I’ve heard much about Sierra but haven’t ever tried their product. What do I need to pretend to buy and then complain about to get on a call with their agents?
A more fair assessment would be: company runs a utility => they need to be a regulated utility!
The core part of air travel doesn’t really feel any different to a bus or metro or train. Off the tarmac then yes it absolutely feels like a Verizon store, as does some of the in-flight service, but there’s always been this weird feeling as a traveler that every carrier is basically the same thing but with different decals on it. Airline alliances are surely the ultimate example of this.
Have you ever flown spirit or any of the other ultra low cost carriers?
It very much is a different experience than flying a legacy domestic mainline carrier. I’m not alone amongst people i know who will happily fly the cheap seats on United/Delta/AA but won’t even look at a ticket from Spirit or Frontier even at a significant discount.
Compare it to a flag carrier like Singapore air and it is a shockingly different product.
All that’s an aside: we know what regulated airlines look like since we already tried it, much more expensive, with airlines competing not on price but on amenities.
I’ve flown Spirit and Frontier several times, and Southwest many times (I know they’re not quite in the same category, especially after their recent changes). I genuinely don’t know what you’re referring to regarding the experience being wildly different. Other than a few quirks about what they do and don’t charge for and how they board and assign seats, I feel like there’s almost no meaningful difference between these and legacy carriers like United and American. I honestly don’t even feel like the prices are consistently that different.
The two main differences are more armchair lawyering required to avoid fees (legacy carrier is often not going to put your bag in the dimension bin, but the Spirits and Frontiers of the world certainly will) and having to sit through three sales pitches instead of one on the legacy airlines. I think Delta is the only legacy carrier in the States that doesn't do obnoxious sales pitches - only the food cart upsell. Ryanair will come through with their hands out minimally three times since last time I rode them (though it's been several years, is it four now?)
One other difference I can think of is that carry-ons are more rarely included in the base fare in the budget airlines than the legacy airlines, though maybe that has also gone away since the changes where bags must be included in the listed price that Southwest pushed for.
Ryanair (EU) also does this, but the US is indeed pretty obnoxious here.
United even has commercials before the safety video; combined with the "if you're watching explicit content on this flight, please mind the children" announcement, those flights onestly honestly felt pretty surreal to me.
United has gotten worse and worse with this. The ads after (not before) the safety video, and also before each movie you watch (and it's usually the same ads before every movie). A few years ago the ads were skippable, but not anymore.
The flight attendant also makes an announcement about the United-branded credit cards near the beginning of the flight.
But this is really just an illustration of what the top-poster of this thread said: flying people places doesn't make enough money, so they have to pursue other revenue streams.
Look at prices (which are much higher than when I booked my trip later this summer), United prices are insane compared to others. Their prices were 4x what I paid for on SAS. I've long had a united club card, but likely circulating that out in the next year. Their prices for service/availability isn't worth whatever crack smoking is going into their pricing.
People keep asking airlines to raise price for better service and then every time they travel they hop on a price comparison website to find the ticket with the lowest sticker price, punishing companies for actually raising prices.
The annoying thing is... I already have a United card :) (and being able to board early and bring a normal size carry-on on basic economy is one of the best perks).
[1] There's two metrics airlines report: Cost per Available Seat Mile and Passenger Revenue per Available Seat Mile.
This is the cost/revenue for flying a seat, which may or may not be occupied by a person, to a destination. If the seat is empty it gets $0 in revenue but still costs money.
You can calculate the profit made from selling tickets per seat mile by PRASM - CASM.
The cabin crew stand at the front of the plane, and either play a recording or make an announcement saying you can buy a lottery scratchcard for €2 or whatever, with some of the money going to charity. They then walk down the plane "scratchards? scratchcards?"
They repeat this with a collection for charity (no scratchcard), a promoted drink, and some sort of food.
