"We have junk mail because the government gives a massive discount to junk mail, which it calls marketing mail. We could simply stop offering that discount." -- but it funds USPS so that's hard to remove. it's ad income. i think we should give people a way to pay $6 a year to get no junk mail.
Re: Bus drivers. Unlike the trucker situation, paying the bus driver to _not_ drive might be a win all around. The driver can do a better job at all the non-driving tasks, making the experience of riding a bus much more pleasant, while the driving probably also gets better and safer (although buses, unlike cars, are actually safe enough that I expect the safety gains to be minimal).
Yeah, I had to snicker at "the driver is also keeping order and collecting fares, including acting as a deterrent"...I can't even remember the last time that happened in SF. Some other cities, sure; I used to do work with VTA in Santa Clara, and those guys actually did some of those not-strictly-driving tasks with regularity, with union backing even. But the systems that have the worst problems with orderliness on public transit aren't going to solve it by deputizing the former drivers. Not what they signed up for, many other systemic headwinds like lack of standing (social and legal) for enforcement actions, "difficult clientele", etc.
Which isn't to say things haven't been improving on the public-order front for SF, or that it definitely wouldn't help on the margin! Just that this feels like an "arm teachers to deter school shooters" type thing. (And one of course has to worry about the shenanigans people would get up to with *no* Official Authority on board, too. Even a fig leaf deterrent is better than a mere eye in the sky camera.)
Unfortunately bus drivers do literal nothing when something crazy is going down on the bus. Probably shouldn't, I guess, I mean in their position I also would be thinking "hey I am not getting paid enough to break up knife fights"
Right now, it's not really their job (other than passively by presence). In the situation I'm describing, it would, literally, be their job. Hopefully with the training and tools necessary to actually do it.
RE: Hantavirus - it became clear to me that we learned nothing but theater regarding virus containment when I saw clips of passengers dressed in blue ponchos marching off the ship and newscasters were calling it “protective gear.”
Movies quality is much less linked to "maximizing" some technical metric (duration, fx, sound quality, etc...) when compared to videogames (duration, map size, graphics), this is one reason for which for many of us movie quality is decidedly not increased in the last 30 years
EDIT: for many of us deluded by the last years of cinema the main dimension on which to measure a movie is one by far: the story, and new stories are often not good as old ones
It's...kind of like hypnotism? Despite knowing it "doesn't" "really" "work", actually engaging in good faith with the process does...something. Not literally magical or brainwashy, to be clear, but it's like the concept of Hansonian medicine. Getting a dose of Genuine Caring and Human Interest In Your Problems, with a clever gamification overlay that helps one suspend just the right amount of disbelief (because ideally, if the practitioner is any good, you're having fun, it's a good vibe and mystical atmosphere). That's the actual active ingredient, not the process itself. The easiest person to deceive is yourself, except applied to positive ends, and with a little help from an external friend.
Might be somewhat culture-bound though. Despite being Asian, I find it hard to even belief-in-belief for chakras/energy meridians/acupuncture/etc. The media I grew up with frequently featured tarot and other magical card games, so it's not hard to suspend disbelief "to the level of videogame logic", while staying cognizant that real life isn't a videogame. Perhaps if I'd consumed a lot of xianxia instead, then I'd find Eastern woo more palatable? (Not to say yoga and meditation aren't relaxing in some ways, they just don't tickle my mystical bone.)
On bus drivers: driverless trains are a common thing (and even trains that have drivers don't really interact with them). There is an issue with bus behavioral norms being worse in many places but you could at least do them in some areas.
Sadly, the CDC has been destroyed by the Trump administration. It's not missing in action, it's missing. It is hard to tell what price this wanton destruction will have in the future, but there will be one.
I also laughed, but because I've seen these claims over and over, and over the years many teams have "optimized" more summed compute costs than they were spending in the first place.
It's been a weird experience, getting older and having Great Cooks in the family die off, then only belatedly realizing that the way my family does dish xyz isn't actually "the typical Southern Chinese way", it's...a very specific formulation that we came up with, often to try and mimic a good restaurant meal. I'm not so biased as to claim all of that is objectively Good Food, and it's highly unlikely I'll have heirs to pass things down to anyway...but it'll kinda be sad nonetheless, to have that knowledge get lost forever when I'm gone? Generations of hard-won kitchen innovation and povery hacks, forgotten, possibly never to be re-discovered. It's hard to write down quantification-resistant implicit knowledge too: we follow the Martin Yan school of "Always Measure Precisely".
(The tension between this roundup item and the perennial "home cooking is for inefficient chumps, the Pareto frontier is outsourcing all cooking to professional restaurants" item is...left as an exercise for the eater. Food for thought.)
The incentive structure gets worse when the "bug" is a safety concern at an AI lab. The Tech Oversight Project documented OpenAI using restrictive NDAs and equity threats to silence employees who raised concerns. The people catching problems aren't getting four million dollar bonuses. They're weighing whether speaking up is worth their vested equity.
I have a generally high impression of Olivier Habryka, from a distance, but that was a really dumb claim. Either he is highly coordinated, or he is just blissfully ignorant of physical expertise.
