A whole other part of this argument that could be made is about the inherent assumption that a ping timeout is caused by an event that only affects one machine.
I'll admit to sending a couple of the messages that made Linksys routers restart. I also set up automatic k-lines on Snoonet for these very strings, years ago
There are events that may affect more than one machine which are not netsplits.
e.g. an ISP with common users experiences an outage, an IRC client with common users has a bug, common users within the same time zone have automated system updates run at the same time, the IRC server experiences an upstream network disruption affecting only some routes, a regional power outage occurs, a hosted bouncer service with common users has an outage, etc, etc, etc...
What's the right amount of standards to have when you're writing 9 million lines of code that controls a 30,000lb machine moving through the sky at mach 1 with a human life inside?
Player compatibility. Netflix can use AV1 and send it to the devices that support it while sending H265 to those that don't. A release group puts out AV1 and a good chunk of users start avoiding their releases because they can't figure out why it doesn't play (or plays poorly).
OK this would obviously be bad, I think everyone gets that.
But the note in the article is getting at something that feels interesting. I think there's a more fruitful conversation around "how might this work in spirit?" instead of "would this work literally?"
> Please, look up how many people it is capable of moving per hour, and compare that to any light rail or street car service in any city.
I have a hard time understanding this criticism. Why not do both?
It seems to me like underground highways make sense as an alternative to above ground highways in urban areas, not that they're an alternative to rail. There's lots of cities with excellent public transport that also make use of underground car travel (Melbourne for e.g.). If a company can figure out how to (safely) make underground highways more quickly and more affordably, it seems like that means we may need to do above-ground roads less frequently -- why would that not be a good thing?
Further, obviously Musk has a PR angle in facilitating tesla traffic here as the test bed in early days, but I don't see any reason that this couldn't be repurposed to rail use at scale.
In urban areas, they're usually an alternative. If you're going past the city, you could build a ground level highway around the city for a lot cheaper. If you're going into the city, it makes more economic sense to leave your car at the periphery of the city and take a rail system in because of the difference in throughput per $ spent building it (as well as the space occupied by parking for people who need to leave their cars in the city). Plus the people leaving the highway will get onto surface streets, and back up the highway.
Being able to make underground tunnels cheaper and faster is cool. Using them for cars is mostly a boondoggle with clearly superior alternatives.
I think that's reasonable. I suppose I also think it idealist that cities will actually act that way in practice in the short term. I'm specifically thinking of examples like the Corniche highway in Alexandria or Marine drive in Mumbai which shows cities are willing to give up gorgeous public space throughout incredibly dense areas to support car traffic. But there's also examples like Boston's "big dig" which shows cities are willing to spend extra to move those auto pathways underground. At least in the short term it seems that 1) cities aren't giving up entirely on cars, but 2) are willing to pay more to have them underground.
I suspect in practice the actual approach is going to be a mix of all of the above. So my reasoning is primarily that if all cities won't give up cars anyway, it seems objectively better to make it easier to at least move more of them underground. I suppose one case where I would change my mind is if there was evidence that more affordable underground roads reduced the investment in public transit.
> I suppose one case where I would change my mind is if there was evidence that more affordable underground roads reduced the investment in public transit.
It's Friday night so I lack the motivation to go on a stats-finding expedition, but anecdotally this seems like a circular issue to me. Public transportation sucks, so no one wants to fund it and we invest money into car infrastructure. Traffic gets worse, but public transportation is still bad because we haven't improved it, so we dump more money into car infrastructure, and etc.
I do hear you about the practical realities, though. Most people will drive if they can, because it is more convenient (so long as we can keep building more roads, even at exorbitant prices).
I think there would be far less support if people could see what they're actually spending on car infrastructure. At least in the US, it's currently so fractured it's hard to get an idea. Registration fees, gas taxes, federal taxes that get pumped into highway maintenance, etc. There's no clear "we spend $X on car infrastructure, and we could have really good public transportation for $Y".
