Cars are not the solution to that. Hooligans and irritating people are just a possibility in literally every social environment, they always have been, and they always will be. Answers to that problem are social - it's a bigger problem in America than Japan, for exmaplem.
Answers which involve removing oneself from society (by entering a private car) are not good answers. And when you factor in the externalities, you're just displacing "I'm upset, possibly even unwell due to sleep lost" onto "we replaced 90% of the local natural environment with pavement and paint it with crushed human beings every single day".
Look I don't fault you - Americans drive cars because every alternative is absolute dogshit, I don't disagree. But I can't e realistic about that and not this:
> As for the environmental impact, I agree that trains or busses may sometimes be better for environment
That's like saying gunshots may sometimes be more dangerous than throwing rocks.
> but we’re also approaching a future of self driving electric cars powered by nuclear and fusion plants providing clean energy
Even if this was true (I don't think either change is happening nearly fast enough) car-dependency is directly upstream of numerous other environmental problems, most of which don't disappear even if you take parking out of the mix, such as grounds heat and flooding caused by paved roads, such as obsession with energy- and water-inefficient low-density residential zoning (sprawl), such as particulate pollution from tires, such as ecosystem damage from the need to dump literal tons of salt on icy roads for tires to drive on, such as the emissions of road paving itself... you get the idea.
These also don't disappear if you replace privately-owned cars with buses and trains. You need paved roads to put buses on and track to put trains on, and they emit particulate pollution as well unless they're also electrified which is a similar problem to electrifying cars.
Low-density residential sprawl is mostly water-inefficient because it allows people to have the ability to have a garden that they water, you don't inherently use more household-internal water if you live in a suburban house compared to an apartment. Most of the energy efficiency issues are also directly related to low-density residential zoning allowing for more physical space for a dwelling than an equivalently-expensive dwelling would cost in an expensive, dense urban area. In short, the things about low-density residential neighborhoods that are less energy efficiently mostly don't have to do with cars and mostly do have to do with goods that people actively want and can only afford outside of dense urban areas.
The problems do diminish significantly if you need fewer lanes by half or more, and have fewer vehicles per person.
Low-density sprawl in the American style is impossible without cars. Streetcar suburbs could exist but those are necessarily more concentrated and again need less road coverage.
Nor can you say the sprawl is what people "actively want" when it's illegal to build to any other pattern in the vast majority of the country.
None. Why would you think that? My guess is you're an American living nowhere near an urban rail system but I thought most people here would at least be passing familiar with modern trains. Even some American cities have them.
Only that they are worthy of noting. If there is a modern system, but it happens to suck for some reason, you don't have to mention that one. So feel free to strike that "notable". Which American cities have modern train systems?
I've lived and travelled in a ton of places. Trains in low density cities are simply not working well enough. I now prefer to live in exurb and drive everywhere. It's so good.
Muse this - train is a tool, just like a car, bus, bike, plane, drone or rollerblades.
Repeating "trains" in every transport context is unproductive. Each mode of transport requires certain density. Most US cities just don't have it. It's that simple.
It's not at all that simple. One of the neat things about trains is their permanence - once you've built one, you can fight for allowing increased density repeatedly until you win. That's what we've been doing in Seattle!
Personally I've found "carefully review every move it makes" to be an extremely unpleasant and difficult workflow. The effort needed to parse every action is immense, but there's a complete absence of creative engagement - no chance of flow state. Just the worst kind of work which I've been unable to sustain, unfortunately. At this point I mostly still do work by hand.
It's unpleasant for me at normal speed settings, but on fast mode it works really well: the AI does changes quickly enough for me to stay focused.
Of course this requires being fortunate enough that you have one of those AI positive employers where you can spend lots of money on clankers.
I don't review every move it makes, I rather have a workflow where I first ask it questions about the code, and it looks around and explores various design choices. then i nudge it towards the design choice I think is best, etc. That asking around about the code also loads up the context in the appropriate manner so that the AI knows how to do the change well.
It's a me in the loop workflow but that prevents a lot of bugs, makes me aware of the design choices, and thanks to fast mode, it is more pleasant and much faster than me manually doing it.
This is my biggest problem with the promises of agentic coding (well, there are an awful lot of problems, but this is the biggest one from an immediate practical perspective).
One the one hand, reviewing and micromaning everything it does is tedious and unrewarding. Unlike reviewing a colleague's code, you're never going to teach it anything; maybe you'll get some skills out of it if you finds something that comes up often enough it's worth writing a skill for. And this only gets you, at best, a slight speedup over writing it yourself, as you have to stay engaged and think about everything that's going on.
Or you can just let it grind away agentically and only test the final output. This allows you to get those huge gains at first, but it can easily just start accumulating more and more cruft and bad design decisions and hacks on top of hacks. And you increasingly don't know what it's doing or why, you're losing the skill of even being able to because you're not exercising it.
