LeanderK

is there really no middle ground (not an American)? What about cities like Seattle or Boston (just guessing here)? For me, the thought feels a bit like just going back in time. I mean there are still issues everywhere but this is so drastic and feels like you're back to constantly fighting for really basic rights.

This comment also reads a bit like it's ok for you if you don't personally feel hostility, so this might only be true for your personal situation. I don't think it's really that much of a personal question because different groups feel different amounts of hostility. Will you just ignore them?

> The game theory of zoning dictates that it needs to be done at a higher-than-local level.

This is also true in other countries. When a city grows everybody agrees that we need to expand the city and build new city districts. But it's always the other neighbouring municipalities who is better suited.

there's also a tension between making things simple and making things customisable. The reality is that for most a computer is not a hobby but a tool. They use it to do something and do not want to babysit it. The simpler, the better. Ideally no interaction required beside the interaction you want.

It's similar to cars. Nobody can fix todays cars besides professionals and I bet most have really no idea what's going. But most also don't care because they do not view cars as a hobby but as a tool that just has to work (it usually just works). If they are not required to fix them themselves they won't engage with it at all.

Well, but cars don't work very well as soon as you concentrate parts of your population in urban centres. Both are needed and both are optional depending on where you live. At least individual ownership, because you will always need trucks, but you will also always need freight trains.

training it will be way harder and the net probably needs to grow to eliminate external motion tracking, but I don't think the image processing and quality of image sensors is the bottleneck. These robots need the right hardware for quick inference, maybe some specialised inference chips or something, but I think if you manage to train a net that can do this, you can deploy it in principle on the robots. It looks like it has a "Intel Core i3 processor dual core" which is definitely not the right hardware for efficient (throughput + power consumption) inference.

The problem is imho that the problem is way harder and we will probably struggle to train a net that can do this in simulation. It might just be impossible with our current capabilities, we might have to wait a few years until research catches up with the problem. But I am not a RL guy and can comment only from my computer vision-perspective.

this is a personal opinion disguised as a rational argument and general truth. It essentially reads as "I don't like brutalism, nobody does, it sucks and therefore this has nothing to do with it". It's intellectually dishonest and cheap.

Brutalism was never about stripping buildings of all aesthetics, a common misconception or often heard derogatory argument against many forms of minimalism. Minimalism does not eliminate design. It is more about rejecting purely decorative elements and working directly with the structural elements and building material. Recognising aesthetic choices is therefore not fraudulent or dishonest, but your lack of understanding what brutalism is about.

commuting should definitely be factored in. You don't commute for fun, you only commute for the job. It's an expense that occurs every time you work and, as you said, a fixed cost that becomes more important the lower paying your job is.

In the end, it's what you take home and that's what the article is about.

I don't why the climate change aspect is so dismissed. In germany we are currently banning new gas heating installation as a general push to phase out gas. If you want to replace gas with electricity from green sources you have to start somewhere, otherwise everyone will just cry when being forced to replace it, even if announced that general Gas will shout down in 15 or 20 or whatever years. If you really want to achieve carbon neutrality, you have to think about every energy source. We can not just continue to use gas because synthesising it is so much more expensive and otherwise we're stuck with the infrastructure we built today. Gas cooking is probably easier to replace than gas heating but it's still a headache and the public opposition to replace fully it in the future is directly correlated with the number of people using it.

If you want to achieve carbon neutrality in 20 years it's ambitious and you need a plan. Phasing out the gas-infrastructure is one of them. And housing and its infrastructure is so permanent, our gas heating is as old than I am, at least it looks this way.

I bet this can be resolved in the future. The problem is that some things appear very, very often in similar forms in the training data, this leads to the model memorising the answer instead to generalising. This phenomenon can be seen for other tasks in other models, e.g. vision.

ah ok, now I get what you mean. Yeah, doing everything in canvas is in general a bad approach for all the reasons you listed.

> I don't know but Vespa-type scooters are very uncommon in the US

why? They are also quite common in germany for people living in the city and very useful to get around in the city. I personally bike but I see the appeal.

