quantumwannabe

We already tried that experiment. The result was Houston.

If you believe that adding lanes doesn't reduce congestion, then you must also believe that adding transit doesn't reduce congestion.

That’s why I don’t understand why Google’s stock has gone up so much recently. They already have maximum market share of digital ads; they can only lose share to competitors like OpenAI. The only way they can make more money is through paid subscriptions.

More details on the difference between the OpenAI and Anthropic contracts from one of the Under Secretaries of State:

The axios article doesn’t have much detail and this is DoW’s decision, not mine. But if the contract defines the guardrails with reference to legal constraints (e.g. mass surveillance in contravention of specific authorities) rather than based on the purely subjective conditions included in Anthropic’s TOS, then yes. This, btw, was a compromise offered to—and rejected by—Anthropic.

https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027566426970530135

For the avoidance of doubt, the OpenAI - @DeptofWar contract flows from the touchstone of “all lawful use” that DoW has rightfully insisted upon & xAI agreed to. But as Sam explained, it references certain existing legal authorities and includes certain mutually agreed upon safety mechanisms. This, again, is a compromise that Anthropic was offered, and rejected.

Even if the substantive issues are the same there is a huge difference between (1) memorializing specific safety concerns by reference to particular legal and policy authorities, which are products of our constitutional and political system, and (2) insisting upon a set of prudential constraints subject to the interpretation of a private company and CEO. As we have been saying, the question is fundamental—who decides these weighty questions? Approach (1), accepted by OAI, references laws and thus appropriately vests those questions in our democratic system. Approach (2) unacceptably vests those questions in a single unaccountable CEO who would usurp sovereign control of our most sensitive systems.

It is a great day for both America’s national security and AI leadership that two of our leading labs, OAI and xAI have reached the patriotic and correct answer here

https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230

That's because his American-made competitors charge $50 less than he is charging for his Chinese-made showerhead: https://www.waterchef.com/products/waterchef-sf-7c-premium-s...

The old science fairs actually did find real geniuses. Many kids who placed highly in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search ended up winning Nobel Prizes later in life.

The modern ones are sadly just another checkbox for college admissions, full of cheaters gaming the metrics.

They haven't really added anything to Office since 2013, the last pre-subscription version. There were massive changes between Office 98 and 2013, including entirely new programs like OneNote. They just found a way to get their customers to rebuy the same product every year.

Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.

Only because you chose to walk through the port instead of through town. Google Maps' walking route is shorter than the route that goes through that road, entirely on sidewalks, and only requires crossing one road wider than one car lane per direction (and said road has a signalized crosswalk). There is also a pedestrian bridge across that road that could be used instead, but Google didn't pick it, likely because it connects with "private" property (the convention center's path).

https://maps.app.goo.gl/asfGrRLkLmtpqnps5

Someone didn't read the article.

It most definitely is not. The vast majority of customers at European Starbucks are locals, not tourists.

Do you know if the knife still acts "sharp" when the physical blade is dull or does it still need regular sharpening like a normal knife?

This is likely a prototype for their folding phone, which are essentially just two ultra-thin phones stuck together.

You should tell Taiwan that.

The hardware was good but nothing that an iPad doesn’t have nowadays. It was revolutionary for the time with the detachable keyboard and trackpad and Wacom-like pen. The software was what made it an amazing device though.

In addition to being able to run any regular Windows application, it had the best and most intuitive feeling UX of any tablet in history. Amongst many other features, window management was gesture controlled and Internet Explorer had an alternate UI that moved the tabs to the bottom of the screen to make them easier to reach.

Sadly, Windows 10 removed all the good parts of Windows tablet mode, but its ideas were so good that Apple is still slowly copying bits of its interface for the iPad to this day.

Whatsapp when it was acquired cost $1/year (with a year long free trial) and had a billion users and 55 employees. They were printing money.

Google had mandatory return-to-office...

That’s the best feature of Apple Maps. Google hides a ton of businesses, even at max zoom.

Yes, they unironically are 15 minute cities. A typical suburbanite will never have to spend more than 15 minutes traveling for a routine errand.

Just because you don’t like how they do it doesn’t mean that they don’t do it.

Be careful what you wish for.

Under a fair weight tax scheme, a passenger of a fully loaded bus would pay more than a solo driver of a Hummer EV (one of the heaviest SUVs on the market).

