sthlm

Europeans (I'm German) often sigh at the price differences, but a big part of it is just that US prices are listed without VAT, while European prices are, and VAT differs across EU member countries.

Denmark has a VAT of 25%, so the DKK 5499 price without VAT is DKK 4399, which amounts to ~$684. Still more but not substantially.

From the article:

> “A bank mistakenly making such a large transfer shows its controls aren’t working adequately, and it’s embarrassing,” said Dieter Hein, an analyst at Fairesearch

Also:

> The error should have been caught by an internal fail-safe system known as a "bear-trap,"

The issue is not that someone said "let's not have any controls", but that the controls failed.

Additionally, yes, ranking all transaction and double-checking the big ones should probably be part of a fail-safe, but I assume that even more harm could be done by a larger amount of minor issues that go unnoticed over a longer period of time.

I can attest to that, my newborn at the time screamed into my ear unexpectedly loud and my hearing was affected for a few days.

This is the best "visualization" / "explanation" of the possibilities and limits of AI that I've seen.

I can show this to someone and say:

1. The software can recognize a feather, as long as it looks similar to what it thinks a feather looks like.

2. The software can't recognize a feather if it's never seen a feather like that. It's not a sentient being.

This is good, because most examples focus on point #1 and -- if enough marketing is involved -- don't go enough into point #2.

People read news articles like "X can recognize cats in a picture with Y certainty!" and are quick to assume that this "AI" can make sense of a picture and understand it, when all it does is apply certain methods for a certain use case.

This does a much better job by letting people write (or draw) their own test cases and figure out the limits intuitively.

I can recommend to peruse the source code. It's well written and documented. Such projects always put a smile on my face, since they demonstrate how far we've come in some respects:

- We've learned how to write and produce reusable, easily digestable code

- Python gives us a language that is concise, readable

- Frameworks like OpenCV let us do incredible things

- Open Source allows us to share it and collaborate*

- Platforms like Github facilitate the entire experience

10 years ago it took forever to configure my webcam on my Linux machine. I had to scour mailing lists and custom web sites to download various versions of kernel patches. Now my webcam is built-in and it takes 2-3 commands to take something off of Github and have fun.

* Of course Open Source is not new, but today it really seems like "Open Source won".