brenns10

> What about the employer’s side of the story though? The one that’s on the other side of the economic engine.

Also the side of the "economic engine" that historically cheerfully exploited workers until the labor movement enacted basic protections. IMO employers (in general) are guilty until proven innocent when it comes to workers' rights.

> I know checking “results” is what should be happening, but guess what? That’s actually pretty difficult and open to all kinds of debate.

Yeah my job is difficult too, but I don't take shortcuts because it was "pretty difficult" to do things correctly. Seems like a bad example to set for your employees if you want them to be hard workers...

> You being “present” during office hours is not up for debate and easy to check.

It's also not part of my employment agreement! I'm salaried, I'm paid for getting the job done. Of course, part of "the job" is to be available during business hours in order to participate in meetings, off the cuff discussions, and of course I value that part too. But so long as I communicate when I may be away from my keyboard for a bit, we're all able to manage this easily.

> We all know you are not “making up for it” in the evenings. You are watching netflix and eating hot dogs while sending some superficial emails and notes to give off the impression you are working.

This is such condescending arrogance it almost doesn't merit a response. But rest assured, there are plenty of us who say they'll make something up in the evening, and they do it without hot dogs and Netflix. (Also, if somebody did their job functions successfully and efficiently while eating hot dogs and watching Netflix... who cares?)

> It’s not some small marginal group taking advantage every way they can every chance they get, it’s nearly everyone I know. It’s insane. But they expect to be paid in full. I am not completely opposed to introducing some metrics to track your value.

Obviously you should track the value of employees, but you track it by results, not by this garbage. If your management isn't able to detect freeloaders who aren't getting results: that's a problem with your management and business.

It was brought up in the article. Elon only posted that after the security lead for the messaging product publicly tweeted completely wrong info about the status of the promised security audit.

Also, trust in the privacy of messages is the entire point of E2E encrypted DMs. It's a pretty dumb strategy to launch that feature and then walk it back with a "oops we're beta testing, don't trust that while privacy thing yet." So either Twitter/Elon has a dumb strategy, or they're (still) making wildly silly blunders as a result of self-inflicted wounds. Either way, pretty compelling arguments to never trust this feature even once they say you can.

It's a DLC :)

I do get that it felt a bit out of place initially, but BOTW has 4 massive mechanical laser-shooting beasts, along with a whole fleet of spider-crawling laser robots and helicopter laser robots... The motorcycle doesn't feel so out of place in that context. But I'll admit, I haven't played many previous Zelda games.

Also, the bike is only unlocked after all the divine beasts, when the game is already "over" and you're just trying to complete all the shrines and quests. I'm so happy to have it in order to help me get around faster for those things.

But yeah, I can't deny it felt weird at first :)

As an alternative to web sockets and JavaScript, can I offer my alternative (ok, it's not persistent chat) implemented with character devices as a Linux kernel module? I don't know if it still works, but it has the same name :)

https://github.com/brenns10/kchat

I fully agree with ditching distracting screens for safety reasons, but this article focuses more on customers disliking the screens. Maybe my 2017 Civic is not new enough to experience that frustration? It has a touchscreen with Android Auto.

All of my environment controls are on buttons and knobs beneath the screen. I'm comfortable adjusting with the smallest of glances. The only downside here is that the knob is just hooked up to the display, so it has no minimum or maximum: you see the level that is currently set on the screen. A reasonable compromise.

Music controls and cruise control on the wheel. Easily skip, pause, play, and adjust volume or radio stations with the left hand, and also voice control or hang up the phone. Right hand has cruise control. And of course blinkers, wipers, headlights on the sticks at either side of the wheel. Hazard lights are a physical button over the screen. Automatic gear shifter is at the center console.

The only things I can't do with physical button/knob and maybe a brief glance, are select playlists in Spotify, and make changes to Google maps. But for the most part, I don't need to do that while in motion, and I think they should disable those inputs at speed unless a passenger is in the car doing it. Voice control is a decent option for some of it, but it's honestly a bit distracting too, since voice control sometimes messes up and you need to focus on the screen/response too much.

