pj_mukh

Along these lines wouldn’t it be better to require ships to add some forward facing underwater radar to watch out for whale strikes? Or am I missing something here?

"My theory is once the novelty wears off..."

FWIW, for a lot of us in the city, the novelties been off for a while. It's now completely replaced uber/lyfts for me, because the driver is a lot more patient, especially with loading children (mini-car seat installation, strollers et al.) and a 100% of my rides have been completely uneventful, no notes, no garbage, no "wAyMo in AccIdeNt". My wife feels safe taking them at night.

I realize digital journalism has no space for this, but I wish there was space for the rest of the public to get messages like: "this service came up and is boringly being used as intended".

Super cool! Though cloud cover disabling your detection technique may make this infeasible for anything but low-altitude drones.

One small nit: Calling Ray-tracing "Not AI" is like calling Matrix Math "Not AI". It's definitely a core component of a lot Machine Perception (i.e. AI) tasks.

I'm guessing OP meant "Without using any costly CNN or Transformer inferencing", which is actually a clever achievement.

Basic social security yield math.

Super interesting! Rapid Storage especially, very useful, but that first line:

"Today's innovation isn't born in a lab or at a drafting board; it's built on the bedrock of AI infrastructure. "

Uhh..No. Even as an AI developer I can tell that is some AI Comms person tripping over.

I think the nuance here is that the income in Universal Basic Income is a stand-in for "everyone's basic needs should be met". But income doesn't guarantee that, because prices go up and down for a variety of reasons.

What people actually want is Universal Basic Buying Power. I should be able to get a roof over my head, get food and an education. It sucks that it's this complicated but in terms of government policy sometimes UBI is cash handouts, other times it should be supply-side investments, and as the original commenter laid out, none of these research experiments are running that experiment.

“it wasn't a NIMBY vs YIMBY thing -- both wanted development”

This distinction isnt the most important point here but this is very much NIMBY-ism. Blocking a development because the community has different opinions about what should be built, particularly opinions they don’t want to fund via their tax dollars is basically textbook NIMBY-ism.

Let’s strike a deal. Let’s take the current city design boards and repurpose them so that instead of micromanaging stucco colors and setbacks they’re micromanaging visual advertising.

Housing gets cheaper, visual advertising disappears.

This feels like pretty typical millennial sensibilities (including me). We don't like class differences made explicit via performative gestures. The fact that they are happening even if you don't participate is irrelevant.

I like lush beautifully designed resorts, my room cleaned, and top-notch local fare room service, but all the other service song-and-dance, the waiting on you hand and foot (as is typical in some developing nations), I can do without.

After 35, you don't like traveling but boy do you like 'Vacationing'.

Author is right, after you travel (and slum it a bit) you realize that after surface level cultural/food/history differences everyone kinda/sorta wants similar things in life and while people's life stories are interesting, you start noticing patterns.

OTOH, (Caveat:I don't have enough money for this) there is nothing that recharges you more than first class tickets somewhere beautiful and getting pampered in a resort. People (esp in their 20's) poo poo this. Rightly so, you should be experiencing the "real culture". But me, I've done that already, I'm gonna sit in the Four Seasons.

P.S: Another thing I'd suggest the author try is fitness trips! Big Hikes, marathons, surfing competitions? Nothing speedruns cultural competency like doing a really difficult thing somewhere new. Get Travel insurance.

"incentivize higher wages in a way that set rates make producers more profitable if they paid workers more"

That sounds amazing..how would that work?

To add to this:

Most good founders (regardless of market fit) should be figuring out sales engines themselves. Especially the first version.

I would not invest in a company where the founder is trying to offload sales. Precisely because, as mentioned, sales, market fit and product are so deeply interlinked.

Of course! Nothing I said precludes this. Lots of collaboration is used for selfish means.

"would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans."

I'm tired of this line. We are animals first and foremost. Complicated animals, but animals nonetheless. We will never consistently be this. The best of us will try but most of us will animalistically react to the incentives in front of us in selfish ways.

We are better of thinking of systems and the incentives they create than hopelessly waiting for us to become not animals. Aligning good goals with personal profit is the name of the game.

You're calling a President hammering every nail with a Tariff hammer and who wants every neighborhood to use zoning to sue property rights out of existence but calling it "deregulation", who's using simplified labels here?

