5,902 karma · joined August 26, 2011
https://layeredthoughts.com
For autonomous trucking, you’re grossly underestimating 1) how dangerous these trucks are. A small rear end accident with a car does some damage, a small rear end from a tractor with 80k pounds of cargo kills people. 2) They are hard to drive, hard to navigate in cities, require inspections constantly for roadworthiness and safety. Sure having a tractor pull a load on a few hundred miles of straight empty highway in Texas is doable today, having that same truck get to a warehouse in the center of Dallas is a nightmare even for pro drivers. 3) Plus no one knows how to legislate or regulate these things. If a robot tractor kills someone, who is at fault? The vehicle maker? The autonomy software maker? The carrier? There are already nuclear verdict lawsuits for these types of situations with human truck drivers that can be tens to hundreds of millions of dollars I.e. shut down a carrier bad. You think a bunch of octogenarians in congress know what the hell to do with any of this stuff?
I say all of this while also fully agreeing that consumer autonomy seems to have been solved or is on its way to being solved, I’d bet in 5 years it will be weird to get an uber and there’s a person actually driving. Commercial heavy duty trucking is a whole different class of problems that goes well beyond “can the software do it”.
Source: I make software for trucking carriers and drivers
- I don't care how you produce the words
- I expect you to use tools to be as efficient and productive as possible
- You are accountable for every word you produce
Some other ideas I've thought about:
- Pay to boost a specific article for a period of time (with appropriate UI changes so people know it's a boosted article)
- A job board that puts roles in the article rankings (ideally also semantically matched to users based on their profile/topics they follow). a reverse job board could work too, where people can indicate the types of roles they're open to
- An Offers board, for people to pay to advertise their product / startup with a specialized deal available to readers of the site (could also be more of an affiliate system to reduce friction of getting Offers submitted by taking a commission on payments collected using the offer code).
Overall there's a bunch of directions this could go, I just need to start promoting the site itself to get traffic up and consistent.
I also want to add content digests/newsletters that highlights best content of the week for sharing on twitter and via email to those who register accounts. Typical growth marketing stuff
Interesting idea overall. Could be generalized to just general trend identification I think based on named entity recognition (like google trends). Over time you can trace first mentions of stuff and buzz over time. I’ll noodle on it.
What's your tech stack? Mine is pretty vanilla ruby on rails, while my site is closed source, I did open source a rails engine for adaptive monitoring of RSS feeds that does a lot of the heavy lifting: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor
Fun times when “safety” means both the safety of mankind, and also the safety of revenues
Even though I have it on Ethernet on a gigabit network at home, with WiFi 7 mesh that gets 950mb up/down to the internet, I’ve never been able to use jetkvm whether through their cloud portal or through direct ip connection without it feeling very sluggish. It’s plugged into an aging NUC that I know is still performant, and I previously had no machine setup with settings configured to a smooth basically realtime feel even over Tailscale remotely, so I don’t know if I just am using the wrong settings or something or what. Might just have to have codex computer use fiddle with it to see if it can figure it out.
But I hear you.
I do want to ask though (and I should make this clear in a FAQ or something): the way I check RSS feeds uses adaptive scheduling, so I intentionally don’t check feeds of sites too rapidly. Then the summarization is based on the full article content but I never render that full content on the site (to avoid traffic hijacking concerns). Given that: what’s the concern?
EDIT: just checked in firefox, I don't see an issue. can you email me at me@dchuk.com and maybe I can debug with you?
But I also extract topics automatically from the content too with LLMs, to allow for dynamic topic pages that users can separately subscribe to to tune their feeds.
Haven't promoted it much, but it's pretty amazing what you can do for a couple bucks a month. And my main thesis with this site is that by locking the content to only rss feeds of known blogs, you dramatically reduce the spam submission risk (basically eliminate it). Doesn't handle the spam comment side of things, but that's a different problem.
EDIT: I also open sourced a Rails engine I made to power this site if anyone is interested: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor