left-wing parties favoured by those with 'higher education' did not participate in the government at that time.
I grew up in the Netherlands and lived there until about 25 years ago. I have seen this slide in trust with my own eyes, from the country where I could open the front door by pulling the string which dangled through the letter slot when I cycled home from school at 6 years old to the Fort-Knox-with-cameras now required, from the police officer on his bike greeting the people on his beat to "romeo's" (undercover arrest teams) being accused of inciting riots [8], from nearly the entire village coming out to welcome Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas who brings presents to children at the 5th of December) to those events being cancelled due to the fear of violence and protests, etcetera.
If there were a string in the mail slot in the house where I grew up it would not end well, unfortunately. Even the mail slot itself is suspect since these have been used by burglars to open unlocked doors (metal wire through the slot, easy), by vandals to throw in fireworks (one house burned down that way), by creeps to pee through it (another house in the same area), by other vandals to put a garden hose in to flood the hallway just for kicks, etc.
This was in Amstelveen, to the south of Amsterdam. Where do you live?
[Insert red herring about MCAS and cop out about how redundancy is "hard" and "bad" "complexity".]
Have a minimum quorum of sensors, disable one if it generates impossible values (while deciding carefully what is and isn't possible), use sensors that are much more durable, reliable, and can be self-tested, and integration and subsystem test test test thoroughly some more.
I've heard stories of plastic bags on the highway making their way into the path of the front-facing cameras of vehicles. Resulting in automatic emergency braking at highway speeds.
Human eyes are better by most metrics than any camera, and certainly any camera which costs less than a car. Also, obviously, our visual processing is, by most metrics, so much better than the best CV (never mind the sort of CV that can run realtime in a car) that it's not even funny.
they're making fun of Tesla, which stopped putting radar (ed: I misremembered, thanks to the commenter below) in their cars during the pandemic when it got expensive and instead of saying "we can't afford it", claimed it's actually better to not have lidar and just rely on cameras
Yeah! Just add more sensors! We're only 992 more sensors away from full self-driving! It totally works that way!
The debris? The very visible piece of debris? The piece of debris that a third party camera inside the car did in fact see? Adding 2 radars and 5 LIDARs would totally solve that!
For fuck's sake, I am tired of this worn out argument. The bottleneck of self-driving isn't sensors. It was never sensors. The bottleneck of self-drivng always was, and still is: AI.
Every time a self-driving car crashes due to a self-driving fault, you pull the blackbox, and what do you see? The sensors received all the data they needed to make the right call. The system had enough time to make the right call. The system did not make the right call. The issue is always AI.
You want the AI to take the camera's uncertainty about a road-colored object and do an emergency maneuver? You don't want to instead add a camera that sees metal and concrete like night and day?
It’s a lot easier to make an AI that highly reliably identifies dangerous road debris if it can see the appearance and the 3D shape of it. There’s a fair bit of debris out there that just looks really weird because it’s the mangled and broken version of something else. There are a lot of ways to mangle and break things, so the training data is sparser than you’d ideally like.
We don't have a bottleneck anymore. We have Waymo. They seemed to have solved whatever the issue was...I wonder what the main difference between the Waymo system and the Tesla system is?
The "main difference" is that Waymo wouldn't even try to drive coast to coast.
Because it's geofenced to shit. Restricted entirely to a few select, fully pre-mapped areas. They only recently started trying to add more freeways to the fence.
You're right, they wouldn't try, but I don't think there's any evidence for the idea that Waymo couldn't pull this trip off now from a technical POV. Even if they're pre-mapping, the vehicles still have to react to what's actually around them.
This just reflects the type of coding that George is doing. But the VAST majority of code written in the world is CRUD, Forms, Scripts, etc that AI aka "English" is a perfectly reasonable fit for. I mean, I use AI to write code hours a day and I don't think I'd let it drive my car for me.
Hyprland was a bit too far from what I'm used to, and required too many changes in my workflow, but all of this DHH pushing convinced me to try out Linux on a day to day basis and I'm switching to Fedora/Gnome so that's still a win for the cause I'd say.
I've been using Linux on and off since 2005. I've mostly stuck with Ubuntu after briefly using Slackware, but found myself using Windows like 95% of the time in the last few years.
Then DHH launched Omakub and, for me, it's been a game changer. It's not like he invented anything revolutionary, but he did something I hadn't had the time to do: customize it in a sensible way that, for me, is now superior to using Windows 10/11. Also caught the Lazyvim/neovim bug thanks to him, which led to other improvements such as Vimium in browsers.
I haven't tried Omarchy yet, but I will as soon as I find the time to tinker with it.
As someone in the midst of transitioning to Linux for the first time ever, the thing is: I still kinda hate Unix, but my AI friends (Claude Code / Codex) are very good at Unix/Linux and the everything is a file nature of it is amenable to AI helping me make my OS do what I want in a way that Windows definitely isn't.
