VLM

Two comments about this being fake news, based upon my wife having two nurse friends:

MDs are nationally organized and have a fixed career path. Nurses are more "you do you" career path and if a news story about shortages doesn't specify licenses assume they're scamming you. There's a big difference in supply/demand curves for a state licensed 3-month CNA vs a NP with 30 years experience. Flooding the CNA supply by lowering standards will not magically make 30 year experienced certified APRNs appear, at least not for another decade or two.

Female coded jobs have very short career lengths. There's a reason there's a shortage, management makes everyone quit. Average nurse career length is only 8 years. Its not as bad as public school teacher but its pretty bad. Everyone knows the RN with 20 years experience makes six figures etc. Mostly because management forced 90% of her peers to quit and she'll all thats left and it takes six figure salary to keep her. The high pay is not exactly a glowing endorsement of working conditions LOL. Most whom enter the field will burn out long before they get high pay or "cool jobs".

I would comment that everyone knows their field of expertise is mostly inaccurately described in mass media, but surely every other field is accurately represented. This situation unfortunately applies to all areas of expertise including nursing. Articles like this annoy nurses much like mass media portrays of "computers" and "computer people" annoy us with their inaccuracies.

None of this is an "AI" problem its SaaS BAU.

You don't like the new agreement? Pray I don't alter it further.

"This way your passwords are truly yours"

They were never yours, and zillions of people you don't know have access to them.

As a concrete example, some advertising supported topics place search as an unwanted middleman, may as well ask a LLM directly. Consider "chocolate chip cookie recipe".

Using google search, will return roughly infinite recipe sites. The sites were generated to spam AI generated recipes surrounded by advertisements. None of them are really any good because they were generated by a script and not looked at by a human until I come along and click. The standard is for all recipes to have at least 10-15 screenfulls of vertical spam wrapped by ads for recipe pages. The internet, at least using Search, is now useless for food recipes. I would have better, faster luck driving to the public library and looking in a physical cookbook; at least those recipes were probably tested at least once by humans unlike the advertising spam sites. Nobody has 45 minutes to watch 44 minutes of filler material surrounded by ads on Youtube either. If you want to cook food, the internet is near dead at this time, unfortunately.

AI search will plagiarize the "Original Nestle Toll House" recipe from the back of every bag of chocolate chips ever made. Its a good recipe and I've baked them many times over the decades.

I wish the internet were more useful, but the people in charge of it don't want it to be useful; here have some ragebait and doomscroll while watching the ads.

I can't figure out how to find a list and I believe that's intentional to avoid simplistic copyright search and takedown type of problems. It is aggravating how little information is available on the website.

1) I run my own systems in emulation and its always educational to see how other people handle configuration and sysadmin type problems. Much like programmers reading other programmer's code for educational purposes.

2) I have a genuine philosophical question which it appears I cannot answer by any means simpler than running it and trying it. Similar to the halting problem LOL. I wonder how the project handles operating systems like MVS/360 where there exists a perfectly good 1960s installation (which I have installed by hand from tape for the experience) however no one uses that IRL because the various MVS Turnkey projects provide seemingly infinite debugged and dependency organized patch sets. There's quite a difference between trying to white knuckle a homemade bare basic MVS/360 from the 1960s vs "MVS Turnkey 4" which basically just works out of the box.

Another example of #2 above is there's DEC PDP-8 OS-8 which technically boots... but the most common distro had a non-working but trivially fixable FORTRAN compiler (IIRC the runtime package filename was wrong or something similar). There's a lot of fun customization.

Another example of #2 above is I wonder how the author handles RSX-11M, distribute the ancient unpatched unmodified OS from DEC or ship something like the Billquist distro, or does the author ship the PiDP-11 RSX-11M (or is PiDP-11 shipping the Billquist RSX-11 distro now?)

I guess for people not into retrocomputing it would be like claiming some rando RedHat .iso from the 90s is "The" Linux operating system. Well, its "a" linux from one instant in time... Likewise there seems to be no "The" MVS/360 operating system there's a zillion possible local installs of all capability levels and eras, all very different and fun.

This is a classic outside the field vs inside the field conceptual disagreement.

From the outside, the hard part of designing a chair is making a blueprint. At least making a blueprint looks hard to people who've never made one. According to outsiders, the next layer of the onion is perhaps inserting reasonable constraint dimensions for similar reasons.

