tfehring

I don't follow.

The fertility rate has decreased significantly for US-born women of every race and ethnicity since the 1990s. I couldn't quickly find good stats on trend in birth control usage or labor force participation by race, ethnicity, or immigration status, but I'm skeptical that the trend is in the opposite direction for any particular demographic.

So I expect the claims in my previous comment still hold even for, e.g., native-born whites as a subgroup: flat-to-decreasing birth control usage, declining labor force participation, but still declining fertility rate. Obviously the magnitudes of those changes may be different at the subgroup level, but I don't see how the data is compatible with the claims of the comment I initially replied to.

This is surely part of the story historically, but not recently. Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s in the US, while total fertility rate is down ~20% since then. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002

The timing for those factors doesn’t match the timing of the fertility decline in the US.

Birth control usage is slightly down since the mid 90s. Among sexually active women not trying to get pregnant, the rate has been flat since 2002. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-unit...

Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002

It’s hard to see how a stronger social safety net would decrease birth rates, but that has actually also decreased, e.g. from welfare reforms in 1996.

Meanwhile, total fertility is down ~20% over the ~30 year period since then.

I don’t think the evidence either way is strong enough to call that one a myth. There are lots of other differences between the two countries that could offset the impact of Austria’s childcare subsidies.

There are plenty of longitudinal studies from various geographies, which I would summarize as “childcare subsidies increase birth rates in some contexts, but the effects are complex and depend on program specifics.” E.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2917182/ and https://clef.uwaterloo.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CLEF-07...

13" Macbook Air, I rarely use a mouse to begin with. Trans-Pacific flights usually have a few extra inches of legroom compared to domestic flights, so it's not that cramped even in economy (and obviously a non-issue in premium economy or business).

Civ III is still my go-to activity for long flights with no internet - I've yet to find a better way to instantly time-travel forward 12 hours.

I haven't tried OpenCiv3, but I'm glad it exists - getting vanilla Civ III running on MacOS is a hassle and still has issues with e.g. audio and cutscenes. I also hope it leads to a way to improve worker automation. Managing your workers well is important, doing it manually is tedious, and the built-in Automate feature is really bad.

My mistake - I misinterpreted your comment, but after re-reading more carefully, it's clear that the video confirms exactly what you said.

No, but if you run a shadow or offline camera-only model in parallel with a camera + LIDAR model, you can (1) measure how much worse the camera-only model is so you can decide when (if ever) it's safe enough to stop installing LIDAR, and (2) look at the specific inputs for which the models diverge and focus on improving the camera-only model in those situations.

I watched that video around both timestamps and didn't see or hear any mention of LIDAR, only of video.

OpenAI models in general, yes - `opencode auth login`, select OpenAI, then ChatGPT Pro/Plus. I just checked and 5.3-codex isn't available in opencode yet, but I assume it will be soon.

I don’t think that statement was missing the point. As you point out, what matters is the total cost of ownership of the system. The cost of launching mass into space today isn’t the only reason terrestrial data centers are more cost effective today, but it’s the main one. If you make it cheap enough to send giant solar arrays and radiators to space, the other costs of operating in space may start to look like a small price to pay to eliminate the need for inputs like land and batteries.

They do, at a much higher rate than the US as a whole, but cars are still dominant. Transit mode share in the city of Chicago is around 21%, down from 28% pre-pandemic, while driving is at 44%. For Chicagoland as a whole, driving is 63%, transit only 9%. The usual source for this data is the American Community Survey; I pulled these numbers from https://api.census.gov, but the same source is also cited in e.g. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...) and Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-22/how-ameri...)

Driving to work is the most common way of commuting everywhere in the US except NYC. So in that sense, no, taking a taxi to work daily is not normal, just as walking, biking, and taking public transit aren’t normal.

When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.

Natural gas, not coal. From Wikipedia [0], "The electrical energy generation mix in 2024 was 40.7% natural gas, 31.8% coal, 15.5% nuclear, 4.5% solar, 3% wind, 2.9% hydroelectric, 1.4% biomass (including refuse-derived fuel), and 0.2% other." The new generation capacity being added is 1.4 GW natural gas and 1.1 GW solar [1]. New coal plants aren't economical under any reasonable market assumptions anywhere in the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Wisc...

[1] https://www.wpr.org/news/we-energies-add-3gw-electric-grid-d...