So I guess all of that to say, please do get rid of some of the touchscreen controls for safety. (Also add speed limiters in cities and neighborhoods, for safety). But I guess I'm surprised that customers are the ones revolting here.

To be fair, that's exactly how LA turned into LA: they ripped up streetcar lines, demolished parts of the city to make room for interstate highways, and changed the development rules to require low density and lots of parking.

Which is to say, American cities were not born with the car centrism, they were demolished and rebuilt with it. The reason it succeeded here, but not in London, may have a lot to do with the insane corruption due to the auto industry here (but we call it lobbying, not corruption, so it's fine :P), and also due to the hyper racist forces that drove white flight to suburbs. Also the incredible amounts of federal money that went to the interstate highway system.

Except, side-loading has already existed on Android for... a long time. I regularly install from F-Droid, and it's totally possible to download an .apk from the Internet and install it. If your client was getting "cracked" it could already have been happening on Android for years (assuming you have an Android app). See also: Youtube vanced.

So really what you're saying in this comment is that you've written your backend APIs with the assumption that the only user is a benevolent app which you wrote. If it's possible for somebody to take your app and tweak it to circumvent your subscription's restrictions, then what prevents a person from hooking up their phone to a development HTTPS proxy, intercepting the API requests, and making their own cracked client without side-loading at all?

Side-loading is NOT a problem for subscription apps done properly, and it's NOT a problem for privacy or security, so long as the side-loading implementation is done responsibly.

You might be interested in pre-commit which does exactly that! https://pre-commit.com/

It probably will also support Ruff if it doesn't already.

Maybe I should have clarified, that quote came from the bio which you get if you click on the author's name -- not from the body of the article. It does appear in a little "show more" box (at the end of the article) but the juicy conflict of interest bits are obscured by the "show more" link. That's not clear disclosure by journalistic standards.

Journalists put relevant conflict-of-interest disclosures right at the beginning of the article, with emphasis added. This guy is doing the opposite: using the Forbes site to make it look like he's a journalist employed by them, when in fact he's a consultant/investor with the very industry he's writing apologist articles for. Sure, he's not lying... he put it in the bio field. But it's still misrepresentation.

Ok, show me the owl silently towing a few cases of beer and I'll take that into account ;)

Edit: OK, on reread this is far more snarky than is deserved. Sorry!

I get what you're saying about the noise per unit weight! Clearly nature has potential ways to improve on the technology, though I have to wonder how much development is necessary until a drone could restock my corner store at the same noise level as a van does.

Overall, my larger concern, which should have been listed first, is that delivery traffic is not the primary cause of traffic on our roads. Eliminating it won't solve our transit issues in cities.

> I founded ClariNet, the world's first internet based business, am Chairman Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a fellow of the Foresight Institute. My current passion is self-driving vehicles and robots. I worked on Google's car team in its early years and am an advisor and/or investor for car OEMs and many of the top startups in robocars, sensors, delivery robots and even some flying cars. Plus AR/VR and software. I am founding faculty and computing chair for Singularity University, and I write, consult and speak on robocar technology around the globe.

(Emphasis added)

This doesn't sound like the bio of a person who gives a fair shake at AVs. This sounds like a person who is quite literally invested in the success of AVs and is using the Forbes platform to lend legitimacy to his opinions.

To be fair, it also sounds like the bio of a person who's quite knowledgeable about AVs. But I'd rather get my commentary about AVs from somebody who doesn't have a financial interest in their success.

I believe that you'll find the plenty of people complaining about both of them. Speaking as one of those people. The sideshows have woken me up at night on a couple occasions.

Sure, and I'm happy to see those uses get developed. :)

The original argument I'm pushing back against is that by replacing deliveries in cities, drones could deliver the car-free pedestrian/cycling utopia of our dreams.

Yep, and I show my bookmark bar too with no trouble. Not sure what the issue was for you there.

Not that Firefox isn't without it's issues, but I'd much rather deal with those few and far between ones than use Chrome and surrender more of my privacy to Google.