From the inside, as a guy who's recreationally made furniture, the hard part is judgment about joint selection and design, experience with wood warping (all wood changes shape with the seasons, a good woodworker makes it look easy to work around and a bad one makes expensive firewood that rapidly falls apart). Another insider PoV is judgment about wood selection to get the correct balance of final finish durability and appearance. Finally working toward outer layers of the onion, its time to do parametric joint design decisions... What's the ideal number and size of dovetail joints for, perhaps, a drawer.

I've seen prints of chairs before I don't need a LLM to make one similar to the ones I've seen before and could probably make from memory (at least ones I built myself), the library has loanable books and woodworking magazines. I do see the attraction from the outside.

Consider something like a Windsor chair. The larger the wedge in the spindles the tighter and longer lasting the chair until you break something trying to force them in; there's a lot of judgment and experience in designing, selecting, and installing spindles, but none of it is written down so it'll be hard to train a LLM... Tighten it until it breaks then don't tighten it that much next time. Most super detailed plans for Windsors are for inferior machine produced replicas which are not necessarily useful for a fine woodworker and are not exactly what craftsmen would aspire to. People who want "a cheap chair" will buy a 4-pak of folding chairs from walmart anyway, not make a homemade Windsor-style chair.

Another somewhat more blunt example is for actual woodworkers the "problem" with hand cut dovetails isn't knowing what they look like or how to make a diagram of one, but gaining the experience behind a hammer and chisel to push your luck while cutting them as far as possible without going too far and turning the part into scrap. One unavoidable part of woodworking is I've turned quite a bit of wood into scrap on the last step; oh well make another. At least I can burn scrap wood to keep warm LOL.

Its kind of like from outside the programming fraternity the non-programmers think the only skills required to program are typing real fast and being very experienced at fizzbuzz during interviews. But that doesn't work IRL, from an inside-out perspective.....

The woodworking world is not exactly lacking for a library of "semi-decent" plans. An automated system to make enormous quantities of low quality unverified and untested plans would not really help the field, no.

Make it anonymous and the problem will go away.

The problem is people trying to get individual credit for merely running a script that spams a mailing list. Many of those people are likely not even C programmers or programmers at all.

Without the immense personal reward and recognition and job offers as a motivation, the problem will disappear.

The problem will also disappear with time as the people lauding and celebrating and hiring security researchers of the past will quickly abandon LLM generated spam as a positive signal; running a prompt that sends spam is, if anything, a strong negative indicator of infosec ability and skill.

LLMs are a tool. Like all tools, most people can't or won't use them responsibly or profitably although they are useful in the correct hands.

For those who don't "get it", it's output is not dismal, far from it LOL.

About 5M people, a fifth the population of Malawi, none the less are one of the top producers in the entire world for oats and barley. Not per capita... total. Wow. Note that only about 10% of the population farms which makes the ratio even crazier.

Finns as a whole somehow produce about 2x their entire countries body weight in barley per year which always freaks me out. The country is also one of the top 10, usually top 5, producers of oats in the entire world, and they're competing with giant countries like Canada and Russia. Giant Canada only produces about 3x as much oats as tiny Finland.

Finland climate isn't what you'd think of for tomatoes but they produce about three dozen tomatoes per capita every year, which is also weird to think about. Not just how do they grow that many tomatoes, but why? They like pasta sauce and pizza sauce that much?

However Finland is not massively wildly overpopulated with frequent famines like Malawi. Those conditions will annihilate a countries productivity, including ag productivity.

It's very strange what they don't discuss, especially when it seems to answer supposedly unanswerable questions.

I rooted around in wikipedia and Malawi has FAR more people than the land can support. They have a top down demand they must grow maize although the land and climate are very unsuited for maize. Why? Unsurprisingly they have had severe recent famines unlike Rwanda. If they had capacity they could survive a minor shortfall in rain but they have more people than the land can support so the famines are very rough. They have about 3x the agricultural land as Rwanda but its not suited to maize but its demanded they grow maize. Maize will only grow with massive fertilizer imports which they cannot afford and occasionally politically/economically manage to totally screw up, alongside Maize is traditionally dependent on very reliable rainfall or post industrial era advanced irrigation which they don't have.

I would estimate the geography of Rwanda will support about 20M people, luckily they have about 14M. They can coast thru some rough agricultural times and they've developed enough industry and trade that they can import their way thru short term minor local problems.

On the other hand Malawi can only support maybe 15M people reliably, unfortunately they have about 22M. When the rains don't come or the politicians screw up the fertilizer imports, they die.

Its very difficult for them to "advance" beyond subsistence ag without enough to feed everyone and ag policies seemingly intended to be self destructive.

I don't know why they "have to" grow maize despite it resulting in starvation. Historically this type of thing is caused by someone making a huge profit or attempting to maintain control. Regardless of cause, until they can eat, they will not advance.

After eating dinner tonight they can dig a mine or build a factory. Oh wait there is no dinner tonight. Well then. And so they remain very poor, permanently.

The country, as a plot of land, is quite wealthy. $22B is a lot of money. If they had, say, 3M people as a population they'd be in position to become the next Taiwan. Taiwan's GDP per capita was about there in the mid 80s before they really took off. But they have over 20M people probably 30M soon, so they'll live in poverty, permanently.

In Rwanda an unusually good harvest means a new mine can be opened and they will "permanently" be richer. In Malawi an unusually good harvest means the people who would have starved to death this year now won't starve to death until next year. There will be no permanent improvement of anything in Malawi.

We're going to have two phones, the big brother phone you usually leave at home for banking apps and tax filing and boring stuff like that, locked down and nanny up, and the "real phone" from aliexpress or whatever that is purchased rooted and you actually live your real life upon.

I would not be surprised to see double sided phone cases so we can carry our big brother phone with our real phone.

There is some prior art in people being forced to carry a "work phone" and a "personal phone" at the same time.

There will be strange product marketing effects. If you only carry one phone, you can currently talk people into spending over $1K on a high tier big brother phone. But if you only use a big brother phone for bank apps and only at home, a $1K phone from Apple or Samsung is a hard sell, I'd be more likely to spend $1K on a really nice anti big brother phone on ali express or whatever.

Ironically the Z80 is a nibble ALU. That's why its so slow compared to the competition, an 8 bit add on a "2 MHz" Z80 takes as much clock time as a 8 bit add on a "1 MHz" 6809.

Click "Start" admire the CP/M startup, you have an "A>" prompt go for it.

Start with

https://archive.org/details/cpm-primer-second-edition/mode/1...

Or this if you dare:

https://archive.org/details/TheCpmProgrammersHandbook/mode/1...

The thing you missed to search for Nyquist limit as applies to the triad of battery power use vs data speed vs range. There's also error rate in the equation...

You can more or less only communicate with people agreeing with one specific tradeoff and the majority have spoken and they want slow long range texting, so you'll only be compatible with their mesh if you're compatible with that use case.

The software works fine if you set up super high bit rate, although you will not like the short range. There is no such thing as a free lunch and something like Y2K wifi speeds will have Y2K wifi ranges and battery use LOL. Also you will not mesh with other people's infrastructure if you intentionally use a modulation scheme they don't use. Its quite capable, really. But if most people want to max out their possible range and secondarily max out their battery life, it isn't going to be very fast...

"Setup a bunch of nodes across a significant area of land, run ... sensors"

This is my use case. There are no other options that don't demand something like cell phone coverage (LOL no) and cost $1K/node and maybe $50/month until you give up on the project. For hobbyists this is a total non-starter. Do you have a budget for satellite telemetry, LOL no.

With meshcore its more like $100/node and $0/month forever which is somewhat more affordable than the next cheapest possible competitor.

For a scientific-ish environmental sensor that generates a couple integer data points every hour or so, its vastly more than fast enough. My project is not far enough along to discuss beyond that and I may end up scrapping it for reasons totally unrelated to networking LOL. At least the networking side was beyond trivial to set up.

Very handwavy meshcore is meshtastic plus the lessons about digipeating etc that ham radio guys (like me) figured out the hard way back in the 80s/90s. So I have zero interest in reinventing the wheel with meshtastic and reliving the problems of the 80s in the 20s. I don't think meshtastic devs looked at prior art when they initially designed it, or they would have done things quite a bit more like meshcore.

