Maybe this is the performance. The podcast, based on the GGP, is a far more realistic form of human behavior. The current mode seems like a performance, following the trend of other SV CEOs.
For people who claim to be really smart, original thinkers, they follow the herd right toward the cliff.
There was an app called Exit Strategy that showed you where to stand on the train to maximize your routes, depending on what transfers you were taking.
The new R211 trainsets[1] have digital displays that show this information as well -- they show the upcoming station ahead of time, along with which exit is relative to which car in the train.
On a recent week long with lots of subway use trip to NYC, it was wild to me that this sort of extremely basic information was incredibly hard to impossible to find. At best, there was a single screen, but positioned in such a way to be invisible to at least half the carriage (on the side in one of the ends); at worst there was only the driver saying stations names over an intercom system that garbled everything. Same at stations, where with a few exceptions, it seemed the only information was on track-facing screens in very limited numbers. There was vastly more space dedicated to ads, including screens with ads, than to signage. Why? Why not replace 3 of the 100 ad signs with some information about the train, or a map? Being more used to Paris and London metros, it was quite hard to navigate and took lots of effort fishing for information which should be well presented.
It seems that usability is one of the last concerns of US transit planners. And NYC Subway is supposed to be one of the good ones!
> At best, there was a single screen, but positioned in such a way to be invisible to at least half the carriage (on the side in one of the ends); at worst there was only the driver saying stations names over an intercom system that garbled everything.
That’s the old (but not very old) trainsets. The new ones have a digital display above every door. Be happy you weren’t on the very old ones; those don’t have displays at all, besides a paper map.
The answer to this isn’t about usability, but about the fact that the NYC subway runs old trainsets and isn’t given very much money (relative to its economic impact on the city) to upgrade them. But that’s slowly changing.
Even the oldest trainsets in Paris and London (as old as from the 50s) have at least a static map of the line; none in NYC out of those I was one had even that.
Similarly, all stations have digital signage indicating when the next train is coming and where it's going, starting from the ~70s.
My point about usability was that NYC Subway was pretty hard to use as a tourist. Station entrances had random variations of end destinations or broad directions (e.g. either the name of the lasts stops, or the location of the last stop like Coney Island, or the general direction of Uptown or Brooklyn). Understanding where express services are stopping was hard, because the one screen per station with that detail was inaccessible due to the amounts of people on waiting. And the noise.. NYC Subway needs lots of investment, but that investment needs to be spent better too.I passed through some works a few time, and the ratio of workers on their phone vs workers looking like they're working was 30:1 each time. The Grand Paris Express president talked about the mismanagement and absurd contracts MTA have, and he has said that if they had the same requirements GPE (100+ km of brand new fully automated metros) would never have been built.
> Even the oldest trainsets in Paris and London (as old as from the 50s) have at least a static map of the line; none in NYC out of those I was one had even that.
You might have missed it. I absolutely guarantee you that every single car in the NYC subway has at least one system map and multiple line maps. On the older cars, the (paper) system map tends to be at the front of the car, and the (paper) line maps are generally in the middle of the car.
I don't particularly disagree about destination-designated services being confusing. However, that's the norm for subway systems AFAICT; Paris's metro directions were equally confusing for me as a visitor.
(You're also right about the noise although, again, I think Paris is a relative outlier among large metros in terms of low noise levels. To my understanding, this is a result of using rubber tires on some lines, continuously-welded rail on others, smaller trainsets overall, and - yes - better maintenance.)
> You might have missed it. I absolutely guarantee you that every single car in the NYC subway has at least one system map and multiple line maps. On the older cars, the (paper) system map tends to be at the front of the car, and the (paper) line maps are generally in the middle of the car.
One per car is absurdly insufficient. Especially considering the amount of space dedicated to ads.
> I don't particularly disagree about destination-designated services being confusing. However, that's the norm for subway systems AFAICT; Paris's metro directions were equally confusing for me as a visitor.
Nope, Paris metro only uses the last stop for signs. You don't have some signs saying La Plaine, others St Denis, third ones Mairie de St Denis when they're talking about the Mairie de St Denis stop in the La Plaine neighbourhood of St Denis (random example). This is the same way that transit apps orient you (tell you to catch line X from stop A, direction ABC; having some stop entrances say some places on the way to ABC, that's confusing)
Not on the elevated lines (with the exception of some stretches that are being replaced now), to my knowledge. The elevated lines are some of the loudest in the city.
(Ironically, the biggest reduction in noise along the J/Z line in recent years has been due to lead abatement: the temporary sheds they're using to cover the superstructure while they remove the lead paint makes the surrounding streets noticeably quieter.)
Lots of beautiful spots to see in the interior, Kaiteur is the highest single drop waterfall in the world. Baganara Island is a good vacation spot. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.
The "Changes to my workflow" part is most relevant, and would be more accurately titled "How Cursor writes code differently to me [a senior developer]".
For example:
1) Cursor/AI more likely to reinvent the wheel and write code from scratch rather than use support libraries. Good to avoid dependencies I suppose, but widely used specialized libraries are likely to be debugged, and mature - able to handle corner cases gracefully, etc. AI "writes code" by regenerating stuff from it's training data - akin to cut and pasting from Stack Overflow, etc. If you're using this for a throwaway prototype or personal project then maybe you don't care as long as it works most of the time, but for corporate production use this is a liability.
2) AI more likely to generate repetitive code rather than write reusable functions (which he spins as avoiding abstractions) means code that is harder to read, debug and maintain. It's like avoiding global symbolic constants and defining them multiple times throughout your code instead. This wouldn't pass typical human code review. When future you, or a co-worker, maybe using a different editor/IDE, fixes a bug, they may not realize that the same bug has been repeated multiple times throughout the code, rather than fixing it once in a function.
We don't have human level AGI yet, far from it, and the code that today's AI generates reflects that. This isn't code that an experienced developer would write - this is LLM generated code, which means it's either regurgitated as-as from some unknown internet source, or worse yet (and probably more typical?) is a mashup of multiple sources, where the LLM may well have introduced it's own bugs in addition to those present in the original sources.
Hey there. Been where you have been and can safely say, there is always a way out of it.
Sounds like you just need a bit of consistency to make some progress. I'd be down to chat once a week for 15 minutes and we can figure out the focus for the week. Hit me if you think that would be helpful, sounds like you can build some good stuff.
