Again, I don’t disagree with anything you are saying here. Yes, to overcome auto dependency, we need intercity rail, and yes, we also need intracity transit in the form of busses and trams, etc.

My point is that people overemphasize the importance of large scale transit projects like these for reducing auto dependency, when the most important thing is walkability. Again, you can fill a city with trams and brt lines, but if the city isn’t walkable, no one (or, very few) will use them.

As an example. I am currently living on the outskirts of a small town in Mexico for the winter with a small comminity of other anglophones. Where I am living, our little expat community is able to support a few restaurants, bars, and tightly packed residential communities. About twice per week, I will carpool into the town proper to get some groceries or other supplies and enjoy some of the local life and culture. So in a typical week, I make a total of 2 car trips. I can contrast this with my life in my hometown in the united states, where I would make up to 10 car trips per day in my auto oriented city, going to work, groceries, restaurants, stores, entertainment venues, or friends’ homes. Supposing I average 5 car trips per day in the United States, that is 35 car trips per week. Reducing from 35 car trips per week to 2 is a 95% decrease in auto use. And I do this with not a single thought for reducing my auto dependency or saving the planet - I just do it because the area is walkable, and it is more convenient to walk to places than to drive.

This is why walking should be regarded as the primary mode of transportation that urban reformers should strive for. 90% of car trips in auto oriented areas are made for the hum-drum reasons of daily life - the grocery store, the hardware store, getting the kids from day care, getting a quick meal when you don’t have time to cook, going to the gym, etc. If these things are conveniently within walking distance of peoples’ homes, then they will walk, saving all those car trips. Maybe transit in their city is still sub-par, so they still drive to work every day - they will still significantly reduce their auto use if the area the live in is walkable, and will reduce it more if the area they work in is also walkable. And then, if both home and work are walkable, they will consider the option of taking fast and convenient transit between them.

Certainly trains will play a part in a transition away from auto oriented transport systems. But my point is that walking needs to be primary. Every few years the train boosters will say that, for example, a high speed rail project connecting two cities will reduce auto congestion and car dependency. And then it ends up a severely underutilized boondoggle, because the two cities it connects are still auto oriented.

If you have two places that are already pedestrian friendly and which have a high volume of traffic between them, by all means, build a train. But a train that only has stops in a sea of parking lots is not a reasonable infrastructure investment. The surrounding environment must be reformed before the train will see significant use.

I’ve never heard of that platform, whereas I have heard of Substack. If I’d already built a following, they already have their alerts set up for my substack. If I’m hoping people will pay me, many have already put their payment information into substack, which is a significant barrier many people face in deciding to pay for something online. At a certain point, ideological purity runs into pragmatic problems.

Purity tests are dumb

You could say the same thing about a picture of a cow with the text “Cows have feelings. Stop killing cows.” Yes, science can validate that cows have feelings, and it can discuss the ways in which animal agriculture contributes to climate change. But we could all tell that the poster has less interest in making jokes about science, and more interest in spreading heavy-handed vegan propaganda.

And again, I personally am in favor of reforming urban design to lessen our reliance on personal automobiles (though I will note that, contrary to the emphasis of the meme, the more research-supported position is that the primary transportation alternative to cars needs to be walking, not trains). But this meme is clearly not a science meme.

Also, it isn’t funny. So I like it even less, because I think getting people on board with improved urban environments starts with being likeable - not whiny.

I mean, you are correct that building an entire rail line to a single farm to take the farmer’s kids to school would be extremely inefficient. We need farms, and farmers, and those farmers need to be able to get around, and the way for them to get around is personal automobiles.

But the argument “farmers need cars so we still need cars” is not really an argument in favor of auto-intensive infrastructure. It is a edge case, and we should design cities around the needs of the average person and make allowances for edge cases, not the other way around.

Downvoting because this doesn’t really have anything to do with science. Also because it isn’t funny. I support the message, though

Otoh, murder hole is quite a nice cave

I’m friends with a number of fairly dedicated cavers, including a few who have participated in multi-day first descents and who have been part of scientifically funded research expeditions.

This guy died because he was dumb.