I think this is mostly unique to Ryanair (in Europe), I don't remember Wizz Air, Norwegian or EasyJet doing this. Part of Ryanair's marketing is to make the experience worse than it needs to be, so you know you're saving money.
ive never experienced that on ryanair? I fly it pretty regularly, its just the food cart, and even that feels halfhearted, I see maybe 3% of customers actually getting something, so most of the time they dont even bother asking, just roll right on by unless you go out of your way to ask for something.
The only bad upsell they do is in the booking process. Are you sure you don't want a hire car?
If you search "Ryanair scratchcards" you'll see recent news articles about them.
I've used Ryanair once in the previous 5 years, so my experience might be out of date. There was a time my job was taking me to "holiday" destinations for meetings, back then I used Ryanair more often as they often had the only direct route. Maybe the scratchcard sales are more common on those flights.
googling it it seems like its still a thing. I reckon it must be on certain specific flights, maybe ones that are likely to attract a certain crowd, liverpool to malaga sort of flights maybe. Ive definitely not heard about it, but I do usually fly the same routes so
Yes, Ryanair is the undisputed leader in finding new creative ways to take advantage of their captive audience and saving a few pennies here and there (e.g. I'm not aware of other low-cost carriers that have advertising on the overhead bins or put the safety instructions on seat-back stickers because it's marginally cheaper than using cards for that). Not to mention only flying from airports in the middle of nowhere to save airport fees.
...while other low-cost carriers try to distinguish themselves by not being quite as bad as Ryanair.
I kinda' like Ryanair as lowcost airline? They're fairly efficient (boarding, serving etc), they _actually fly_ the advertised flights (with relatively few exceptions), and the food is reasonably priced. During COVID they would just give your money back, no shenanigans like "they're in our company wallet". Sure they have their quirks but they don't seem to go out of their way to deceive you, they're pretty open about what you pay and what you get.
Now Wizzair is "mostly not an airline" for me, because they have all the negative traits I hinted above. E.g. they'll happily advertise flights they have no intention of flying, make refunds hard, are as misleading as they can be about pricing, make it impossible to checkin online a few hours before the flight so that you have to pay their high fees, etc.
I wouldn't want the Ryanair experience for long-haul flights; but for short 2-3h ones within Europe, they're fine, I'm always considering them. Not for the perceived cheapness, but for the "I expect them to actually fly AND be on time" part.
> During COVID they would just give your money back, no shenanigans like "they're in our company wallet"
Generally I agree with your view that Ryanair is decent at what it does, but COVID refunds happened only after the regulator stepped in to threaten them over their original "no refunds" and then "refund in the form of a voucher, with a short expiry date on it" policies actually being unlawful, and even allowing for the scale of its operations it received more complaints to the UK CAA than anyone else about refund handling during COVID.
In Romania I think they just gave back the money (or maybe it was on a voucher with "if you don't use the voucher by date X, we'll refund the money"). which is in stark contrast with how other low-cost airlines like WizzAir behaved. Perhaps it was regional policy; or perhaps it was due to their previous interactions with UK regulators? But for me, they gained a lot of respect for them back then (whereas WizzAir is on the "only if absolutely no other choice" list - and I think I only used it once, for a business trip where it had a good direct flight AND I didn't care if I actually made it to the destination, or if I got stranded there for a few days - since the company would've been paying)
Ryanair have been regulated into compliance very effectively by the European authorities- everyone knows they are scumbags and make sure they don’t get away with nonsense.
Literally how regulators should work. They look at the outrageous things they try to do and make laws to prevent them. It’s worked very well and also hasn’t ended Ryanair (which is the usual anti regulation argument , that we can’t have cheap things with regulations).
I personally never fly Ryanair because I’ve had to sue them (and won) in the past, they really do suck.
When's the last time you tried to claw back your EU mandated clawback for things like delayed flights from one of these airlines without fighting tooth and nail and threatening legal action? Perhaps this has improved in recent years, but when I was flying EU regularly several years ago getting that refund has always been an uphill battle.
Hah, I tried when BA had to cancel my flight due to a computer system outage. Coincidentally, some “activists” handcuffed themselves to a fence on the runway at the exact same time, which was an act of terror or whatever and thus not covered, so I did not receive my money back.