Some data on bus weights [1]:

      Transit Bus Type           Passengers         Curb Weight (lb)   Fully‐Loaded Weight (lb)
                            Max Seated Max Total 
  2‐axle 35‐foot               27 – 40   46 – 72     15,450 – 28,510       23,360 – 39,020
  2‐axle 40‐foot               35 – 44   61 – 92     20,520 – 32,520       30,600 – 44,100
  2‐axle 45‐foot               44 – 46   80 – 86     30,130 – 30,450       41,480 – 42,530
  3‐axle 45‐foot Double‐deck   79 – 82   116 – 122   36,560 – 37,930       54,670 – 55,850
  3‐axle 60‐foot Articulated   41 – 61   89 – 123    37,920 – 49,520       55,975 – 64,690

A three axle articulated bus with 123 passengers has a loaded axle weight of 21,563 lbs using the data from the table above.

This means that the bus has ~4.7 times the load per axle as the SUV, so per the fourth power law, it does 488 times as much damage to the road as the SUV. Since it carries 123 people, that means that each bus passenger is doing ~4 times as much damage to the road as the SUV driver.

[1] https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/tcrp/docs/TCRPJ-11Task... (Table 7/Page 25)

The current "iPhone" is a low-cost parts bin model that was first introduced as the iPhone 5C. The current iPhone should be compared to phones in that family (5C, XR, SE, 8, and 11-15), not to the actual iPhone family (Original, 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S, 5, 5S, 6, 6S, 7, X, XS, and 11-15 Pro).

You're clearly not very well traveled if you think that the east coast is a bastion of intellectualism while the rest of the country is innumerate.

The struggling student interviewed in the article lives on the east coast!

They drive more conservatively than the most conservative human driver, mainly because they don’t try at all to cooperate with other vehicles. It’s clearly due to technical reasons, not because they’re being more safe.

For example, if they need to make a lane change for a turn on a congested street, they will wait for someone to let them in rather than “pushing” their way in like a human driver (especially a bus driver) would. When that inevitably doesn’t happen, they are forced to go around the block and try again.

That exact behavior happened during the “Uber” ride I took on a Waymo, and it is possible they have improved since then.

Today it's a lagoon and a field so it's even more of a waste of space.

The hilarious thing is that when TSMC was founded they had to train EVERYONE. Taiwan had zero chip fabrication talent. All of the specialists at the time, even the founder of TSMC, were in the US. For them to complain that it's impossible to train a workforce is laughable and is most likely just racism/nationalism.

In the description, they say they charge extra fees:

*******

▶ Mandatory fees

You’ll be asked to pay the following charges at check-in or check-out:

• A damage deposit of $350 will be collected by credit card. You should be reimbursed within 7 days of check-out. Your deposit will be refunded in full by credit card, subject to an inspection of the property.

• A resort fee of $40.16 per night

• There will be taxes and fees that need to be paid at the front desk

▶ Optional Extra

• This property allows pets however there is a $350 pet deposit per stay. 50 USD is kept for a deep cleaning fee, and the remainder is refunded if there is no pet damage.

• Parking $78 for 24 hrs and $93 for oversized. no in and out

Flashpoint [1] is a similar program that lets you download and play practically every flash game.

[1] https://flashpointarchive.org/

You're making the same mistake as the author. What matters is how many people a lane can move in a given amount of time, not how large each burst of people is.

We stop at 20 cars in 10 minutes because that's the equivalent of the bus. If the bus ran twice as often (i.e. 5 minute headways), we'd have 40 cars in 10 minutes, but that's only one car every 15 seconds which is far from a congested state, especially with no traffic signals (like a rail/guideway based PRT or a hypothetical future self-driving system where cars coordinate with each other).

PRT is essentially just a bus system with a large number of small buses and a large number of routes as opposed to a traditional bus system with a small number of large buses and a small number of routes.

The bus and the 20 AVs have the same throughput (40 passengers in 10 minutes). While the AVs take up more physical space than the bus, they require the same amount of road space to transport the same number of passengers in the same amount of time.

You have to have extremely short bus headways before the road space efficiency tilts back towards its favor.

The author forgot about time. 20 small self-driving vehicles that come every 30 seconds uses no more road space than a 40-person bus that comes every 10 minutes.

Musk's self-driving taxi idea also isn't new. It's essentially the same thing as Personal Rapid Transit [1] which was originally envisioned back in the 1950s as a way to solve real world public transit system issues:

Most mass transit systems move people in groups over scheduled routes. This has inherent inefficiencies. For passengers, time is wasted by waiting for the next vehicle to arrive, indirect routes to their destination, stopping for passengers with other destinations, and often confusing or inconsistent schedules. Slowing and accelerating large weights can undermine public transport's benefit to the environment while slowing other traffic.

Personal rapid transit systems attempt to eliminate these wastes by moving small groups nonstop in automated vehicles on fixed tracks. Passengers can ideally board a pod immediately upon arriving at a station, and can – with a sufficiently extensive network of tracks – take relatively direct routes to their destination without stops

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit