I was looking at Tucson to Seattle trip on a relatively short notice - all sleeping tickets were sold out multiple weeks in advance. And due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat.

    due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat

One of the friends I was with threw in the towel and bought a plane ticket home, though to be fair she was traveling with her 18-month-old daughter at the time and it's honestly a testament to youthful indiscretions that she even went along with the plan in the first place!

Personally, I find driving to be a much better way to see the US than trains, especially if you avoid interstate highways.

Living in Indiana with much of my family on the east and west coasts, I actually prefer driving

Like Amtrak, driving is rarely cheaper than flying, especially when traveling alone on a multi-day trip if you're not willing to sleep at rest areas and don't have friends to stay with at convenient points along the way.

For reference, from Indy, on the interstate, NYC is an easy one-day trip (~12 hours), and LA is a long but viable two-day trip with a stop in Denver (~15 hours/day), but SF and the Pacific Northwest are pushing it even in two days. Taking non-interstate routes can take much longer, especially when traveling through the mountains or major metro areas.

* Actually from Chicago to Needles, CA, with a bus between Indy and Chicago and a van between Needles and Vegas, because Amtrak didn't even offer service to Indy or Vegas at the time.

I want to setup agent to clean up my gmail inbox which has many thousands of unread messages.

The way I do it is every morning we go through recent emails in my inbox one at a time. If I want to mark it as spam, delete it, add it to my calendar, whatever, I explain to the agent why in detail. Over time it builds up an understanding of how I handle a lot of things, it needs to show me less and less, and it handles more and more on its own.

I also told the assistant to check my email on its own once per hour and auto-action what it can. That helps keep junk from building up, and it alerts me via SMS if something high priority shows up (e.g. user reporting a bug).

Point is there was never a point where it just ran for a long time and magically cleaned everything up just how I'd have wanted. I have like 7k emails in my inbox, that wouldn't be practical. But the number is going down now gradually, instead of up. I've had a chance to teach it and let it establish trust that it's doing things the right way. Which feels safer.

Most people I talk to hate that pipeline and spend a lot of debug hours on it when Arxiv can't compile what overleaf and your local latex install can.

The reason authors like and use arxiv is that it gives 1) a timestamp, 2) a standardized citable ID, and 3) stable hosting of the pdf. And readers like the no-nonsense single click download of the pdf and a barebones consistent website look.

All else is a side show.

Spinning the service off forces other the labor out onto other universities rather than leaving them to solely Cornell

Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation. It needs minimal checks to remove overtly illegal content.

Seems like a lot of people are asking for moderation. And moderation is a pretty big part of the existing offering[1].

[1]: https://info.arxiv.org/help/moderation/index.html

This is a motte and bailey fallacy. The real question is about moderation with the goal of checking truth and the scientific content. Obviously illegal content and ddos type overloading attacks need to be blocked.

Very different philosophies are clashing here. Arxiv came about in an age of different zeitgeist. We may never get back to that moment.

No. Around half the cost is infrastructure. The other half of the cost is people. i.e. engineers to maintain infra and build mod tools for moderators to operate.

> Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation.

This is just not true. Tons of people ask for arxiv to have moderation. Especially since covid, etc when antivaxxers and alternative medicine peddlers started trying to pump the medical categories of arxiv with quack science preprints and then go on to use the arxiv preprint and its DOI to take advantage of non academics who don't really understand what arxiv is other than it looks vaguely like a journal.

And doubly so now that people keep submitting AI generated slop papers to the service trying to flood the different categories so they can pad their resumes or CVs. And on top of that people who don't actually understand the fields they are trying to write papers in using AI to generate "innovative papers" that are completely nonsensical but vaguely parroting the terms of art.

The only reason you don't see more people calling for arxiv moderation is because they already spend so much time on it. If they were to stop moderating the site it would overflow into an absolute nightmare of garbage near overnight. And people wouldn't be upset with the users uploading this of course, they'd be upset with arxiv for failing to take action.

Moderation is inherently unappreciated because in the ideal form it should be effectively invisible (which arxiv's mostly is).

If you want to see the type of stuff that arxiv keeps out, go over to ViXrA [1] or you can watch k-theory's video [2] having fun digging through some of the quality posts that live over on that site.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViXra

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1at9BjQP8CI

Also, the "human review" is a simple moderation process [1]. It usually does not dig into the submission's scientific merits.

[1] https://info.arxiv.org/help/moderation/index.html

A critical component of the arXiv-CE project is moving our services entirely off of Cornell University’s infrastructure — this goal is also known as Milestone 1. Milestone 1 completion is projected for the end of fiscal year 2026.