> As a cyclist, I don't have an issue sharing space with other traffic, but I do have an issue with the hyper-aggressive drivers that seek to scare and/or injure cyclists by not giving them enough space when overtaking

I haven't generally seen that in Germany, although I have only lived in cities with a generally good biking infrastructure. The only time when I get uncomfortably close is either due to fundamental infrastructure constrains (intersection squeezed in between buildings) or if some stupid delivery van parks on the bicycle path so I have to overtake it by crossing into the road. I wonder if more cyclist would normalise the situation so that abusive drivers calm down.

> USING HIDET SCRIPT TO WRITE CUSTOM OPERATORS

this is really cool. I sometimes would like to have custom operators that are more or less trivial but the amount of work to create the operators by hand is just not worth it.

I think it might also be the privilege of software engineers speaking. You can literally get another job, a permanent position with benefits, if you're unhappy with your current position. You probably just have to change your linkedin status, write a few former colleagues or tell it the world via twitter.

This is not possible if you're working in the kitchen or cleaning. Sucks for you, right? You must be in this situation because you've chosen it, you can just switch jobs otherwise.

In a world where you're only surrounded by tech workers your whole world might become tech with an occasional ring from the food delivery man the only contact with the outside world. I've never been in silicon valley but that's how I imagine it to be.

Wouldn't you need pipes anyway for regular plumbing? That would have lead to issues anyway, right? Also I doubt somewhat the tech was new 15 years ago, it's quite common in germany to use district heating, especially if there's a source nearby you can use or it's a bigger city. So I am pretty sure district heating is very old-tech, just geothermal source is new. German wikipedia says:

> About 9 % of the total heat demand in Germany is covered by heat grids today and 14 % of the demand for residential buildings.

this take is a little bit too simplistic. There are use-cases where you are bound to a web-based framework but JS solutions are just not fast enough, e.g. data visualisations via jupyter notebooks. So you're stuck with some horribly slow solutions or non-interactive ones giving you pngs. Since you're plotting data, the text is minimal and the needed dialogs etc. are also minimal (clicking on a point and getting a label) or having a few options to rotate/turn on some features/zoom. And pngs with rendered text is as inaccessible as it gets, although data-visualisation may be fundamentally incompatible with accessibility tools since it is all about seeing stuff.

So I usually produce pngs via matplotlib and only selectively use interactive, js based, visualisations but they are get so unbelievable slow quickly when that your whole tab freezes.

wow, i am genuinely impressed! super snappy. I wonder whether it could be used to tackle a real pain point of mine. I work a lot with data, visualisations with jupiter notebooks. There are essentially two approaches: matplotlib, which outputs pngs/svgs. The notebooks stay fast but they are not interactive. The other is approaches like plotly, js-based, interactive, very useful but it gets slow really fast. I can not handle a lot of data. It can not handle a lot of plots. A simple, interactive plotting library with a focus on speed would be immensely useful! With python bindings. Could be a fun weekend project. I don't know any rust though, anybody up to collaborate? :P

I bet the canvas approach would not slow-down the notebook.

also I wasn't really talking as if there's not fix for it, but the sabotage of MS on the UX of their flagship product. It feels cheap and not pleasant to use if you're bombarded with ads and stupid cortana-stuff.

I really don't like the painting of business leaders as heroes, but here it feels a little bit appropriate: I bet steve jobs would have fired you on the spot for this. And the managers under him would have never dared to do this and still don't.

my girlfriend recently had ads in the browser from microsoft urging her to use bing for a month to earn a few dollars in amazon credit. I was baffled how you can cripple the UX of your flagship product without any respect to it, and in such a cheap, tasteless way.

even elon musk said it would be a success if it didn't damage the launchpad. It did, it is wrecked.

but do you need to reach geostationary? couldn't you just switch to a rocket at this stage? Maybe a small one to bridge the gap? I would have thought that the first kilometres are the ones where you have to invest the most work so if you just bridge them using the space elevator it would be still an improvement.

Maybe for cargo the 20 days are not really important

I consider everything longer than 15 minutes a lot. 80 minutes away by car is enormous, that's 160 minutes to your friend and back, even 40 minutes is a lot. It just kills spontaneity and increases work. I don't want travel for 40 minutes after an exhausting day, I want to meet a friend in a 5 to 10 minutes time, 20 max, and complain about how stupid my day was while enjoying the last rays of sunshine (at least in the summer...).