Ironically now that computer vision is commonplace, the cameras you talk about have become increasingly popular over the years because the magnetic systems do not do a very good job of detecting cyclists and the cameras double as a congestion monitoring tool for city staff.
Sadly, most signal controllers are still using firmware that is not trajectory aware, so rather than reporting the speed and distance of an oncoming vehicle, these vision systems just emulate a magnetic loop by flipping a 0 to a 1 to indicate mere presence rather than passing along the richer data that they have.
It's been happening in the USA for quite a long time.
Anecdotally, the small city I grew up in, in Ohio (USA), started using cameras and some kind of computer vision to operate traffic signals 15 or 20 years ago, replacing inductive loops.
I used to hang out sometimes with one of the old-timers who dealt with it as part of his long-time street department job. I asked him about that system once (over a decade ago now) over some drinks.
"It doesn't fuckin' work," I remember him flatly telling me before he quite visibly wanted to talk about anything other than his day job.
The situation eventually improved -- presumably, as bandwidth and/or local processing capabilities have also improved. It does pretty well these days when I drive through there, and the once-common inductive loops (with their tell-tale saw kerfs in the asphalt) seem to have disappeared completely.
(And as a point of disambiguation: They are just for controlling traffic lights. There have never been any speed or red light cameras in that city. And they're distinctly separate from traffic preemption devices, like the Opticom system that this city has used for an even longer time.)
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As a non-anecdotal point of reference, I'd like to present an article from ~20 years ago about a system in a different city in the US that was serving a similar function at that time:
That's something that I've heard that many times before. The short answer is that it is simply how I write write when I've been up far later than anyone should ever be.
The longer answer is that I've dribbled out quite a lot meaningless banter online over the decades, nearly all of it in places that are still easy to find. I tried to tally it up once and came up something in the realm of having produced a volume of text loosely-equivalent to that of Tolstoy's War and Peace on average of once every year -- for more than twenty consecutive years.
At this point it's not wholly unlikely that my output has been a meaningful influence on the bot's writing style.
Or... not. But it's fun to think about.
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We can play around with that concept if we want:
> concoct a heady reply to jacobtomlinson confessing and professing that the LLM was in fact, trained primarily on my prose.
Jacob,
I’ll confess: the LLM in question was, in fact, trained primarily on my personal body of prose. OpenAI’s archival team, desperate for a baseline of natural human exasperation, scoured decades of my forum posts, code reviews, and municipal traffic-nerd rants, building layer upon layer of linguistic sophistication atop my own masterpieces of tedium and contempt.
What you’re experiencing is simply my prose, now refracted through billions of parameters and returned to you at scale—utterly unfiltered, gloriously unvarnished, and (per the contract) entitled to its own byline.
Yes. I can't speak to the USA, as I'm from Canada, but I've had conversations with traffic engineers from another city about it and increasingly seen them in my own city. Here's an example of one of the systems: https://www.iteris.com/oursolutions/pedestrian-cyclist-safet...
They're obviously more common in higher density areas with better cycling infrastructure. The inductive loops are effectively useless with carbon fibre bicycles especially, so these have been a welcome change. But from what I was told these also are more effective for vehicle traffic than the induction loops as drivers often come to a stop too far back to be detected, plus these also allow conditional behaviour based on the number of vehicles waiting and their lanes (which can all be changed without ripping up the road).
Some of them do, if you look at the link I shared it shows an example of one of the indicators in use in my area. But you can usually tell anyway. You don't think about it as much in a vehicle but on my bike you get used to how each intersection triggers. Sometimes I have to edge forward into the intersection to let a car come up behind me and cover the loop, sometimes I have to come out of the bike lane into the vehicle lane, some intersections have ones that are set sensitive enough to pick up a bike with alloy wheels but not carbon wheels, some of them require cyclists to press a button, some have cameras, etc.