This can't be reiterated enough times. Forbes articles, in my mind, are automatically bunk now, since they accept minimally vetted blog posts from their "contributors" who are just looking for SEO and a boost from the brand name.

Not that Wired is some bastion of perfect journalism, but it's funny how this blog post levels criticism at Wired with little additional data, and simply says "I think they're wrong, because I think AVs will be better one day, so it's worth letting them screw up all over our cities for a few years".

So this is basically some Forbes contributor's reaction piece to the recent Wired article full of anecdotes of Muni disruptions:

https://www.wired.com/story/dashcam-footage-shows-driverless...

And I'm happy to entertain the calls of "where's the data" in response to anecdotes. But the thing is, this article just takes the same information reported by Wired and says "it's really not that bad [presumably compared to human drivers], and even if it is that bad, I don't care because I hope AVs will be better than humans someday(TM)".

What really matters here is how disruptive the AVs are in terms of minutes of public transit delay per vehicle mile traveled (VMT), compared to human driven vehicles. Of course human drivers cause the majority of incidents on SF roads: they're the vast majority of VMTs, and they are the ones permitted to drive during the daytime that makes up the bulk of Muni service. Until there's data on real SF streets saying that AVs are causing less delays per VMT, then IMO, the criticism can't be ignored. Especially since we've been lead on by AV companies insisting that autonomous technology would be safer (and presumably less disruptive) than humans. We need to take their assertions with a grain of salt, given that they're trying to extract profits on our streets.

And plus, there's a whole area of the original wired article that is much harder to contradict. Dealing with the disruptions caused by AVs is so much more demoralizing than dealing with a human. A human realizes they've made a mistake, moves their car to the side, and awkwardly waves people by. An AV throws on its hazards and waits in the middle of an intersection until its "handlers" can be bothered to intervene. It's a faceless and inhumane experience that will never be quicker than a human driver making an innocent mistake. No amount of data can change that.

> Drones move in 3d space. Maybe a lot more investment would have yielded some cool ways to navigate in 3d space around cities. I know there are regulations around where and how drones can be used but in a city like SF it’s probably fine.

In many iconic areas of SF it's illegal to use those video camera drones because of the disruption they cause, in terms of noise, and also disrupting beautiful scenery. And those are drones with nowhere near the capacity to carry a few hundred pounds of cargo. Do you want some quadcopter with a few cases of beer blaring their rotors past your bedroom window all night because there's "cool ways to navigate 3d space"? Personally, I don't.

> Besides when have regulations stopped startups from defining something new and better?

Maybe different strokes for different folks, but this is the exact attitude I actively dislike when it comes to city planning. "Just let the venture capitalists throw their shitty tech project into the city and let the city workers clean up the mess". It's not a good strategy for transportation planning. In fact, I'd far rather that elected officials make a weird and crazy decision with little community input (we can always reverse it and vote them out) rather than a VC funded startup trying to "disrupt" local transit in my area.

> Cars and trucks just take up way too much space. They also pollute. I like scooters but they don’t have a lot of range:time advantage.

Fully agree right up to the range/time thing. Electric mobility devices on the street, with even the shitty infrastructure SF has, are like a cheat code to transit. Traffic can't go that fast in a dense city, so scooters and the like don't need to go that fast to outdo, or at least rival them. And as for range: SF is 7x7 miles, it's a very limited problem in a city. Plus, Lyft is introducing 20+ mile range heavy ebikes for trips which may be a bit beyond the city.

> At least with drones you could deploy relay style movement so the drones could move items between multiple drones, of various types and capabilities, to get the item to the final destination. Or work in tandem with the scooter people.

And none of this solves the root cause of traffic: personal mobility. Unless we're having drones ferrying people Jetsons style, i.e. helicopter noise all over the city, then this is just a pipe dream that doesn't alleviate traffic, but ruins the cityscape and dramatically increases noise pollution.

I'm definitely on the side of walkable and safe streets, but I guess I'm interested why you think drones would be a better option than delivery vehicles, or that they would deliver on the promise of a car free future?