In 40 minutes I could have already met a friend after 10 minutes and talked 30 minutes and start to head home again!

I am surprised we are this close to regional airliner. I would have thought any useful electric plane is not feasible yet. Maybe electric regional airliners will inject enough capital to increase the range gradually.

Europe has to accept the loss of Ariane 6. We have to write it off, it's a pill we have to swallow. Either get Ariane 6 into production right now or continue with Ariane 5, but we have to get Ariane 7 into development as fast as possible. Ariane 6 is a dead-end.

Everyone is pretty pessimistic here, but you have to keep in mind that before spacex ariane was a big player. They didn't realise the revolution happening until it was too late and now have this uncompetitive rocket, but Ariane is not entirely stupid and incompetent. They can create a reliable, good rocket.

it mirrors a bit the experience I had in university with foreign students/phd students. Some immigrants are only friends with immigrants from the same country and it was surprising to hear that after spending years (sometimes BSc/Msc/Phd or Work) they are completely unable to say a single word in german, have no german friends etc. Usually very unapproachable und uncomfortable to talk to.

Others with mixed groups of friends were way more approachable, I was surprised by some how well they are able to speak the language after just a few years.

this really sounds like a fun and promising way to make friends. I've seen it happen at universities with "tandem" partners (italian comes to germany and wants to learn german, the german wants to learn italian), but they usually leave after the exchange.

yeah, I am a bit confused by the statement. I have never planned this, it just happens after repeatedly meeting at the same pub in some frequency. I've also seen a shared, regular activity create this, for example the monthly pub quiz or sneak preview in the small independent cinema. I think it's important that it's somewhat accessible everyone so that it's not a chore.

I would say suburbs are smaller communities next to a major city. Most inhabitants usually work in the city, and the suburb is clustered around a center with the town-hall, activities like an ice-cream shop, and a mass-transit connection to the city center. They also have an easy connection to a major road/highway taking you to the city. The connection to the city is easy and commuting expected. The suburb is similar to a town in a sense that it is self-sufficient with a school, pharmacy and one, two restaurants, but with few cultural activities due to the competition from the city. Inhabitants spend most of their time in the suburb and children grow up there, but due to easy access to the city people living in the suburb often go into the city to shop, go into a cinema, meet friends or into a museum/theatre. The symbiosis with the city differentiate the suburb to an adjacent smaller town.

> Well … yeah. It’s education at scale. Anything at scale will be inflexible by definition.

Maybe agree to disagree because I don't see that.

> ~$22k

wow...this is honestly insane. I wonder how many full-time teacher positions per class this could afford. What's the most comprehensive schools education you can get there? In germany there's been the recent rise of all-day options at schools (school until 4pm covering lessons, homework and studying for exams and optional topics like school orchestra or more intense sports). 22k should pay for that and this would help overworked or overwhelmed parents. My girlfriend and her sister was raised by a single mother and went to one when it was still the exception (roughly ~40% are enrolling at all day schools right now, but it really started nation wide ~2002). It was quite different to my experience at a "normal" school class. She liked it.

I struggle to imagine how you can raise two daughters, work a full time job in a competitive housing market (so you can't really reduce your hours because the rent is high) while finding the time to invest enough time into the education of your children. At least the amount of time my parents have put in would be straight up impossible (one was working full time, the other reduced to 50% so afternoons there was always one present at home).

> That’s the current theory and it fails

I do not see such evidence, maybe it fails in san francisco but that can have thousands of reasons. Everything I've read here points me to the fact that the public education is not good/comprehensive enough and too inflexible. I am honestly a bit shocked what i've read here, this is definitely not my experience with public education, like not at all. San francisco is rich, people make a lot of money there. There is no excuse why public education should not excel. I bet every major politician has his kids on a private school and also every other decision maker.

> There is no way for you to create a public system that overcomes the success that comes out of parents who are involved and invested in their child’s education

This is not exactly what I said. It is probably impossible in practice to eliminate this advantage. But while impossible to eliminate, you can try to minimise it and you should. It's the only fair thing to do because kids can't choose their parents. I would go further, it's the only ethical thing to do.