There is approximately infinite interpersonal drama in both projects with all kinds of legal wrangling and much bike shedding apparently to prevent progress. I would not be surprised if TPTB are using funded LLM bots to disrupt those projects. Its pretty bad but as long as you stay away from the communities and socializing, both projects produce good code. I suppose for people that like that sort of thing, either project would be very attractive.

Unlike ham radio, it allows encryption and doesn't forbid commercial use, so it'll get taken over by commercial interests if it works, or ignored if it remains small or fails. If it works the pioneers will get wiped out and removed from the network...

The purpose of a LLM ban is to encourage use of LLMs to submit PRs, not discourage. The longer term effect is to eliminate FOSS competency from the hiring process.

It takes some human effort to set up a slop generator. Have the slop generator make 100 buckets of slop, humans will work hard accepting or rejecting the buckets, somewhat less than 100 buckets will be approved, the payoff for the owner of the slop generator is now they have "verified FOSS developer contribution" on their resume which translates directly into job offers and salary. Its a profitable grift, profitable enough that the remaining humans are being flooded out. The ban makes successful submission to Redox even MORE valuable than before. They can expect infinite floods of PRs now that a successful PR "proves" that Redox thinks the human owner of the slop generator did the work and should therefore be offered more jobs, paid more, etc. Technically, they're hiring and paying based on ability to set up a slop generator which is not zero value, but not as valuable as being an Official Redox Contributor.

In the long run, this eliminates FOSS competency from the hiring process. Currently FOSS competency and coding experience indicates a certain amount, however minimal, of human skill and ability to work with others. Soon, it'll mean the person claiming to be a contributor has no problem violating orders and rules, such as the ones forbidding AI submissions, and it'll be a strong signal they actively work to subvert teams for their own financial reward and benefit. Which might actually be a hiring bullet point for corporate management in more dysfunctional orgs, but probably not help individual contributors get hired.

"AN/AAR-57" Yes the small yellow subwoofer looking things that people speculate endlessly about. Supposedly BAE systems marketing released a picture of the whole system LOL, who needs spies if you have a marketing dept, also supposedly just about everything about this is classified. They supposedly come in four packs and there are "many" public pictures of them one under each cockpit rail on the F15 and the other two are unknown location? Or maybe the mythology online that they come in four packs is false and they actually come in two packs which seems more likely. Plausibly they install 4-packs on helicopters not fixed wing.

I could see some logic in not putting cams pointing forward because theoretically the pilot is looking where they're going and not putting one facing back because flight time to impact is so low they can't evade anyway, but a side attack is survivable if detected early enough... Also facing back they're going to be "seeing" their own exhaust most of the time.

The total non-reaction by the pilots in the public videos would indicate that if those planes even had -57s they were not working or not working well enough to matter or not working fast enough to matter.

I would agree some monster sized BVR missile will be easier to detect. In practice does it matter if the missile detector works at short range if the attacker would likely be in guns mode at short enough range anyway?

DCS World to the rescue?

There's open source intel on google that Iran has SU-27s. Under combat conditions you have an instant to tell them apart. Clearly, its possible to misidentify them at least one time historically as the F-15s did get shot down.

I can assure you from having flown around a lot, if you are wildly outnumbered 3 SU-27 (err, F15) to your 1 F-18 you do not attempt a radar lock you do an IR only attack. The article mentions getting a radar lock first but that is unnecessary for IR guided weapons and in a 3-1 situation will just get you shot down.

Waiting for confirmation from the ground means 1 of the 3 will surely notice and you will be shot down.

Ironically if it were a flight of 4 F-18 they'd probably not have been as skittish at radar locking a mere 3 aircraft and the IFF (assuming its probably configured and working etc) would have informed them they're friendlies. IFF can only tell you if everything on both sides is working perfectly and powered up, if you don't get a friendly response all you know is it didn't work. Not unlike a network ping command. If ping works you know they're up and accepting pings from you, if ping doesn't work, you don't really know anything for sure.

Possibly the primary fault was the Kuwaiti lack of situational awareness. Somehow he's in shoot down range of three other A/C and he's got maybe 3 to 5 seconds to shoot them down or be shot down himself.

Somehow there is no discussion on what both A/C were doing. Usually a landing on an airfield would not look like a bombing run but possibly the F15s were doing something "weird" for which they could be blamed. The total censorship of what they were doing points to them being up to something dumb "lets buzz the airfield during active combat would could possibly go wrong" and they get shot down for looking like an attack run. Or a mix up where there's a published ahead of time safe altitude window around 15K but these guys for who knows why were 1000 feet off the ground doing who knows what. Maybe they had a good tactical reason to do it but its damning that nothing is being reported as an excuse.

Clearly any passive IR detector thats theorized to exist for years either doesn't exist or doesn't work very well. In theory, a smart enough IR camera should be able to notice something very warm indeed is getting rapidly brighter as it approaches you. In practice, these don't exist, or don't work. "Oh yeah they didn't have those when I was in, but they totally have them now" for the last 30 years. Apparently, not yet in 2026.

I find it unfortunate that people who do this for a living can't legally comment, people who do this for a hobby are not asked or actively ignored despite extensive practical experience, and people who mostly have a grift of looking authoritative for legacy media get automatic blind belief despite sometimes spouting total nonsense. This is the typical journalistic response in ALL disaster situations not just military aviation.

400 yen for a ten pack is more like $2.50 than $5

Typical markup in the USA is 100% from wholesaler to retail. Running brick and mortar is very expensive. So if Walgreens were selling this, the wholesale price would be $1.25. I think it reasonable to expect the Yakult Ladies are pulling in the same $1.25 per package that walgreens gets.

The key, I think, is "Most of them are self-employed". Its a gig economy idea. You have to eat. If you're walking home from the store anyway (or kids school or on the way home from work or whatever), you may as well deliver packages for $1.25 each on the way home. You're walking home anyway, you may as well make free money on the walk.

There's been a lot of historical work done in the past and I used NIST FIPS181 to implement this.

Note: FIPS181 was intended for passwords and I was using them as handy short human-readable record IDs as per your post. You probably shouldn't use FIPS181 for passwords in 2026 LOL.

Describing FIPS181 as pronounceable is optimistic. However its better than random text wrt human conversations. They start looking like mysterious assembly language mnemonics after awhile.

Its a small tech bit but a big architecture / management decision.

Basically, who runs golang?

The perfectionists are correct, UUIDs are awful and if there's a pile of standards that all have small problems the best thing you can do is make a totally new standard to add to the already too long list.

The in-the-trenches system software devs want this BAD. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#... They want a library that flawlessly interops with everything on that list, ideally. Something you can trust and will not deprecate a function you need for live code and it just works. I admit a certain affinity to this perspective.

The cryptobros want to wait, there is some temporary current turmoil in UUID land. Not like "drama" but things are in flux and it would be horrible for golang to be stuck permanently supporting forever some interim thing that officially gets dropped (or worse, under scrutiny has a security hole or something, but for reverse compatibility with older/present golang would need permanent-ish reverse compatibility) Can't we just wait until 2027 or so? This is not the ideal time to set UUID policy in concrete. Just wait a couple more months or a year or two? https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9562

I think I covered the three groups that are fighting pretty accurately and at least semi fairly, I did make fun of the perfectionists a little but cut me a break everyone makes fun of those guys.

So, yeah, a "small technical bit" but its actually a super huge architectural / leadership / management decision.

I hope they get it correct, I love golang and have a side thing with tinygo. If you're doing something with microcontrollers that doesn't use networking and you're not locked in to a framework/rtos, just use tinygo its SO cool. Its just fun. I with tinygo had any or decent networking. Why would I need zephyr if I have go routines? Hmm.

I've been around the block a few times with UUID-alike situations and the worst thing they could decide is to swing to an extreme. They'll probably be OK this is not golangs first time around the block either.

It'll probably be OK. I hope.

Cheap, nearly free voice phone calls killed old fashioned phone service. Once the incoming spam exceeded 95% I shut off the ringer and no longer use voice phone calls.

Once the cost of generating push media drops low enough (close enough to zero) the media is dead.

Pull requests are (ironically) a push media, and infinite zero effort PRs can be generated, therefore PRs are dead.

The proper way to handle the situation is to no longer accept PRs.

In github, enter a repo, "settings" "General" scroll down to Features, then uncheck "Pull requests". Or at least set to collaborators only. Probably need to shut off issues.

