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Well yeah — cars are expensive.

Tokyo has a population of some 14 million. Dallas is about 1.3 million. Did you pick cities with populations exactly 10x apart on purpose or something?

Got any real stats?


So what? Why do you need one city with 13 million people when the US has the land area to build 10 cities with 1.3 million people?

Because that's where people individually want to live. Cities are getting bigger, rural areas and small towns are depopulating.

If speed is your only concern, why not hire a helicopter? Oh, because cost is also a concern so we can't just look at what's "faster"? Rats.

Why hire a helicopter when one can just be bought outright?

https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/mining...

Permitting can be a bitch though: https://www.afr.com/property/residential/rinehart-s-loses-bi...

so there's a reason not to.


this is the west, we can afford to spend more marginally on transportation to:

- have a financial and physical barrier between the riffraff and paying customers

- spend less total money (for real, the cost of second ave subway alone is about 1/3 the market cap of waymo)

- sit down in comfort with door-to-door air conditioning

- go faster

wheverever the density justifies, autonomy will make "dollar van"-style minibuses financially viable too, since unionized drivers have made full-sized buses a money pit


> I’m convinced public transit is a major reason for the birth rate collapse in east asia.

Sure thing. Just so we're on the same page, mind backing that up with the obvious basic research? You know, just a simple breakdown of birth rates vs public transit usage across the world. Rudimentary stuff.


There are studies showing that dense housing is correlated with lower birth rates. https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-crowding-fewer-babies-the-ef.... It’s possible that public transit has a similar effect.

A lot of obviously positive things correlated with lower birth rates, like not having half your kids die before they reach adulthood, being able to treat infections with antibiotics, not needing a crazy amount of labor to keep subsistence farming going.

Birth rate collapse itself is a positive thing, this planet can’t ecologically sustain pre-industrialization birthrates combined with modern medicine and life expectancy. Back in the mid-century there was a lot of academic concern about overpopulation.


Right, it's not the geopolitical situation, but cars. Natural resources + every potentially powerful hostile country is across entire oceans = success.

What is this horseshit.

What exactly does specifically engine efficiency have to do with horse usage? Cars like the Ford Model T entered mass production somewhere around 1908. Oh, and would you look at the horse usage graph around that date! sigh

The chess ranking graph seems to be just a linear relationship?

> This pink line, back in 2024, was a large part of my job. Answer technical questions for new hires.

>

> Claude, meanwhile, was now answering 30,000 questions a month; eight times as many questions as me & mine ever did.

So more == better. sigh. Ran any, you know, studies to see the quality of those answers? I too can consult /dev/random for answers at a rate of gigabytes per second!

> I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic.

Yeah. I can tell. Somebody's high on their own supply here.


Well, for some reason horse numbers and horse usage dropped sharply at a moment in time. Probably there was some horse pandemic I forgot about.

There's a huge difference indeed — uBlock + SponsorBlock are superior. Not only do I not see any ads at all—including self-promotions of the video creators and their sponsorship segments—I also get to skip content-free intermissions, tangents, etc. and jump straight to the highlight of the video.

So you just manually skip the sponsor segments that most popular creators include in their videos or what?

Sponsorblock exists and is absolutely marvelous. It's a crowdsourced database of sponsored segments + an add-on that queries this database and automatically skips the sponsor segments. There's also Sponsorblock plugins for MPV if that's more your thing.

> error handing is essentially optional

Theoretically optional, maybe.

> the stdlib does things like assume filepaths are valid strings

A Go string is just an array of bytes.

The rest is true enough, but Rust doesn't offer just the bare minimum features to cover those weaknesses, it offers 10x the complexity. Is that worth it?


You could have done that in Rust but you wouldn't, because the allure of just typing a single character of

    ?
is too strong.

The UX is terrible — the path of least resistance is that of laziness. You should be forced to provide an error message, i.e.

    ?("failed to create file: {e}")
should be the only valid form.

In Go, for one reason or another, it's standard to provide error context; it's not typical at all to just return a bare `err` — it's frowned upon and unidiomatic.


> You could have done that in Rust but you wouldn't, because the allure of just typing a single character of ? is too strong.

You could have done that in Go but you wouldn't, because the allure of just typing two words

    return err
is too strong.

Quite literally the same thing and the only difference is bias and habit.


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