Drones are loud, and it can't be avoided (they need to move air to provide lift, and doing so creates vibration - I.e noise). Cars are definitely loud but not on the scale of a swarm of drones.

Drones don't have the cargo capacity of, e.g. a moderately sized van.

We don't have the traffic management policies for low air traffic, and we do have those policies already for street traffic.

Most importantly, deliveries don't account for the majority of traffic: in fact, most commercial deliveries happen at off hours for traffic. If you eliminated deliveries in cities, you may get rid of some annoying double parked Amazon vans, but you wouldn't meaningfully reduce traffic. The majority of traffic is people in personal automobiles (usually one or two per several ton SUV).

We get walkable and safe streets by changing our building codes and parking requirements to make walkable neighborhoods legal to build. And by building useful public transit, at a local and regional level. And by incentivizing personal mobility options like (e-)bikes and scooters, while disinventivizing cars. But delivery vehicles, along with work trucks and vans: I have no problem with them staying exactly as is. If we get rid of the vast majority of personal vehicle traffic, then commercial delivery vans will be no big deal, and small deliveries will happen via ebikes and cargo ebikes. No need for drones!

That's an argument that's pretty hard to justify. Most zoning rules with parking minimums attempt to meet peak demand for free parking. Subsidized free parking means that all the extra spaces are paid for by the business regardless of whether they're used. So the business (and thus the customer) is always overpaying for parking, compared to some hypothetical business with no free parking, but reimburses all market-rate parking for visitors and employees. Of course, that hypothetical business could only exist in a dense or very pedestrianized area, and not all businesses are suited to zero-parking.

The point I'd make is that mandating minimums of free parking is absurd: businesses and developers could instead decide how much parking they anticipate their business would need. They could come up with many creative solutions somewhere between the extremes of zero parking and plentiful free parking depending on the area. In most towns and cities across America, except for a few dense urban cores, we mandate one extreme and the result is higher prices for everyone (including the non-drivers, who get to help pay for all that unused parking as well).

If there was already plentiful parking at your destination then the whole "cruising for parking" discussion is moot anyway, right? The concerns were about congested commutes to denser downtown areas where parking is difficult, or the date night into the city from the suburbs, etc. Difficult/expensive parking disincentivizes car trips there, and shifts them to public transit, ride share, and commuter rail, which are better suited for cities. If you weren't encountering difficulty finding street parking or paying steep garage prices, then of course you wouldn't suddenly be sending your AV on a joyride around town or letting random people use it as car share.

Much of this depends on the particular city's rules and when development happened. Off-street parking requirements have become far more common since the 1950s. Places that developed prior to this (and didn't dramatically re-develop) may not have this as much, since the rules would only apply to new development. I think a fair bit of the US northeast may fall under that category.

And, for instance, San Francisco has no required off-street parking, and has limits to off-street parking instead: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...

However, plenty of other places in the US are different. The rest of the Bay Area is quite sprawled, as are the areas of the Midwest I've spent time in.

I think it's a moonshot because it expects that we will have shared, open standards and protocols for all of this, which will either need to come from industry, or from regulators. Neither feels very likely. But then again, it could happen :)

Congestion pricing and market rate, unsubsidized parking _should_ be the default already. So let's start with those policies now :)

Exactly. Which means drivers are getting a great discount thanks to the people who don't use a car, and the non-drivers are getting a markup on all the prices they pay. And the non-drivers were already paying a huge amount to maintain car infrastructure (at least in the US) because the gas tax doesn't nearly cover it.

Now don't get me wrong, I understand the value of a public good. Grocery stores receive food via trucks on roads, so even non-drivers get the benefit of the road. The parking subsidy, however, is insidious because it's so much less visible. It's not a government investing in a public good: the city instead requires businesses to maintain off-street parking, and they pass that cost on to everyone. It lets everybody believe that parking, and driving altogether, is much cheaper than it really is, because the (actually enormous) parking costs are hidden away and subsidized by those who don't use it.

