domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6m ago
I found this blog when I was trying to figure out what a “Soviet triangle” meant. Thought it was interesting reading. That article is about bus networks, but there are others on subway placement, throughout, all sorts of stuff.
congestion fees
Those certainly disincentivize traffic, but I’m not sure I grasp the economics. Taxing consumption reduces the clearing quantity. But the clearing quantity for roads is the supply of workers! Any intervention that doesn’t change the ratio of road usage per worker is going to affect the cost of labor, too.
So we need to ask whether self-driving cars fundamentally changes that ratio. I think it has to, right? Flawless zipper-merging. Reduced accident rates. Shorter following distances, perhaps ending in attached convoys to reduce drag. There’s a lot of room for technical solutions.
I don’t think we’ve hit the limit on people-miles per hour. Until we do, we still have room to make congestion more efficient.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
10m ago
Redot
I'm happy to hear it. If they can make it so that compiling for double-precision AND C# actually works, then they're winners in my book. I'll check it out once I've established a new weekly routine that makes some suitable time for sitting down and tinkering.
@Southkraut, you mentioned you probably wouldn't have time over the past week, but I'll traditionally ask how are you doing anyway.
Thanks for asking, and please do keep it up, even though it's a bit of a drought right now. I did not get around to anything at all - I was always at work, or making up for my absence by going full hog on dad duty, or just plain tuckered out.
Can you elaborate on this. I think I know what you mean, but I don't know what consequences, if any, it would have on picking an Engine, for example.
It wouldn't. It's not related to the engine question. It's rather a change in how I approach my cluster of projects, and a change that snuck up on me and I only recognized it long after it happened. Let me illustrate the comparison a little.
Old: There are many Physical Entities. All these entities have complex physical properties and interactions. All these entities are always rendered and physically simulated. Some of those entities may contain so-called Functional Structures. Some of those Functional Structures might support Behaviors. Some of those might be Agents, who actually act upon the game world. All their actions and interactions go through the physical properties of their Physical Entities.
New: There are many agents. All these agents have goals and sets of possible actions. Some of those agents have physical bodies. But the actions and interactions of the agents only account for their physical bodies in the broadest sense, i.e., usually just location. Those physical bodies that are very close to the player's location are actually rendered and physically simulated, but the abstract behavior of the agents has priority over the physics simulation, and they can interact with non-rendered, non-physically-simulated agents just fine.
Also, congrats on the new job! I recall you posted about being burned out with the old one a while back. I've been in a similar position not long ago, so I'm glad to hear you took matters into your own hands, and hope the new job is a better fit.
I didn't really take the initiative on this until the last job really started falling apart, but it's still a sound improvement overall. Better salary, conditions, benefits, location, and most importantly I get along with my new colleagues very well, which was sadly not really the case in the old job. That last point is very important to me; I'm much more motivated when people I actually like depend on me. I'm also on premises all the time, which helps a lot with actually focusing on the job - no more distractions on the home front. The work itself is extremely dry and technically uninteresting, but I suppose you can't have it all. I'm honestly surprising myself with how easily I manage to adapt to the new working conditions after four years of practically pure home office, and how much energy I can muster for work after so much time spent just dragging myself along in a job I hated. It's nice. Exhausing, too, but I'm happier than I've been in a long time.
How did your similar situation turn out?
MathWizard
Good things are good
11m ago
I am absolutely not blue tribe, and never have been, this does not describe me. I grew up with Christian Republican parents, got a hunting license at 12 years old, I hate cities, am highly skeptical of big government and redistributive policies, and think the majority of social problems are best solved by self control and personal responsibility, or failing that, ruthless law enforcement. My grandparents on both sides are rednecks and they are wonderful and kind people who I adore. But I personally would rather spend my day on my computer than outdoors on a pickup truck, and I think the Republicans are equally braindead as the Democrats, just less trigger-happy about their stupid plans. I suppose you could define me as "a particular disaffected part of the red tribe", but then you have to explain why I have more in common with the other blue-grey people than I do with the pure red people. I think lots of the right-leaning Mottizens have similar cultural leanings. Some of them are disaffected blue tribe, but others came from Red. But most of us don't fit in nicely with either.
Even if you don't think "gray tribe" is the best way to describe it, there's clearly some real thing that the term is pointing to, something that bridges the gap between Red and Blue.
roystgnr
17m ago
No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it.
Tom Clancy, "Debt of Honor", wasn't too far off. Disgruntled pilot rather than hijackers, one plane into the Capitol building rather than 4 planes into assorted targets, but it obviously conveyed "a jumbo jet full of fuel is a dangerous missile", and it was the 7th book in a best-selling series that had already been adapted into 3 blockbuster movies.
Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack.
It was the weapon delivery system in the OKC bombing, but yeah, not the weapon.
as a result pretty much every major public square in Europe now has bollards to prevent people from getting vehicles into them during busy times.
I've always half-wondered why truck attacks didn't become a more serious threat. It seemed so trivially easy and moderately effective that in the wake of Nice I expected it to become just another Thing that happens regularly. Wikipedia doesn't even list more than a handful of copycats.
it certainly seems like people who commit terrorist attacks want it to be recognizeable as such; or alternatively are just generally uncreative.
IIRC this still holds even if you have a very loose definition of "terrorist"; the "contagious" timing of school shootings suggests that the kinds of assholes who try to become infamous for shooting up a school are much more likely to do so if there's been another famous school shooting recently, as if even though the idea is hardly a secret at this point they don't really take it seriously until they see a de-facto commercial for another one on the news.
I do also think there might be something to the theory
Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?
The black trench coats and guns at Columbine were like an evil echo of The Matrix protagonists superhumanly fighting The Man, whereas simply running people over feels like something that could be accomplished by an elderly person confusing the gas and brake pedals. They say that "nobody thinks they're the villain of their own story", but also nobody even wants to think they're just a half-competent mook in their own story, so perhaps when they do slip into villainy they try to make it dramatic. The sort of utilitarian who deduces that you can massacre more people with a car than a gun might also generally be the sort who deduces that massacring a bunch of people doesn't actually accomplish any of your real goals anyway.
haroldbkny
21m ago
a modern take on Back to the Future featuring a Cybertruck
"The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with a complete lack of style?"
some
25m ago
The article still includes:
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported that the contents of Brooks' Facebook account, which contained "Black nationalist and anti-Semitic" viewpoints, and his crime were exploited by white supremacists in order to push racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, claiming Brooks' attack was racially motivated, that he killed his victims specifically because he hated white people, and that left-wing media were attempting to cover up the incident. Law enforcement did not give a motive for the attack.[109][110][111]
Through the "shamelessness", to use your accurate term, is so off the charts, it may have been added by trolls seeking to discredit ADL. It certainly lowers my opinion of this anti-antisemitism organization to see it defending an antisemitic murderer, by pining of the label of "antisemite" onto his critics.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27m ago
Mobile sports gambling is like, really, really bad, mmm'kay
Color me in the not surprised category. The article, and the additional one's it links at the bottom, do a good job of toe-ing the line between "people should be given the freedom to make choices" and "holy shit this is sentencing those with addictive personalities to lives of poverty."
I'm not super interested in talking about sports gambling itself, although I welcome any good anecdotes, and would instead like to invite comments on the concept of "digital addiction."
There's enough literature out there now that there's a strong enough case to be made that digital technology - very specifically smartphones - can cause behavior patterns that can accurately be described as addictive. However, there is still a delineation between digital addiction and physical/neurological addiction of alcohol and drugs. As a society, we acknowledge the basic danger of these substances by age-limiting some and outright prohibiting others.
My general question would be; what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids? For all of society?
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
31m ago
guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade.
This was a popular method back when ISIS was still called ISIS; some guy in France managed to kill over 100 people doing that a few years ago. It's possible to do this serially to random people in crosswalks as well; some guy in Quebec did that a while back, too.
There are ways to get large vehicles, but those are still a little harder to pull off
It's easier, trivial even, and this works in all countries. To get a large vehicle, you go to a U-Haul or your local car rental desk (which is where at least one of the vehicles used in the events described above came from, if not both). Worst case, you need a driver's license and don't have one.
Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?
Probably. These people are more interested in Sending a Message (and simply picking targets of opportunity) and basically just screw around lighting rounds off in the general direction of their targets until the cops shoot them (body count rises as the cops delay); things like "raw body count" and "the suitability of one's firearm to this task" tend to be secondary considerations, to put it lightly.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
33m ago
I guess this is also one of those things that are affected by how well you can do laptop work in a moving vehicle. I can work even while riding shotgun in a car if necessary, some people can't even do it on a train. A major factor for me to not own a car; train trips can actually be useful in themselves for doing work with limited opportunities for personal distraction.
Supah_Schmendrick
41m ago
On a practical level, in a city like Seattle, a driverless taxi would become a toilet pretty quickly.
