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It's not the NFC the bank is interested it, it the MFA provided by your phone PIN, fingerprint or face unlock.

When you open the app on your phone, the phone probably needed to be unlocked first, though not everyone sets a PIN or biometric lock on their phone.

Then you will be prompted for a separate PIN or your fingerprint within the banking app. This provides a stronger signal to the bank that you are the legitimate account holder. If your phone is lost or stolen, the chances of someone else being able to authenticate to your banking app are considerably reduced.

With the web app, people will often save their bank website login credentials in the browser. So now someone nefarious only needs to access the unlocked computer or phone the go to the bank's website to gain unauthorised by still authenticated access to the customer's accounts.

Yes, there are now laptops and tablets with biometric authentication, so the potential is there for adding biometric authentication for banking website. However, when you look at the demographics of banking app vs website use, a strong majority of Millennials and Gen-Z do all their banking via the phone app. Gen-X also slightly favour the phone app whereas Boomers strongly prefer the website. So banks focus their development efforts where the majority of users are.

Swing with the Nimbus Look and Feel isn't too bad for a quick, functionality-focused widget and it's super handy to have it still built into the JDK. It's not a good option for building a long term desktop application UI now though. There is no on-going development, the focus is now in Java FX. Prior to AI tooling, finding answers to Swing questions was getting much harder. Surprisingly I've found Claude to be pretty good at providing simple Swing UIs.

How could you establish what parts of the code was produced by an LLM vs updated by a human afterwards?

The LLM will output different results over time as the models get updated. Are we heading towards needing to retain a full prompt history that can be replayed against a specific LLM model version to prove what the output was for copyright purposes?

That could be a real experience for children in the not too distant future.

We are seeing more and more appliances coming out with less buttons and a mobile app to access advanced features. Also cars (annoyingly) are coming out with more physical controls replaced by touchscreen interfaces. It's not hard to imagine a world without physical buttons becoming a reality.

The days of digital buttons might also be numbered. Apps designed for touched enabled interfaces, particularly on mobiles, support swipes and gestures to perform different actions. There is no obvious indication you can perform an action with a swipe or gesture. Having grown up pre-internet with physical buttons, dials, sliders etc I automatically look for the digital equivalent for interaction, I don't assume I can swipe or gesture to do something. I have to resort to searching for "how do I do x with y" to find out.

Children on the other hand spend a lot of time playing with new things. they are far more likely to discover swipe or gesture through play. As an adult I am much more task oriented, I'm not looking to play I'm looking to get the thing done.

As children grow up in a world without physical buttons, they may not see the relevance of digital equivalents and lean towards swipe, gesture, voice control etc. Digital buttons may disappear.

An example of an similar technological shift happened for many pre-Boomers with the introduction of Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs). My father grew up with analog clocks and watches. Time was told by two or three hands on a clock face. When VCRs became more affordable in the 80s they came with digital clocks. He could read the time off the digital display but couldn't make the leap to setting a recording time by putting it into program mode then using buttons to set a record start time and duration. To him, time was set by moving the clock hands or twisting a watch dial.

The introduction of flat-UI bothered me in it threw away a visual indication that this "thing" is a clickable button. I obviously not fully adapted to swipes and gestures. I feel like a few steps down the path for whatever the future equivalent of "can't program the VCR" is. I hope the advent of LLMs will make it easy enough for application developers to produce multiple UIs for different classes of user button users, swipe users, whatever the next thing is (brain wave control??).

This is probably going to push me to completely close a couple of AWS accounts I setup when doing training courses so I could get certified (mandatory requirement from my work).

I'm not currently running anything and have no plans to at the moment. I've always had a mild dread that I'll suddenly get a bill for more than $0.00.

If AWS can goof in a way that causes obviously massive bills (like today), what's to say they can't goof in more subtle ways and start charging small additional amounts that many people may not notice and just pay it.

It's also so that rescue personnel can see into the plane in the event it crashes.

The AI tool providers need companies and customers to pay for the tools and automation. If all the white collar jobs in the Western world are replaced by AI or AI generated SAAS products, some 60% percent the workforce suddenly won't have jobs. If such a large percentage of the workforce has no income through employment, who will be able to pay for the services from SAAS providers and thus ultimately the AI providers?

The tradesmen working on my house renovations aren't consuming SAAS products during their day jobs.

The white collar workforce can't rapidly switch to blue collar jobs.

So for these companies to remain viable, they need the white collar workers to still somehow end up with enough money to pay for services that ultimately the companies provide.

Maybe the turning point will be a recognition that companies can't only focus on maximising shareholder value. They also need to consider their role in maintaining and improving the societies they operate in.

I work for a bank. There is a strategic focus on the mobile banking app over the web app. Younger generations are doing everything through their phones. Including applying for home loans. Many banks are moving towards being digital only as contactless payments means people are using cash a lot less to the point that physical bank branches don't make sense anymore.

As I teenager and then poor uni student, I rode a number of bikes or bike parts to failure.

I first snapped the top tube of a stell framed BMX near the stem after many years of using it for a local paper round with a milk crate roped onto the handlebars. The weight of the papers was certainly a contributing factor.

I've snapped a chain while out of the saddle, accelerating a road bike. Nothing too serious, just banged by knee on the bars. Still, do not recommend.

While riding up a long steep hill, I snapped the nut off the outside of a clipless pedal. Luckily the pedal didn't slip off the axle and I could get to a safe stopping point.

I had a carbon top tube delaminate from some aluminium lugs near the stem. Something felt off with the handling so I glanced down and could see ~1.5 cm of the lug showing. Decided to walk the bike the rest of the way to work that day. Got a local carbon repair specialist to re-bond it and it lasted a few more years.

That carbon frame eventually developed a crack in the bottom bracket and frame from front to back right next to the seat tube on the chain ring side. When it failed, the bike started feeling "noodly" to ride, so I looked down and saw the crack opening and closing as I pedaled along.

Somehow I snapped the rear suspension pivot in a Trek Y3 without realising it until the next time I went to ride it. I jumped on it to ride to uni and something felt off. Then I noticed the front and rear wheels were both tracking straight but significantly offset from each other. Took a while to get it repaired as it was a custom part.

When borrowing my brothers (pre-suspension era) MTB I tried a little jump up a kerb. The front fork folded in half. I bent it back straight enough to get sufficient wheel clearance to finish the ride (slowly).

I have buckled many rims over the years on BMX, MTB and road bikes. The early aluminium rims were expensive and really easy to buckle compared to steel rims.

Had the freewheel pawls fail in a rear cassette suddenly one day. They would catch once every few pedal rotations for maybe 1/3 of a rotation. Initially I thought I'd dropped the chain. It was a long walk home.

I was having trouble keep my front QR wheel on a road bike from vibrating mildly as I rode on it. I thought the bearing were loose, so I took the wheel off then found the hollow QR axle had snapped in the middle.

From riding with many others over the years, I'm also aware that larger (taller) riders can break stuff more easily as well. One work colleague who was probably 6'3-4" snapped a cog off the rear cassette almost perfectly in half while accelerating. He wasn't a strong rider, he'd started bike commuting a few months earlier. Maybe the crank length he needed brought extra torque.

Another very strong 6'1" guy I rode with for a few years cracked 3 carbon Bianchi frames within the first few months of owning them. All replaced under warranty. I think he was just heavier and stronger that the frames were generally designed for.

Frames are typically weakest at the joins as that is where the stress is concentrated.

Any rotating part will eventually wear and fail.

Ride a bike long and often enough and something _will_ give out.

The Book of Eli War of the Worlds 2012 Day of the Triffids (TV series) The Bodysnatchers Waterworld The Postman Contagion

I know this is a late response, but for anyone curious you would need to use an official Oracle or Sun JDK/JRE from Java 8 or older. OpenJDK doesn't include support for applets.

You also need a browser that has NPAPI. IE 11 was the most modern browser I am aware of that still supported applets.

The old GUI framework mentioned in the GP might have been Swing. It is still included in most JDKs and allows for cross platform desktop GUI application development with no other dependencies outside the JDK. Finding documentation on how to do GUIs in Swing is getting increasingly difficult though.

Using your restaurant example, if the restaurant closes it may not have much obvious effect on other nearby businesses. However, that restaurant would have given business to various food and consumables suppliers, to waste management companies, to an accountant etc. All those businesses have now lost a source of income and may be less profitable.

Perhaps the restaurant was leasing the premises from a landlord. The landlord may still have a loan for the business premises. That loan could be at risk of going into arrears if no other person decides to try their luck running a restaurant in a location that doesn't have sufficient patronage.

Consider now that the office workers who have refused to RTO work for the bank that holds the loan for the business premises. There is a risk to the bank now that the premises is less valuable because it can't be leased and is less attractive for a future purchaser.

The point is that most businesses don't operate without having other businesses as suppliers or clients. When one business does badly it can affect other businesses in their network. A small number of isolated businesses failing doesn't cause knock on effects. However, if a larger number of smaller retailers, dependent on foot traffic close in the same locality it will have a ripple effect out to many other larger businesses.

Business owners and executives have an interest in trying to maintain a healthy business network. Some will believe that pushing for RTO should help other local businesses in their business network and thus will be beneficial for their company in the long term.

There are broader implications for the economy if a large percentage of people continue to WFH. In larger cities, many smaller businesses, like food outlets, are sustained by workers coming to their city offices most weekdays.

Many such businesses failed during COVID knockdowns due to lack of customers. Some are still struggling to become viable again with a low RTO percentage.

For some medium to large businesses, these struggling smaller businesses or business owners are their customers. So there is some self interest from many companies to go back to the way things were.

Arguably the failed or struggling businesses could be being replaced by other services, eg home food delivery, but I've not personally noticed anything like that happening.

You are probably thinking of dowels used as loose tenons, where a blind hole is drilled into the mating pieces of wood and the dowel is not visible once the joint is together.

Sometimes people glue a butt or mitre joint, then once the glue has set, drill a through hole for a through dowel from an outside face of the joint.

The blind holes approach is tricky to get perfect alignment on where dowels are being added across a longer length. As a hobbyist I've tried a few cheaper dowelling jigs and had mixed success. This challenge lead to other loose tenon solutions like biscuits or dominos which allow for some side to side misalignment while retaining the ability to keep the visible faces aligned.

The through dowel approach avoids the misalignment problem, but comes with the visibility of the end grain of the dowel on one exposed face. Some people are ok with that.

Dowels are still one of the "strongest" options for end-grain to long-grain joints. Many professional woodworkers now favour dominos simply due to who quick it allows them to work and the additional allowance for some side-to-side alignment.

Shorter words mean less time with your mouth open which means less chance for the flies to get in.