> When are we going to build a safe version of this?

I built something similar to Clawdbot for my own use, but with a narrower feature set and obviously more focus on security. I'm now evaluating Letta Bot [0], a Clawdbot fork by Letta with a seemingly much saner development philosophy, and will probably migrate my own agent over. For now I would describe this as "safer" rather than "safe," but something to keep an eye on.

I was already using Letta's main open source offering [1] for my agent's memory, and I can already highly recommend that.

[0] https://github.com/letta-ai/lettabot

[1] https://github.com/letta-ai/letta

It was unchanged at 4.4% from September to December (seasonally adjusted).

27%* https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...

Not publicly disclosed as far as I'm aware, but likely 1x. In Q4 2021 when Brex last raised, only ~3% of rounds had >1x liquidation preference according to Carta. https://carta.com/data/state-of-private-markets-q2-2024/

Homeownership rates are only ~flat in aggregate because the population is aging and older people are more likely to own their homes. The homeownership rates of Americans aged <35, 35-44, and 45-54 are down ~10% since 1982 and continuing to decrease. https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf

Source?

You’re correct. There are people in the US who drive in the passing lane without passing, but most consider that a bad practice, as it makes roads both less efficient and less safe.

Allianz Life publishes a HIPAA privacy notice at [0], which states:

> This notice applies to individuals who participate in any of the following programs under the closed line of business:

> • Long term care

> • Medical

> • Medical supplemental

> • Hospital income

> • Cancer and disease specific coverage

> • Dental benefits

> The Covered Entity’s actions and obligations are undertaken by Allianz employees as well as the third parties who perform services for the Covered Entity. However, Allianz employees perform only limited Covered Entity functions – most Covered Entity administrative functions are performed by third party service providers.

It sold long term care insurance policies until 2010.

(Disclosure, I happen to have worked at Allianz Life a long time ago, though I have no nonpublic information about any of this.)

[0] https://www.allianzlife.com/-/media/Files/Allianz/PDFs/about...

Not Windows-specific, I had to go through about:config to enable this on MacOS as of late last year.

Yep I totally get it and would probably go the same route in Polars' situation. Just sharing how some of the data teams I'm familiar with would likely be thinking about the tradeoffs.

That's almost certainly the main reason they're offering this on all 3 major public clouds from day 1.

The obvious one is that you can handle bigger workloads than you can fit in RAM on a single machine. The more important but less obvious one is that it right-sizes the resources needed for each workload, so you're not running an 8GB job on an 8TB machine, and your manually-allocated 8GB server doesn't OOM when that job grows to 10GB next year.

This is really cool, not sure how I missed it. I assume catalog support will be added fairly quickly. But ironically I think the biggest barrier to adoption will be the lack of an off-ramp to a FOSS solution that companies can self-host. Obviously Polars itself is FOSS, but it understandably seems like there's no way to self-host a backend to point a `pc.ComputeContext` to. That will be an especially tough selling point for companies that are already on Spark. I wonder how much they'll focus on startups vs. trying to get bigger companies to switch, and whether they'll try a Spark compatibility layer like DataFusion (https://github.com/apache/datafusion-comet).

Anecdotally, I use rideshare every workday for last-mile transit from the train station, and I’ll pick the $13 Waymo over the $7 Uber every time. There are some inherent advantages to the self-driving, like improved safety [0] and not having to talk to the driver, but the main benefits are that it’s just a consistent experience with nice quiet cars, ~90%-ile driving quality, and much more accurate time estimates.

I look forward to competition bringing prices down, but on pure quality and willingness to pay, the premium price seems to make sense.

[0] https://waymo.com/research/do-autonomous-vehicles-outperform...

Insurance requires risk transfer but that's different from cross-subsidization. It's fine for 100 equally flood-prone houses to all pay the same insurance premiums even if only 1 of them floods in a given year. But people in a less flood-prone area, all else being equal, should be paying less for flood insurance. The alternative (aka the status quo) creates market distortions, making it artificially cheap to live in flood-prone areas and encouraging more building there.

Plenty of people would still live in those areas even if they were paying actuarially fair prices for insurance. And lots of places are safe enough from natural disasters that they're affordable to live in without cross-subsidization - in fact, eliminating cross-subsidization would make most people's cost of living go down, at the expense of a minority of people who live in very high-risk areas.