It gitlab, (I'm not as certain about this) enter a repo, "Settings", Visibility, "Merge Requests" change to "Only project members"

Its a post AI world, those features cannot be enabled on the internet anymore. Anything that accepts push from the public will get spammed into inability to use it. As a social activity PRs are dead. They were nice, but they are dangerous to leave enabled on the internet now. Oh well thats the cost of AI.

"The law" There is no "The law" there are multiple levels of government implementing multiple solutions all different and somewhat incompatible.

Honestly, probably by intention. Its sort of a SLAPP attack on the entire world population.

Two meta observations about the comments:

1) The issue doesn't matter much. Corporate takeover of the internet caused severe damage, but overrunning social media with LLM generated content is a mortal wound. Roughly the same number of humans will be using social media in 2030 as currently use CB radio. Remember near a fifth of the population was using CB radio at the peak in the late 70s. Its too little, too late, closing the barn door after the horses have left is pointless. Like re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic after it hit the iceberg. Once the advertisers get wise to the scam that nobody is seeing their ads except bots, the problem will kind of fix itself. I think TPTB want to use "protecting kids from social media" as the public face of why social media will crash and burn soon to avoid discussion of how LLMs actually killed it, because authoritarians love LLMs and they're in charge (although seemingly everyone else hates LLMs, so I'm sure this will end well).

2) Most of the anti commentary reads a lot like addict speak IRL. Talk to a drunk about how it would be a great idea not to drink or a carb addict about how they should not eat donuts and you'll get absolutely rage blasted in return for threatening their addiction, which in the case of an addict, is their identity. "Well it would be the end of the world if people (me) were not drunk and other people (projection of me) will do anything to feed their addiction so obviously no effort should be made to limit addictions and it won't work anyway because other people (me) will even drink mouthwash or homebrew their own moonshine to get drunk" etc. Note I'm not completely against the anti's and they make some very good points that should be considered, but raging like an addict after their drug of choice is threatened is a VERY bad look and is not helping their case at all, if anything it strengthens the case against the anti's. What the pro's don't understand is you can't fix an addiction externally, addicts gotta addict and punishing them and making them miserable might help the pro's feel superior or at least thankful they're not addicted, but it never helped no one. Social media is "an ill of society" and should be treated as such including sensible regulation, protection of threatened groups, treatment for the addicts, and some compassion and acceptance of the addicts either returning to the real world or dying in the addicted world.

A better analogy would be regulation of addictive activities like gambling and regulation of addictive substances like painkillers. Given that the platforms being regulated were intentionally engineered to maximize addictive potential, this seems a fair and reasonable response.

I would assume its fake and an attempt at identify theft at some level of the system. Is their PC infected at the OS level or just a fraudulent browser extension or something more like a popup ad masquerading as a system dialogue? A less trusting person would assume any request made by a computer is totally non-fraudulent and would gladly submit any requested private information.

"Dad, I can't do my math homework, a pop up says you need to provide a copy of your bank statement, your mom's maiden name, and a copy of your birth certificate, SS card, and drivers license, and can you hurry up Dad, my homework is due tomorrow morning." And people will fall for this once they get used to the system being absurd enough.

The fraud machine must be kept fed...

They would have needed 20 participants, which is too many.

Soon we will have more participants in the HN comments for the study, than were studied in the study.

"If you have a congested city"

I would agree with and extend your remarks that we also have problems where traffic patterns and geography don't match political boundaries and transit is traditionally locally run and locally budgeted.

So in the USA you end in scenarios where it takes 20 minutes to drive 20 miles but a bus would take four legs with three transfers across three separate city bus companies, figure at least three hours each way. And again, as per your "mass transit" you can't expect taxpayers in my city to provide a special bus run into my neighboring adjacent city much less the city next to that one.

This results in people being very happy indeed to pay the financial and environmental costs of car ownership to avoid sitting in a bus for six hours of daily commute.

There are also interesting social issues; if you're late its a personal failing, even if you take mass transit. I recall a friend at work getting fired because the bus was late too many times. Oh well, should have bought a car. The feeling of not being in control is further worse due to crime rates. No one will sneak up on my wife and stab her in the neck in her car, but it certainly happens on buses and no one cares if it happens depending on local race relations. None of the other passengers on the bus even cared, for racial reasons. Its pretty messed up here.

