arcticbull

I'm also not sure it even drives a ton of value in software engineering. It makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder. Typing out software in your mind was never the difficult part. Figuring out what to write, how to interpret specs in context, how to make your code work within the context of a broader whole, how to be extensible, maintainable, reliable, etc. That's hard, and LLMs really don't help.

Even when writing, it shifts the mental burden from an easy thing (writing code) to a very hard thing (reading that code, validating it's right, hallucination free, and then refactoring it to match your teams code style and patterns).

It's great for building a first-order approximation of a tech demo app that you then throw out and build from scratch, and auto-complete. In my experience, anyways. I'm sure others have had different experiences.

Yep, it's basically a federal version of Romneycare. [1]

[1] https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2...

Actually come to think of it a very similar pole reversal happened in Canada with the "Trudeau/Liberal Carbon Tax" -- a program originally proposed by the British Columbia Conservative Party, first implemented in Alberta by a Conservative Party and proposed federally by Stephen Harper of the Federal Conservatives.

A lot of Americans don't even realize that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing -- even in 2017 it was 1/3. I believe the skew is even worse today.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/upshot/one-third-dont-kno...

For what it's worth they cost a lot less than highways to maintain. Something like the 101 in the Bay Area costs about $40,000 per lane-mile per year, or about $240,000.

Trains are closer to $50-100,000 per mile per year.

If there's no money for the work it's a prioritization decision.

People tend to equate this to the railroad boom when saying that infrastructure spending will yield durable returns into the future no matter what.

When the railroad bubble popped we had railroads. Metal and sticks, and probably more importantly, rights-of-way.

If this is a bubble, and it pops, basically all the money will have been spent on Nvidia GPUs that depreciate to 0 over 4 years. All this GPU spending will need to be done again, every 4 years.

Hopefully we at least get some nuclear power plants out of this.

I can’t help but feel their push to go public is driven by their having milked the private markets dry.

Their revenue in the entire first half per the article was $4.3B, even if we assume it was backloaded in Q2 that’s a -500% profit margin. I’m very excited to review their S-1.

Like, for every dollar you give them they spend $5 to deliver the product. They’re selling $10 bills for $2. They seem to have taken the joke about making up losses with scale pretty seriously.

300 counts per minute is significantly less than you’d get from a banana. Wish they’d use uSv though.

I’m sure there some strong data behind that quote, maybe some randomized controlled trials?

No, what I said was the COVID years. People became dramatically more prone to conspiracy theories and significantly more polarized in the 2020-2025 period. A lot more happened to people than just exposure to COVID, which was of course part of it. I'm not talking about the people who died or the healthcare workers. There was a meaningful step change in the way we interact with each other and what is acceptable. There was a huge impact to the social fabric and cohesion of society.

My comment was not about COVID.

COVID years really messed some people up.

Kaiser is continuing to cover it for everyone.

Can you imagine how much traffic there would be if NYC didn't have the MTA? The principle of induced demand tells us that as long as there are roads they will have roughly constant traffic because people are willing to spend some roughly constant amount of time getting to and from destinations by road each day. More roads speeds up everyone's commute which brings in more drivers, which brings traffic right back to the baseline terribleness.

The question is how shitty it would be if they also had everyone on them who's currently on public transit.

So basically, it is a traffic-free panacea for everyone who chooses to use it. It's not a goal of trains to eliminate traffic for everyone who insists on driving.

https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/indu...

Buddy the tube seldom fails for that reason either. Plus some self-driving sauce would reduce their hours to 0. Certain lines in London like the DLR are already driverless (Grade of Automation 3). Most of the other lines are GoA2.

The contrary findings section on Wikipedia starts quoting a 2002 article. Could you point to which part exactly you find more compelling?

Education and contraceptives as the article I linked are separately correlated and powerful, as is religious adherence. They're all factors. Note that each of these factors is differently important in different countries or regions, so just because you found a study that shows a positive correlation in the Netherlands that it is in isolation important or that it would work the same way in the US.

Try a bicycle or a stroll instead of embracing the WALL-E.

If you feel that way about transit you may not have tried a good transit option like Hong Kong MTR with 90 second headways and travel from and to substantially everywhere you want to be.

Cars of any sort, self-driving or otherwise, do not solve traffic any more than Uber does because you need to have enough of them to get everyone to and from work at basically the same time. Trains are the only way to address traffic. Trains are self-driving. Europe already has the better self-driving system. It's just boring because self-driving is much easier when you build the road to support it instead of removing all constraints and adding GPUs, lidar sensors, cameras and an army of fall-back operators in overseas call centers.

It holds. It holds practically everywhere on Earth. Income is one of the strongest inverse correlations to fertility.

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

> If you consider starting a family with no hope of ever getting out of renting, as landlords constantly raise monthlies, you might reconsider children.

Generally the less money you make the more kids you have. It's really a question of prioritization. People say they're holding off on kids for X or Y reason but I think this is more of an expressed vs revealed preferences situation. They would rather chase material wealth for themselves than have kids, and to be clear I'm not judging just observing. Through most of human history mud huts weren't a blocker to having kids.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

> In a world that you have both developed and developing countries, the stable equilibrium seems to be world suffering.

I think that's the wrong read.

All sorts of animal population follow a sigmoidal growth pattern where there's exponential growth, some degree of overshoot and then a return to a steady level somewhat below that peak.

I think it's more likely, drawing from biology, that we end up at a stable global population level without having to worry about moving backwards along the metrics of education, income or contraceptive access.

Remember it was just a few years ago everyone was absolutely terrified that we would grow to the point where the world simply couldn't hold us all and we'd die off -- and now we're terrified the population will zero out. In reality, neither is very likely. We're probably just going to chill around 8 billion or so until/if we go multi-planetary.

It was a prepaid plan that was the same price whether I got the phone or not. I guess you could say everyone who didn’t get the phone was subsidizing those who did, but there’s no way to opt for lower pricing if you BYOD. So no, in this case that’s not really true. If it were Verizon where you can pay less if you BYOD then sure but that’s not what I did.

What makes a good foldable better than say a $700 RAZR?

I have a folding android and it’s very meh. Wouldn’t get one again. It was also free with a prepaid phone plan so I doubt cost is really the factor.

For the mic cut-off? My understanding is that it outputs an electrical signal that's routed to the audio codec that literally prevents the audio from getting to system memory in the same way a physical switch would. It autonomously, at an electrical level, disconnects the mic without OS or software intervention. As it cannot be programmed again, you would have to crack open the laptop and modify the PCB to override it.

If the point is to hide the recording that's not a great way. Especially when many corporate IT solutions monitor USB device connections.

As far as I know the mic is still shut off when the machine is set to clamshell mode. That's the point. You cannot use the mic when the lid is closed. It's a hardware cut-off, you cannot configure it in software. Hence my comment about the bug bounty.

Yes, it could be done with a Hall effect sensor or something like they used to. The cool thing about this approach is they actually use a different angle to turn the screen off as you close the lid than they do for turning it on when you open the lid, to create a better experience. Since it is a security feature, then the "open" vs "closed" state should use the same source of truth. So it's a trade-off of complexity and experience.

First of all, wut. Second, that's irrelevant because stable coins rely on fiat backing (ostensibly) so you're stacking a new problem on top of what you perceive to be a different problem. If you believed that to be a problem then stable coins give you that problem twice as hard. And a whole mess of new ones too, like zero recourse against the newly intermediated offshore issuers in low-or-zero regulation locales.

If you were to come up with one, I suspect you'd have a solid bug bounty waiting for you.