soiltype

What do you mean by notable?

The problems do diminish significantly if you need fewer lanes by half or more, and have fewer vehicles per person.

Low-density sprawl in the American style is impossible without cars. Streetcar suburbs could exist but those are necessarily more concentrated and again need less road coverage.

Nor can you say the sprawl is what people "actively want" when it's illegal to build to any other pattern in the vast majority of the country.

Guessing you're American is ad hominem?

Cars are not the solution to that. Hooligans and irritating people are just a possibility in literally every social environment, they always have been, and they always will be. Answers to that problem are social - it's a bigger problem in America than Japan, for exmaplem.

Answers which involve removing oneself from society (by entering a private car) are not good answers. And when you factor in the externalities, you're just displacing "I'm upset, possibly even unwell due to sleep lost" onto "we replaced 90% of the local natural environment with pavement and paint it with crushed human beings every single day".

Look I don't fault you - Americans drive cars because every alternative is absolute dogshit, I don't disagree. But I can't e realistic about that and not this:

> As for the environmental impact, I agree that trains or busses may sometimes be better for environment

That's like saying gunshots may sometimes be more dangerous than throwing rocks.

> but we’re also approaching a future of self driving electric cars powered by nuclear and fusion plants providing clean energy

Even if this was true (I don't think either change is happening nearly fast enough) car-dependency is directly upstream of numerous other environmental problems, most of which don't disappear even if you take parking out of the mix, such as grounds heat and flooding caused by paved roads, such as obsession with energy- and water-inefficient low-density residential zoning (sprawl), such as particulate pollution from tires, such as ecosystem damage from the need to dump literal tons of salt on icy roads for tires to drive on, such as the emissions of road paving itself... you get the idea.

None. Why would you think that? My guess is you're an American living nowhere near an urban rail system but I thought most people here would at least be passing familiar with modern trains. Even some American cities have them.

I don't think there's anything difficult or unpleasant about the process of letting the LLM run free, that's the whole point, it's nearly frictionless. Which includes not reviewing the code carefully. You say "need" but you mean "ought".

Personally I've found "carefully review every move it makes" to be an extremely unpleasant and difficult workflow. The effort needed to parse every action is immense, but there's a complete absence of creative engagement - no chance of flow state. Just the worst kind of work which I've been unable to sustain, unfortunately. At this point I mostly still do work by hand.

This comment is completely out of touch with how typical office workers use their computers. "Package manager" is your feldspars. But it's even worse than that, because you don't train for the typical employee, you train for the least-technical employee lest they become completely useless overnight.

It seems strange to you? It's natural to how I write - intentionally avoiding politeness would be weirder to me.

But aside from that, an LLM is only a roleplayer. Treat it like an idiot that makes mistakes and it will act like one. Treat it like a coworker who you respect and it will act like one, and it will find better results.

Obviously nothing about how they act is set in stone but as a general rule this seems to me to be both wise and, in my experience, true as well.

Yes

Yeah that's increasingly been my feeling as well. I have to keep prefacing my Kagi recommendations with, "web search is less and less useful every year, but..."

I still appreciate being able to customize rankings, bangs, and redirects. But with how utterly shit the web is overall, any web search is basically only good if you know the site(s) the answer(s) will be on. When you're searching for something novel-to-you, even Kagi is just going to show you a full page of unregulated slop on the dumbest, just-registered-this-year domains. Real information is increasingly limited to small islands of trust.

As a rule, "pop history" is full of shit and is probably better considered misinformation than anything else. I probably don't I know of a single general-audience history/anthropology book that doesn't horrify scholars of the field.

As unfortunate as it is, studying cause-and-effect is extremely complex. If it's even theoretically possible to distill it down to easily digestible ideas, that's well outside our current technical capabilities.

There's usually going to be some true and interesting information in these books, but it will be too deeply embedded in a narrative that is misleading.

Oh, I admit that I didn't finish the Rockefeller article, since it looked like more of the same. I can see now how it's satire.

Honestly though, I'm still not sure what the point of the vampires one is. Satire relies on the reader drawing some conclusions that aren't laid out, and I don't really see where it's trying to lead me in that respect. Is it that these billionaires are fools for following bunk research?

Interesting... I first went to the linked recent post What the Longevity Experts Don't Tell You. Sorry to be harsh: it was nonsense. It just lists a few weird, unscientific behaviours of John D Rockefeller and tries to draw lessons (to what end? longevity? is Rockefeller still alive?) from them despite there being no indication those behaviors even had any effect, let alone positive impact on longevity. It also doesn't bring up things "the longevity experts don't tell you," it's just summaries of topics in a single biography.