On UNIX the "everything is a file" quickly breaks down, when networking, or features added post UNIX System V get used, but the meme still holds apparently.
If you want really everything is a file, that was fixed by UNIX authors in Plan 9 and Inferno.
Yeah, I was really confused when I learned that every device was simply a file in /dev, except the network interfaces. I never understood why there is no /dev/eth0 ...
That was back in the mid-90s but even today I still don't understand why network interfaces are treated differently than other devices
It's probably because ethernet and early versions of what became TCP/IP were not originally developed on Unix, and weren't tied to it's paradigms, they were ported to it.
Plan 9 does exactly this but all networking protocols live in /net - ethernet, tcp, udp, tls, icmp, etc. The dial string in the form of "net!address!service" abstracts the protocol from the application. A program can dial tcp!1.2.3.4!7788 or maybe udp!1.2.3.4!7788. How about raw Ethernet? /net/ether1!aabbccddeeff!12345. The dial(2) routine takes a dial string and returns an fd you read() and write(). Very simple networking API.
What would it mean to write to a network interface? Blast everyone as multicast? Not that useful. But Plan9 had connections as files, though I’ve never tried.
That's a bad argument. What does it mean to write to a mouse device? To the audio mixer? To the i2c bus device? To a raw SCSI device (scanner or whatever)? Those are all not very useful either.
Especially since there actually is a very useful thing that writing to /dev/eth0 would do: Put a raw frame on the wire, and reading from it would read raw frames.
You haven't thought through what you're asking. That's the bad argument. Network packets are not viable without a destination address. Nor does anyone want unaddressed (garbage) packets on their network.
Network packets don't need a destination address. Broadcast addresses exist. Also, packets to invalid/unknown destinations exist. You can send network packets with invalid source or destination addresses already anyway.
Taking a raw chunk of data and putting it on the wire as-is is the most logical interpretation of "writing to the ethernet device". Does it make sense to allow everyone to do that? Certainly not, that's why you restrict access to devices anyway.
The fact that not every chunk of data "makes sense" for every device in /dev is certainly nothing new, since that is the case for all other devices already (I mentioned a few in my post above).
Packets don't need to be routed. Sometimes you just want to communicate with a host on the same Layer-2 network. I said "Broadcast" (not Multicast) on purpose.
Sometimes you don't even want TCP/IP on the wire. Heck, sometimes you maybe don't even want DIX Ethernet on the wire.
Anyway, this discussion is going nowhere. Handcrafting packets is possible (it's basically what the kernel does anyway), sometimes it's useful, and if you could write a user-space program that could just open /dev/eth0 and write its own handcrafted packets to that stream would be helpful.
Well it depends on what "file" means. Linuxian interpretation would be that file is something you can get file descriptor for. And then the "everything is a file" mantra holds better again.
Windows is actually much closer to this limited, meaningless, form of the "everything is a file" meme. In Windows literally every kernel object is a Handle. A file, a thread, a mutex, a socket - all Handles. In Linux, some of these are file descriptors, some are completely different things.
Of course, this is meaningless, as you can't actually do any common operation, except maybe Close*, on all of them. So them being the same type is actually a hindrance, not a help - it makes it easier to accidentally pass a socket to a function that expects a file, and will fail badly when trying to, for example, seek() in it.
* to be fair, Windows actually has WaitForSingleObject / WaitForMultipleObjects as well, which I think does do something meaningful for any Handle. I don't think Linux has anything similar.
You can call write() and read() on any file descriptor, but it won't necessarily do something meaningful. For example, calling them on a socket in listen mode won't do anything meaningful. And many special files don't implement at least one of read or write - for example, reading or writing to many of the special files in /proc/fs doesn't do anything.
You can try to read/write the same on Windows: ReadFile (and friends) take a HANDLE.
It won't make sense to try to read from all things you can get a HANDLE to on Windows either, but it's up to what created the HANDLE/object as to what operations are valid.
I was recently thinking that object orientation is kind of everything is a file 2.0 in the form everything is an object I mean ofcourse didn’t pan out that good.
Haven’t googled yet what people had to say about that already before.
P.s. big fan of ur comments.
> object orientation is kind of everything is a file 2.0 in the form everything is an object
That is why I love Plan 9. 9P serves you a tree of named objects that can be byte addressed. Those objects are on the other end of an RPC server that can run anywhere, on any machine, thanks to 9p being architecture agnostic. Those named objects could be memory, hardware devices, actual on-disk files, etc. Very flexible and simple architecture.
I rather pick Inferno, as it improved on top of Plan 9 learnings, like the safe userspace in form of Limbo, after conclusion throwing away Alef wasn't that great in the end.
Inferno was a commercial attempt at competing with Sun's Java. The plan 9 folks had to shift gears so they took Plan 9 and built a smaller portable version of it in about a year. Both the Plan 9 kernel and Inferno kernel share a lot of code and build system so moving code between them is pretty simple.
