kqgnkqgn's comments

Everyone agrees their community and moderators turned toxic. But why? Was it inevitable that people would turn bitter / jaded after answering questions for years? Was it wrong incentives from StackOverflow itself? The outside tech environment becoming worse?

The precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow.

Why should people in the nice dense efficient area subsidize everyone else via PG&E? Pay your fair share.

Given the buzzword, social media, and advertising infested garbage that ~80% of news sites have turned into...it's hard to sympathize with them.

I wouldn't consider myself anti-transit - before Covid I took BART every work day and currently walk to my office. And have never regularly commuted by car in the Bay Area. But in SF, we seem to keep throwing money at transit orgs through ballot measures, and getting little tangible results in return. I voted for funding increases for Muni for years, with supposed reliability / service enhancements that never seemed to materialize. It's disappointing that rather than hearing that voters are more hesitant to fund this now vs previously, the reaction would be to try to lower thresholds to get things passed.

Even with the new Central Subway that opened in SF (which I assume cost billions given how long it took to develop), wasn't a clear net-win. Muni closed other Metro routes when those opened. Depending on where you're going, you might be worse off now.

While RTO may be increasing ridership numbers, Covid did change population and commuting dynamics. Transit orgs need to adapt, and maybe accept downsizing / focusing more on a smaller scope. In Bart's case, maybe it would be wiser to focus on the core Bart system, and not the more recent expansions (the East Bay trains that are totally separate from the rest of Bart, and the Oakland airport train). Maybe a stronger look should be taken at merging the disparate transit organizations themselves, to reduce administrative overhead?

Caltrain seems to be doing better than others - they have financing worries themselves, but are on a better track from my understanding. Pun semi-intended :)

Transit is important, and I feel like the current organizations keep letting us down.

Visiting one with a probe would surely be amazing in it's own right...but hitching a ride would mean matching velocities with them. And if you can do that...you're already in the same orbit, so the comet doesn't really help.

I have no strong opinions on the architecture itself, but this "moving diagram" format, that changes shape when you try to zoom in and out is unusable.

Seem like sensible changes, though more is still needed. Requiring H1B holders to leave the country to renew paperwork is an insane anachronism. The per-country caps also seem like a throwback to the early 1900's era immigration exclusion policies.

Re: the concerns over "immigrants taking our jobs!". As a native-born American working in a large tech company today - the threat is very clearly not from H1B's and other visas. The threat to American tech jobs is when US tech companies choose to build out offices in lower cost of living countries (and I'm very much including Europe in that, I think that's even a bigger problem).

It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.

If we want to keep opportunities here - that's the issue we should be focus on fixing. What regulatory steps could we advocate for that would address this risk? Immigration is the wrong problem, and the focus on that in certain populist circles really demonstrates they are rather out of touch from what's actually happening in the industries that are driving the US economy today.