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Does going to college and learning say, compilers or differential equations not have value? Your employer won't teach you. Please don't tell me the heat equation is fake.

I think they're saying that learning compilers, differential equations, or the heat equation aren't actually that relevant for getting a mid-level procurement job or becoming the manager of a hotel.

I mean that's what a reasonable person might write but that's not what the parent comment actually wrote.


I have seen a Waymo do a very stupid thing where it darted across a busy street, and it left very little margin of error for the oncoming traffic, which happened to be a loaded dump truck that could not have stopped. The dump truck driver was clearly surprised. It was a move that I never would have made as a driver. Did they dial the aggression up? I'm sure they're safer than humans in aggregate as there are some dumb humans out there but it's not infallible.

Waymo continues to improve every year, but dumb drivers never will.

It is probably possible to get drivers to improve if the incentives were there or if they had no choice due to external factors. I bet it would be cheaper than money spent on self driving tech too.

Or public transit on a track.


Drivers can improve, but they won't. They will talk about the abstract just fine, but always in context of how "the other guy" is so bad, they resist any suggestion that they might not be good either. As soon as your point out something that nearly everyone is doing wrong (as backed up by statistics and traffic safety engineers who study this) and suddenly they will shut you down. As the other reply said: drivers vote and so any change that would affect all of them is impossible.

I'd love to see better public transit, but transit is so bad for most of us that it would take a massive investment before there is any return, and half measures won't work. You have to go all in on transit before you can see any significant change - if you invest in the wrong network you won't know until a massive amount as been invested and there is no return (leaving open the question of if a different investment would have worked).


Drivers hate enforcement, and they vote.

But the incentives are there. The knowledge is even there. What's left is the sum of all values.

American drivers specifically can be improved. Every other country stands as an existence proof of that.

If only we honked the horn when our cars are stopped, to let people know where it is. And honked before putting our cars in motion, to let people know we're about to move. And while the car is in motion, to let people know the car is in motion. I saw no collisions while visiting India, and continuous honking must be a significant part of the reason.

You clearly haven't been to very many countries if you think American drivers are the worst out there.


Ah of course, all other thirty seven countries of the world.

True, the UK is basically an alien civilization compared to the average american state. No comparison is meaningful unless we compare it to every nation state in the world.

What about non-OECD countries? I'm told those are actually most of the world's population and driving.

Not normalized per miles driven? Sure, makes sense chief.

Weird, because per capita deaths leveled off in the 1930's and declined from that plateau in '70's to lows in the 2010's.

Did we get less dumb drivers starting in the '70's?


Deaths and accidents are different measurements. Cars are much safer in an accident than they were in the early/middle 20th century.

Per-mile-driven deaths started climbing again around 2012 in the U.S., I'd wager due to the trend towards larger vehicles causing more collateral damage.


Waymos do seem to have gotten a lot more aggressive.


That reminds me of the Feb 14, 2016 collision in Mountain View [1] (sorry for pdf, but it has the best images of articles I saw) between a Google self-driving car and a VTA articulated bus. TLDR, the software and the safety driver thought the bus would move out of the way because it was a big vehicle and a professional driver. From the report:

> Google said it has tweaked its software to "more deeply understand that buses and other large vehicles are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles."

Maybe that got lost.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2016-03-apnewsbreak-video-google-self-...


I think it made a calculation that it could do it, and did it. I think it was absolutely correct with respect to the physics and timing. What was not factored in to it was how surprising it would be to other drivers, and what would happen if a pedestrian or cyclist or some other surprise showed up, and it would just have no margin whatsoever so it would be straight to the trolley problem.

That would make parties a bit awkward, but it would avoid collisions.


Hi,my name is 1bd0a30d-b415-4747-9650-f1f6e530cd2a, can I get you something to drink?


What a coincidence! That's my name too!!


John Jacob Jingleheimer cfeb6ddc-43a5-4ba9-8a28-b71d93407c78, that's my name too. Whenever I go out, the people always shout, cfeb6ddc-43a5-4ba9-8a28-b71d93407c78

As The Clash booms through the speakers

Lock the taskbar, lock the taskbar!

Hmm, yes, I don’t know what I want, but I’m sure we’ll hash it out together

There are four kinds of people, those that put things into categories, and those that like matrices.

There's at least two meanings for stupid. One is someone who is not intelligent, and it's just kind of an intrinsic thing. The other is someone who does something stupid, irrespective of their intelligence. This is a conditional attribute that depends on available information / motivation / laziness.

Point being a 2x2 matrix is just an oversimplification of real life and also wtf are the axes here???


> There are four kinds of people, those that put things into categories, and those that like matrices.

I must be missing the joke here - those are not exclusive categories, and there are only two of them.

> wtf are the axes here???

It's explained in the text just below the drawing....


It's not?


This trial puts them in quite a pickle.


Real schmear campaign.


No you're now a technology manager. Managing means pep talks, sometimes.


Boots on the moon! Maybe we will want that helium 3 since it looks like fusion has a shot.


Is it really easier/cheaper to colonize the moon, set up Helium 3 collection, and transport it back, rather than use Deuterium/Tritium?

Also while He-3 doesn't produce radio-active by products, doesn't the reaction require much higher temps than a D-T one?

Perhaps it might be wise to get one working first before investing too much in a moon shot.


No of course not. Helium 3 is a joke. I mean, it'd be nice not to make nuclear waste of the reactor walls. But maybe not billion dollar nice.


Fun fact, diamond has 4x the thermal conductivity of copper.


May our children live to use high-end diamond cookware


I had to look up at what temperature diamonds start to oxidize/burn[0]: Different sources say different things but apparently it's somewhere between 700°C and 900°C (depending on the exact conditions I suppose).

I suppose that's enough for cookware?

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TPyuDY3iq1Q


Your lower and is around the melting point of aluminum, that is in wide use in cookware.


Gas flames are easily hotter and exposure to flame can start burning below the autoignition temperature.


Maybe it could be used as an inner-layer in multi-layer cookware (like some pans use aluminum today)?


Even according to the article: "2,200 to 2,400 watts per meter per kelvin - roughly six times as conductive as copper.". It's way higher than copper in fact. Copper is ~400 W/(m·K)


It's not a stable sort?


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