I actually like wizz. They are dirt cheap which is the only thing i care about. The ground crew don't openly despise you, unlike easyjet, they tolerate you and their cabins are all right. Just they don't have any customer service if anything goes wrong.
"Wizz; Not the worst airline you've ever flown on"
The safety card thing, and lack of seatback pockets is mainly to speed up turnaround after everyone's off the plane. (planes only make money when they're in the air)
After they made this change years ago, they said so explicitly in their marketing around continuous improvement.
They don't have to actually sell a single scratchcard for it to be worthwhile for them - the whole point is to cheapen the experience.
They have an entire theory of marketing based on people believing that "if it feels cheap, it is cheap", and so they deliberately build in a bunch of annoyances (scratchcards, arbitrary baggage restrictions, checkout hoop-jumping, endless PR about removing toilets or running standing-only flights) which serve to make their service seem as cheap and nasty as possible.
And it works: some people simply ignore the nasty aspects, others are willing to put up with them in order to get a bargain, and yet others actually take pride in wading through the crap - usually expressing it in "I beat the system" terms. And here we are talking about it on a barely-related thread - carrying their marketing message further!
Besides the seats, seat pitch, entertainment, cabin classes, upcharges, boarding staff paid commission to reject carryons, advertising everywhere, the unpolished behavior of other clientele, customer service, and how they handle failure, sure it’s practically the same.
Failure is the one that always puts me off...
At least with United, there's a good chance they can get a broken plane running again, or swap in a different airframe, within a reasonable number of hours. For example, my last flight to Puerto Rico was delayed by ~5 hours, due to a nose gear problem. They eventually swapped air frames around, giving us one that was scheduled for the late day flight, and got our air frame fixed in time for that later flight.
Spirit or another super-low-cost? They don't have the extra air frames and number of flights to do that. You get to wait even longer, losing valuable vacation days (or missing work meetings).
I feel like you're living in a different universe then. I will literally never fly Spirit (well, neither will anyone else) nor Frontier ever, I loath the experiences I've had on them so much.
First, as someone with relatively long thighs, I literally don't fit in their sardine can seats. But more relevant to most people, while things may be OK if everything goes perfectly and nothing is delayed or cancelled, you are completely SOL with Spirit/Frontier if something goes wrong (and "something" may just be they themselves decide to cancel an undersold flight at the last minute). It's nearly impossible to get someone to talk to, I feel like the employees know how shitty their companies are so they all have an attitude like they DGAF, and it's a mad (expensive) scramble to find alternative arrangements at the last minute.
I've never had as abysmal experiences as I've had on Frontier compared to any other airline.
From a customers' immediate point of view, this sucks for you.
But it's great they are not regulated utilities. Because either everyone would have to pay for extra legroom, even if they don't need it, or some freakishly long people would not be able to pay for the extra legroom that they need.
That's not how regulation works. Or at least not how it has to work.
I don't pay a flat fee for my water, electricity, or gas usage, regardless of how much I use. I pay for the gallons, kWh, and therms I actually use. (Yes, there are other fees on those bills, but my usage actually matters.)
Airline regulation doesn't have to specify standardized seat pitch, etc.
Sure, there's probably some utopian nirvana regulation that gives you exactly what you need.
In practice airline regulation did preclude the airline from adding more seats. So in practice it banned airlines from offering you cheaper fares in return for enduring less legroom.
In practice airline regulation did preclude the airline from adding more seats. So in practice it banned airlines from offering you cheaper fares in return for enduring less legroom.
I’m relatively tall and have a generally rough (but tolerable) time with all domestic bottom-tier seats.
I have no difficulty believing you when it comes to customer service. I’ve never had any issues requiring anything beyond the most basic customer service, so I just haven’t been exposed to differences between airlines in that regard. I also understand that a bad experience can leave an exceptionally bad impression. I suppose the only thing that might surprise me is if the higher-cost airlines don’t also have terrible service.