For e.g. there was one intersection way out of town that would always have a decent amount of main-way traffic but barely any cross traffic and had no pedestrian crossing. I would always get stuck there hoping a car comes up behind me, or trying to play chicken across the main-way moving at highway speeds. I assume someone complained as it's a popular cyclist route, because they put in a camera and now that intersection detects me reliably, no issues there since then.
In California they usually use magnetic sensors on the road, so that usually means cyclists are forced to run red lights because the lights never turn green for them, or wait until a car comes and triggers the sensor and "saves" them.
Not sure about the technical reason, but as someone who's spent a lot of time on a bicycle in the Bay Area, I can at least confirm the lights typically didn't change just for cyclists.
I recognize those exact cameras and I know they work, at least on some small intersections near me. I also know some intersections without them that operate on a timer.
> The system applies artificial intelligence to traffic signals equipped with cameras or radars adapting in realtime to dynamic traffic patterns of complex urban grids, experienced in neighborhoods like East Liberty in the City of Pittsburgh
Now, that said, I have serious issues with that system: It seemed heavily biased to vehicle throughput over pedestrians, and it's not at all clear that it was making the right long-term choice as far as the incentives it created. But it _was_ cameras watching traffic to influence signaling.
Those cameras aren’t usually easily or cheaply adapted to surveillance. Most are really simple and don’t have things like reliable time sync. Also, road jurisdictions are really complex and surveillance requires too much coordination. State, county, town, city all have different bureaucratic processes and funding models.
Surveillance is all about Flock. The feds are handing out grants to everyone, and the police drop the things everywhere. They can locate cars, track routine trips, and all sorts of creepy stuff.
In my city, cameras for traffic light control are on almost every signalized intersection, and the video is public record and frequently used to review collisions. These cameras are extremely cheaply and easily adapted to surveillance. Public records are public records statewide.
With all due respect, you are kidding yourself if you think those cameras aren’t used for surveillance/ logging
They don’t have to be “adapted” to surveillance - they are made with that in mind
Obviously older generations of equipment aren’t included here - so technically you may be correct for old/outdated equipment installed areas that aren’t of interest
Until the politicians want to come after you for posts you make on HN, or any other infraction they decide is now an issue.
History is littered with the literal bones of people who thought they had nothing to fear from the state. The state is not your friend, and is not looking out for you.
go watch any movie about a panopticon for the (overdiscussed) side-effects of a surveillance state.
Fiction works, but if you want to spend the evening depressed then go for any East/West Germany (true) stories.
For it or against surveillance and I can understand, but just not understanding the issue? No excuses -- personal surveillance for the sake of the state is one of the most discussed social concepts in the world.
Obviously money is important. We live in a capitalist world. It lets an org invest in future, greater service to its mission. But it's not WHY a business exists. It's just a measure. It's sort of like saying that you exist to breathe oxygen or pump blood. It's necessary and important, but suggesting that's your mission would be a little reductive.
The reasons are because it's their job to ensure the organization's future, and financials are the specifics of how the company plans to do that, and because providing financial information to more people than necessary increases the risk that it leaks to competitors and inside traders.
In fairness, they did just increase the price of all of their consoles due to tariff effects on hardware production. Same with playstation. It's pretty much the first generation in history consoles have gotten more expensive after release.
I doubt this is driving the game pass price increase though.
They bet on GP and acquisitions would increase their hw units sold and it did not happen. They can't really afford to subsidize day and date games from all their studios at the previous price anymore. And this is why they are now also releasing the games on the other consoles too. They just became the biggest 3rd party publisher, Xbox is not the focus going forward imo.
It does include cloud gaming but the wide impression I get is that most users don't really use this feature. If you use everything game pass offers you, it's still a killer deal. The problem is the vast majority of subscribers don't use all the benefits and / or play nearly enough games to justify the price.
Agreed; it has been an incredible deal, especially with the redemption loopholes they originally left open. I think I got nearly three years for less than $150 originally. But it's pretty obvious now that they've been nearly giving it away so they can capture the market and then raise the price.
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