That kid should get the top grade for the project. She really proved his thesis that this is something she needs to learn about

Oh I totally agree. They are not very useful and even if they were there is also not a market/customer base.

But Boston Dynamics Optimus is getting pretty decent. There are claims that even at an expected price of $200k, over its lifetime that is cheaper than human menial labor. It can swap out its own battery, so tHere’s at least one useful skill

The goal of Tesla-bot is to hit $20k. While that doesn’t seem likely, even double that price could be affordable for small offices …… if it could do stuff.

The track is privately owned by freight companies, and they do have a long term trend of shutting things down. More importantly they only allow passenger service because they have to, and they have no incentive to keep their track in adequate shape for useful and comfortable passenger service. They are also fine with not going to populated areas where passenger rail might be useful

The problem with industrial robots is they really need scale. They’re not practical or useful for anything but very large manufacturing.

If humanoid robots become a thing, they promise to automate a lot of smaller scale manual work

My company is in there somewhere, however the layoffs weren’t that big and seemed well targeted. Especially the number of middle managers

And were spending way too much on ai. No guardrails. No limits. Reviewed partly on how high your ai spend is

I’m definitely worried, since I don’t spend enough

All the real developers are using Macs. BRO, do you even code?

I’ve been suffering from too short an attention span. I keep ending up. scrolling on my phone while waiting for ai to spew its slop, and have been caught too many times

Part of the scoring at my company is how many generated lines of code you accept.

Going back to the beginning of the year, I think I’m up to 6

He’s was following too closely fir not paying attention

After watching too many dash cam videos where this happens, I’ve started using my hazards when I’m stopped at the tail of traffic on a fast road. I don’t know if it really helps but it could and at least it’s an attempt to be more visible

Oh I do understand that for sure. My worst such case did not result in an accident luckily.

I had gone back to my hometown and was driving around and there was a new traffic light that I somehow didn’t see. I was so used to that intersection not having a light that even after years of being away, even in good conditions, even without any distractions, my mind somehow edited out effing traffic lights

I don’t know, the bus has a lot more mass than most cars - even in a bumper to bumper collision they should come out pretty well

That’s from a couple years ago, and there was a recent one connected with that proposal. I know what you mean.

While I somewhat agree with the desire to facilitate this private passenger rail service, it seems like a really bad idea here and now. Maybe if we had healthy infrastructure and widely adopted service, that could take us to the next level, but passenger rail in the us is such a basket case that it would not serve anyone’s needs.

• no matter what, we have a century of deferred maintenance to catch up on. No private company could afford that and we shouldn’t spend that kind of money just so someone can extract profit
• no matter what, outside the NEC, intercity passenger service is horrible: it’s a welfare case now, is not in a useful state, and we shouldn’t be paying that kind of money just so someone can extract profit
• highways are supported by public funding: intercity passenger rail deserves similar. We need options where either s better than the other

While part of me wishes we could keep NEC profit to invest in all the improvements we need here, I generally think it’s a good investment to try to develop other locations. Transportation infrastructure is a public good to improve our society and our economy (and the network effect is a big deal), but taking some of our NEC profit to pay for some billionaires profit is very much NOT a public good

Yeah, very made that argument in the past, but you have to start somewhere

• for Midwest passenger rail, the cities are big enough they ought to have transit, but also it’s appropriate for the federal govern invest in infrastructure to jumpstart their revival
• for smaller cities on long distance routes, their may not be scheduled air service and distances are too great for some to drive. There should be an option. A useful option
• and yes, the long distance routes are a “money saver”. If we ever want to have useful long distance service m, we need to keep the right of way alive. A huge part of the ridiculous cost of rail improvements is the land, and no one will pay for 1,000 miles of right of way

Yeah it’s quite painful- we need significant investments in intercity rail, yet the best we can do with the largest infrastructure bill ever is sprinkle around little baby steps in many places …… and too much of that was broken contracts, not happening

Yes there are some huge projects too, mostly on NEC, and desperately needed. But even there, we’re talking about barely scratching a century of deferred maintenance resulting in only incremental improvements.

There’s got to be a better and cheaper way of doing this.

Think of the language like units in a math problem.

“East” (English) is more literally “East”

Than “Leste”( Portuguese), even if it translates to the same

If you make an analogy with temperature:

• 212°F is more literally “212” than 100C even if they are both the boiling point of water

While it’s correct that the long distance routes will always be slower than flying so will get few end-to-end passengers, that’s not entirely their goal. Think of them more as a bunch of mid-range segments. Not a single long range route but dozens of middle range routes connected together

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Part of the infrastructure bill of 2022 was both studies for increased service and increased service in a variety of places. The goal was to increment next phases of building a better and more complete network.

I see your point about OK but there were several related baby steps toward extending the NEC and toward building Chicago as the hub of a useful Midwest train network. Passenger rail has never gotten sufficient funding so progress is in baby steps, but the best way to get support for more service is to improve enough to start being useful. There were several reputed increasing to half a dozen trains, which is starting to be useful

That’s just an argument that we need to find rail sufficiently for Amtrak to own its rails. Freight is never in the way on the NEC.

It’s also an indictment for lack of regulation. Freight rail has been milking ancient infrastructure far beyond its useful life and without updating to new requirements.

Among their shortcuts that directly cause delays for both trains and cars are

• failure to maintain tracks to keep the speed they were designed for
• pulling up second rail for cheaper maintenance
• continuing to run ever larger trains without enlarging the sidings that are supposed to let them get out of the way

I would have liked it just for the integration with code reviews, but we didn’t even get a chance to try because “it’s too expensive” …… as we’re migrating from on-prem infrastructure licensed per site to cloud infrastructure charged per usage, and with no valid cost comparison