Still I gave this article a shot. I don't understand what it's doing. Like, one of the points about Thiel is that he destroyed Gawker to cover up his vampirism. He actually destroyed Gawker to cover up his relationship to Epstein, the pedophile and saboteur of US social/economic integrity. Why put a silly spin on that? I guess the entire thing is just a little joke... just doesn't feel like it belongs on the HN front page. I had higher expectations.

A bit of a meta lesson for me here: Writing a short, pointed, opinionated blog post is blogging. If I care about blogging my thoughts, I need to just do it, not worry about rigor or depth ahead of time

Hmm I see. So the grant makers are more of a problem here. And what are their incentives to fund ~bad research?

Actually yes you're 100% right, I phrased that badly

Thank you in advance for that! I barely use AI to generate code so I feel pretty lost looking at projects like this.

That feels arbitrary as a measure of quality. Why isn't new research simply devalued and replication valued higher?

"Dr Alice failed to reproduce 20 would-be headline-grabbing papers, preventing them from sucking all the air out of the room in cancer research" is something laudable, but we're not lauding it.

But that seems almost trivially solved. In software it's common to value independent verification - e.g. code review. Someone who is only focused on writing new code instead of careful testing, refactoring, or peer review is widely viewed as a shitty developer by their peers. Of course there's management to consider and that's where incentives are skewed, but we're talking about a different structure. Why wouldn't the following work?

A single university or even department could make this change - reproduction is the important work, reproduction is what earns a PhD. Or require some split, 20-50% novel work maybe is also expected. Now the incentives are changed. Potentially, this university develops a reputation for reliable research. Others may follow suit.

Presumably, there's a step in this process where money incentivizes the opposite of my suggestion, and I'm not familiar with the process to know which.

Is it the university itself which will be starved of resources if it's not pumping out novel (yet unreproducible) research?

...No. Not at all. Not in the case of Google and generally that's not "how life works". If it was true, why would Google spend so much money to be the default search engine in so many devices/browsers?

The skills of writing and coding atrophy when replaced by generative AI. The more we use AI to do thinking in some domain, the less we will be able to do that thinking ourselves. It's not a perfect analogy for car infrastructure.

Yeah Kagi is good, but the web is increasingly dogshit, so if you're searching in a space where you don't already have trusted domains for high quality results, you may just end up being unable to find anything reliable even with a good engine.

No, people hate being trapped without a car in an environment built exclusively to serve cars. Our love of cars is largely just downstream of negative emotions like FOMO or indignation caused by the inability to imagine traveling by any other mode (because on most cases that's not even remotely feasible anymore).

Considering the ubiquity and necessity of driving cars is overwhelmingly a result of intentional policy choices irrespective of what people wanted or was good for the public interest... actually that's quite a decent analogy for integrated LLM assistants.

People will use AI because other options keep getting worse and because it keeps getting harder to avoid using it. I don't think it's fair to characterize that as convenience though, personally. Like with cars, many people will be well aware of the negative externalities, the risk of harm to themselves, and the lack of personal agency caused by this tool and still use it because avoiding it will become costly to their everyday life.

I think of convenience as something that is a "bonus" on top of normal life typically. Something that becomes mandatory to avoid being left out of society no longer counts.

You think I was lying? About a good metal album existing? It's "The Splintered Oar", and I learned about it through Bandcamp's human curation. I hope this helps you get off Mr GPT's Wild Ride and engage with the art.

https://bindrunerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/the-splintered...

Oh. Why? I didn't see anybody arguing that DJing was random or unskilled.

> knowing about my music taste

As with almost all arguments against exercising privacy, this is merely a failure of imagination on your part. Spotify doesn't give a shit about your taste.

Next time you listen to music, think about all the possible data that could be observed simply from you pressing play. What time of day is it? What day of the week? Which device are you using? Where is that device? Is this an unusual genre for you at 8pm? And so on. "You listen to indie rock" is harmless data. "We know the all your emotional states from the past 10 years and also those of your whole family" is at least a little scarier, right?

Combining large amounts of data about how you use a single app can tell a lot about your life. You may say this is overblown, but if you do want to hold a true belief instead of a convenient one, start by acknowledging the enormous amounts of data Spotify actually has about who you are and how you live.

Tidal and Qobuz are good, if you need a streaming service, although Qobuz is much less oriented around "pick a vibe and press play". They might not have exactly the things you like about Spotify, but as far as sacrifice goes, if you feel Spotify should be abandoned for ideological reasons, it's trivial.

It's very hard for me to see how someone could believe this unless they never even tried to actually find new music. I just bought a great new metal album (human made) yesterday.