Breza

Yup, every time I'm on a city bus they have a screen that cycles through the different cameras. They really have every angle covered. And some of our buses even have traffic enforcement cameras that issue tickets to cars.

> scheduling constraint

Honestly I think this is the only real advantage of a self-driving bus. Driving a bus is hard work and it doesn't pay well. Getting drivers to cover all the routes every day is an ongoing challenge.

I would honestly be nervous to ride a self-driving bus much of the time. Drivers limit the level of shenanigans that can happen. The subway has emergency intercoms and staff at every single station, but a bus could take you miles away from the nearest transit cop.

Bus drivers don't make much money, at least not here in the United States. I was shocked when I learned how low the average salary is, considering you might be tasked with navigating a massive vehicle carrying dozens of people through narrow streets during rush hour. And I'm not even considering the customer service aspects and public safety aspects of what they do.

All that to say, we are far from the point where a self-driving bus is cheaper than buying a regular bus and paying a driver.

Done. I grew up in suburban Michigan. I moved to Washington DC for college 20 years ago and I'm still here. When looking to buy a house, we only looked at options with public transit access.

I know it's not for everyone, but if you really do value being able to go out without driving, it's a great lifestyle.

I totally agree with you. Here in DC they use a public charger that's on one of my running routes, so I interact with them more often than the average Washingtonian. I feel more comfortable around them than I do around human drivers.

Waymo has done a great job of making its rollouts into new cities smooth. I have to wonder what will happen once they pivot to profitability in a few years. Will they be willing to lose revenue pulling so many cars out of service? Will they optimize the human costs by not having so many humans on staff?

Maybe they'll kill Uber first and then drop the quality.

Look at the train and bus stops outside of a transit-connected stadium after a game. Here in DC, the transit cops often make people wait outside the subway stations so they aren't overcrowded. I can't imagine the congestion nightmare of trying to put every one of those people into cars instead.

At a slightly smaller scale, think about rush hour. The passengers on a single bus could fill up the entire block if they were in individual cars instead.

And that's not even considering empty AVs driving around looking for a fare. Locally we're thinking about assessing a mileage fee to discourage this behavior, which is a good start, but at some point you inevitably will have lots of empty cars heading to the stadium or whatever when the game is about to end, clogging streets.

I'm definitely not anti-Waymo. I want them to be legalized here. I'm just realistic that they will basically serve the role of taxis/Ubers, not replace the concept of buses.

GP is talking about government-subsidized housing. So it's not "their lifestyle is wrong" so much as "how should we subsidize housing costs with taxpayer money?" I just don't think building housing in the suburbs and buying residents a $30,000/year Waymo gift card is the most efficient or desirable approach.

The other day, I was working with Polars and decided to go old school with everything. I asked my questions on udm14.com and wrote the code in Notepad++. It was invigorating. Reminded me why I started coding in the first place.

I know this would add complexity, but I wonder if they could train a model to predict the odds of a given cart being abandoned. I'm a data scientist. I bet there are at least a few situations where you could be confident that someone was going to complete a sale.

I wonder if the human training process amplified this effect. I like to imagine there's an OpenAI RLHF trainer in Kenya whose name we'll never know who really likes this style of writing and is solely responsible for LLM voice. I know that's not how it works, but it would make for a fun story.

And you know what? That's not annoying--that's brave.

I had never heard the phrase "contrastive parallelism" before and I love it. I mean, I can't stand how often LLMs do it, but having a word for my annoyance is nice.

I agree with you. When I was a freshman, the school paper assigned me to cover a professor talking about the blogosphere. That was a year before Facebook released its newsfeed. My story did not age well.

https://gwhatchet.com/2005/10/13/professor-describes-influen...

I sometimes wonder about the V2, atomic bomb, bomb sight, and other massively expensive WWII research programs. It seems like they all could have been replaced with much more boring uses of the same money for much greater effect.

You are correct. If the company wanted, it could probably be profitable in the next couple of years. But that would require aggressively shedding stuff like X, xAI, and Starship. If they did that, they'd lose a lot of stock market value.

Growing up inMichigan in the nineties, solar water heaters were surprisingly common. Your comment makes me wonder how hard it would be to pipe water through the PV panels en route to the actual water heater.

Good tip. Somehow this feels more fair than the elevator example but I can't put my finger on why.

I used to work in a shiny new LEED certified government building here in DC. My office was on the second floor. I had to take a elevator every day because the only stairs were for fire use. So frustrating.

In my own experience, the brass sets the culture and expectations that encourage department heads to break the law. Certainly there are done CEOs explicitly commanding people to do crime, but it's more common to tell people to, eg, move fast, focus on profits, and do whatever needs to get done.

Honest question, why do they need tens of thousands of GPUs? I would have thought they could run a Sol-level model on a few million dollars of hardware. Let's say it's ten million dollars, and let's also say they want to test multiple models in multiple different ways. You're still talking on the order of a hundred million dollars to build an airgapped test system. Happy to have my math proven wrong here.

One of my friends from grad school got a Masters of Public Policy then decided she would rather chalk menuboards for a living, spun up an LLC, and does amazing work. I admire people who are so willing to chase their dreams. I joke with my five year old that I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, except it's increasingly not a joke.

I totally agree with you! I love seeing a flyer at my daughter's school that was obviously made by a student. It shows that they care enough about the thing to put real work into promoting it. Heck yes I'll buy a donut from coffee cart so you can go to some camp, fifth graders!

This is incredibly well stated. I might trot out this comment the next time the bosses ask for more accurate next-year financial projections.

Now most people get their music through a paid service that streams content from a remote data center. OpenAI is trying to replicate the music industry's history.

It'll be easy to enforce for most corporate clients. I work in a profit-driven corporation that's now owned by a private equity firm. We try all sorts of things to make money. But there's no way we'd deploy a legally questionable model, even if we thought nobody on the outside would ever find out. I was our technical lead for GDPR implementation; we took all sorts of steps to make sure systems were compliant even when there was approximately zero chance of anybody on the outside ever finding out if we hadn't. The buy-cake-for-money-launderers companies flouting the law are an exception, not the rule.

I've lived in Washington DC for 20 years and I never realized why the bus stops here are concrete! Thank you for this.

I recently hired for a tech position on my team. I ended up hiring an amazing internal applicant. I consider myself lucky. The hiring process has gotten awful on both sides in recent years.

If you do crime, can you be arrested by the local police?

"I have diplomatic immunity! Also I live on a reservation with their own police force. So no."

It's pretty clear that's what the amendment means. The only ambiguous situation I've found is if you're born just inside American waters on your way between foreign countries, but that's a really narrow case.

I'll point out how many cases are decided unanimously. It's quite rare for a case to be decided 6-3 on ideological lines.

What change would you suggest? A minimum period of time in the country before birthright citizenship applies? What about people who enter the United States illegally and then have a child twenty years later? What about my ancestors, who entered the country legally but never pursued American citizenship?

The 14th amendment was written the way it was to create a bright line that was easy to implement. I'm sure they considered other ways of framing the issue. I think it's brilliant just the way it is.