I wouldn't trust a fully-autonomous car in any location where there's a reasonable chance of any exterior disturbance in the vicinity of the car. Anything from wildlife to protesters to squeegee men - it's too easy to blockade the car (either intentionally or unintentionally) and harass the passengers.
johnfabian
44m ago
There were a spate of these kind of terror attacks in Europe in the mid-2010s. ISIS-inspired, invariably; some 2nd generation disaffected Arab rents a U-Haul and drives it into a crowd on some holiday. The first one was the Nice truck attack in 2016; there were a bunch of copycats and as a result pretty much every major public square in Europe now has bollards to prevent people from getting vehicles into them during busy times.
There are a couple of other similar cases elsewhere; here in Toronto in 2018 an incel hired a van and killed a bunch of people with it.
Terror attacks very much seem to follow specific trends, and it seems to take certain people to think of novel ways to go about it. No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it. Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack. I'm not sure why this is, but it certainly seems like people who commit terrorist attacks want it to be recognizeable as such; or alternatively are just generally uncreative.
jkf
45m ago
That seems extremely unlikely -- there are numerous mug-shots, as seen on many news sites (including one linked in this very thread).
What is the licensing issue with a mug-shot?
"Wikipedia editors make up excuses to justify ideological narrative shaping on hot-CW related topics" on the other hand... would not be a big surprise to me.
some
49m ago
This is the go-to excuse wikipedians use when they want to memoryhole something. They also used it to attempt to delete the Trump Raised Fist photo. Of course, this is just a pretext, as the solution is widely used on wikipedia: reduce the resolution of the photo.
Dont you mean the "Waukesha Christmas parade incident caused by an SUV"?
The headlines for that were beyond parody. I wonder if all the arguments are still on the wiki talk page, or stuck in an archive. There was a level of shamelessness reached in 2020-2022 that seems almost unreal now, like a fever dream.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
will note that there is not a picture of him in the Wikipedia article,
Edit history suggests that it's a licensing issue. If you can find a photo with an appropriate license you should add it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
It was already permeating normie spaces, though. Trump was part of the inflammation response to the infection of Woke ideology. Fevers are necessary; it's the infection that's the problem.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1hr ago
Or they could park further away than their occupants are willing/able to walk....
RedRegard
1hr ago
I mean that it's not indicative of whether people prefer modern life to Amish life, since the 'switch' doesn't happen without a significant cost. The fact that most people don't join Amish communes might simply signify peoples' preference for the familiar, or for environments they've already made significant investments in that they don't want to abandon.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1hr ago
I think that is kind of what they are saying - that Trump emboldened Wokeism and caused it to break free into normie spaces.
To add to this, I can confirm that this is not just an opinion they're projecting outwards, I've heard high ranking industry professionals despair to a room of colleagues as to what they should do about the "misinformation" problem. They truly believe that the public is turning away from their trustworthy news because they're not as comforting as misinformation.
And those in that industry I've personally interacted with, yes, probably do take their ethics and integrity seriously. The reason they don't get a pass is something I've touched a couple of times here.
Even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, my observation is that as a group they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession. And I don't mean "the evil and bad right wing journalists that write misinformation", I mean their own in-group. When outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. Journalists cannot afford in-group loyalty with their peers. As Scott wrote, yes, genuinely criticizing the in-group is excruciatingly painful, but that is precisely what the public expects journalism school to train journalists to be able to do.
As long as the profession as those serious journalists don't start publically cleaning up their profession, the public has no reason to trust them.
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
For those who don’t know, this guy’s trial got live-streamed. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. He represented himself, made a gigantic fool of himself, and constantly interrupted the proceedings with insane legal theories. The best part was the judge couldn’t do anything about it. Normally you would hold somebody like that in contempt of court, but this guy was already in jail, and already facing down almost certain life without parole. Holding him in contempt would have done nothing except delay the inevitable, so everyone had to just sit there and take it for weeks.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
In a dense urban center, someone is always going to need a ride.
If the demand for rides out of the urban center (in the morning) were as high as demand for a ride in, then we'd already see equal movement in both directions.
Well, no. They are only in motion if they have a fare already - this is what an algorithm would handle. Uber drivers have to roam the streets and try to chase the surge because they're humans earning a wage. With a fleet of autonomous vehicles, the unit economics of one particular vehicle don't matter, it's a very straightforward supply/demand matching algorithm at the broad market level. You'd end up having waves of fleet movement at something like a Metropolitan Statistical Area level.
You can algorithmically optimize things all you want, but in the end, it isn't really an improvement unless the car can find a fare relatively quickly and relatively close by. If it has to park downtown for any period of time, it's spending money rather than making money, and it's likely more money than a private commuter would pay for his car since he'd probably have a lease (and the pay structures of most garages make things even more complicated and expensive). If the car drives around to find fares, picks up a fare outside of downtown, or goes to a lot where it can park for free, it's contributing to traffic. Additionally, the optimization is only concerned with losing the least amount of money when the cars don't have passengers. Minimizing traffic doesn't play into the equation.
