joshe

I, for one, favor having a .1 cent piece, a third the size of a penny about the size of a shirt button.

Because San Francisco sales tax is 8.63 and something the costs 1 dollar is really 1.083. And I would like 91.7 bach cents when I give 2 dollars.

What's sad is that unionizing will accelerate whatever the decline of the company is causing the dissatisfaction. Wiser for employees to just jump ship or found a new game studio when this kind of decline happens.

The chances of a company turning around are super low, adding a union makes it harder. Just run.

I stole a lot of books too, reading them and all. Just integrated them into my worldview, and don't pay a license fee when I use the ideas in new contexts. Sometimes I even quote from them. A lot of them I didn't even pay for, I borrowed them from libraries or friends.

Very excited about this. I've been flying curious for years, but haven't actually done it. Some of the cons that have held me back...

A few of the places I'd want to travel to have consistently bad crosswinds. Crabbing looks complex and you have to get 5 things right or you die. For the non flyers check this out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca0V5q4XSb8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ri0D_0DdIU and how to do the maneuver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92K8s-vppDI&t=3s

It greatly limits your available flying days if you think "hey 30mph crosswinds are super sketchy, I don't want to fly today." So that means delayed trips or delayed returns. Hard to plan around.

I realize this isn't part of the current iteration and requires lots of regulatory hoops... But in future with automation, it would be amazing to know you could fly in clouds or evenings easily with only a basic private pilot's license.

Aviation self driving is so much older and reliable than automotive self driving, it's frustrating that it isn't generally available. It's awesome that you are working to bring it to low cost flying, thanks for working on this and congratulations on the launch!

I'll add that I think the "easy to drive as a boat or car" size of the market is easily 10x the existing private pilot market. (And the easy as a car and the price of a pickup truck size of the market is probably 1000x the current market). So I think you are on to something big.

I dearly wish Apple would just publish Dark Sky again. Let the Weather app be whatever super clean design hero you want, just give us back this perfect information dense weather app to use day to day.

There have to be dozens of devs in apple who would love to be on the 1-2 person team it would take to maintain it. (It was a 2 person startup for years, don't come at me with how hard stuff is.) It could even be a reward for good service, "ok you successfully mucked around with weird EU privacy law in the health app for 2 years, instead of a sabbatical for therapy how about you get to work on Dark Sky for a year?"

No, it's painful.

An excellent unintended consequence of forcing builders into modular housing might be a much more robust modular housing market. Sort of like Tesla starting with higher cost Roadsters and Model S cars until there is scale to compete at volume. It would be terrific to see some productivity gain in construction, which as actually declined since 1987. See the Single-Family graph here: https://www.bls.gov/productivity/highlights/construction-lab...

It's worth also noting that despite the drama, Costco is not looking to lose money on these. So the apartments will be nice enough to rent. Nimbys tend to forget the discipline of the market, especially in their talking points.

What a great update, thanks for posting!

Context is important, this is targeted at journalists. They are usually trying to make a point to casual readers.

For readers with more interest or who are numerate in their day jobs (engineers, finance, or economists), dual axis charts can often be a great choice.

This is better graph style advice from the Economist, which includes good dual axis examples and one bad one and how to correct it. https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8...

Since we are engineers or founders trying to deal with very complex systems, adding detail and clarity like the Economist or Edward Tufte does is the better way to go.

Nah it's fine. Arizona doesn't use more water than it did in 1957.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme...

and 74% of that goes to agriculture.

Western water does need to be managed and there are lots of silly water rules that should be changed. But the Mountain West drying up is just a fantasy. For weather, economics, and governance it's probably the region with the brightest future over the next 30 years.

The problem is that average sms security is higher than email, but email CAN be much more secure. So for mass market accounts sms makes a good login confirmation and improves security.

But if you've bothered to have somewhat secure email it sure would be nice to use that instead, and not worry about the 50,000 retail and support staff at telcos who can grab your sms account based on a convincing phone call.

So, please, I beg of you login developers, offer email wherever you use sms now.

I'll second that for Waymo.

