FWIW, I thought that initial quote was very relevant but was also glad you didn't waste a paragraph explaining what everyone knows, that over-emphasizing publication and citation counts and grant money raised is killing academic research. I don't have good ideas either. In the age of AI, cheap metrics and metric hacking are only going to become more prominent.
Just wanted to give a shout out to PJ Library for anyone (willing to claim that they are) Jewish. There is a free service where they send a free book a month. I'm ethnically Jewish but not religious at all. Don't support the current Isreali regime at all. Etc. And I love the books. They are not religious books. My kids favorite one is about a penguin and an elephant and going to grandma's house for dinner.
I'm in the same boat with 2-year-olds. It's been years but Narnia is very Christian / bible coded right? I guess it's fine to read to a little one, but I'd be kind of hoping that doesn't become their favorite book series. Or am I overreacting? I'm not letting my kids near Ayn Rand when they are older :p. Phantom Toolbooth would be great.
It's so funny seeing most of the comments, plus the original article, implying that roundabouts are always better or always worse than traffic signals. As someone who used to be a Transportation Engineering professor, they have a time and place where they outperform traffic signals but it's definitely not everywhere. It is known and there are many traffic simulation software tools that will give you a pretty good indication of what will happen if you put a roundabout here or a traffic signal there.
This thread reminds me of when my libertarian friend was explaining to me how traffic shows how everything can work well when everyone acts in their own self interest. Well, sure, except for all the traffic laws, the difference between User and System Optimal that traffic engineers spend much of their lives trying to bridge, and, you know, the fact that it took an enormous effort by government to build smooth roads and put up signs everywhere. Sigh. I'm not saying Transportation Engineering is the most important, innovative field, but funny things happen when not transportation engineers talk about transportation systems.
I just switched from a Whoop to the Fitbit Air. Whoop wanted $350 for a subscription fee which I just found really ridiculous. It's only been a few days, but the Fitbit Air might even be better at tracking sleep. And it looks like it can periodically, automatically check for Afib unlike the Whoop (?). The rest looks a little worse. But worth it to avoid a subscription fee. Not sure how Whoop stays in business TBH.
I wonder how much of this is caused by income inequality. There are some young people I talk to that are genuinely worried about whether AI will take all the jobs. But there are a lot more that rightfully realize that they probably can't afford the middle class life their parents had and are annoyed at all the money AI is hoovering up and how rich these CEOs are. And that's the surface level. There's all sorts of resentment that hasn't really been thought through and wouldn't exist if we had the sort of real growth in lower- and middle-class incomes that we used to.
Worked in this area for a couple of years. We have automated collision avoidance systems and have for years. But things can go off nominal fast and you don't want passenger aircraft making drastic maneuvers that fast. Because conditions can change so fast, queueing theory isn't that useful either. It's useful for more strategic as opposed to tactical air traffic control, what we call air traffic flow management. There's been a ton of research in this area for decades, for example at the National Center of Excellence in Aviation Operations Research (NEXTOR) and at NASA's Aviation Systems division. I could say a lot more offline about why, in my humble opinion, progress has been unbelievably slow, but the short answer is that it's government plus modern day academia operating in an environment where funding is low and risk tolerance is lower.
I think this line of thinking is a bit dangerous. It reminds me when I used to teach in a Civil Engineering department and the other faculty members focused exclusively on how well our coursework prepared our students to become civil engineers. Of course, very few of our students actually did become civil engineers and those that did both required years of additional training and often didn't last long in the profession before transitioning to something else. I used to teach maths and decision making. Had numerous students thank me later on for teaching some of the only material they actually used in their (non-civil-engineering) careers. No one knows what students will do post graduation. One of the best things we can do is to give them tools that are broadly useful.
I had a particularly bad experience with a hotel in Silicon Valley that had outsourced the front desk duties to remote workers. I was stuck outside in the rain, fighting a bad internet connection, trying to check-in. Probably saved them the space taken up by a front desk inside the hotel but I made a mental note never to use that hotel chain again.
This is basically my professional career. I've stayed 5+ years at the same place now and it's gotten to the point where people ask for me to build an optimization before it's even clear they have a problem amenable to optimization. Yay! My work has a good rep. But also I'm called upon entirely too frequently to explain work I did years ago or to answer questions like which constraint "comes first". Honestly it's getting very tiring. I think a switch to a new company would help but I wonder what will happen to the optimization work at my current company after I leave. It's weird that such a useful academic field still feels like black magic to much of corporate America. I guess it's just sophisticated enough.
The two things you reference are very loosely related. I studied Transportation Engineering in the Civil department at UC Berkeley. I have always been very interested in public transportation. But I work as a Data Scientist in Silicon Valley rather than at one of the public transportation agencies. Because it pays roughly 10x as much. Every single one of the smartest people I went to school with is also now working in tech in Silicon Valley. A lot work on stuff like advertising optimization. Sigh.
