Even in cities that currently have underground rail systems, I think public transport within cities is inefficient. So much time is wasted stopped at stations, and not going directly from your origin to your destination. If the tunnels were paved and road ramps to the surface added so that robotaxis could go down there to avoid the disruptions of the surface, so much time would be saved. Yes, autonomous driving is not good enough yet, but Waymo and the latest Tesla FSD version are undeniably not that far away, so I think cities should start planning for it now since it will likely be a reality within 15 years. It frustrates me that no one in my city's management seems to be thinking about it at all and are instead planning to restrict car access and invest billions in new rail systems that won't be ready until around the time they will be obsolete. They talk about the space used by cars compared to buses/trains without considering that most robotaxis will probably be tiny single occupant vehicles that aren't comparable to today's cars.
I chose an ambitious/important topic for my PhD. Perhaps it is because stories usually have happy endings, causing us to be overly optimistic, but I imagined that if I just worked really hard on it then eventually I would solve it. In the end I did enough to get the degree, but I didn't solve the problem in any real way. It was five years of struggle that didn't produce any interesting results. The biggest learning for me from the PhD was that it made me more humble and caused me to doubt that something is possible unless a clear path to it is already visible.
> Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media environment?
Perhaps America is a bigger target than other countries for foreign influence operations that seek to cause division and depression using social media.
I also suspect that there isn't an easy way to reduce the resolution that the default iPhone camera app takes photographs at (that I could find) because Apple wants them to be big so that you will need to buy cloud storage.
I am perhaps missing your point, but if people will be able to experience incredible VR worlds, couldn't people happily spend their time sitting in tiny windowless rooms rather than physically travelling to a beach?
One of my colleagues predicted, when ChatGPT was first released, that AI would reduce the value of knowledge work relative to manual labour, but I disagreed as I think the main thing holding back robots from replacing many manual labour jobs at the moment is the difficulty communicating with them. I argued that ChatGPT indicated that we were not too far away from being able to tell a robot to pick the apples from a particular row and put them in the green barn as the usual red barn was being painted today. This video suggests that I was right, and I in fact suspect that such manual labour is a more realistic type of work for AI (with robots) to substantially replace first than most knowledge work, where I think it will remain as an assistant for some time.
Or someone with an interest in making Boeing look bad, such as Comac or a foreign government that wants to tarnish the reputation of one of America's largest exporters.
I wonder whether the recent release of the Comac C919 [1] has anything to do with it - either through pushing Boeing to cut corners to compete on cost, or through malicious amplification of bad news stories involving Boeing.
The similarities between the Irish language and Middle Eastern languages was one of the reasons why people thought there had been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland, and I think this was at least partly what led British Israelites to dig up Ireland's sacred hill of Tara looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Genetic studies later confirmed that there had in fact been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland.
With so many promises being made about "Vision 2030", I worry that the amount of discontent that results when it turns out to be a disappointment might lead to instability
I recently visited King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC, [1]) in Saudi Arabia. It was intended to have a population of 2 million, but according to the Financial Times only had a population of 7000 in 2018. It was like a ghost town when I visited, so I don't think it has increased much since then.
Indeed, however at least TurboTax has competition so that the experience, while unnecessarily complicated, is not as unpleasant as it could be. I have recently been thinking about this as I have just filed my taxes, which, in the country I am living in, can be done only using the government's website. This website is dreadful. It hasn't changed since the early 2000s at the latest, provides no help or guidance, contains typos, and even requires that you manually copy a number from one page to the next. I also don't think the tax system is noticeably easier than the one in the USA (where I used to live) even though there is no direct analogue of TurboTax lobbying for complexity (although there probably are still accountant lobby groups).
A bank called me to ask me security questions. I said that I would call back using the number on the bank's website. They said (and the bank confirmed when I did call the number) that there is no way to be transferred to the security question people when I call the bank - the only way is for them to call me. I explained that that was poor security practice. They said that I should just look at the caller ID to see that it was the bank calling. It was useless trying to tell them about caller ID spoofing.
I was at Nvidia's GTC conference in 2010 and my friend who was with me suggested that we should buy Nvidia stock. I was sceptical as I felt it was highly likely that Intel, which had so many more resources, would soon release a superior product, and so didn't invest.
The computer I use most of the time is a 19 year old (2005) laptop. I run Debian with LXDE and Firefox on it and, although you have to be a little bit patient with some websites, I am generally still very satisfied with it.
Very impressive. My only comment is that it wasn't immediately clear whether I needed to click the microphone icon each time I wanted to respond or not.
One thing that has kept me from ever returning to MIT (where I did my PhD) is that I don't think I could bear the feeling of loss that I am sure would overwhelm me when confronted with the sights and smells and memories of that period of my life that I can never go back to live again. I have lived in quite a few different places during my life, and have pleasant memories from all of them, but my time at MIT feels completely different - it's not just memories, but it feels much more personal, as if it's not just a place but represents who I really am. I have often wondered whether everyone feels like that about their PhD years, but your comments seems to suggest that it is not universal.
The one in Dalkey (south Co. Dublin) is supplemented by another tower on top of nearby Dalkey hill that could see ships from further away and signal down to the Martello tower.
There is no Anki package for Debian 12, and the binaries on the Anki website are only 64bit, so on my 32bit system I use the online version on ankiweb.net, which actually works pretty well.
In the past few months I have talked (separately) to three Chinese students who were doing PhDs in different countries. I asked each what their plans were for the future, and was struck by how determined all three were to not return to China. This is obviously a biased sample, since they already chose to do their PhD outside China, but conditions in China, such as 996 culture, definitely seem to be pushing some talented young people away.
It made me feel, more than I have ever felt before, that Google is now run by non-technical business people who don't seem to understand that many people who have at least some awareness of how this technology works, and so are probably going to be part of the decision-making process on whether to use it and other Google products, can immediately see that it is faked and are often the type of people who react very negatively to such deceptive practices.
Why wasn't automatic updating to this halted immediately? The "grave" bug report was yesterday, but today unattended-upgrades updated me to the affected kernel and I restarted before I heard about the problem.
> maybe you should also get comfortable with simply running the red lights on these quiet roads, since nothing is coming. At least in your case, you have a giant machine with airbags to protect you if you make a mistake.
I do not have a car. It is while walking that I am affected by the behaviour.