You're just building yourself a huge pile of technical debt. You might delete your prod database without realizing it. You might end up with an auth system that doesn't actually check the auth and so someone can just set a username of an admin in a cookie to log in. Or whatever; you have no idea, and even if the model gets it right 95% of the time, do you want to be periodically rolling a d20 and if you get a 1 you lose everything?
I don't think there's anything difficult or unpleasant about the process of letting the LLM run free, that's the whole point, it's nearly frictionless. Which includes not reviewing the code carefully. You say "need" but you mean "ought".
Reviewing isn't hard when the diff is what you asked for. It's when you asked for a one-line fix and get back 40 changed lines across four files. At that point you're not even reviewing your change anymore, you're auditing theirs.
This comment is completely out of touch with how typical office workers use their computers. "Package manager" is your feldspars. But it's even worse than that, because you don't train for the typical employee, you train for the least-technical employee lest they become completely useless overnight.
It seems strange to you? It's natural to how I write - intentionally avoiding politeness would be weirder to me.
But aside from that, an LLM is only a roleplayer. Treat it like an idiot that makes mistakes and it will act like one. Treat it like a coworker who you respect and it will act like one, and it will find better results.
Obviously nothing about how they act is set in stone but as a general rule this seems to me to be both wise and, in my experience, true as well.
I think if you treat it like a coworker who you respect, it will speak to you like a coworker who respects you, but will still make some idiotic mistakes...
Yeah that's increasingly been my feeling as well. I have to keep prefacing my Kagi recommendations with, "web search is less and less useful every year, but..."
I still appreciate being able to customize rankings, bangs, and redirects. But with how utterly shit the web is overall, any web search is basically only good if you know the site(s) the answer(s) will be on. When you're searching for something novel-to-you, even Kagi is just going to show you a full page of unregulated slop on the dumbest, just-registered-this-year domains. Real information is increasingly limited to small islands of trust.
As a rule, "pop history" is full of shit and is probably better considered misinformation than anything else. I probably don't I know of a single general-audience history/anthropology book that doesn't horrify scholars of the field.
As unfortunate as it is, studying cause-and-effect is extremely complex. If it's even theoretically possible to distill it down to easily digestible ideas, that's well outside our current technical capabilities.
There's usually going to be some true and interesting information in these books, but it will be too deeply embedded in a narrative that is misleading.
I'm an avid reader of history books (antiquity, middle ages), and I'd say I'm very picky, trawling through reviews and recommendations from trusted sources before deciding on a book.
I have already come across books that were a slog to read because of the author's simplistic worldview or obvious contrarian agenda (so I can definitely relate), but I've also read some masterpieces (for example, Kaldellis I believe is solid).
Unfortunately I don't count any historians among my friends, so I'd welcome any recs from you for authors that are the least bad, or a teardown of main antiquity/middle ages historians.
Interesting... I first went to the linked recent post What the Longevity Experts Don't Tell You. Sorry to be harsh: it was nonsense. It just lists a few weird, unscientific behaviours of John D Rockefeller and tries to draw lessons (to what end? longevity? is Rockefeller still alive?) from them despite there being no indication those behaviors even had any effect, let alone positive impact on longevity. It also doesn't bring up things "the longevity experts don't tell you," it's just summaries of topics in a single biography.
Still I gave this article a shot. I don't understand what it's doing. Like, one of the points about Thiel is that he destroyed Gawker to cover up his vampirism. He actually destroyed Gawker to cover up his relationship to Epstein, the pedophile and saboteur of US social/economic integrity. Why put a silly spin on that? I guess the entire thing is just a little joke... just doesn't feel like it belongs on the HN front page. I had higher expectations.
Oh, I admit that I didn't finish the Rockefeller article, since it looked like more of the same. I can see now how it's satire.
Honestly though, I'm still not sure what the point of the vampires one is. Satire relies on the reader drawing some conclusions that aren't laid out, and I don't really see where it's trying to lead me in that respect. Is it that these billionaires are fools for following bunk research?
Also weird it didn't mention Peter Attia's connection to Epstein outright. It did this weird tongue-in-cheek thing for a few paragraphs referencing Epstein only in the foot notes. I still can't tell whether what I read was actually praising these guys or extremely subtly sardonic.
A bit of a meta lesson for me here: Writing a short, pointed, opinionated blog post is blogging. If I care about blogging my thoughts, I need to just do it, not worry about rigor or depth ahead of time
Answers which involve removing oneself from society (by entering a private car) are not good answers. And when you factor in the externalities, you're just displacing "I'm upset, possibly even unwell due to sleep lost" onto "we replaced 90% of the local natural environment with pavement and paint it with crushed human beings every single day".
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