Assume if you are a library, and every day, half baked so-called books brought to the librarians where they have to make sure it is meaningful, readable and printable, 3000 of them, they accept and put them in the right bookshelf, and entire internet reads every one of them on the shelf multiple times by the AI bots, search engines and researchers.

They are not only making a new library, they are also maintaining both and syncing two libraries because Cornell cannot handle the volume of access by bots.

It is not static. It is essentially running two ships side-by-side, and two ships need to appear as one from the outside. And, the new ship is still only half built. The new ship is being designed, and being built. 27 seems small to me.

I've contracted into some consultancy teams which you could uncharitably describe as "15 people and $4mn/yr to create one PDF per month".

Is this true, or you just can’t discover them anymore because everything else competes for your attention? Arguably in the last decade more great content in both movies and TV shows produced than ever, it’s just so much, that it’s hard to choose.

That was the era of "every second counts." Every second has meaning and purpose and adds something to the narrative. The Fifth Element is another good example, and almost 30 years old. Now in the age of binging, where a 2 hour plot is stretched into 17 hours of TV, there is SO much filler and downtime and it's honestly just offensive in comparison.

I kind of enjoyed Pluribus, I liked the concept and what they did with it, but there's way too much forgettable filler that dilutes it into a slog. The movies I mentioned are (again, IMO) absolutely gripping and just lean and mean storytelling vehicles.

That's the problem with nostalgia, you don't remember all the bad movies you had to watch just to get those two gems. Someone probably suggested those movies rather than you stumbling onto them. That's pretty much the job of a critic. Siskel and Ebert in the 1980s would often talk about the pain of having to sit through hours of awful movies every week just so that they could find one or two worth recommending.

I tried to provide specific examples and contrast with something in the current zeitgest. I'm open to counter-arguments. I liked Barbie and Oppenheimer, both were well-done, but I don't think they'll stand up with the greats. I admit that I don't watch as many movies now but what stands out in the past 10 years? What has captured the zeitgeist like The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings?

Those great directors you just named were nobodies at the time those films were made. You need to find movies made by the current nobodies. Those are indie films. Go find more indie films. Those are the ones you will enjoy. My favorite movie of all time is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022). I just now had to look up the director and did not recognize the names.

Part of my point though is that, for a long time, the big-budget Hollywood stuff was actually "the good stuff." Like people can quibble about whether indie art films were better or not but I think it's pretty well agreed that (some set of) the big name directors and actors and blockbusters were pushing the art form. And it required those kinds of budgets to pull off, and it was seen as legitimately elite status to be given the chance to do it. The crazy complicated shit they did with practical effects and elaborate set building, for example. Teams of visionaries coming together to build deeply immersive worlds. It was a bleeding edge of art, and it attracted those types.

Read about the making of Die Hard. They're legitimately blowing up and ramming SWAT vehicles into a huge office tower in Los Angeles. Alan Rickman of all people is doing crazy stuntwork with flying cameras and real explosions and everything needs to be timed to the millisecond and executed by the whole team. There is no "do it in post", there is no CGI. And you can feel it.

Some in this thread have made the point that it was wasteful and excessive, and dangerous, and exploited labor, and that is all true, but...it was art.

It's hard to argue Sinners wasn't taking risks, or One Battle After Another (not my favorite this year, but it was a wild ride). Even Marty Supreme was a very weird and strange film that was very high budget (the CGI was in the background, but there's a lot).

Sometimes, cultural decline actually does happen, usually eventually followed by some kind of renaissance. Anyone who has studied the cinema, literature, etc. of a certain country in the past knows that there are "hot" periods and "cool" ones. When we see this phenomenon in the past, it doesn't tend to trigger the same defensive reaction, I guess because it doesn't feel as personal.

There is an element of that perhaps: from the past we already have a great number of movies. The more time passes the more great movies will accumulate, so newer movies will be judges compared to that whole set.

However, at the same thinking how many times I was exciting about a movie and how much I liked it. There are lot of fewer of them in the recent times.

> Arguably in the last decade more great content in both movies and TV shows produced than ever,

I could see the quantity but not the quality. Netflix produced a lot of shows and movies, Hollywood did, but I don't think as many good ones in there as say in the decades of 1990-2000 or 2000-2010. Tastes of course are subjective, you may just like newer movies they make that's fine, too.

It seems to have died for good after it ended, though.

For this visualization: get positive quantities in 3D space, normalize to 1, now you have dot on a triangle on 1-sphere in a positive octant. Project triangle into 2D space a this is your visualization.