I mean, for sure there are some cool moonshot ideas. However I think it's pretty important to have some proof of concept or even a technical idea of how that would work before dismissing all of the concerns around congestion. Waving around "tech will save us" is really easy to do. (Especially when the solution to congestion already exists and is criminally underfunded.)

You're right that I did predicate that little rant on the idea that the majority of AVs would be personally owned and not part of a fleet. I'm sure that car share will come into play to some degree, but I do think it's tough to convince people who are used to their car being a personal, (relatively) private space that they can store nearly for free on public roads, to give that up. It's especially hard to convince the automobile industry that the incredibly profitable 1-2 car per household model should be pushed aside in order to manufacture fewer, shared vehicles. Cruise (i.e. GM) will not cannibalize their personal car sale business: they're using this as a way to get test data to build personal AVs. Maybe car share will increase over time, but we're not about to witness some revolution, especially if it reduces consumption or profit.

Wow, found the WEF conspiracy theorist :)

Sure, fair market pricing for parking via bidding would be amazing. Of course, there's decades of subsidies for parking built-in, but the price would still be much higher than you'd expect. (Check out "The High Cost of Free Parking" by Donald Shoup for a great overview of the huge public subsidy we already give cars, paid for by non-drivers).

You'd then need to price the time a vehicle spends on the road without an occupant. Otherwise you're just pushing people to send their cars around the block for an hour to avoid paying market rate for parking.

But it's hard to enforce the "unoccupied vehicle" rule, so it would be much better to just charge for all road use time in high congestion areas. Maybe... congestion pricing?

> Cars can park away from you and come back to pick you up. This should alleviate parking problems, and reduce parking-space-search based congestion on the street.

I know this sounds nice for just a moment, but if you consider it longer, it's awful. It won't decrease congestion, it will increase it. Why?

1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people will prefer to have their car nearby. It's not as if every car will altruistically drive to a far-off area. Since self driving cars have more patience than humans, they'll be on the road much longer searching for their parking. It may be more efficient to keep the car circling the block, which is even worse.

2. Parking availability is a major inhibitor of car trips, especially in cities. This is a good thing. If it becomes easier to "park" (ie leave your car driving on the street or send it away), that will induce more car trips, and more car trips means more congestion, until there's a new equilibrium (maybe a 7-minute parking search is eliminated, but it's replaced with 7+ minutes of traffic).

3. Pick-up and drop-off in cities is already difficult with rideshare services. If all personal vehicles are doing it as well, they'll definitely congest the curb lanes more. This is definitely a more solvable problem than the first two, but still an annoyance.

And for what it's worth, the 4-hour commute may be a bit far fetched, but it's hard to deny that many wouldn't mind an extra 20 minutes of commute time in traffic if they can relax, nap, read, watch a show, etc. People will chose that option more, adding more trips and more congestion, until an equilibrium is reached. Maybe it won't be 4-hour commute times but it will be a major increase and added congestion.

All of these extra miles traveled searching for parking, and adding extra congestion, are disastrous to cities and neighborhoods. Sure, the fossil fuel emissions alone would be awful, but suppose (charitably) that all autonomous vehicles are electric, and assume that their electricity generation is emission free (unrealistic for decades). The weight of EV batteries will dramatically increase road wear and tear, and they'll increase the pollution due to rubber tires, which are already the major source of microplastic pollution. And of course, it's a dramatic waste of energy from the power grid. And all of this is ignoring that dedicating that much road space storing to idling and parked vehicles is a no-good, terrible, awful way to utilize public space in a city or neighborhood, when it could be used by some efficient public transit, parks, and safer infrastructure for personal vehicles when necessary.

> [edit]: flake8, remarkably, dropped roughly an order of magnitude in performance between version 2 and 3. So that didn't help.

Sorry for the drive by, but did you try bisecting the flake8 change that slowed it down? Unless there were thousands of commits between releases, it would only take <10 runs to bisect, an automated bisect should be under an hour with a test case that takes a few minutes. Could be an interesting thing to try?