The decision to not require seats is one of the best regulatory decisions I have ever heard of, and I wish this kind of thought process was more present in all kinds of places. The funny thing is that, I bet if it were used more broadly, given the absolutely enormous safety advantage that flying has over basically any other mode of transportation, there would be a non trivial number of other flight safety regulations that would get reconsidered.
Going back to pre-9/11 security screening would probably save lives. The extra time & hassle required to get through security (and the fact that only passengers can go through) means that some people drive instead of fly. Driving is less safe than flying, so some of those people die in car wrecks.
> The extra time & hassle required to get through security (and the fact that only passengers can go through) means that some people drive instead of fly.
I suspect it leads to more people not travelling at all (or much shorter distances) and net saves lives in both the relatively immediate travel sense and even moreso in the broader analysis including net carbon emissions and their effect in climate change.
(It is still a mix of corrupt corporatism and authoritarian conditioning that should be ended for that reason.)
I'm not sure I disagree. I don't have numbers but, anecdotally, you sure hear a lot of "But flying is such a hassle" which is sorta true but not sure how much more than it's ever been especially if you're willing to pay a bit more. I'm not sure how many people translate that into "So I'll just drive 1,000 miles instead."
In Europe (and the US Northeast Corridor), I do favor trains to avoid going to and dealing with airports, but they're no panacea either. And I say this as someone with the various passes that make flying easier.
I can drive for 5 hours, or take the 1 hour flight. The one hour flight has a total time of over 5 hours when you include getting to the airport, clearing security and getting bags at the other end. Plus I will not have a vehicle. For one person the cost is probably a wash, for two or more driving will be cheaper. 1000 miles does tip towards flying. Under 300 miles driving is going to be way less hassle to drive.
It has very little to do with security though. I usually go through security in 5 minutes at my home airport. I do leave a lot more time than that partially because my car company sort of insists on it. (Of course, the car company is another cost.)
Honestly, it would be faster and possibly cheaper for me to drive to Manhattan than take the train--in which case security doesn't enter in at all. And certainly for two people. But I hate driving into Manhattan.
The math does pencil out for Boston to New York. I'd be an hour to my local airport, arrive 2 hours in advance (could cheat a bit with an early flight--it's taken me almost 2 hours to get into Boston near rush hour--especially given basically a commuter flight but a good hour drive in), probably an hour for a shortish flight, baggage claim (if relevant), then transportation into the city.
Were I amenable, which I'm generally not, could probably drive 4 hours from my house into the city. (Almost always take the train.)
While I don't disagree and I think a lot of it is just nonsense security theater, it is probably worth noting that incidents of airline terrorism have fallen completely off the map in this new regime.
Not sure how old you are but bombings and hijackings of airplanes were just kind of a common fact of life when I was a kid and I was there on 9/11 as well.
There's at least some element of Chesterton's fence that could come into play here.
> Not sure how old you are but bombings and hijackings of airplanes were just kind of a common fact of life when I was a kid and I was there on 9/11 as well.
The period where hijackings were “common” (an exaggeration even then) ended around the time the first airline security screening requirements were adopted, about 30 years before 9/11 and (and just a little bit before I was born, and I am in my 50s.)
Airline bombings were NEVER common in the US (there are three I can find reference to, the most recent in 1962 and the others in 1933 and 1955.) They have been more of an issue internationally, but obviously US screening rules have done fuck-all about that, and they have continued.
I would argue that high speed regional rail would address this as well. How many flights from regional airports to major hubs could be eliminated with a decent train?
Regular rail is already this, and for much of the Northeast is already roughly at or near time parity with flying, all things considered. If you have to arrive at the airport 2 hours early, and it takes 30 minutes-1 hour to leave by whatever means (renting a car, waiting for a bus or Uber, etc. + baggage return and simply walking through the airport), and then another 30 minutes-hour to actually arrive at your destination, arriving at your local station 10 minutes before departure and arriving in the city center/local destination station starts to look really attractive for flights of <2 hours/train rides of <6 hours.
High speed rail is only cost-effective between major cities that are within a few hundred miles or so. Otherwise you don't have enough passengers to recoup the cost of building & maintaining the rail system.
For example: Spokane to Seattle is about 230 miles in a straight line, or 280 miles driving. A flight takes less than an hour (not even 40 minutes of which is spent in the air) and costs $80-130 one way. A train traveling 200mph nonstop would take 1 hour 24 minutes. Building high speed rail costs $20-$200 million per mile (the upper end of that is California HSR). If we optimistically assume $20m/mile, constructing the line will cost $5.6b. If all SEA-GEG passengers (677k per year) choose to take rail instead of flying, and we want the project to pay for itself after 50 years, then each ticket will need to cost $165. This also assumes no cost to maintain or operate the rail line.
You sent me down a rabbit hole, thank you, reading about the current state of Cascadia HSR, what it would take to make the current 79mph tracks capable of 110mph or 125mph (spoiler, 110mph is barely worthwhile and 125mph is an overt waste of effort), etc. The more I look at the numbers, the more I think the future does not look like HSR in the PNW. Wildly expensive, low ridership.
I wonder if we could not get most of the benefit by doing substantially cheaper options like separating freight from rail on major routes, electrifying parts of it where feasible. And maybe taking specific segments in areas where the track conditions are already favorable and increasing the maximum speeds on those segments. Probably two-thirds of the route between Portland and Salem, for example, is already suitable with modest upgrades to hit 125 mph. And basically all modern trains are capable of that speed already.
If you're comparing HSR to air travel with post 9/11 security then there's a a moderate number. However, once you have HSR that moves a significant amount of people, you WILL get post 9/11 security there as well, taking the number to approximately zero.
Plenty of places operate much more dense transit without that level of security.
Trains, even HSR have essentially zero hijacking risk relative to airplanes, and proper safety interlocks make them very difficult to use the vehicle as a weapon.
At that point, your terrorism risk is approximately on level with any other dense transportation interconnect.
Do you have any evidence on this? As a personal anecdote, driving is as much a hassle if not more than flying, depending on the distance. I care more about cost first and time second. Even if you buffer in getting to the airport 2 hours early, flying is almost certainly the fastest (compared to driving and train, if available) unless you're flying from like, bos -> nyc. Security at airports hasnt felt like a hassle for me in years (at least the past six years).
I had two recent trips to the same destination. I drove once because it was so much cheaper (during the world cup when air fare was jacked up) compared to the train or flying. I flew the other time, because it was only a little more expensive and flying is faster and less of a hassle, actually.
Additionally, given the article talks about families, the cost comes down a lot with multiple people in one car vs multiple plane tickets. If we want to make travel safer by putting fewer cars on the road, make alternatives cheaper. They're already more convenient to me...
> The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven't banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead.
Is this really why the rule was made? Did they really have safety of driving in mind or is this just in the interest of the profits of airlines?
It seems like if they really had safety in mind there are better solutions:
* Subsidize the 2nd seat for parents with children from tax dollars
> Is this really why the rule was made? Did they really have safety of driving in mind or is this just in the interest of the profits of airlines?
Yes. There are multiple public documents showing this, ex:
> The FAA has determined it is not appropriate to mandate the use of CRSs in aircraft now. We remain concerned that if we require children under 2 years old to be in an approved restraint system (which requires a passenger seat), affected operators might find it necessary to charge a fare for transporting these children. (Currently most, if not all, operators do not charge a fare for children under 2 years old who are held in an adult's lap.) In turn, for economic reasons some adults might decide to drive in automobiles to their destinations rather than fly. The FAA is concerned because automobile injury and fatality rates are higher than aircraft injury and fatality rates. As a result, there would be a net increase in transportation injuries and fatalities as families opt, for economic reasons, to drive rather than fly to their destinations.
I mean, the head of the FAA and the head of the DOT can have a coffee chat with the president and get an executive order then? Anything is possible to do, apparently.
They were already safer than coal...by several orders of magnitude. A Chernobyl level disaster every single year would have killed fewer people than coal power. The level of safety you are describing has literally killed millions of people.
Commoditizing the existing reactors of 40-50 years ago would have lead to a dramatically better world than we currently live in, with cheaper power, essentially defeated climate change, better air quality, and fewer premature deaths associated with that air quality.
As far as I can tell here the ghost portion is basically a non-sequiter. The waymo vehicle called the cops because it detected e passengers had a gun. The vehicle did not know or care about its status as a ghost gun or not. I'm sure that the Waymo terms of service prohibit carrying weapons into the vehicle. I'm pretty sure that if you were brandishing a realistic looking enough gun, an Uber driver would kick you out and call the cops as well.
There's a big difference between a human present who can make a decision based on a situation literally in front of their eyes, and a computer flagging a video feed for someone in what amounts to a call center to look at and decide on.
Not to mention the mass surveillance this sort of stuff continues to help enable.
I'm not a fan of expanding surveillance but the alternative of unmonitored transit seems worse.
Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain. Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints. Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure. Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.
These are just a few situations any human driver would obviously react to. And a modicum of detection and human review could solve in an autonomous vehicle.
This is a problem that autonomous vehicles created. Why should we not complain that its solution is worse than non-autonomous travel, given it carries risk that doesn't exist today? Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
And what surveillance or other risks does this introduce outside of the cabin, and why should society allow that? What is the definition of modicum of detection, and who is drawing that line?
Citation needed. Assaults and abuse against public transit and taxi drivers is a common workplace hazard. Why are we subjecting humans to that? Why are we ok expecting them to decide if a gun is fake or not and call the police?
>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
>>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
>Absolutely.
Citation needed.
Why stop at Waymo? The entirety of your digital activity happens on private property. You should have no expectation of privacy, and your attempts at privacy should mark you as a higher risk subject. We should algorithmically police your digital life in case you start showing signs of anti-social behavior. I don't want to wait until you get your gun into a Waymo to have the cops handle you. I want you to be caught much earlier. This will make the world much safer.
There are other ways to solve safety issues, but they are harder and more expensive - civic education and a government invested in incentivizing a productive life, better law enforcement training, freely available mental health services etc.
No? The Fourth Amendment only grants you protections that apply to government action. The police are allowed to accept evidence gathered voluntarily by private citizens or corporations.
Maybe we shouldn't put the whole burden of world justice on Waymo, this allowing it a complete invasion of the privacy of both the people who use it and those who don't? Guy takes a drugged up girl on the train, should we hold the train responsible for the outcome also?
That's the key question: whose laws are Waymo enforcing? ICE and Flock's extra-constitutional policies? City ordinances? A future eco-radical government's laws?
How about things taking place outside the car?
Can Waymo mount a robotic machine gun next to the LIDAR and snipe suspected terrorists? Release tear gas? Self destruct, killing several nuns to protect s CEO?
Yes? I am pretty sure they don't do algorithmic policing. Fwiw, they probably don't do any policing, but that is a different subject.
I am not against monitoring for safety - I am against deploying a sophisticated network of automated monitoring that covers all digital and soon physical aspects of my life for my "safety" by for profit companies.
Public trains are covered in camera surveillance and that footage is very often used in conjunction with tracking down and prosecuting criminals. You should have no expectation of privacy on a public train.
I agree we should also add live facial recognition to train stations.
No expectation of privacy in public does not mean we should eliminate privacy from public areas or allow our government to engage in mass surveillance.
I think the risks are different on a train, which is far more public than the inside of a taxi. There are more likely to be other people and/or an operator to intervene.
Those are bad examples of things where a computer should make a judgement call.
> Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain.
I take my kid to go skeet shooting. You’d call the police on us for having legal guns? What about my pocket knife?
> Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints.
My wife is scared by someone on the sidewalk. We’re riding to where we parked our car for the evening. There’s a scared woman with me as we commute to our vehicle. BART wouldn’t call the cops on me.
> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.
What’s “obvious” here? I have drinks with friends and bump my head on a cabinet, and now I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m not remotely about to die. Dammit, Waymo, I just want to go home and shower and let me wife laugh at me while she tapes me up.
> Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.
Person’s exhausted after work and wants to nap on the way home. They look identical to the dead guy. BART lets you nap.
If we had ubiquitous taxi and subway police, maybe they’d spent 5 seconds assessing each situation and move on. In no other real-life situation do we expect empty subways or taxi drivers to call the cops and investigate every possible bad scenario, nor should we.
But it's a reduction of privacy compared to private vehicles. If the goal is to convert all transportation infrastructure into surveilled transportation then that is a loss in privacy for the general public.
No, the argument should be raised before that happens. You want to prevent undesirable things from happening, not try to claw them back after they happened.
It looks quite foolish to me to never plan ahead and predict undesirable future events and then trying to prevent them ahead of time.
"Sorry, we can't fulfill your request for transportation to the protest for private ownership, but we can offer a free ride to the Colosseum" ;)
I don't think their primary intent is to create a surveillance state (though google might like having yet another data source...), I think companies are trying to make it happen to capture transportation market share, regulators will want to make it happen to drive down traffic fatalities and insurers will incentivize it because human drivers are more costly.
And once the difference in how they can be regulated is clear there'll be additional incentives to discourage private transportation.
> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.
When I was a teenager working in a taxi office some guy came in slurring and covered in blood. I phoned him an ambulance and after 15 minutes of waiting he got up and walked out despite my protests. How should I have reacted?
Those are made up problems because 90% of the time people drive their own vehicle or are with a willing participant. We don't have cameras watching us in normal cars.
I'm pretty sure a human started watching live video from the car as soon as the AI flagged a gun. I doubt that Waymo is willing to have their system automatically call cops.
People are awful when they think they aren't being watched, especially with communal or other people's property. It's why things are covered in lame low-effort graffiti tags, why bathroom mirrors have things scratched into them with keys, and why bridges over highways all have metal grates to stop people from throwing rocks at oncoming cars.
When people know they're being watched and there will be immediate consequences if they do something bad, their behavior changes. If they don't, they're awful. We've seen this for decades (arguably millennia, as we know Pompeii had graffiti too)
A lot of taxis have models detecting weapons and aggressive behaviours. I work on some models like this. I think they are necessary. For driver's safety.
Would you be upset if someone at the WalMart central data center called the local police because they saw someone with a gun in a Walmart at a remote location?
That's what happened here. A private company saw a gun inside their property and called the police.
I'm honestly curious about the "market keeps rejecting it" part. Yes, they sold far fewer units than the other models....but did they really not make money? I have made variations on this comment many many times. I completely buy that the opinions about phone form factor and features expressed on HN/reddit/online, and my own idiosyncratic preferences probably even more so, represent somewhat of a niche, and that your median phone consumer isn't interested in what we/I want. But the phone market seems like it's so large that it should be able to support a lot of niches! A tenth of a percent of the total market (~1,300 million in 2023 according to [0], 0.1% of which would be 1.3 million phones) should be totally viable as a business! I get that, maybe for Apple there is opportunity cost. Having more product lines adds overhead, and if the profit margin on those extra product lines isn't enough higher than the main lines to justify that overhead, they kill it. But why doesn't some smaller company (so yes, this mostly applies to Android) try to steal that fractional market share? I simply don't understand why it doesn't work to the point that now, when the market is so much larger than it was in the past, we have so much less hardware diversity.
Why does the Vision Pro exist then? What is that if not a niche? What about the iPad Mini or for that matter the Mac Mini, which if not for the recent AI craze would have been cut in the next few years for sure.
Apple can absolutely do niche products. Just not this one I guess.
>>The Mac Mini is an entry level product I see quite lot of people pick up. How is it niche?
It's a stationary computer that requires a standalone monitor, keyboard and mouse/touchpad. People just buy a laptop instead, a dedicated "computer" space at home is increasingly a thing of the past. And especially now if you can get the Neo for very similar money I have no idea why you'd buy the mini if your entire computer use is Facebook and maybe some word editing from time to time.
Yeah and the production numbers from the start seemed to indicate that Apple knew it wouldn't be extremely popular.
FWIW, I bought one knowing this, and have zero regrets. Amazing hardware, it's the best personal display on the market. I use it for the majority of my movie watching.
The Vision Pro (and the folding iPhone Duo) involve developing a lot of underlying technologies that will be useful in currently popular or potential future product lines, even if the market they serve themselves is niche.
I'm sure they made money. But that's not the right question to ask, in my opinion. The right question is did they make as much or more than their internal rate of return (IRR)? Perhaps the smaller iPhones (I had one) do not so they cut the product line. Or maybe they over-purchased some components and figured they could make a phone or two out of them.
That's how several major AI advancements have happened. I have seen no evidence that that is the fastest way to make progress right now. I expect that, much like chess engines, it will not take too long before AI is significantly better than AI + human. But right now, my bet is that we are still safely within the window where an AI + human mathematician team is still better than AI alone (at least for the case where the human has learned how to work effectively with the partner....something that this event could possible be good for teaching).
I suspect that the best progress will be made by a team that purely spends their time taking a list of open problems and promoting "solve <problem>", without actually trying to understand anything. Just keep as many problems in flight as you can across as many sessions as you can.
You can probably ask the AI to come up with a list of problems itself, and rank them by the likelihood of progress.
Then 20 years go by and you wake up one day with questions that you cannot get out of your mind: why did I start prompting the LLM for? Why did I need these random proofs for? What do i do with my repo with 2billion lines of Lean?
The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.
I remember the days that Bibliogram worked for Instagram. They've given up. A decade ago I could have an RSS feed for what my friends posted, besides the toxic short-form content of IG reels that everyone is now obsessed with post Meta acquisition and their battle to compete with Tiktok.
And that idiot, Zuck, thought he was getting a good deal when he poached former head of design, Alan Dye, from Apple. We were relieved to see him go. Our desktop OS is already making small improvements now that he's gone.
Context: the guy doesn't understand fundamentals of UX and has made MacOS worse for years.
Good UI makes it easier to be selective. social media owners dont want you to be selective, they are selling you to advertisers and influencers after all.
Zuckerberg and his minions have changes html and obfuscate it so much, it is impossible to block ads these days. They are worst than google. Imagine google decided every video will require widevine & there is no way to block ads just like twitch.
Last I was on the platform, they eventually added a tab for only chronological posts on the timeline a-la how IG used to work. But they gave no exposure to it, _and_ it completely hid the IG stories of your friends so nobody would want to use it in the first place.
The UI/UX is the main thing. I technically have an X-Twitter account that I rarely use, but loading plain HTML with a bit of JS beats loading a whole SPA experience just to read a post.
At that point though, it's like why. Reddit is, well, trash. It's barely worth visiting without an account, and if you're going to make me jump through hoops to visit, it's time to accept the message of "we don't want you here" and go somewhere else.
If you're browsing Reddit for its front page, yes, that's trash. But it can be a great source for getting information on narrow, specific topics on well-moderated subreddits filled with enthusiastic and obsessive people eager to share their knowledge. It's been very helpful for me when researching coffee grinders, refrigerators, solar battery backups, headphones, and other such things.
The reason to use it is that Reddit does provide the occasional answer to questions like "how to get a Samsung SCX 3400 to run on a Raspberry Pi" (etc.).
Now all that's missing is Chatlib, a self-hosted proxy for ChatGPT which makes it possible to a) query the service without leaving a personally identifiable trace and b) separate out the facts from the dreamt-up fiction. Using Redlib I at least get to see the original posts which makes it easier to separate fact from fiction.
I've been making money from reddit, and for about a decade and a half and at this point, why bother? It's basically drained and what remains is of zero value.
The same is and has been true for Reddit for a long time, the difference lies mostly in the ideological sauce flavouring these places, i.e. Little-endians vs. Big-endians. If you're a Reddit-endian you'll despise the Tube-endians and vice versa.
I could use it without an account and know that any comment I clicked into would take me to the thread of posts under it without sponsored ads or posts.
There was a brief moment when smartphones first came out but the rest of the world's companies weren't taking them seriously yet that was a truly brilliant time and ever since then it's been nothing but downhill.
Haven’t had that luxury in Russia. Though being a script kiddie I’ve set up a shortcode just for myself (there were these “paid content SMS as a Service” thingies that forwarded SMS text to an HTTP endpoint you provide).
Didn't have that luxury either, but at one point, "Twilio" was the star and poster-child of startups, with their "Guerilla marketing" and completely fresh and new roles of "developer advocates" so of course everyone and their mother had been to at least one Twilio meetup, or your local meetup with a "developer evangelist" from Twilio. Lots of us built our first SMS-capable service as a "Forward this SMS to this HTTP endpoint", I too did the SMS-to-Tweet thing as the US number didn't accept my SMSes (or wasn't available, or something).
I think it's great. My feed is people posting tech/AI news, scientific publications, videos of rockets and self-driving cars, things made with coding agents etc. It's full of people who do meaningful work as well and you can see who they are.
Dark mode, ability to easily copy images, link to posts, see posts of interesting people by going to their profile. On top of that the feed algorithm is open source and actually sane. What else would I want?
It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.
Why would I doubt it? if you think they are deploying something else then it's quite a claim but it's you who need to show some evidence.
It works great anyway. I get a lot of junk I don't want to see on FB/Insta. Reddit is not even worth discussing. X is the only place with where you get a lot of people who work on interesting/important/big stuff and post frequently.
I understand you can still tailor a good experience, but if you create a fresh X account the density of Elon Musk posts is genuinely absurd. There's no way he isn't putting his thumb on the algorithm to boost his reach.
Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.
I made a new reddit account for a side project a few months ago and I couldn't believe how terrible reddit is when you don't have 10 years of subreddit curation. The default experience is to be dumped into what basically amounts to "Facebook boomer slop" mixed with a ton of hustle / small business / get rich quick content.
It's an unpleasant experience. My main Reddit account doesn't "solve reddit" by any means - I often find myself thinking "man this site sucks, I should stop coming here," but the difference between that curated account and a fresh one is night and day.
Their "open source algorithm" (Which is actually a random code dump that does not constitute the algorithm) contains enough evidence that Elon posts are massively boosted, though no smoking gun. It also classifies politics as democrat or republican and then acts to maintain echo chambers.
I mean I went from fresh account to unprompted groypers posting hitler hype edits and white nationalists posting happy merchant memes about the great replacement.
This is uniquely an X thing. It wasn't like this when I used twitter, and it isn't like that on any other socials I know.
The Dutch PM for some reason uses X (or his PR agents do). There is always a lot of impotent homophobic rage coming from the retweets. It is all very sad.
The US first amendment has nothing to do with what a private company chooses to host on their platform. That content is there because the users and owners of the platform want it to be there.
I can concur though. I have a rarely used account and I get Elon on top of the feed all the time. Even as mobile notifications. I don't click on them and scroll past, but they keep coming.
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