Airtag is the reason of why I stil have my favourite hand luggage.
I had just sat down on the train from Zurich to Basel. Suddenly, someone sat down in front of me. He looked suspicious, but I didn't pay much attention. Just before the train departed, he picked up what I thought were his belongings and left.
Twenty minutes later, already on the way to Basel, I looked toward where I had left my suitcase. It was gone. That was when I realized that the person who had sat in front of me was a thief.
However, he hadn't counted on the fact that I have an AirTag in every backpack and suitcase.
So I was able to see where the thief was and where he was moving. I considered going to retrieve my suitcase myself, but while traveling back to Zurich, I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was.
Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
Something similar happened to me between Essen and Dortmund while trying to get to the airport. The train stoped around 50 minutes between stations without a chance of getting off the train. I lost my flight as a result.
I have also been left in remote villages when the last train of the day broke for some reason at 12:30 am. All travellers and myself had to look for Ubers, which the government also tries to suppress.
I agree with some comenters that German companies seem to prefer to stuck with Bureaucracy other than finding what could be confortable or even human solutions.
I agree. But Google has gone in that direction long ago: ads are now harder to distinguish from genuine search results. In many cases, the organic results are buried so deep that they don’t even appear in the first visible section of the page anymore.
Chat offers a far better experience than using Google—no more searching through spam-filled results, clicking between sponsored links, accepting endless cookie banners, and trying to read a tiny bit of useful content buried among ads and clutter.
It has the potential to bridge the gap between pure conversation and the functionality of a full website.
The problem is that getting those things right is 4x more difficult in a SPA app than a legacy, server rendered, app.
- No native back and forward button implementation. Now you must listen to an API and emulate the legacy behaviour.
- The concept of links, its also emulated via onClick events. This means that anything can be a link, so in many cases rows become links and their content is not really selectable as text. Legacy HTML has clear limitations for this not to happen.
- Same with buttons. There are no native buttons anymore. Anything can be a button, including any DIV with an event listener. Good luck tabbing through every DIV to get you to a button, that's also another difficult implementation.
I love Rails, its been my to-go framework for reference. But I could never get as confortable with Ruby as writing JS or PHP. I do not know the reason.
One of the many reasons of why frameworks like React are used so extensively is because they provide a bridge for the lack of modern HTML implementation of basic control elements, like multi-selectors, search selectors, calendar pickers, and autofill inputs.
Now what we see around the web as "controls" are just a group of <div>s with hidden JS behaviour, lacking both accessibility and deeper integration. With hundreds, if not thousands, of implementations for things like calendar pickers, search selectors, etc.
The funny thing is that sometimes we need to machine-read documents produced by humans on machines, but the actual source is almost always machine-readable data.
So a few months ago, after a buggy change to a stock update sent to the channel manager (external system for updating pricing and availability of hotel rooms) we lost 21.000 EUR in just 2 hours of the bug being deployed. We exported low season rates (today’s rates) for the higher seasons.
Luckily a human saw the error, when he saw a big flow of reservation coming in at anomalous peace.
From there on, I’m too scared to make changes to the 20-line function that produces the updates to be sent.
We had not a chance to cancel the reservations made through the channels (websites were you book the reservations).
I had just sat down on the train from Zurich to Basel. Suddenly, someone sat down in front of me. He looked suspicious, but I didn't pay much attention. Just before the train departed, he picked up what I thought were his belongings and left.
Twenty minutes later, already on the way to Basel, I looked toward where I had left my suitcase. It was gone. That was when I realized that the person who had sat in front of me was a thief.
However, he hadn't counted on the fact that I have an AirTag in every backpack and suitcase.
So I was able to see where the thief was and where he was moving. I considered going to retrieve my suitcase myself, but while traveling back to Zurich, I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was.
Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
But also the thief and his accomplice.