Eg: I have successfully renovated rooms. But not in 20 years could I become an expert level athlete (maybe I could have in running, when younger, but that seems unlikely and would be the absolute limit).
I assume that this generalises to each other domain he mentions.
Yes I also read that as "egghead who is completely oblivious to the vast diversity of physical tasks." The notion that an elite weightlifter would automatically be a good dancer, or a good plumber, is laughable. Also isn't this just rediscovering "multiple intelligences"?
Physical tasks are interesting because they are much less correlated with one another than intellectual ones.
Espresso is more efficient extraction than drip (I'm not sure if that includes a full lifecycle analysis for the machine itself), and it's notably faster, so quite possibly americano is a win both for Andy Masley and also for time, and time is money. So the subtle jibe would be more along the lines of calling a major lowbrow retailer Tar-jhay, of attracting a premium mediocre aura on a product that's "basically just" fancier [basic unpretentious thing]. Drip coffee is just coffee, it doesn't need a highbrow European name, etc.
The actual iPod was a clever little device, but iTunes can GDIAF. Still randomly get DRM hiccups from some old files ported through that ecosystem, even though I own them free and clear. Even if I hadn't broken mine years ago, even if smartphones never picked up music capability - no way in hell I'd go back to that paranoid walled garden. A music file is a file like any other on my computer, let me do with it as I will. Keep your corporate hands off my Rx (Medicate)! Let's be real too, so many people voluntarily don't own any music anymore, they just stream. And if you're adding that kind of data link, at that point you're halfway to reinventing the phone, so...???? PEBKAC: the solution to device hell isn't going to be more and worse devices. (But, yes, it'd be a fine marketing stunt and grease those earnings calls. Better way to waste resources than the Apple Vision Pro!)
"(..), but the driver is also keeping order and collecting fares, including acting as a deterrent, and answering questions." -- I happen to live in Stavanger (the town in question). Buss drivers are not responsible for collecting fares (tickets are sold through an app), checking tickets (handled by ticket collectors who do random controls), or keeping order (Norway..). They do answer questions, but there has to be cheaper ways to provide that service.
What are your thoughts on the multiplayer of Sts2 if you have any? :)
"We have junk mail because the government gives a massive discount to junk mail, which it calls marketing mail. We could simply stop offering that discount." -- but it funds USPS so that's hard to remove. it's ad income. i think we should give people a way to pay $6 a year to get no junk mail.
I get no junk mail for free. I just stopped taking mail out of my mailbox, and now the mailman can’t put any more in
If USPS can't survive without spamming me, then let it die.
Or we could just treat USPS as a government service instead of a business that has to cover its own costs.
Re: Bus drivers. Unlike the trucker situation, paying the bus driver to _not_ drive might be a win all around. The driver can do a better job at all the non-driving tasks, making the experience of riding a bus much more pleasant, while the driving probably also gets better and safer (although buses, unlike cars, are actually safe enough that I expect the safety gains to be minimal).
Yeah, I had to snicker at "the driver is also keeping order and collecting fares, including acting as a deterrent"...I can't even remember the last time that happened in SF. Some other cities, sure; I used to do work with VTA in Santa Clara, and those guys actually did some of those not-strictly-driving tasks with regularity, with union backing even. But the systems that have the worst problems with orderliness on public transit aren't going to solve it by deputizing the former drivers. Not what they signed up for, many other systemic headwinds like lack of standing (social and legal) for enforcement actions, "difficult clientele", etc.
Which isn't to say things haven't been improving on the public-order front for SF, or that it definitely wouldn't help on the margin! Just that this feels like an "arm teachers to deter school shooters" type thing. (And one of course has to worry about the shenanigans people would get up to with *no* Official Authority on board, too. Even a fig leaf deterrent is better than a mere eye in the sky camera.)
Unfortunately bus drivers do literal nothing when something crazy is going down on the bus. Probably shouldn't, I guess, I mean in their position I also would be thinking "hey I am not getting paid enough to break up knife fights"
Right now, it's not really their job (other than passively by presence). In the situation I'm describing, it would, literally, be their job. Hopefully with the training and tools necessary to actually do it.
RE: Hantavirus - it became clear to me that we learned nothing but theater regarding virus containment when I saw clips of passengers dressed in blue ponchos marching off the ship and newscasters were calling it “protective gear.”
Movies quality is much less linked to "maximizing" some technical metric (duration, fx, sound quality, etc...) when compared to videogames (duration, map size, graphics), this is one reason for which for many of us movie quality is decidedly not increased in the last 30 years
EDIT: for many of us deluded by the last years of cinema the main dimension on which to measure a movie is one by far: the story, and new stories are often not good as old ones
Huh, I feel like I'd find tarot harder to get something out of without kind-of-sort-of suspending disbelief than chakras?