Consider the following scenario: A downtown area gets 20,000 commuter vehicles per day, and a garage costs $15/day on average. Assuming demand to leave downtown is minimal until later mid-afternoon, the optimal move is to simply have the cars drive around downtown. Perversely, if the cars are electric or hybrid (which they are usually assumed to be), it's in the interest of the car service to create as much traffic as possible. Since the bulk of the energy consumption only occurs when the cars are actually moving, it's best for the companies to ensure that the cars are stopped as much as possible. If people need to leave downtown during the day, then, well, there aren't enough of them to make it worth it to park the cars somewhere.
What does "contend" in this context mean?
Deal with the consequences of. Sitting traffic as a passenger isn't exactly much of an improvement when you're trying to get somewhere.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
I agree with your conclusions from the standpoint of personal ownership as the situation currently is. People do like to have "their" car, even if it's "just in case". While there is some percentage of folks out there who have chosen to forgo personal ownership (or, say, downgraded their household from two to one car), it's not very significant yet. Significant price decreases across the board for autonomous cars won't necessarily change the perspective of the individual, as they'd see a similar price decrease on the side of personal ownership as well.
However, riffing a bit on vague thoughts, what if the demand signal came from businesses? I have a vague thought that, sometimes, services which once made financial sense only for particular, highly-remunerated employees may sort of trickle down the chain as the cost to the business decreases. (E.g., when work phones or flights are really expensive, businesses only pay for them for a small number of employees that are a) worth it to provide the perk and get the employee, and/or b) whose productivity gains would offset the cost.) So, I'm thinking, something like how the NFL has extremely highly-paid employees, some of whom are liable to get themselves into trouble with their cars or whatever. So the league offers a car service that will come pick them up and take them anywhere, at any time. Expensive? Absolutely. Worth it to them? Possibly. Lower down the chain, other companies buy company cars for high-level employees. Could be fleet-owned; could be subsidizing a personal purchase. It's a perk and form of compensation, as well as a bit of confidence that they'll be driving a newer, maintained vehicle, and aren't going to have to take unfortunate days off because of car issues. Another example is that the financial industry already pays for employees to take late night taxis home.
Uber is already targeting business. 'Offer commuting services to your employees,' they say. It's a perk to the employee, a way of compensating them; it's cheaper to the business than those other things. There could be perverse incentives, but presumably, the business can say things like, "We'll compensate up to this amount of commute, and if you choose to live further, you'll have to cost share," or something. But they'll get to work every day. It's easy to add in if they need to drive across the city occasionally for business, without jumping all the way to a company car. Maybe when you're negotiating that new lease for office space, you can also say that you only need twenty reserved parking spaces in the building's lot/garage, not a hundred. Uber is betting that they can get to a price point where maybe you used to offer company cars to your C-suite, but now you can offer Uber Business + Commutes to all your VPs as well.
If autonomous vehicles cut the cost of this service down even more, how far down the chain do the perks go? Probably not all the way, not 100%. But can it increase enough to make some money? Uber is betting that it can. Businesses don't care about limit arguments of, "Oh, what if tens of years down the line, the number of autonomous vehicles is approaching 100%; what are urban planners gonna do about deadheading?" They don't care what Autonomous Uber chooses to do with those cars once they've dropped off their employees. If it makes economic sense, they'll just do it. Unless and until, of course, the @Rov_Scam folks start to slap laws around to kill it. That's a problem for the urban planners and Uber to fight about. They just want to attract the best employees and make sure they get to where they need to work every day.
Now, if Uber is right and businesses actually start adopting this sort of thing more, it actually can change some amount of the personal calculation. It's not, "I have to do the math on a cost comparison, and I have to take the risk of surge pricing or delays in getting a driver, and I have to figure out whether the complicated set of tradeoffs allow me to put my personal faith and reputation in this service enough to consider having our household go to one fewer vehicle." Instead, it's, "Well, so my commute is covered. I don't have to think about that. I'm not going to save money by just choosing to not use it. Now, what do we want to have for personally-owned vehicles?"
this is true, for strict definitions of "normal" and strict definitions of "enemy". Al Qaeda was a political enemy, was it not?
...More generally, though, I think you're more or less entirely correct in this case. "Resist the Fascists" signaling is mainly signaling; there is not actually a way to hurt the outgroup much worse than previously without getting in too much trouble, and a lot of the signaling is being driven by at least a subconscious understanding that nothing is actually going to happen.
More or less 100% of people who refer to it as "the JQ" are using it as you describe.
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