Just took a Waymo ride across San Francisco 3 nights ago in hard rain, at night. A hilly complex city with bike lanes, kinda oddball medians and bollards, many pedestrians, and homeless people wandering down the middle of streets. It did great.

I've taken 5 trips so far, and all have been great and better than the average uber driver.

I've had 3 sketchy Uber rides out of about 10 total in the last 3 months. One older woman was was peering over her steering wheel commenting that she really can't see that well at night, she'd kinda guess and head over to next lane, and had to abort once when she almost merged into another car. One plunged across 3 lanes of traffic without signaling while looking at the phone in her hand, twice! Another did a no look left turn while looking at the map and almost hit a pedestrian in the crosswalk. I said "stop!" and he did and looked up shocked. Slow enough that it would have only been a broken leg, but still...

Nah, it's failure mode is to slow down and pull over. It would be amazing if drunk humans did the same.

Just took a Waymo ride across San Francisco 3 nights ago in hard rain, at night. A hilly complex city with bike lanes, kinda oddball medians and bollards, many pedestrians, and homeless people wandering down the middle of streets. It did great.

Even if it didn't work in snow (and it's unlikely to do worse than humans), all the west coast, desert west, and south have basically zero snow all year long.

A quote from Tyler Cowen I read this morning...

Tyler Cowen: Uncertainty should not paralyse you. Try to do your best, pursue maximum expected value, and just avoid the moral nervousness. Be a little Straussian about it. Like here's a rule, on average it's a good rule, we're all gonna follow it. Bravo, go on to the next thing. Be a builder.

Joe Walker: Get on with it?

Tyler Cowen: Yes. Because ultimately the nervous Nellies, they're not philosophically sophisticated, they're overindulging in their own neuroticism when you get right down to it. So it's not like there's some brute let's be a builder' view and then in contrast there's some deeper wisdom that the real philosophers pursue. It's: you be a builder or you're a nervous Nelly. Take your pick. I say be a builder.

Sorta surprised at how badly people dislike the Cybertruck.

Harvard's actions are also consistent with her not doing good research. Note that she was not snapped up by another institution to be faculty, just a "tenure track position". One red flag is that the reporter cites all the times she talked to media and congress. A good indicator that it was superficial and headline driven work.

I'm sure she was a valuable source for reporters needing dramatic quotes on a slow news day, but really there should be more heft than that.

10 years ago, I thought it was important have newsrooms reporting on current events. But now it's so schlocky, even on things I agree with them on, that I think they do more harm than good. Really anyone who has to come up with something shocking to report everyday is going to put out garbage. I include in this major city newspapers, news only websites (like tech press), network and cable news, and weekly magazines.

Here are two good breakdowns of the problems/limits of modern mainstream news.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/journalism-needs-more-taylor-sw...

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1714648538746118265

Americans wisely agree, trust in media is very low https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-re....

It's worth pointing out that mass media has had a brief lifespan, about from the 1920s. And the "golden age" when everyone was following it was really only 1950 to 2000.

It's fine if it declines, and even if it disappears.

Canada's accidental banning of links to news is a good model, we should do it in the US. Let's tax any links to news sites from major web platforms.

Yes! Saw that and was relieved I have nothing on them :-)

A problem for me building on this is that Google Cloud has no coherent strategy. So the price could easily be double or quadruple Amazon in 2 years.

Google Maps is the key lesson here. 10 to 20 times price increase, just because someone had a meeting. No justification or coherent strategy, just "sorry here's a shiv to the gut".

At least with Amazon, as chaotic as it is, you know that they just mark stuff up to the margin they want and let the market sort out what gets used. Google is into secretive grand strategy that changes completely anytime 4 product managers get together in a room.

Advances are always welcome, but it's worth noting that desalination works economically right now.

In the last 15 years large scale desalination has become practical. It's one of the great engineering feats of our time.

We can now generate it at scale for less than $.01 per 6.4 gallons. This includes the cost of the electricity, which is about half the expense.

San Francisco charges $.02/gallon to residents, 12 times that price. It's now cost effective for any coastal city in America to supply residential water this way.