It's...kind of like hypnotism? Despite knowing it "doesn't" "really" "work", actually engaging in good faith with the process does...something. Not literally magical or brainwashy, to be clear, but it's like the concept of Hansonian medicine. Getting a dose of Genuine Caring and Human Interest In Your Problems, with a clever gamification overlay that helps one suspend just the right amount of disbelief (because ideally, if the practitioner is any good, you're having fun, it's a good vibe and mystical atmosphere). That's the actual active ingredient, not the process itself. The easiest person to deceive is yourself, except applied to positive ends, and with a little help from an external friend.
Might be somewhat culture-bound though. Despite being Asian, I find it hard to even belief-in-belief for chakras/energy meridians/acupuncture/etc. The media I grew up with frequently featured tarot and other magical card games, so it's not hard to suspend disbelief "to the level of videogame logic", while staying cognizant that real life isn't a videogame. Perhaps if I'd consumed a lot of xianxia instead, then I'd find Eastern woo more palatable? (Not to say yoga and meditation aren't relaxing in some ways, they just don't tickle my mystical bone.)
Zvi, thank you!
On bus drivers: driverless trains are a common thing (and even trains that have drivers don't really interact with them). There is an issue with bus behavioral norms being worse in many places but you could at least do them in some areas.
Also, the example in question is in Norway, I think it'll work fine
"The CDC is nowhere to be found"
Sadly, the CDC has been destroyed by the Trump administration. It's not missing in action, it's missing. It is hard to tell what price this wanton destruction will have in the future, but there will be one.
"optimized compute costs by $X-XX million a year"
I also laughed, but because I've seen these claims over and over, and over the years many teams have "optimized" more summed compute costs than they were spending in the first place.
It's been a weird experience, getting older and having Great Cooks in the family die off, then only belatedly realizing that the way my family does dish xyz isn't actually "the typical Southern Chinese way", it's...a very specific formulation that we came up with, often to try and mimic a good restaurant meal. I'm not so biased as to claim all of that is objectively Good Food, and it's highly unlikely I'll have heirs to pass things down to anyway...but it'll kinda be sad nonetheless, to have that knowledge get lost forever when I'm gone? Generations of hard-won kitchen innovation and povery hacks, forgotten, possibly never to be re-discovered. It's hard to write down quantification-resistant implicit knowledge too: we follow the Martin Yan school of "Always Measure Precisely".
(The tension between this roundup item and the perennial "home cooking is for inefficient chumps, the Pareto frontier is outsourcing all cooking to professional restaurants" item is...left as an exercise for the eater. Food for thought.)
The black Waymo tweet accidentally links again to Rob Henderson's airport, not Kelsey Piper. Should go to this post in The Argument: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/no-waymos-arent-racist
The incentive structure gets worse when the "bug" is a safety concern at an AI lab. The Tech Oversight Project documented OpenAI using restrictive NDAs and equity threats to silence employees who raised concerns. The people catching problems aren't getting four million dollar bonuses. They're weighing whether speaking up is worth their vested equity.
I have a generally high impression of Olivier Habryka, from a distance, but that was a really dumb claim. Either he is highly coordinated, or he is just blissfully ignorant of physical expertise.
Eg: I have successfully renovated rooms. But not in 20 years could I become an expert level athlete (maybe I could have in running, when younger, but that seems unlikely and would be the absolute limit).
I assume that this generalises to each other domain he mentions.
Yes I also read that as "egghead who is completely oblivious to the vast diversity of physical tasks." The notion that an elite weightlifter would automatically be a good dancer, or a good plumber, is laughable. Also isn't this just rediscovering "multiple intelligences"?
Physical tasks are interesting because they are much less correlated with one another than intellectual ones.
Espresso is more efficient extraction than drip (I'm not sure if that includes a full lifecycle analysis for the machine itself), and it's notably faster, so quite possibly americano is a win both for Andy Masley and also for time, and time is money. So the subtle jibe would be more along the lines of calling a major lowbrow retailer Tar-jhay, of attracting a premium mediocre aura on a product that's "basically just" fancier [basic unpretentious thing]. Drip coffee is just coffee, it doesn't need a highbrow European name, etc.
The actual iPod was a clever little device, but iTunes can GDIAF. Still randomly get DRM hiccups from some old files ported through that ecosystem, even though I own them free and clear. Even if I hadn't broken mine years ago, even if smartphones never picked up music capability - no way in hell I'd go back to that paranoid walled garden. A music file is a file like any other on my computer, let me do with it as I will. Keep your corporate hands off my Rx (Medicate)! Let's be real too, so many people voluntarily don't own any music anymore, they just stream. And if you're adding that kind of data link, at that point you're halfway to reinventing the phone, so...???? PEBKAC: the solution to device hell isn't going to be more and worse devices. (But, yes, it'd be a fine marketing stunt and grease those earnings calls. Better way to waste resources than the Apple Vision Pro!)
"(..), but the driver is also keeping order and collecting fares, including acting as a deterrent, and answering questions." -- I happen to live in Stavanger (the town in question). Buss drivers are not responsible for collecting fares (tickets are sold through an app), checking tickets (handled by ticket collectors who do random controls), or keeping order (Norway..). They do answer questions, but there has to be cheaper ways to provide that service.