- Idea: let's make it so all emergency powers have to be re-authorized every week by Congress at midnight on Friday with a 90% quorum of physically-present representatives.
If "emergency" action is needed because Congress is too slow, then let's make sure they are working through the process to create real law. Or if they aren't, I guess it wasn't an emergency, and there's no reason for administrative law to "fill in" using a non-democratic process.
- "This ends up being self-fulfilling."
Perhaps. But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it, and then you have a huge sunk cost that you don't want to cancel so it drags on forever, eroding trust even further.
Private companies have some advantages here. If they don't think the project will succeed, they will stop, because they know there's no payday. If it's due to bad laws, they will lobby (a bad word, I know) to change them. They'll fire people who don't perform. They'll look in all kinds of creative ways to find people who can get the job done. They'll stop and think about who might actually ride it, because they need the ticket revenue, so they will build the lines in the right places with the right stops.
Maybe all of that could be true for some governments. But there's a long way to go before the US or the California government is able to do any of those things.
- "no political will in the US to build publicly-owned transport"
There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work. It's hard for me to imagine the federal government succeeding at that for any reasonable cost, and I suppose you could blame some of that on partisan bickering. But I also can't imagine California succeeding for any reasonable cost, and it's a one-party state, so there's no excuse.
At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep. My guess is that Birghtline found a few such people and that's their competitive advantage as a business.
- Yeah, I've always found that particular argument unconvincing. If road usage grows, that means more people are benefiting, right?
There are some fundamental problems with cars crowding out alternatives (either due to cost or space). But saying that utilization is evidence that something is bad seems backwards to me.
- An AI should be helpful to the user, unless it's a horrible question, in which case just don't answer.
Bring in whatever values you want along the way. If you ask your aunt or uncle a question, they will answer helpfully and maybe spread their values in the process. If they aren't helpful, their values don't matter because nobody will hear them.
- What was the blunder?
EDIT: had to follow a link and read halfway down to find:
> When asked for a “historically accurate depiction of a medieval British king,” the model generated another racially diverse set of images, including one of a woman ruler, screenshots show. Users reported similar outcomes when they asked for images of the U.S. founding fathers, an 18th-century king of France, a German couple in the 1800s and more. The model showed an image of Asian men in response to a query about Google’s own founders, users reported.
- In a weird sense smart bombs might be considered construction, in much the same way as a carefully-controlled chisel creates a statue rather than destroying a rock.
I'm not making a moral equivalence here -- please don't construe my comment to mean that blowing people up is somehow good. But from the perspective of the person dropping the bomb, they are reshaping rather than destroying. If their goal were purely destructive, there are cheaper means available.
- I think the point was that code is not inherently limited in the same way as other kinds of engineering.
If you tell someone to engineer you the arm for positioning a desk lamp, they aren't going to give you the hydraulic arm for a 12-ton backhoe without anyone noticing. There are physical and cost constraints that will prevent that from happening pretty quickly.
In software, there are no comparable constraints. A few MiB of software contains extraordinary amounts of complexity but could easily fly under the radar and ship, and then become a maintenance nightmare.
- Not an expert, but it seems to me that sarcasm is a kind of universal negativity that can be applied to pretty much anything. It's also incredibly vague and ambiguous about whether anything better exists or could exist.
For instance, looking at American news, you could sarcastically say "Go America!" to almost any story (unless it's actually good news, of course). Not only is such sarcasm negative, but it's also very passive.
Sarcasm also strikes me as juvenile. Children complain because they expect a parent will find a solution for them. Juveniles turn to sarcasm because they don't want to ask an adult to solve it, but they don't have a solution either. Then when they grow up, they realize that problems really do need to be solved and no one else will do it, so they need to use more productive communication strategies.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...
TIL that car fatalities were declining until 2019, and then reversed and are getting worse.
What happened in the last five years? Safety features of the cars themselves are improving (emergency braking). Alcohol may be a factor, but why in the last five years? Cars have been big for a while. WFH probably reduced commuting time. Other countries appear to be on the decline.
- "We have no idea where Venus will be exactly [ten] million years from today."
I'm trying to figure out what this is supposed to mean. Of course we don't know exactly, but also of course we have some idea.
Like, could Venus have had an eccentric orbit that extended further from the Sun than Earth or closer than Mercury? Could it have had a moon?
- This is a reminder to me how deceptive projections are. We were so sure before that we'd run out of economically-available oil on the planet soon. The numbers felt irrefutable. Now that point seems far away.
This is not a comment on whether that's good or bad in the case of oil, but it seems to happen a lot.
I think what we miss is that there are simply so many variables changing at any time that something that seems impossible all of a sudden becomes possible. And then we just take it for granted so quickly.
It makes me wonder if we will be saved from global warming by some series of changes that seem utterly ridiculous. Maybe AI, cheap space flight, and some other crazy thing we aren't paying attention to combine into a solution. That's not to say we shouldn't care about global warming: quite the opposite, we should keep trying to make improvements on every front, both reasonable (consume less wastefully) and crazy (ask ChatGPT to come up with a plan).
I doubt some shifts in the opinions of normal people are going to stop the elite flywheel -- there's just not enough connection between a machinist in Ohio or a nurse in Phoenix and the elite for their opinions to matter.
The Ivy League can fall apart one of two ways:
1. The levers of power move around to new groups of people radically enough that the jobs that were once elite are now irrelevant and forgotten, like a guild for some forgotten craft. AI is obviously one way this might happen, where many elite professions might just collapse.
2. Internal bickering over identity that just makes it impossible for normal people to attend. Think crazy stuff like requiring graduates to share their income for life with other graduates, or requiring some weird kind of binding pledge about who you can work for. Colleges already have a weird possessiveness over their graduates, this just takes that to the logical next level.