Yes! I'm "only" a parent of 3 and live nowhere near my coworkers and would be happiest never going to the office. I have been told to travel across the country to HQ every 2 months for vague reasons. I wish I could better articulate to my managers the costs of this policy to my family. Usually female managers understand.
Hmmm... On the one hand, yes, silt deposition would tend to expand the delta and that's what you saw over the last 5,000 years up until the 1930's. And yes, it was work done by the Corps of Engineers to fix the course of the Mississippi River that broke this system. That plus logging, oil and gas extraction, and tons of other "local land use" things then led to sinking ground levels. As the article mentions, the governor cancelled a(n expensive) effort that would have resulted in more silt deposition ... in the general area that most experts think would have helped.
On the other hand, the silt wasn't ever being deposited in large quantities in New Orleans itself, but more in other places. The delta is huge. New Orleans is famously below sea level and always has been. There's always been hurricanes. It's always been dangerous to live there and I'm not sure you can blame the dynamic nature of the river.
Oh hey, something I used to work on. The story here is coastal erosion / land subsidence much more than it is sea level rise, although that is a contributing factor. The land subsidence has been caused by Engineering works of the past, including the construction of levees and floodwalls around the city. When I worked on this a decade ago, we were already telling people outside of the city to move and spending a fortune to protect people inside the city. The most cost-effective option is often getting people to move, but good luck convincing everyone. Also this is such a shame because New Orleans is one of the most unique, charming places in the US.
The Southern Strategy destroyed the GOP as we knew it. It is now the party of dumb. Say that and you get accused of being elitist, but it's the truth. You can win elections as the party of dumb. But, man, it's tough being dumb in the USA today. There's so much misinformation and marketing of harmful products.
It's interesting that taxis and shared vehicles came so many years before buses. Also interesting to think about through the lens of aviation. I wonder how soon after we had powered flight someone launched a commercial fixed route service. And how much economics has to do with all of this.
If you read the article, it's mainly about data centers. Which is understandable regardless of your feelings about the technology. There's a ton of money, energy, labor, water, etc. going into building and operating data centers. It's a big change and a big topic for a lot of local governments. Because there's so much money involved and local government is so dysfunctional, there's also at least the appearance of the public will being given short shrift.
Then you add in on top of that people hearing that everyone's job is in jeopardy, like right now, even if it's not really true. Plus rumors about how untrustworthy people like Sam Altman are. Not to mention that they are San Francisco elites. Lawsuits. Cozying up to Trump. Etc. It's not surprising most of the sentiment around AI is incredibly negative and getting more negative by the day.
Can you really think deeply in 20 min, while on zoom or in a meeting room?
I think this gets to the heart of my complaint. I thought this would increase the water level on our technical discussions. It hasn't. Like I say, could be the documents or people are poor. In any event, I'm one person that believed in this right up until my org implemented it.
Well they don't say they didn't read the thing. But 10-20 minutes often isn't enough time to truly digest the arguments. And even it were, I'm not sure it would matter. What I've seen is 10-20 minutes of awkward silent time followed by a level of discussion that isn't notably better than meetings before we adopted Amazon ways. Probably we are doing it wrong and/or have the wrong people in the room.
We have a bunch of Amazon transplants who newly arrived at my company and have started doing this. I thought I would love it, because I'm a good writer, a great reader, not great at PowerPoint or meeting gamesmanship, etc. Turns out I kind of hate it. The silent reading time is annoying, especially when you've already read the doc or when most people are on zoom, etc. The intellectual bloodbath doesn't happen at my company. The most senior people are given the floor and they usually spout nonsense because they haven't had time to read the doc, are miles away from the intellectual details, are too busy playing office politics, etc. And then there's just as much meeting gamesmanship as before. I was hoping decision would be more scientific but that just hasn't happened. Maybe we're doing it wrong. Maybe we've hired the Amazon rejects. I don't know. Hoping it improves.
On the one hand, this is a clean post that explains exactly what a lot of us have been thinking and seeing on the job at large organizations doing tech work. Dear Author, I agree with you 110% and want everybody else to come to understand what you have written.
On the other hand, it feels like we've been over this tens of times recently, on HN specifically and IRL at work. Another blog post isn't going to convince leaders that this is how the world works when they are socially and financially incentivized to pretend like AI really will speed things up. So now I just wait for their AI projects to fail or go as slowly as previous projects and hope they learn something.
I agree with the 2 separate groups theory, but I don't buy that the group that produces "copy/paste junk" is the much larger group. I think in most mega-corps, there is a huge existing code base, there are huge organizational challenges, and there is huge hierarchy with most people not being the junior juniors. 90+% of the work is "not coding." Probably way, way more if we include the middle managers. At startups, there is a lot of "copy/paste junk" but also often a decent amount of push the boundary new stuff. I don't know. I've been in the industry for 8 years now and it's been really rare to see the actual coding being the bottleneck or even the thing that takes the majority of the time.
I don't understand this reply. Yes, I solve problems all the time. And that usually requires thinking deeply about the problem. And that deep thought is difficult when I'm getting constantly pinged about other stuff.