There's an old German short film called Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969)[1] that I'm fond of. It was a protest film against Napalm and how some companies wouldn't really let their employees know what they were actually working on.
"I am a worker and I work in a vacuum cleaner factory. My wife could use a vacuum cleaner. That's why everyday I pick up a piece. At home I try to assemble the vacuum cleaner. But however I try, it always becomes a sub-machine gun.
...
This vacuum cleaner can become a useful weapon. This sub-machine gun can become a useful household appliance.
What we produce it depends on the workers, students, and engineers."
DOW Chemical was producing Agent Orange, but was getting a ton of public pushback - so bad it decided to stop production, forcing the Pentagon to look for an alternative supplier.
That supplier? A German privately owned pharmaco called Boehringer-Ingelheim. It's Chairman at the time? Richard von Weizsäcker, future President of Germany.
The production site was in Hamburg, is contaminated for the next thousand years. Boehringer is legally forced to operate pumps to prevent the dioxins in that site from reaching the water table. If those did, it would wipe out the full population.
This question has been boiling in my brain for quite a long time.
Consider a hypothetical scenario where one spy chinese or russian programmer working in Google or Meta might have siphoned off (copied and uploaded) all the important code (Monorepo) to the Mothership and all of us are now sitting ducks.
I am sure, this question might have crossed your minds. I have no idea. if blueprints for the TPU chip design could get leaked, imagine what might have already happened?
Minor point but this doesn't only have to be russian/chinese spies but rather this can be anybody including say the UK/Israel or even countries which can be considered "allies"
I'd also be surprised if this code isn't already available with the US forces too and sometimes the enemy can be from within too.
I would go even further and state that "you should never assume that floating point functions will evaluate the same on two different computers, or even on two different versions of the same application", as the results of floating point evaluations can differ depending on platform, compiler optimizations, compilation-flags, run-time FPU environment (rounding mode, &c.), and even memory alignment of run-time data.
There's a C++26 paper about compile time math optimizations with a good overview and discussion about some of these issues [P1383]. The paper explicitly states:
1. It is acceptable for evaluation of mathematical functions to differ between translation time and runtime.
2. It is acceptable for constant evaluation of mathematical functions to differ between platforms.
So C++ has very much accepted the fact that floating point functions should not be presumed to give identical results in all circumstances.
Now, it is of course possible to ensure that floating point-related functions give identical results on all your target machines, but it's usually not worth the hassle.
It's already eroded in many countries right? Gendered patronymic names used to be common here in Sweden - Katarina Gustavsdotter (Vasa) was the daughter of Gusav Eriksson (Vasa), who was the son of Erik Johansson (Vasa), &c. - but gendered patronymic names eventually became permanent last names that got inherited over multiple generations.
So now we have a few hundred thousand people with the last name Andersson, despite most of them not being Anders's son.
> Digital payments are very convenient and deeply integrated, so long as you have a local ID which allows you use the local payment system Swish etc.
Just to reiterate how ubiquitous Swish and BankID are here: 99.9% of Swedish residents age 18-67 have BankID (8.6M users), while Swish has 8.7M private users, and 93% of those users send or receive money via Swish at least once per month.
I'm in Sweden and the only time I've ever come in contact with a check was when an American company sent me one as a refund.
Most of these reasons just sound like fee-issues to me. I use a debit card (or Swish) to pay for everything and there's never a cheaper payment option. The fact that checks somehow cost less to use than debit/credit cards sounds ridiculous tbh, especially with all the added handling that must go into dealing with them (it just seems so inefficient).
That is partially why the banks/government in Sweden have been happy to phase it out. Companies also don't like dealing with cash because it requires extra accounting, security, and transportation. In the early 2000s there were about 50 cash transport robberies per year in Sweden, in 2018 there was 1.
> Companies also don't like dealing with cash because it requires extra accounting, security, and transportation.
At least in the US, individual businesses don't like dealing with credit because of the transaction fees but are kind of forced to thanks to everybody else taking credit everywhere.
Of course, the big chains love credit and are happy to pay the transaction cost because it lets them audit all the transactions and increase their control over local managers and employees. Presumably, the big chains also negotiate lower fees.
Swedbank offers debit cards to kids as young as seven [1]. Depending on the kid's age (and what the parents configure), there will be different limits on how much the kid can spend.
Swish is the de facto standard for sending money between individuals [2], and that's what grandparents tend to use to send money to their grandchildren.
It's fee-less (for person-to-person transfers use at least) and it connects your bank account with your phone number. So if anyone wants to send you money, they can just open Swish and enter your phone number (or scan a QR code) and send you some. You also have to sign the payment with the BankID app, which is the de facto standard for authentication [3].
And when I write de facto standard I really mean it. 99.9% of Swedish residents age 18-67 have BankID (8.6M users), while Swish has 8.7M private users (93% of which use Swish at least once per month).
This is also partially due to hacking incidents in recent years. In 2021, all 800 Coop grocery stores were closed for a few days due to the Kaseya VSA ransomware attack [1].
"I am a worker and I work in a vacuum cleaner factory. My wife could use a vacuum cleaner. That's why everyday I pick up a piece. At home I try to assemble the vacuum cleaner. But however I try, it always becomes a sub-machine gun.
...
This vacuum cleaner can become a useful weapon. This sub-machine gun can become a useful household appliance.
What we produce it depends on the workers, students, and engineers."
That last line is still very relevant today.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnpLS4ct2mM