beat's comments

I've actually been more productive since full-time wfh. Fewer interruptions and less micromanagement.

In practice, are the last 8 hours of a workweek as productive as the first 8 hours? Would employers actually be losing 20% of a worker's productivity in many cases? Or would it be more like 10%? Maybe even less, if productivity improves on the four working days?

That's why one place I really want a driving assist is automatically backing out of spaces in parking lots. Visibility is terrible for the driver. You need to be paying close attention in multiple directions at once, you often don't have visibility at all when you need to start moving (like a larger vehicle parked next to you), and both pedestrians and other vehicles can appear out of nowhere, often moving in unexpected directions. It feels very unsafe.

Computer vision could be making those go-stop decisions for you, much more effectively than human drivers.

Heck, imagine a "smart" parking lot that tracks its available spaces and communicates with your car. You enter the parking lot and hand over control, and the car and lot work together to park you safely in the best available space.

The one time I was hit by a car as a pedestrian was a driver who wasn't paying attention. He was making a perfectly legal left turn at a green light, except for the pedestrians in the way (me and my girlfriend).

The danger with an autonomous vehicle is it not seeing you. The danger with a driver is not noticing you.

Maybe not 50%, but there's certainly a strong bias in that data toward friday/saturday nights. Since the data resets at midnight rather than on bar hours, look at the difference in midnight-4am data on saturday and sunday mornings, vs the rest of the week.

Oh, I concur. I want it measured against skilled, sober, attentive drivers, not "bad" drivers.

I am a safe driver. (My measure: two moving violations in nearly 40 years of driving, the last one 16 years ago. No accidents in 19 years, no injury accidents ever. And I've driven daily for the whole time.)

In the past couple of weeks, I've narrowly avoided hitting pedestrians three different times. Each time, the pedestrian was somewhere other than a valid crosswalk (once was on a highway exit). In each case, I think an autonomous vehicle could have handled it better than me.

When a human kills someone with a car because they're drunk, or texting, I don't have much empathy for them.

I read a statistic long ago - don't know how true it is, but it feels truthy - that half of all traffic fatalities happen between 9pm and 3am on friday and saturday nights. The fact that autonomous systems will never be intoxicated, distracted, or emotional makes me feel much safer.

I don't think you understand how "cause of death" reporting actually works.

My mother got her first vaccination shot yesterday. She's in a nursing home in Virginia. She's already had one COVID exposure (luckily she didn't get it), and it's just scary there.

Bucatini is the best pasta shape, though. Comedy always has that grain of truth in it. If you can somehow get past the great bucatini shortage of 2020, make some cacio e pepe with it. Trust me.

This is the gentrification problem. Make the community more desirable, and you make it increasingly more expensive for the existing residents. It's hard to balance these things.

In the case of Minneapolis, the city committed to a plan (Minneapolis2040) to increase housing density. And a lot of that new apartment/condo construction (mostly on unused or old industrial land) is necessarily out of financial reach for average residents. But the increased supply helps protect the prices for the existing houses and older apartments, whether privately owned or rentals.

It's not perfect, it's arguably not even good, but it's a tradeoff most Minneapolis residents can live with.

I can't. But I do find they're less likely to interrupt in chat than they are in a physical space.

Also, it's a lot easier for me to finish what I'm doing before answering a chat than it is to finish what I'm doing and answer someone standing next to me. Although I'm known for putting a finger up in the air at them and making them wait.

I'm one of those who probably cannot be convinced to go back to the office. Why would I want to go back to losing an hour and a half a day to commuting? What problem does this solve for me? I find most aspects of my job are actually easier when working remotely - in particular, being able to get people to leave me the hell alone for those two or three hour blocks of concentration. I used to have to go hide at the office in order to work without someone asking me a question every fifteen minutes.

As a Minneapolis third precinct resident who saw what went down here, I saw the "looting" call in Chicago and immediately thought "Organized crime".

Something that happened here, as the protests kicked up, was organized robbery under the guise of looting. We'd see a van pull up to a boutique clothing/electronics store, and a group would pour out... a mix of "looters", lookouts, and security. They'd smash the store, grab the best stuff, toss it into the van, and roll away in minutes. That's not "looting". That's organized crime. And, because Minneapolis police were too busy tear-gassing peaceful protesters to bother protecting residents or property, it was easy.

So Chicago... after a police shooting, someone immediately goes online and calls for looting downtown, where all the nice boutiques are. Which, of course, creates plenty of cover for these organized teams to clean out stores. In other words, there's a fundamental difference between an organized crew robbing a boutique clothing store, and a poor mother walking out of a "looted" Target with a grocery cart full of diapers and food.

The public conversation, of course, lacks such distinctions.

Popular isn't the same as influential. For a good example of "unparalleled influence", look at the Velvet Underground. They hardly sold any copies of their first album, but as (I think) Brian Eno observed, "Everyone who bought that album started a band". Velvet Underground and Nico is arguably one of the ten most important rock albums ever made.

Maybe, fifty years from now, we'll look back on that first Taylor Swift album as world-changing. But I doubt it. Talented? Yes, remarkably so. But I don't hear a "Heroin" or "Venus in Furs" level change in the very nature of music there.

My spouse has a 2019 Honda HRV and I hate dealing with the touchscreen while driving. It's cognitively very difficult to do the degree of fine motor control and visual attention the touchscreen requires while also driving safely. It's actually a little terrifying.

I remember reading an article a while back about some manufacturer, can't remember which one, adding a clickable knob to control the "smart" functions. Since so much of what we use a touchscreen for is actually menu selection, that could cover most of what we need to "touch".

Yeah, I can see reason for the CDC to have daily press conferences now, not be routing it all through the White House. But that starts to lean toward political pressure from the White House silencing them to prevent mixed messages.

Do you know the CDC has been "silent", or have you just not seen anything about this before? Two weeks is pretty rapid to push through a decision like this, even in an emergency.

Well, there should be plenty of patients for studies soon.

The timing actually makes some sense. Getting it into the field in a "can't hurt" way allows us to start studying its effectiveness quickly, before the medical system gets totally overwhelmed and studies become nearly impossible.