The real interesting magic behind Plan 9 is 9P and its VFS design so that leaves Inferno with one thing going for it: Dis, its user space VM. However, Dis does not protect memory as it was developed for mmu-less embedded use. It implicitly trusts the programmer not to clobber other programs memory. It is also hopelessly stuck in 32bit land.
These days Inferno is not actively maintained by anyone. There are a few forks in various states and a few attempts to make inferno 64 bit but so far no one has succeeded. You can check: https://github.com/henesy/awesome-inferno
Alef was abandoned because they needed to build a compiler for each arch and they already had a full C compiler suite. So they took the ideas from Alef and made the thread(2) C library. If you're curious about the history of Alef and how it influenced thread(2), Limbo and Go: https://seh.dev/go-legacy/
These days Plan 9 is still alive and well in the form of 9front, an actively developed fork. I know a lot of the devs and some of them daily drive their work via 9front running on actual hardware. I also daily drive 9front via drawterm to a physical CPU sever that also serves DNS and DHCP so my network is managed via ndb. Super simple to setup vs other clunky operating systems.
And lastly, I would like to see a better Inferno but it would be a lot of work. 64 bit support and memory protection would be key along with other languages. It would make a better drawterm and a good platform for web applications.
> I would like to see a better Inferno but it would be a lot of work. 64 bit support and memory protection would be key along with other languages. It would make a better drawterm and a good platform for web applications.
Doesn't Wasm/WASI provide these same features already? That doesn't seem like "a lot of work", it's basically there already. Does dis add anything compelling when compared to that existing technology stack?
Inferno was initially released in 1996, 21 years before WASM existed.
An inferno built using WASM would be interesting. Though WASI would likely be supplanted by a Plan 9/Inferno interface possibly with WASI compatibility. Instead of a hacked up hyper text viewer you start with a real portable virtual OS that can run hosted or native. Then you build whatever you'd like on top like HTML renderers, JS interpreters, media players/codecs, etc. You profile is a user account so you get security for free using the OS mechanisms. Would make a very interesting platform.
I am well aware of that. My point is a web browser, originally a hypertext viewer, is now a clunky runtime for all sorts of ad-hoc standards including a WASM VM. So instead, start with a portable WASM VM that is a light weight OS that you build a browser inside of composed of individual components like Lego. You get all the benefits of having a real OS including process isolation, memory management, file system, security, and tooling. WASI is a POSIX like ABI/API that does not fit the Plan 9/Inferno design as they thankfully aren't Unix.
The WASI folks are accepting new API proposals. If the existing API does not fit an Inferno-like design, you can propose tweaked APIs in order to improve that fit.
All of that prose doesn't change the fact that at the time Inferno was built, it was an improvement over Plan 9, taking its experience into consideration for improvements.
I know pretty well the history, I was around at the time after all, and Plan 9 gets more attention these days, exactly because most UNIX heads usually ignore Inferno.
"We 've painted a dim picture of what it takes to bring IPEs to UNIX. The problems of locating. user interfaces. system seamlessness. and incrementality are hard to solve for current UNIXes--but not impossible. One of the reasons so little attention has been paid to the needs of IPEs in UNIX is that
UNIX had not had good examples of IPEs for inspiration. This is changing: for instance. one of this article's authors has helped to develop the Small talk IPE for UNIX (see the adjacent story). and two others of us are working to make the Cedar IPE available on UNIX.
What's more. new UNIX facilities. such as shared memory and lightweight processes (threads). go a long way toward enabling seamless integration. Of course. these features don't themselves deliver integration: that takes UNIX programmers shaping UNIX as they always have--in the context of a friendly and cooperative community. As more UNIX programmers come to know IPEs and their
power. UNIX itself will inevitably evolve toward being a full IPE. And then UNIX programmers can have what Lisp and Small talk and Cedar programmers have had for many years: a truly comfortable place to program."
Some GOSIP (remember that?) implementations on some Unicies did have files for network connections, but it was very much in the minority. Since BSD was the home of the first widely usable socket() implementations for TCP/IP it became the norm; sockets are a file, but just not linked to any filesystem and control is connect()/accept() and the networking equivalent (setsockopt()) of the Unix system call dumping ground; ioctl().
Linus finally relented and changed it to "everything is a stream of bits." Still, it's a useful metaphor and way to think about interacting with bits of the OS.
Having observed my fair share of beginners transition from win to linux, the most common source of pain I've seen is getting used to the file permissions, and playing fast and loose with sudo.
While we are complaining about Microsoft and Emoji's -- they need to grow a spine and bring back Emoji Flags. If you weren't aware Microsoft removed all flags to avoid geopolitical backlash over Taiwain, etc.
Country flag emojis are actually just specialised glyphs for pairs of characters, taken in pairs to form a country-code. If the system doesn't know how to render a given country code, it will just fallback to displaying the country code (often stylised as white on blue tiles) instead.
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