Its easy for the public in general to advise others to do inconvenient or career ending or life threatening activities, to "save the planet" or whatever, but I wouldn't do it, and I'd certainly never let my wife or kids do it, so we own cars and avoid public transit at all costs. Not taking that advice as been pretty nice so far.

You're making suspicions about suspicions without numerical data.

According to my cities 2022 annual report (where are 2023-2025?) they provided precisely 464344 unlinked pax trips (UPT) so someone stepped aboard a bus and threw money in the real or virtual fare box 464344 times that year. "Sources of operating funds expended directly generated" which I read as annual fare revenue was $660748.

We have a very simple two tier system $2 for adults and $1 for seniors and disabled. 2(464344-x)+1x=660748 x=267940

So we only had 196404 healthy young adult bus riders that year vs 267940 senior citizens. Your experience is not unusual but also is by far not the majority; a SUBSTANTIAL majority of the people on the bus in my city are too old or too sick or too blind to take long walks in the rain, snow, ice, heat, cold, etc.

Honestly the bus is so slow, if they could walk, they'd probably just walk. So it should not be overly surprising that most on the bus quite literally can't walk, and really need bus stops close together for disability reasons.

So all of this theoretical "well it would be so much faster if there were fewer stops" is irrelevant if the served population is primarily physically disabled, and the system can't survive. And we'd be talking about excluding one of the most powerful voting blocks in the city, that being old people. Eliminating stops would eliminate or reduce 58% of the current riders which would shut the system down, I don't think it could politically survive a hit like that.

Ironically that shutdown might be good as everyone would be better off both financially and environmentally in cars than in buses. Bus exhaust is not exactly perfume to mother nature LOL, and essentially our bus program is not a transit system, its a corrupt jobs program for drivers, mechanics, and especially for highly paid administrators.

In 2022 according to the transit system annual report, the suburban quarter million person city I live in has ten routes and operates about 12 hours per day and per the annual report average weekday service consumed is 1556 UPT, so 1556 people step aboard the system and toss coins in the fare jar or pay with the app. UPT means they're not tracking transfers and essentially 100% of trips require a transfer so the real number of people served daily is closer to 775 than to 1550, but we'll run the optimistic numbers. Each of the ten hourly routes is about 4 miles long. So the overall system drives 12 hours * 10 routes * 4 miles * 5280 feet/mile = 2.5 million feet per day and divide that by 1556 passengers per day that's a pax every 1628 feet driven on an average day.

So if we had a bus stop every 800 feet, on average half the stops would be empty and passed by. If that high level of use is causing too much congestion and slow down at stops, if we had two buses running out of phase, pax arrive at the same rate, so we'd pick up a pax every 3000+ feet driven. So if we had bus stops every 500 feet to keep people happy, on average the bus would drive right by about 5 out of 6 empty stops, which seems reasonable and would not result in unusual delays or congestion. Also the bus would pass by every half hour not every hour, which would probably increase ridership a lot.

So if the only labor expense were the $23/hr driver, and we pay 10 drivers on 10 routes, to drive twelve times, thats $23/hr * 10 routes * 12 hours if everything except driver labor were free that means we spend $2760 per day to transport 1556 people, or about $1.77 per trip (assuming diesel is free, buses never wear out, etc). If we doubled the number of bus that would be $5520 of driver labor to move 1556 people per day or $3.55 cost per pax trip. On one hand the actual annual total "OE per UPT" counting weekends and maint and office people and dispatchers etc, according to the annual report is $13.94, so an extra $1.77 would seem cheap, but the bus does not run for free and the total expense of doubling the runs might cost as much as an extra $14 per pax trip.

The costs don't really matter, if the taxpayers want it as a luxury bragging feature of the city. Everyone wants everyone else to use it even though no one would be caught dead actually using it. My point being that adult fare is $2 but adults don't ride its mostly elderly and disabled at the $1 fare, so a profit (loss) ratio of (28 - 1)/28 with two buses per route isn't much worse than (14 - 1)/14 with one bus per route.

Maybe another way to look at the analysis is in my city if the stops are more than 1600 feet apart there will be multiple people per stop and that would "slow things down" whereas a small fraction like 400 feet would mean the bus mostly just speeds by.

No one can seem to explain why we can't have infinite bus stops. How about every stop sign is a bus stop? The bus has to stop anyway. Artificial scarcity to drive down ridership, I suppose.