Wow, that’s not great. You have my condolences and I hope you manage to convince your city to put some money into a frontage road or path of some sort. I’ve seen some pretty nice rail trails and the like in very small communities, but they take a lot of work and time.

One thing most often missed with bike-curious people, like yourself, miss is that the roads taken by bike are usually not the ones you’d drive.

A car route is often a poor choice when riding a bike. Avoiding fast moving cars means avoiding those dangerous areas. Pedestrians die because they don’t have an alternative (parked across the road, or it’s near home, school, etc).

For example, I’m at a friend’s place and I rode my bike here. The path I take is through slower neighborhoods and dedicated trails. If I drove my car, I’d take a very different route.

My advice is to think of some regular trips you make; work, shopping, or otherwise. Then use Google or Strava or other mapping software to see what their suggested bike routes are. You may be surprised at what’s available. I know I was when I started biking more regularly.

Also there are health benefits. If you’re not exercising every day, then commuting for 5 days by bike absolutely will improve your health. I’ve lost a ton of weight. Take a look at how deadly heart disease is for folks without regular “walking 20 minutes a day” exercise is.

Locking up is a great way to get some piece of mind. Another way is insurance! It’s not too expensive compared to an expensive bike. You can also setup your own “insurance” by opening a savings account/index funds/rotating CoDs with some money and deposit a monthly value of your choice (gas money saved per month, what private insurance would be, or as a general savings goal).

IMHO, scooters are so inexpensive that it’s not a huge deal to buy a new one when it’s stolen. This is true for ebikes too, though it can be a little more painful. Try comparing such a loss to how much you’re paying for transportation and you’ll find that a bike isn’t the biggest slice of that pie. Use that knowledge to relish the thought with your coffee after not paying for gas or a parking meter.

There’s a whole suite of vaccines which do not provide what you’re asking for: sterilizing immunity. That’s the penultimate ability of a vaccine. It’s incredible we’re even able to create anything of that character given we’re fighting against living, evolving things.

Setting the minimum bar to “I must never get sick” instead of “won’t find myself in a grave” or “I wasn’t able to work for a month and was stuck in a hospital for three weeks” is a crazy thing to hang onto.

Absolutely. My comment is about why a regulation would be 2 hours when today we can get more capable, air rated parts. US regulation is lagging behind, but it was based on what was within reach 20+ years ago. Heck, I bet most craft would eventually become 25 hours voice recording as older standard recorders become no longer available.

Flight recorders have a very long history with modern ones being engineered in the 1960s. They used film and magnetic tape loops, having very limited capacity. That’s where we get 2 hours from. Early ones only ran for 30 minutes, so 2 hours is pretty good in comparison.

It’s time to upgrade the regulations to match our current technology instead of 1990s limitations.

Uber has posted profits for the last two quarters. Lyft hasn’t yet been profitable, but they have been reducing their losses quite a bit.

I don’t think either of them will fail this year. Some AI gold rushing unicorns out there certainly will. It’s hard to know which though; they’re still private companies.

Nortel wasn’t killed by Huawei stealing their IP, which certainly did happen. They tanked themselves with some terrible accounting that hid the terrible situation they put themselves in. Nortel and Enron are the reason GAAP is the gold standard and legally required to be reported these days.

There are sailed powered logistics ships! Here’s a grain ship that just launched. There are also companies that produce inflatable or deployable sails to reduce fuel consumption in favorable winds.

Ultimately there will be a need for chemical energy or similarly dense energy to move a ship. The wind doesn’t always blow, and when it does it won’t always be in the direction you want. Nuclear is certainly an interesting option.

A friend of mine explained why it’s important to his kids: they can’t chat with a group of their friends.

Why? Because parents don’t want to install WhatsApp or other group chats due to legitimate concerns about scammers, pedophiles, and other child predators. SMS chat fills that gap, but it breaks horribly for groups bigger than 10 people. Hence if some kid is on Android, they break their chat. Given the penetration of Apple devices, it’s the kids with Android who are considered at-fault. “Just get an iPhone!”

Welcome to anticompetitive practices targeted at your children.

Spot on!

Sometimes even cheaters could be dealt with without an admin in those days. Servers would have fun game settings and odd maps that would break cheating gameplay.

My brother and I often played CS in the same room, on opposing teams because we didn’t like being cheated and didn’t want to be cheaters. We found an empty server with a sniping-only map. Made for great fun and someone joined in about 15 minutes later. They seemed really good, so we joined together to see if we could make it challenging. The new guy was just too good, so we decided to swap back and forth with the new guy to see if one of us could make a 1v2 miracle happen. That’s when we figured out he was impossibly aim hacking. Bummer, our fun game was toasted.

Then we realized the map settings had friendly fire on and a 5 second start delay. Aim hacks don’t target your own teammates. A perfect trap was available: we’d headshot TK the cheater at game start and then 1v1 each other. The cheater tried swapping to the other team only to find my brother using the same TK tactic. Our cheating friend found himself without a chance to grift. Needless to say, he didn’t hang around for long.

It’s a bummer this article pushes aside the importance of calculating bearings. Figuring bearings remains a required skill in both sea and air navigation. GPS works very well, but you don’t want to depend entirely upon it when there’s life and property at risk. Sextants, chronographs, and navigational maps remain onboard many ships.

To not be so negative, here’s something interesting the article does raise but didn’t mention: azimuthal maps are regularly projected at any place on earth. Azimithual projected at a radio station this makes pointing directional antennas intuitive and fast. It’s also helpful in grasping how a directional antenna will behave as their radiation patterns are drawn in polar coordinates and hence can be drawn on top of an azimithual map.

Highways are a great way to install new regional transit. Brightline West is going to link Los Angeles to Las Vegas in the median of interstate 15. That highway is a total mess on weekends and this new line is expected to drastically reduce traffic with big convenience wins given its average speed of 101mph/165kph. And the project is funding wildlife overpasses and other habitat improvements.

As is typical, this science reporting isn’t great. It’s not only that AI can do it effectively, but that it can do it at scale. To quote the paper:

“Despite these models achieving near-expert human performance, they come at a fraction of the cost, requiring 100× less financial and 240× lower time investment than human labelers—making such privacy violations at scale possible for the first time.”

They also demonstrate how interacting with an AI model can quickly extract more private info without looking like it is. A game of 20 questions, except you don’t realize you’re playing.

Tech has been in aggressive growth mode since 2008 because the Fed was handing out free money (interest rate lower than inflation). That allowed investors to dump money into tech businesses in hope of rapid business expansion, which in turn makes the business more valuable.

The free money dried up. Now these tech businesses are going to find out if they’re sustainable.

I’m not familiar with that YouTube channel, but the story absolutely repeats itself. A business will eventually die if it cannot turn around its finances and cannot raise money.

They may have cut themselves. Usually high level cuts are announced as “leaving for an amazing opportunity” or to “focus on family” or similar. That happens a month or two later after a deep layoff round and reorganizing. We’ll see if these recent layoffs included executives by Q1 next year. Watch LinkedIn if you’re that curious.

Still, it’s unfair to the lower levels, including line management, because they don’t get that option. It’s a “thank you for your service” and a boot out the door.

Note: not all tech companies are like this. Gumroad is an excellent example of a very open and ran-differently business.

Q3 just ended. These layoffs are because the books are not looking good. Everyone is hurting with inflation and higher interest, tech being particularly vulnerable to high interest rates.

I can only hope the execs cut correctly. A second round of layoffs at a company can destroy morale enough to sink the company. Who wants to continue working at a place that fired your close peers, wondering if you’re next?