Not to say it isn’t a tragedy. But in caving, you should never really push yourself until you get stuck, and you should never ever descend a tunnel head first. If you are going down, go feet first, because it is far easier to get out crawling up than down.

The cavers I know will be the first to tell you that caving can be dangerous. But they do everything in their power to mitigate that danger. It pisses me off that this is the image that so many people have of caving, when the cavers I know are extremely meticulous about the risks they take. People die in caves every couple of years, but they typically arent knowledgeable and experienced cavers. Typically they are dumbass yahoos who didn’t learn jack about the dangerous terrain they are navigating before waltzing in, and then proceed to demonstrate an ample lack of common sense. Note that the wikipedia article itself notes - this cave was popular with boy scout troops and college kids. Every one of those people, inexperienced and untrained, managed to not crawl headfirst into a tight hole until they were impossibly stuck, because they exercised some straightforward common sense.

A cave like Nutty Putty, when entered with a bit of research, preparation, and common sense, is not very dangerous to the average person. It is a fun and interesting adventure. A chance to explore the natural world. An opportunity to get some fun and novel exercise. And a time when great memories and friendships can be formed. There is always the chance something could go wrong - but then, there is also a chance that you will die in a car wreck while driving to and from the cave. We take calculated risks all the time in the name of living more enjoyable and meaningful lives - the point of life is not to survive, which impossible, but to live. And the takeaway from Nutty Putty should be “don’t be a dumbass” not “never leave your couch, it’s scary outside.”

I imagine this is a description of the mud in the cave. Caves tend to be muddy.

Also, cavers tend to get creative sometimes. But yeah, would be cooler to die in Cemetary Pit or Murder Hole (both actual cave names).

What are the types?

Not really. Sure, the tech has changed, but the underlying logic remains the same.

idk, have you read The Republic? It’s a mishmash of Mary Sue fanfic and Iamverysmart

Elmo should run Arch

Preventing the spread of pornographic deepfakes is simply an extension of very reasonable existing laws banning revenge porn..

Deepfakes in general should have significant legal regulation around them as an extension of libel/slander/defamation/disinformation laws. Imagine if you pissed the wrong person off, and they generated a bunch of deepfake videos of you cruelly killing dogs, then circulated them around to your friends, family, or potential employers. Or imagine if a politician campaigning for reform has a deepfake video generated where they argue in favor of pedophilia.

How are chat bots killing people?

Relevant

I’m confused why you are confused.

In the past week, just prompting, and inspecting the code to provide guidance from time to time

I feel like it is pretty clear the author said “hey AI, do this thing.” The AI made an attempt, the author clarified a few things and maybe made some edits, and then was satisfied with the result.

Like your example of planning a wedding menu. I’m not sure where the ambiguity is. If someone said “I used chatgpt to plan my wedding menu”, I assume they prompted it something like “plan my wedding menu. I want something classy but cheap. No fish.” Then chatgpt spat out a few options, they provided feedback - “I dont like broccoli either” - and then they picked an option they like.

From the article, literally one line above the line you quoted:

In the past week, just prompting, and inspecting the code to provide guidance from time to time, in a few hours I did the following four tasks, in hours instead of weeks:

1. I modified my linenoise library to support UTF-8, and created a framework for line editing testing that uses an emulated terminal that is able to report what is getting displayed in each character cell. Something that I always wanted to do, but it was hard to justify the work needed just to test a side project of mine. But if you can just describe your idea, and it materializes in the code, things are very different.

2. I fixed transient failures in the Redis test. This is very annoying work, timing related issues, TCP deadlock conditions, and so forth. Claude Code iterated for all the time needed to reproduce it, inspected the state of the processes to understand what was happening, and fixed the bugs.

3. Yesterday I wanted a pure C library that would be able to do the inference of BERT like embedding models. Claude Code created it in 5 minutes. Same output and same speed (15% slower) than PyTorch. 700 lines of code. A Python tool to convert the GTE-small model.

4. In the past weeks I operated changes to Redis Streams internals. I had a design document for the work I did. I tried to give it to Claude Code and it reproduced my work in, like, 20 minutes or less (mostly because I’m slow at checking and authorizing to run the commands needed).

“Everyone stop using mechanical looms! They are going to steal all our weaving jobs!”