haweemwho

What is a street if not a space shared with others? Worse, everybody else on the street (pedestrians, cyclists, ...) who is sharing the street with your car is suffering from you using the car by taking up disproportionally much space, needing disproportionally much maintenance and causing disproportionally much noise.

Imagine an inner city without cars. Cities in which this is a reality are a bliss to be in. And people get in and out just fine.

Trains are also much safer, more energy efficient and have lower TCO than a car fleet with similar capacity.

> frequently travel at a fraction of their capacity.

The average occupancy of a car with 5 seats is only marginally above 1. So, 20-25%? The average occupancy of a European streetcar is far above that.

> Properly sized and routed electric vehicles are much more efficient in terms of cost per mile, travel time, and almost any other metric.

Just as much as you can optimize those factors in electric cars can you optimize them in trains/trams/buses/...

The total cost of driving around people individually in cars is substantially higher than the total cost for public transit with similar convenience and significantly higher throughput. (This is including upfront infrastructure investments and maintenance.)

Seems Americans are just too used to staring at a 2 ton steel can in front of them.

Exactly. People are already occupying public resources for their private luxury (in the form of parking on public street in front of their house), nobody would think twice just letting the thing circle. Especially in places where parking costs money, which will then only be a thing for people who can't afford self-driving add-ons or need to charge the thing.

> Parking lots essentially switch from random access (which requires expensive unoccupied 'lanes') into a slowly snaking space-filling curve.

Why would they? You still need to get the car to unpark itself when the owner needs it?

Oh, you mean everybody shares cars with everybody? What about letting sections of that "snake" just drive around, stopping at different spots and let people enter and leave? And perhaps let them walk around inside? Congratulations, you've just re-invented public transit.

Congratulations, you just reinvented public transit.

> self-driving cars could cooperatively pack/unpack themselves

This is unlikely to ever happen. Even in the human-driver world, there would be huge potential to have cars communicate directly with each other. Never materialized.

That's not an inherent issue with public transit vs. individual transport though. You are comparing a really bad public transit implementation with a good implementation of individual transport. In many European cities, getting from A to B by public transit is much faster than by car since they don't focus so much on car infra, with all the downsides it brings (huge areas reserved for 10-lane highways and parking everywhere, air pollution, cost of owning/leasing/insuring, ...). If you get good public transit infra, life has one issue less to worry about.

It's pretty neat, I've moved to a European city recently myself and I'm slightly horrified at the prospect of moving back.

I fully agree.

And what an anticlimactic article. The only ugly piece of craft on this page is his "computer". It's useless too, which is fine, art can be useless, but I have a hard time seeing the esthetic value. In the eye of the beholder, sure. But it feels like my 5-year old having painted something in pre-school and showing it to me. Sure he's proud. Sure I'll praise him. But is it art? Well..

What do the GHC folks (or anybody from the Haskell community) say about your work?

Thanks for the balanced feedback. It's not too far from the impression I got. I do take Lafont and Girard seriously and have greatest respect for them.

It's a scam. Don't bother.

Alright, let me be the skeptic here and ask. Honest question, not intending to just dismiss anybody outright. But I have questions.

I've looked up Victor Taelin and his HighOrderCo company that supposedly just raised $4.5M. So here we have this Brazilian guy who graduated university in 2017, and I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just a fact, a data point. Fresh ideas are always welcome. From his Twitter feed seems to be deeply into the crypto space. He is over- or at least heavily upselling this HVM project as the future of computing. Lots of fuzz about interaction nets and linear logic and that this is the next thing after Turing Machines and Lambda calculus. Ok, strong claims. It makes me a tad suspicious though. Outperforming GHC? Running a new chain that's not a chain so it's not a crypto currency, but somehow it's a chain, but it's formally verified, hm, ok. And how can he strongly claim this to be the superior thing if he just announced how to model complex numbers in his HVM project, and that GPT-4 helped him get this insight? I'd have expected Clifford Algebras to be basic knowledge for everybody working in this space.

I'm only superficially familiar with ETH, with Haskell's GHC, with Rust, with HOTT. But, I'd like to hear from people who know more than I do, and who are not already obvious fanboys of HighOrderCo with submarine PR interests -- how much weight should I put into this? Is it worth reading about, getting my head busy? I've spent an hour now trying to check up on things, but apart from a lot of fluff and quite a lot of technical jargon that went above my head, I'm left confused.

Is there something or is this just supposed to confuse me to get into the next scam?

Edit: Just to add to this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35344514 discusses an article written about the underlying tech. It's a terrible article on the level of a newcomer to programming who doesn't know much about functional programming and even admits as much. Victor Taelin comments with "Very well written and beautiful article." This must be a scam. I'll stop wasting my time on this until somebody manages to convince me otherwise.