My parent "airports" are Bellingham and SeaTac. I hate SeaTac with all my soul. Next admission - primary carrier is Alaska. They are mediocre to ok. Cabin crew, always friendly. I've had random flight cancellations - some seatac/bellingham, others randomly before/after homeland security budget BS. In all cases, they rebooked on something ridiculous (a day or two later, hours that made no sense) and their call hold times (or call backs) are hours. Sadly, I'm in a captive market and am very proactive when day of travel is around.
Yup, came here to say this. Once you're on the plane and its in the air, Spirit and Frontier are like pretty much every other domestic airline. There's slight variation in terms of whether you get a whole can of coke for free or not. If you're taller than me, the 28" of seat pitch vs say 31" on delta may make a difference, but I'm only 5'9".
I still avoided them like the plague because the legacy carriers are selling you operational performance and the ability to usually get you where you're going within a reasonable timeframe if you're delayed or canceled. Spirit, Frontier, Allegiant, whoever else, do not do nearly as good a job when something goes wrong. Although they should get a lot of credit - none of them have ever had a fatal crash.
> Once you're on the plane and its in the air, Spirit and Frontier are like pretty much every other domestic airline.
Yes, if you ignore the part where things are different, it's basically the same. Trouble is, those differences do meaningfully make a difference. There's no objective measure for misery and happiness, but flying Jsx is nicer than Spirit. You can put a dollar value on misery, that's why one's so much more expensive than the other.
Sounds like you guys need some very basic regulations we have here in Europe - companies have to take care of folks, provide food, accommodation and replacement flights (and up to 600 euro in case of overbooking depending on distance). Not great, but worries like above are simply not on our calendar when traveling, low cost or not.
Also, here in Europe, traditional aircraft carriers have been migrating their quality towards bottom end (ie Swiss not giving any beers for free even on intercontinental flights, microscopic legroom also on intercontinental) while for example Easyjet is for me at this point a high quality reliable carrier with no bullshit. Ryanair is a dumpste3r but luckily they don't serve my nearest airport well.
You state an opinion, but not why for that opinion. I’m mostly stuck with Alaska or a small handful being a couple hours north of Seattle and driving to/dealing with SeaTac is not fun. In the caliber you said you wouldn’t travel includes aliegent.
I’ve not flown them and stick to Alaska and the local puddle jumpers to get off the island.
If anything it’s a tool for making people outside of Singapore like/want to do business in Singapore, so if that makes it some twisted kind of utility then I guess anything can be a utility. Not like they have domestic flights.
I think Spirit has the most comfortable seats out of all the ones you listed. Especially if you're lucky enough to have a row to yourself and get to lie across all three of them.
Singapore Airlines is majority-owned by the Singapore government's investment and holding company Temasek Holdings, which holds 55% of voting stock as of 31 March 2020
This is more accurate, but the case for tarmac is weaker than streets or tracks. The natural monopoly on tarmacs is weaker. It can be a very good think for a metro to have competing airports.
The question is whether we feel air travel is as essential to everyday life as busses and trains are.
In other words, do we need to make sure everyone can afford to take a flight somewhere?
Or is air travel a luxury that we can allow the market to set a price for?
Maybe flights are simply too cheap, and we should just allow airlines to fail, which will limit supply enough to bring ticket prices back up to a level that is sustainable for airlines as a business.
Of course, this means that a lot of people are going to be priced out of being able to fly places for non-essential reasons. Which, given the environmental impact, might not be a bad thing, although it will make life very different for most people.
Personally, I'm inclined to drive over fly if I can get there in 8-12 hours or less. Even if it uses up close to a full day for a round trip. I absolutely abhor flying. I'm a bit tall and fat, and I've been stuck on the last row, inside seat with less room in both dimensions while the person in front of me tries to lean back literally dislocating my knee. All because they oversell flights, and your seat selection at purchase time apparently counts for jack squat when you show up at the airport to check in... you really needed to "check in" online the day before, even if you were in meetings until 9pm with no time to actually step aside to do the check-in on your phone that's just a miserable experience in itself, because nobody does accessibility testing with phones and larger text/display sizes.
> The question is whether we feel air travel is as essential to everyday life as busses and trains are.
Anywhere I can get to by train in the USA I can go faster and cheaper by plane. By bus I can go "cheaper" if I ignore the value of my time and the people offering me meth at the bus-stop.
I think the ultimate example is the fact that most routes are run by other companies than the branded carrier; capacity providers like Endeavour and SkyWest just borrow the name and livery of the major carrier they're operating for that day.
Presumably this only applies to newcomers? The thrust of their policy is to nurture new contributors. Once one has established oneself as a meaningful contributor — which the Bun team surely must have done by now — then it doesn’t matter where the code came from.
…in theory. In reality, I’m sure a policy like this can’t be selective and fair at the same time. Pick one!
Three things matter when it comes to eating my breakfast sandwich:
1/ Was the pork in my sausage reared on a farm that meets agricultural standards?
2/ Was the food handled safely by the kitchen that cooked my food?
3/ Does the owner of the diner pay kitchen wages in accordance with labor law?
By contrast, I have no idea what went into the models I use, what system prompts have prejudiced it, and whose IP has been exploited in pursuit of my answer.
That’s being charitable, really. In practice the open secret of the AI industry is that the vast majority of training data, for want of a better word even if it is likely to be the most precise description, is stolen data.
Probably, yes, but the burden of proof is with us not them.
I'm already glad some companies have the guts to open their models because proving it for open models is probably a lot easier than for a model behind a service.
The proof is the $stupid-billion infrastructure built and kept up to host mousetraps armed with free cheese made of virtue signalling about doing the right thing and sharing the code with the world for free.
That's a matter of changing a law, it's all up to the people and their representatives. We talk as if everything is set on stone but if there really is a will, there is a way.
The media industry loves to quote ridiculous numbers on lost revenue due to piracy etc. May be a rough ballpark numbers will get them to do something about this theft.
Can someone put a rough estimate on potential revenue loss (direct and incidental) from training AI with industry wise breakup.
It’s wrong to stop progress. I just want to know what data went into my model and have access to the same data. The same way we have national libraries of books but with the caveat that I don’t really know how one is supposed to browse petabytes of OpenAI .zips like I browse old books.
If the data is proprietary (eg Meta’s stash of FB comments) then I am satisfied to be told it’s private and I can’t see it. If, however, the works were public then give me a URL if it’s live or a cached copy if it isn’t.
Add a black umbrella to each satellite: when they pass through the critical region where they are visible in the night sky while still being sunlit, pop the brollies up. We will fly them in the shade!
You could paint them black but they’d probably get quite hot.
Won't the shade then reflect the light instead? It's nighttime, so sunlight will be aimed up, from the Earth-based observer's point of view, so the shade will need to be pointed down in order to shade the satellite.
It’s been decades since I could claim to know anything about this field so I’m probably completely wrong in how I read this, but the idea that one might build a theorem prover (“ML!”) for one’s non-ML programming language and have the prover itself accidentally be a really good general purpose programming language … is very funny.
To clarify: ML started out as a scripting language for Robin Milner's proof assistant, LCF. The formal system, or "logic," is implemented in a minimal, trusted kernel, and the proof data structure is protected as an abstract data type that can only be constructed through the trusted kernel. On top of the kernel, tactic scripts may be defined to manipulate proof objects and facilitate proof search/automation.
Then, ML grew into a general-purpose programming language (both OCaml and Standard ML are dialects).
Imagine a Vendor API that adds a way to link from the page straight into a device purchase workflow. As a trial of the API in Chrome you can order a new Google Pixel 9b directly from any page with the word Android in it!
Or a LocalNet API that integrates with trusted hardware devices on your local network. As a trial (Chrome beta programme — strictly limited but here’s 3x signup links to share with your friends) you can adjust your Google Next Mini underfloor heating directly from Chrome!
Or a DirectCast API that lets you stream <video> elements to a device of your choice even over a VPN. As a Chrome trial, you can use your Google Cloud account to stream directly from YouTube Premium to any linked Google Chromecast devices you own!
It feels very close to “right to repair”. The coffee grinder you bought came as a single package but it has burrs, gears, machine screws, a motor, etc. If one of those components fails, we should be able to replace it ourselves and as such they should be documented.
The laptop has various pieces of hardware in it and corresponding drivers in macOS to make them tick. Did we buy the hardware and the drivers as an inseparable package, or should we be provided with the manual to make one component work when the other breaks, be that either third party trackpads or third party (Linux) drivers.
Apple might argue that drivers, unlike gears or motors, will never wear down and fail. They won’t need repairing so you don’t get to know how they work. Does right to repair only apply to products that could ever need repairing? Does it also extend to knowing how your purchased product is built so that you could repair it?
Maybe we’ll see a test case some day when a cosmic ray blows out /System/Trackpad.kext and a litigant applies to a court for the documentation to repair their laptop — to write their own driver!
(Or vice versa: a manufacturer of coffee grinders arguing in court that they are exempt from right-to-repair because they repair their machines for free at their Genius Espresso Bar.)
This is an interesting thought exercise. I immediately thought of the counter argument that Apple's driver quality is worse, especially for laptops nearing end of life (for the sake of argument assume this were true).
Could I then submit a warranty claim and demand Apple replace my aging laptop with their latest model?
I think there is a strong case that "the right to repair" includes software. If that doesn't mean drivers must be open source, it should at least mean hardware is documented such that a driver can be written from it.
But the US still doesn't have the right to repair hardware, haha.
I hope the EU is listening. They won't get far with their sovereign software push if hardware cannot be used. Even on the Android side, you can't write an alternative to Android because all of the hardware has locked bootloaders and hidden drivers. Good luck reverse engineering the hardware/drivers on a Samsung Galaxy - let alone an iPhone or MacBook.
I asked ChatGPT to draw the outline of an ellipse using Unicode braille. I asked for 30x8 and it absolutely nailed it. A beautiful piece of ascii (er, Unicode) art. But I wanted to mark the origin! So I asked for a 31x7 ellipse instead. It completely flubbed it, and for 31x9 too.
When a model gives a really good answer, does that just mean it’s seen the problem before? When it gives a crappy answer, is that not simply indicating the problem is novel?
No, that simply is not the case. The whole point of deep learning - and the reason it has been successful in so many domains over the last 20 years - is that generalization does occur. Leela will kick your ass at chess whether she's seen the position before or not, even if her search depth is set at 1 ply.
In the case of LLMs, the compression ratio alone absolutely requires this.
Do you posit that there are enough examples of 30x8 ellipses encoded in braille online for ChatGPT to learn from but not 31x7 or 31x9 ellipses? That seems unlikely.
Yes, or the model got lucky with the quality of output for a particular combination of my prompt and the reasoning behind its answer that lined up with something it had seen before — quality which it was unable to recreate under slightly different circumstances.
I wouldn't ask an LLM to output this directly. For an ellipse ascii I would guess that having it write a python program to generate it and then run it would work much better. Using claude sonnet 4.6 on a free account it seemed to work (sorry in advance if the hacker news formatting is horrendous)
You can use two spaces at the beginning of each line to trigger the "code" mode. I tried to reconstruct your drawing, but perhaps I didn't guess correctly:
Edit: I had to delete the two first spaces or each line and replace them with newly typed spaces from my keyboard. Perhaps there is some white-space-unicode-magic-character that is confusing HN.
All the whitespace appears to be a blank braille character, so it still displays correctly even without the indentation formatting: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2800
(Passed it through xxd to get the utf8 hex values)
Ug wants to borrow ten of my best sticks in exchange for future options to buy berries from his friend Og. Og has a watertight deal with Oog to invest the sticks in a five year mammoth hunting expedition but Oog first needs berries to exchange for sticks to cover his exposure on berry-puts he’s take out against Urrrg’s remortgaged stick pile.
Well, I said no. Not getting burned that way again!
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