tallowen

Bike Lanes have turned out to be an interesting edge case.

Waymos are currently dropping off and picking up passengers in a bike lane which is not legal (because it is dangerous) however many ride share drivers also do this. As somebody who is commonly a biker / pedestrian I am excited that AVs will likely make many things safer for that class of user. That being said, I do worry about how we encode these "social understandings" of laws. - A waymo I rode in on a highway was happy to go slightly above the speed limit - It seems at stop signs waymo prefers to be slightly aggressive to make it through rather than follow the letter of the law.

It seems silly that we have to teach robots to break certain laws sometimes but parking in bike lanes / yielding to pedestrians are laws that human drivers break all the time and I hope the mechanisms mentioned in the article prevent us from teaching robots to program anti-social but common behavior.

https://futurism.com/future-society/waymo-bike-lanes-traffic

A person who drives 12k miles per year in an small vehicle will need about 4000 kWh of electricity or about 600 gallons of gas. Australians are able to buy solar panels that will generate that amount of electricity for a generation for the price of gas for one or two years. Of course there are more costs associated (Installation, batteries, etc) but the cost equation is shifting very quickly.

If anything I'm surprised that this is happening in an area that hasn't benefited as much from dramatic reductions in electricity costs (places with Wind + Solar without large tariff regimes) rather than Australia or the southern latitudes of the US.

AC has higher losses over a transmission wire because of the changing magnetic field that it induces which creates losses.

To me this feels a little like saying "the federal government doesn't know when people are born because births are registered with local governments". In practice this is all a matter of state capacity to keep track of this information. Given political will to make it happen, I don't see a reason why information about car sales couldn't make its way to the federal government in order to make tax filing simpler.

A car sale is an activity that is already registered with the government. It doesn't seem impossible for the data about an electric vehicle sale and it's purchase price to make its way to the IRS. The IRS could create an API to share this type of data with tax preparation software.

their pet things that are obviously worth complicating the tax code to do

I agree that this is at the root of the problem but I think that can be addressed by making it easier to file taxes or by reducing the complexity of the tax code. The child tax credit is a relatively common type of benefit across rich countries. The tax code could be simplified by administering this benefit via direct cash transfers through a different government agency. I think from this perspective, the IRS is _extremely_ efficient at benefit administration.

My personal opinion is that the tax code is not always a bad way to administer benefits but the paperwork burden is the problem and the experience of filing taxes needs to be made easier.

My lessons from working on IRS direct file lead me to believe there are a couple reasons:

1) How the welfare state is administered - as an example, the US does a child tax credit as part of the tax code, other countries have agencies that are setup to give parents money directly. We are trying to do _more_ with our taxes.

2) State taxes - the fact that there are multiple agencies that have their own rules and procedures makes things more complicated. Many localities have their own laws which can be hard to deal with. Efile has improved this since there are fewer ways for states to ask for new information

3) A lack of political will to simply. For the purposes of taxes, the us have multiple definitions of "are you 65" (were you 65 on Jan 1, were you 65 on Dec 31, etc). This makes taxes more complicated than they need to be

4) Conflicts between making things simple and incentivizing a behavior things like no taxes on tips or an EV tax credit both make filling taxes more complicated with the way that the tax code works right now. With better systems, this could all be taken care of for the taxpayer but right now it would require a more complex tax filing process

Direct File was able to solve some of these problems, even automatically using data the government had already where possible. Ultimately I think it is possible to make taxes automatic in the US but the data flows required for it are probably more complex than in other countries due to the fragmented nature of the US government.

It's nice to see an open sourced implementation of the US tax code! This was part of the IRS Direct File codebase that allowed people to file their taxes for free, directly with the IRS. It was canceled earlier this year by the Trump administration. It looks like the Fact Graph was already opensourced a couple months ago and that version of the factgraph lives here: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/tree/main/direct-f...

I'm curious why a second repository was created for this.

Not to disparage, but how did you come to that conclusion?

I did some math and you're clearly right. I think I imagined that with driver-less vehicles leaving much more frequently (10s per minute) one could catch up to the capacity of a small light rail system but that's clearly not the case. I had imagined that _maybe_ it could be an approach for a lower capacity system in the future.

My math as someone who is not knowledgeable in how to get this data is as follows:

In Seattle is running 4 car trains at 8 minute headways at peak which works out to 7500 people per hour at crush load (4 cars, 250 people per car, 7.5 times per hour). This would require 125 vehicles with 5 seats leaving every minute which is clearly impossible.

Looking at Portland's MAX, it looks like they often run 2 car service with 160 passengers of capacity each with service every 15 minutes so 1280 people per hour (2 cars, 160 per car, 4 services per hour).

1280 people per hour could be served by a 5 seat vehicle leaving every ~15 seconds. This I suppose is what I had expected would happen when I tried to imagine the best case scenario for this service.

Thanks for sharing this, I had understood prior to this video that the combo of self driving tech + dedicated tunnels might have capacity that rival a light rail system like Seattle has but that's clearly not the case in the current system. I'm curious why more of the autonomous driving tech isn't being used in what I might have thought would be an "easier" place to do it.

I had a different takeaway - that a lot of folks on here read Ben Thomson and respect his work! It sounds like Ben is pretty bullish on OpenAI and maybe he's convinced folks through his work to agree with this take.

Although these systems are similar in goals, they are pretty different in terms of how they're structured:

- Direct File: Was built by the US government to make tax filing easier - Free File: Is a subsidy from the US government to tax software to make it cheaper for people to file taxes

Direct file had the promise of making things easier and cheaper overall while Free File is more of a cost shifting approach.

Features like importing tax data from other federal government systems were included in Direct File to make it easier to file taxes. These types of features would be hard for those outside the government to do. At a values level, Free File provides funding to the tax preparation software companies. These companies benefit from difficulty in filing taxes because it creates a market for their products.

The US tax code isn't created to work like this. Direct file asked many questions about things like dependent children, whether you're blind and whether you have an HSA - all things that are relevant to your taxes that aren't actually available to the government right now.

Secondly, there is the issue of State / Local taxes - the IRS only receives federal tax data making it hard to automatically fill out the whole tax return since efiling products tend to file federal / state taxes together.

This year, direct file allowed people to import their W2s and 1099-INTs automatically based on the information the IRS had: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f...

In fact it did do that! Direct File imported W2s, 1099-INTs and other data during the filing season that ended in April.

https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f...

There is a bunch of code to import w2s from the SSA in this codebase - this did happen this year for direct file. That being said, big issues remain:

- Employers don't tell the federal government about state tax information and when they do, the government doesn't store that information

- W2s aren't due to the SSA at the opening of tax filing season and penalties aren't commonly enforced for submitting w2s on time.

https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f...

I think this is great to think about however I think many of the same lessons may still apply and can and should be applied now in a forward looking way:

From the article:

Whereas the Netherlands clearly differentiates roads and streets — as do Germany, Spain, and France — the US is known for having “stroads,” roads where cars reach high speeds yet must also avoid drivers entering from adjacent businesses and homes. The majority of fatal crashes in American cities happen on these “stroads,” and impact pedestrians and cyclists in particular.

I think this will be _more_ important with autonomous driving. We've developed a built environment where car through traffic and destinations are co-mingled which leaves very little room for people to actually experience their destinations when they get out of their vehicles.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but my expectation is that the problem of "stroads" will only become more apparent if less focus is placed on getting from point A to B and more on where a person is trying to go which is my current long term expectations of the impacts of autonomous vehicles.

There are a bunch of things that still are language or language architecture specific.

How you do manage web servers and starting / stopping processes

Traditionally, PHP/Ruby/Python have had a process per request model but even then, how these processes are started and what memory is shared between requests is different

node.js when deployed on a server allowed one process to serve many requests through the use of the event loop but this has changed with the use AWS Lambda (one process per request) which has opened up more efficient approaches (cloudflare workers)

How do you manage database connections or other shared resources PHP and Laravel expect certain types of things (i.e. db connections) to be long running. How do you deal with scaling up/down your servers in this world?

Laravel has it's own ORM with it's own apis. Can these APIs be improved to allow things to be more easily scaled?

vercel

I think vercel has shown that a tight integration between React and Infrastructure can provide a lot of value to many types of teams. I would expect the same types of benefits could exist for laravel/php!

Portland's trams don't move anywhere close to 35mph as the OP mentioned. Portland's trams are quite capacity constrained due to needing to navigate the short blocks and many intersections of downtown Portland. Dedicated travel cooridors where these trams could move at closer to 35mph would allow trips _through_ downtown to become competitive which currently are often not ideal.

Plain hybrids currently do sell better than PHEVs or EVs.

I'm not sure in which "best of both worlds" a standard hybrid is better than a PHEV - a PHEV allows for cheaper fuel (grid electricity) when it's available. That being said, the extra cost is associated with larger batteries than standard hybrids. As batteries come down in price / size, I'm not sure why people would want a standard hybrid over a PHEV.

The current salary cap for any programmer (or any non executive level roll) that is a federal employee is currently $191,900. I’m glad the hiring requirements are being updated but I’m concerned that making the lower bands easier to join without competitively hiring more senior people will make the federal workforce less effective.

This news feels in stark contrast to apples announcements this week. The price of tech hardware is not keeping up with the target 2-3% inflation. Will higher pricing for software make up for lost (in real terms) revenue for hardware?

As someone who has lived in the southwest, it can't be understated how important the issue of water is.

One thing to keep in mind is that most estimates place human consumption of water at below 20% - a ton of the water of the basin goes to agriculture. To be clear, I think this makes sense - with added water regions in the basin can be some of the most productive ag regions in the country.

The big problem is policy has not adapted to scarcity. There are real tradeoffs when we have 30% less water than forecast and it's not clear who should suffer them.

I think there is often a misconception that this area is somehow "too hot" to live in. Since the advent of air conditioning, we have moved past this. Generally speaking similarly sized homes in Boston will consume more energy for HVAC than Phoenix will simply because heating homes in cold winters is often more energy intensive than cooling in the summer.

Water usage in the colorado basin: https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/meat-of-the-matter-col...

I agree that it could be worse! Facebook has significant (if not more) time spent and I found adding features to news feed a heck of a lot easier than adding features that interacted with google search. Generally a lot of this had to do with the number of people needed to be involved to ensure that the change was safe which always felt higher at Google.

I think I have heard similar things from other googlers and I think there might be two factors on why I think this:

- I worked on Google Assistant which was responsible for integrating many services. This meant I had to work with other peoples code way more regularly that many at google.

- I moved from FB to google - I'm not really sure how many people have had this experience. I think many of my colleagues at google found it surprising how many of the things they thought were unique to google actually also existed at FB.

At the end of the day, any of these processes have pros/cons but I think the cruft of having APIs that are a couple steps harder to evolve due to finding Readability/Owners for everything you touch just makes things slightly less cohesive and a trickier place to have a "good" codebase.

When I worked at FB, I would frequently rebase my code on Monday and find that, for example, the React framework authors or another smaller infra team had improved the API and had changed *every* callsite in the codebase to be improved. This type of iteration was possible in certain situations but was just much less common at google than at fb.

I always find these comments about interesting, having worked at Facebook and Google, I never quite felt this way about Google's Monorepo. Facebook had many of the features you listed and quite performantly if not more so. Compared with working at Facebook where there are no owners owners files and no readability requirements, I found abstraction boundries to be much cleaner at FB. At google, I found there was a ton of cruft in Google's monorepos that were too challenging / too much work for any one person to address.

From the recreational perspective (summer hiking / back-country skiing) - the forests are night and day difference. Having a map of what has been logged and what has not often is the difference between forests that are easy to travel through and forests that are harder. A forest that was clear cut will have trees that are much denser and tightly packed together but tend to be smaller in diameter. These are very hard to travel through (hiking or skiing) compared with the old growth forests.

I don't know a ton about forest ecology but my sense is that trees that do the best are a function of what's already there and that it takes much longer than 100 years for the pre-clear cut conditions to return.

I think we now know about a lot more externalities of this kind of logging than we did generations ago. For example, much of the hydrological basis that provide drinking water to the Seattle metro area was aggressively logged 100 years ago which impacts the hydrology of the basin in a negative way for the purpose collecting drinking water.

I think extra knowledge in the space of the environment often leads to indecision which is certainly it's own drawback but I think these choices are not without tradeoffs that should be acknowledged.

What size should a parking spot be? Who should pay for a larger one?

Over the last number of years, it feels like large vehicles have become more commonly used but most built infrastructure remains the same. I notice this at the city owned parking lot a couple blocks from my house - the whole thing becomes very difficult to navigate with the length and width of some modern pickup trucks/SUVs. It sounds like it's not a big enough issue in this parking lot (perhaps because it's only one large vehicle) but it would become an issue if everyone were driving a cybertruck there.

Should parking spots in parking lots be made bigger? This would probably mean fewer spots / more expensive. Should cars be split into "standard" and "XL" classes? XL spaces or lots that support XL cars could be priced accordingly. People purchasing vehicles would have a better sense of "oh this car won't be allowed in many parking spots.

My experience living in Montana has been that wireless internet providers can be great but they don’t provide great low latency service. It creates a perception that one can’t live in certain areas and do remote work since it’s too hard to do video.

When it comes to broadband there is a question of “how good is good enough” but for the people living in Hamilton Montana (population 5k) I hope there can be a path to infrastructure investment that leads to high quality internet in town.

In talking to my teacher friends, one thing that I hadn't understood is how being the parent of a child has changed due to mobile devices since I was a child.

Parents obviously worry about their children. Parents exist in a community of other parents that uses phones belonging to children to keep track of their children. It was very hard for me to wrap my head around how strongly parents expect to be able to reach their children at any point in time. Most solutions (e.g. Yonder Pouches) end up shutting down location services not to mention the ability of students to say "yes I'm find". This leads to way more resistance to these policies that I ever would have expected!

I think solar is becoming popular because it is so much cheaper where it works.

One point of disagreement is that you are saying "you need more energy in the winter". Right now, for example, tomato paste is made in a facility that runs year round. The main cost in converting tomatoes into tomato paste is in the thermal cost of energy. Having abundant cheap energy at one time of year will shift the way such industrial processes work so that we use more energy when supply is the highest rather than using the most energy when demand is the highest.