cryptoz

Same in the US. I would love to take the train from Seattle to SF, but, it costs so much more than a flight would, and takes a very long time compared. Sleeper cars make the price nearly double, and for such a long trip, train seats without a sleeper are somehow worse than plane seats.

I have taken many Amtrak short trips, like 1h, and 50% of the time the train leaves more than 1h late (and 100% it leaves late, some amount). So I leave my departure location after I was meant to arrive at my arrival location.

In 2005 I took a night train from Budapest to Belgrade, but not really - the ticket I paid for, the platform sign, the ticket agent, all told me that. But once on the train passing the border, the passport checker told me that the route hadn't gone to Belgrade in some time, and that I would be dumped at 2am in Novi Sad, where I was meant to buy a bus ticket. Tickets closed and Euros not accepted. Was a difficult time to resolve, but I bought overpriced Dinars from some travellers with my Euros and got a last minute ticket. Arrived in Belgrade to find 0 hotel rooms due to a football match.

I love trains. But the process needs improvement, just like airplanes. Long-distance travel without a car is honestly quite difficult in Europe and USA imo.

Planes will sell you tickets that don't exist and then pretend like a night in a hotel makes up for it. They abuse you at security. They treat you like trash and everybody deals with it.

Please make trains better, Amtrak, and EU. Please.

Super cool and insane ambition, but I don't get the part about the Dyson sphere. I don't see that as a guaranteed requirement to accomplish the goals set out, and it's going to be insanely controversial. That part seems like a solution looking for a problem, to be built mostly because it's 'cool'.

But I don't want to rain on the parade of long-term, crazy-ambition in space, so I think this is pretty awesome overall. But planning unilaterally to build a dyson sphere will definitely make you a lot of enemies on Earth.

Otherwise, godspeed.

I also find Twitter nearly impossible to follow. The threaded model is difficult to build a mental model around, you must click/tap endlessly to read a whole thread, I see error messages daily that are incorrect ("this tweet has been deleted" when it has not, or "offline" notices when it is not, etc), significant confusion on tweet metrics (reply count is sometimes visible, sometimes not?), etc. I could go on forever about my issues with it.

Been on since 2009, follow/followed by a few hundred people, use reddit since 2006, blahblah. Reddit isn't great either but I find it a lot less confusing to read on a day-to-day basis. At least old reddit...new reddit is quite confusing IMO in many of the same ways twitter is.

If I had to guess I would vote with other commenters here who are saying that the UX is likely on purpose, and has been built with metrics in mind and not user comprehension.

It's not entirely clear to me that this was legal in the first place - surely there are light pollution laws in Dallas? And also 'disturbing the peace' laws, etc. I wonder if there are any chance of legal consequences for stunts like this.

I was wondering why this was here, figuring most on HN know already about this. However I did chuckle reading to the end; in case others missed it:

> At the 94th Academy Awards, Chris Rock congratulated Denzel Washington on his performance in The Tragedy of Macbeth, saying the name of the Scottish play aloud in the Dolby Theatre. Moments later, Rock was slapped by Will Smith after making a joke about Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Viewers, including playwright Lynn Nottage, quickly took to social media to joke that Rock had suffered the curse of the Scottish play

What a take. So from your perspective, the developing world that has largely skipped wired connections for their connectivity is all doing 'toy' stuff, not real work? There are literally billions of people with Wifi/Cell but no wired connection, you're just going to write them off as never having what it takes to do SeriousBusiness (tm)?

That you're privileged enough to consider, even emotionally, the majority of the world's connections as 'toys' is something you should recognize. Way more SeriousBusiness happens on Wifi/Cell than I think you expect, and writing off that large (and growing) group is honestly ridiculous.

On the other end of the spectrum, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk, etc, did/do so much of their work on Wifi/Cell only that it seems insane to think that they are just doing 'toy' stuff as well.

I was on a plane about 10 years ago working on a global network of barometers for weather forecasting research using phones as sensors, and the flight attendant told me rudely to 'put away my toys now'. I've been upset at this ever since, so I'm sorry if this comes off as rude too, but honestly, wtf. I'm working on real stuff, nothing to do with 'toys', as are so many people.

Belittling the Wifi/Cell revolution is a mistake IMO.

You say that this prompt is "very obvious" but I strongly disagree.

> Open With

> (Samsung Internet) (Chrome) (Firefox) (Firefox Focus)

> Just Once | Always

I'm an android developer and have been for more than 10 years. I get messed up at this kind of prompt sometimes, and just the other day I thought to myself, 'surprised google hasn't improved that yet '

I'm sure 99%+ global android users find the experience confusing.

Both can be true. Temps don't need to be below freezing for lots of snow to fall.

Sorry for the source quality. I don't know if the article is true. But if true,

> The hacking team has said that Russian officials have "no more control over their spy satellites."

is a very interesting development.

I figured that one was for radiation, not covid.

"FWIW", the last president declared that climate change was a hoax invented by China to make the US weaker. I don't know about "official position of any political office" but "climate change is a hoax" (or similar) is a common position on one half of the US political divide.

While that is a part of it, I have also heard that the virality was somewhat forced by journalists writing about wordle endlessly: as fans of word games themselves, journalists boosted its popularity in the earlier days, driving a lot of the 'viral' traffic.

I used to think that, but no longer. Many of them are true believers in flat earth, and also, are convinced of hundreds of other things that aren't true either.

Sure lots are trolls. But there are lots and lots (majority of the movement) are real believers.

Instagram stole @sussexroyal from a real user, and gave it to some entitled "royals" who used the account for like a year before dropping it. So annoying how your handle isn't your handle, it's the company's, and they will steal your handle at a whim.

I never even figured out why the "Royals" wanted specifically @sussexroyal or whatever it was so badly. The Royals can't even be like the rest of us and pick a handle that is available, they have to be like "well no we deserve this one even though someone has it already"

> everything built up a nice 1-2 inches of ice so power went out. Again way worse than tornadoes.

Somewhere around 100 people died just last night in these tornados. I think your couple inches of ice and power outage and fences in cars is not so bad compared to these tornados last night.

Right but you can't climb that. The author's math ignores the real context of climbing and uses a google search for the math. But no climber can climb the full altitude due to the physical geography. There's nobody that can relate to climbing that altitude on one mountain because the physical ground isn't like that.

I guess what I'm saying is the AI is showing better understanding of climbing context than the author is giving credit for.

A good article, I appreciate all the discussion on prompts too. However the author is a bit too underestimating of the language model and math:

> GPT-3 is quick to learn that the narratives should include these comparisons, but often gets the maths wrong:

> > During these runs he has climbed 62,599 feet, that’s the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest six times (but a bit less steep)

> Everest is ~29,000 feet, so this runner has climbed Everest roughly twice.

I think it's the author here who gets the math wrong. An Everest climb is closer to 10,000 feet, making the GPT-3 math alarmingly accurate.

Fantastic link, thanks for that. Got me even more excited for JWST!

I have started to wonder, will it ever be possible to 'see' the big bang? How close can we get to measuring that far back? From what I've seen JWST will be able to peer back to just a few hundred million years after the big bang. What are the limit to seeing even further back? Is it a matter of telescope size, will an even larger telescope by definition be able to see even further back? What is the limit?

Macromedia Flash era was the best for authoring IMO. But I was just a hobbyist, didn't use it professionally.

I've lived on the 2nd and 3rd floors of triplexes in the plateau and it was one of the best living experiences I've had. Really awesome location, price, size, etc.

> but I want to see all that fleshed out properly before I dive into it and leverage it.

Why? Why wait for a while? Why is "leveraging" your goal for it? What does this even mean? 20 years ago were you waiting for things to get fleshed out online before you leverage it? Whatever that means.

No I don't find the web dull. Been here 23 years, always found fascinating stuff. Yes it is different now but also we have aged.

> Other than that, the web seems kinda boring lately.

Sorry but I think it is you not the web here.

Why not? I've found this advice to be harmful. Lots of extreme malice happens under the cover of incompetence.

It's like this in Tacoma, WA right now. An Uber or Lyft may never arrive. 5-10 cancelled drivers before the car arrives is normal. A notice saying "No cars available" is shown 70-80% of the time for XL size cars. Often it takes 1h or so to get a ride. Sometimes it will come in 4 minutes, sometimes it will say 4 minutes but then 5+ drivers cancel and it takes an hour of real time, while the app just says 4 minutes.

I have come to depend on Lyft and Uber and they are failing me and have been for a long time now. So long that I now plan to get a driver's license and a car. I don't know how else to make it in this world. If you're at a business and it's closing soon, and raining outside, you are likely to be outside in the cold and rain for 30 minutes waiting for a car.

It's ridiculous. I'm giving up and have already booked my written drivers test for WA.

Well, we did have a need for it but we just chose to ignore that need. Something like 30,000 people died every year from the regular flu in the USA alone, before pandemic. Social distancing (and masks) would bring that number to close to 0.

So if we're going by metrics of, we'd like to save 30,000 people every year, we absolutely had a need for social distancing all this time. But I get it, our society has a large tolerance for mass death, so in that view, we "didn't have much need for it". But taking that view we still don't have any need for it.

Obviously from my perspective we've had a need for it this whole time but just blissfully ignored that fact.

> But I'm at a loss as to how this situation could blossom into something so ridiculous.

This is one of the least ridiculous things Republicans have done in the last few years.

> Taxes are higher in Europe, which disincentivizes risk taking and ambitious individuals.

This seems backwards to me. A society with higher taxes typically has better social safety nets, better infrastructure, less corruption, etc. Higher-tax societies incentivize risk-taking, not the other way around, especially for "ambitious individuals". When there is more structure and support around, more people are able to take a leap.

Giving $80M to each side in a war is no lock on a smart solution. Such a move could easily worsen the war, destroy the tanker anyway, and anger from millions towards whoever's give that 'gift'. There is potential direct loss of life from such payments in addition to additional environmental impact.

Users correcting the weather in-app is a huge curiosity of mine. I first blogged about that like 8 years ago for a now-defunct project: http://www.jacobsheehy.com/2013/12/locally-crowdsourced-weat...

I have also re-implemented this feature in All Clear on Android [1]. My main lesson from all this so far is that it is useful and fun to collect and show the data, and real insights can be had by users seeing their peers' data, but incorporating the data into a model usefully is a bit more difficult! Making numerical predictions that actively use the user's weather data (rather than just showing 'x users say it is raining nearby even though the forecast says it shouldn't be') is much tougher.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...

There isn't enough info in the article to know exactly what is happening, but the problem with most of these systems (my first attempt 10 years ago, or Dark Sky, others as well) is that they use existing rainfall and wind speed to make guesses about where the rain will move. They typically fail at making real weather predictions; new rain starting to fall is a simple example that is often missed by these kinds of predictions.

The article just says "maps" but doesn't say what the data is. Rainfall amount? Just rainfall or also wind maps? What other maps?

Curious to see how this works in reality. Most of these attempts can be impressive sometimes, but fail often enough to make it not reliable for real use. However I am extremely optimistic about the future of increasing weather prediction accuracy, including with AI models as well as traditional physics models.

We'll see I guess.