Lots of people still think desalination is still impractical, because it was 20 years ago. They just haven't learned about the new tech.

The tech:

https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/can-desalination-save-a-dr...

Residential rates:

https://sfpuc.org/accounts-services/water-power-sewer-rates/...

Add Visionect to hacker unfriendly devices. They forced a change to subscription service. Ask me how I know :-(.

I did read it, this was a counterpoint. The article is lying. A small minority had a bad time, they did nothing like a comprehensive counting of everyone who left.

Remember that a greater number of people who stayed would have died as miserable alcoholics. Women are still beaten by their husbands in small towns. Boredom leads to drugs.

Even in the US suicides are 50% higher per capita in rural vs urban areas.

If someone is happy in a rural area they should stay. But if they aren't and they get up the gumption to leave who are you to sit in judgement of how stupid they are?

It is better to move out of towns like this. Better != perfect.

Nice that social media is providing a clear pathway out of towns like this. Sad for the people left behind but the answer is for them to leave, not for everyone to be trapped there. And note the Eastern Europe is doing great at the country level.

In general people should engage in more geographic mobility.

Any chance you could not be vicious tech haters? There's a hole for Michael Arrington era TechCrunch reporting which just focused on factual information about companies and people. What the innovation is, how far the company has gotten with it, what people are trying to accomplish. If a company is boring instead of making a hit piece out of it just don't write about it.

Finally Linux will get the same respect Mac gets from gaming publishers.

Unclear from the article, but maybe they can just pay $8?

An expensive enterprise account is mentioned, but no linkage as to whether they would be forced to use it.

The prices in for flats in areas like this are higher per square foot.

No. Psychology is the worst. It is encouraging that an insurgent group is taking replication on but it feels like only about 20% of the field.

Some results do replicate. Big Five personality traits, general classification of mental illness, mainstream IQ results, and human perception and performance. All psychology is not false and there are interesting things to learn from the field.

But the severity and frequency of fraud and non replication is worst in psychology. So much so that half of what you learned in Psych 101 ten years ago does not replicate.

The big challenge for the field is that humans know a lot of psychology. We can track our own thoughts and we are constantly interacting with people and trying to understand their psychology. A biologist who studies ants intensely for 5 years is maybe only one of 100 people have ever watched them that carefully. They'll find lots of new stuff.

Psychology doesn't have powerful techniques than that for determining new truths about humans. It's still mostly give a questionnaire or put people in weird situations.

So there are a lot of researchers hunting around for original ideas that are undiscoverable with our current tech. Some of them are bound to give into the temptation to just make up an interesting result with manufactured data. With p hacking they might not even be committing fraud, they are desperate for a positive result, when the get one they stop looking and publish.

So I would still guess in 2023 that about 80% of "new" discoveries published in journals won't replicate. That rises to 95% with journal publications that are published as university pr and reported in the media.

For coverage of what to remember to unlearn Rolf Degen is great: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf

Popular examples that do not replicate (mostly from Rolf):

Repressed childhood memories Social media harms Search bubbles and echo chambers Women prefer masculine men when fertile Priming (you see a fight in the hallway and then don't cooperate later) Power posing (puff out your chest to feel more confident) Watching eyes make people more honest (in Kahneman and Malcolm Gladwell)

Notice that a lot of these are interesting, and you want them to be true. That's not enough to make it so.

As a bonus, an interesting interview with Daniel Kahneman: https://www.edge.org/adversarial-collaboration-daniel-kahnem...

She was right about her book title "Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life."

Committing fraud paid well. HBS professor salary is about $220K per year. Ten years of salary is a $2 million payoff. Big incentives to do this.

Worth a policy change by university for clawbacks of salary and especially pensions and tenure. Like insider trading she should be forced to disgorge all the profits from her fraud. Dan Ariely too.

And worth charging for criminal fraud, she defrauded her university and students. 5 years in jail seems fine.

It's time to stop pretending academics are a medieval nobles who grow faint at the idea of their sacred honor being besmirched. With huge salary opportunities for bold populist claims academics will take big risks to achieve choice jobs even if they think they will eventually be discovered.