kuanbutts

Thanks RC! I went back when it was Hacker School! Grateful that period of my life - grew so much!

There's got to be a variant that is a 2x2 matrix of this:

Lie to others, lie to yourself (spiral together; either fantastically poor or spectacularly rich)

Lie to others, tell yourself the truth (manipulation, morally broke, but materially rich)

Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth (integrity, barely scrape by)

Tell others the truth, lie to yourself (be used by the system, usually end up poorly)

Anyone know why some larger cities are not listed? For example, I am noticing that Oakland, CA is missing. This would have been a major city in 1992 when the list was created as well.

He acknowledges the risks and discusses in some detail towards the end of the video around the 29:00 mark. He just wanted to share a tool he found interesting that he was tinkering on.

Was the whole point of this site to make the cars more visible on the map? B/c they're super hard to see! Would've been so much easier to just use a regular Leaflet slippy map or something and just drop an icon for each car... Could've done that in a day. Sigh.

fwiw I find the others (DC, Chi, BOS) easier to view/pan/explore

I was looking at the sourcemap and it appears that they wrote their own tiling library (see Tiles.ts and related files under js/). Is this right? Why not just Leaflet since they're rendering PNG tiles? Or Mapbox?

The whole thing feels a bit over-engineered to me at first glance.

I used to work in N Berkeley and live in Oakland by the lake. A lifestyle where you live and work in the E Bay is simply unparalleled.

I was happy to see the Crisp chat tool in the bottom right hand corner - the folks who make that do a great job. I used it "early on" in the product's life, back in 2016, and really appreciated how responsive they were, etc.

Thanks! That's a helpful description.

Can we all just acknowledge that the "AI" aspect of this is gimmicky and - ignoring that part - Scribblenauts did this way, way better back in like '09?

Quickly scanning comments I do not think anyone else has brought up: administrative bloat.

More money is being spent on science, but is more money actually making it through the administrative bloat encumbering most institutions to the actual performance of research?

Anecdotally, I have a colleague who has received funding from the NSF and the amount of regulations and paperwork and various travel and meeting-related obligations related to the funding soak up so much of the actual dollar amount supplied. (You have to use your funding dollars to satisfy the various required meetings, travel, and paperwork-filling.) The constraints are so ridiculous that satisfying them consumes nearly all the resources the NSF provided, and the little that remains is actually not sufficient to perform the research with. Worse, he has now wasted months of his time satisfying various oversight requirements administrated by both the NSF and the research institution he works in, leaving him an unreasonably small amount of time to actually achieve any significant progress on his work. Once this round of funding dries up, he will be left with no choice but to repeat the process in order to secure some more funding to continue to barely make progress on his stated research goal.

If I had to make up a number to describe the dollar efficiency of research funding, in some cases I might assert it is negative: Not only is it just being soaked up by self-serving, efficiency-draining administrative requirements, it literally destroys the most valuable resource (time!), leaving the researcher with none to actually engage in their subject matter of expertise.

This is awesome! I fully believe that government procurement needs serious reform, which this article and effort is clearly attempting to address. So, props to David Block-Schachter (the CTO).

There are far too many large, bloated consultancies that specialize not in delivering quality products and services, but rather in "surviving" the government procurement process.

Props as well to the Swiftly team - I had a change to take a peak at some of the APIs they expose to their customers and it's quite valuable. In particular, they roll up stop-pair segment performance on routes by time of day, which allows someone to query for bus performance by discrete route-schedule-segments.

Gathering this type of data is quite labor intensive and a significant technical lift (I was once part of a project doing this with GTFS-RT data from the NYC MTA). This type of information, and the broader ecosystem of performance related API services they provide to their users (based off the limited amount I have seen), can enable operators to extract highly articulated performance statistics about their fleet, on their own.