In fact most of the critiques I've read, go something like: "He's obviously right, but I don't like it cuz it smells like something bad from the 80's".

NIMBY-ism vs YIMBY-ism isn't some margin difference. It's Klein's whole thesis.

“ Okay. So the abundance agenda calls for an expert-laden, big-government apparatus to build high-speed rail, and a lean skeleton crew that outsources all the key logistics and execution layers to the private sector for a mass vaccination campaign. It’s difficult to detect a usable framework here.”

Having read about 4 different critiques of the book, this maybe closest to a well thought out one. However, it still gives in to the hyper-partisan times looking for a straightforward template to apply in every situation when actually “it depends” is the right answer.

How to build quickly and efficiently while managing everyone’s expectation is tricky business and not every situation will fall neatly under left-right (big government or small government?!) dichotomies!

The core thesis is to optimize to build quick not for some consistent politics du jour.

Nah, University is too late to fix this. But clearly kids aren’t fully “passing” their high school and probably middle school skills.

Mass failings while satisfying has an air of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. As a parent I can see the mass pull towards phones, practically impossible to disentangle save for simple surgical regulation.

No one should be allowed to have phones in class. That’s it.

We don't really have to look for an explanation. The author says it, pure and clear.

"It’s the phones, stupid"

That's it. Every other variable, including the transactional nature of acquiring a middle class job, has stayed the same. People are just getting dumber [1], and the phones are causing this drop.

I am as tech forward as the next person. I think AI deserves the time to figure out what it is. But the phones have basically shown us where all their negatives and positives are. Time to regulate, get the phones out of the schools. If you're in one of these states [2] get behind the active legislation, if not, start it!

[1]: https://theweek.com/science/have-we-reached-peak-cognition

[2]: https://apnews.com/article/school-cell-phone-bans-states-e6d...

This maybe a little reductionist. To bring the jet engine and/or microprocessor to a point where it could uplift all boats took probably millions of people. You can choose to be one of those people and you'd be working on something amazing. You don't have to be the originator, the follow-on supporters are just as important.

Yup. Political problems irrelevant to the tech. Also a lot more attainable/manageable than an expansive permanent UBI.

That seems like a transitory problem already solved by government programs such as extended unemployment and adult training programs.

The problem is still more people's willingness to cede the status of their current jobs to take up new ones. That's still the hardest part.

I've seen no evidence for there being "not enough jobs". The problem (as always) is the status associated with the job.

There is a real dearth of people wanting to work the trades, but no one wants those jobs. I'm not sure how to solve that problem, even I don't want that job.

"I was thinking last night. Shouldn't <all innovation> we make help people instead of replacing them? Why must innovation be in the direction of and at the cost of replacing humans?"

-Humans when electricity replaced lamplighter jobs [1]

[1]: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/learning-from-automation...

Yea which is why I started with “hate to use this argument”. Definitely anecdotal but the kernel of truth is that income and rent going up could be a correlation with a different causation and as many have pointed out in this thread the paper inadequately controls for this.

This is especially dangerous now as papers can be used as hard truths in a misinfo driven information culture to see policy.

Yes, this. Also, hate to use this argument but this simply doesn't match my lived experience. My rent and income have been going up for the last 10 years and yes that means I'm paying more and more for housing. However, my city rubber-stamped a glut of housing in one neighborhood and as my income went up, I was able to negotiate my rent down.

This phenomenon is a direct contradiction to the thesis of this paper. It is true, the people who people the glut of housing are currently freaking out because their margins are threatened. That's probably a good thing..upto a point [1].

The solution seems simple: rubber-stamp, nay, encourage developers into building gluts of housing so they demolish their own margins into dropping the price of housing.

[1] https://oaklandside.org/2025/02/14/oakland-downtown-apartmen...

I meant Alexa the home assistant (100M MAU, currently mostly setting timers), not Alexa the web-based chat tool that no one uses.

Once Alexa (the home assistant) gets Claude capabilities natively, I can see it becoming infinitely more useful.

Take the L man, you are sitting on 3 countries worth of GDP in cash. Buy Mistral, move on. That's what Amazon (basically) did and they're about to ship [1].

[1]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...

I always saw Stoicism as “things around you are going to be really screwed up and panicking about it will make it worse”

The first part of that sentence is opposite to what the author here suggests.