freditup

I never understand why companies post AI-written articles like this on their blog and why authors are okay having it attributed to them.

Authors: If you actually put deep thought into the content and then have an AI do the final writing, it immensely devalues your final product. I think this author actually has some good content here but the AI-generated prose does it no favors.

Companies: If your blog is for recruiting purposes (which is often one major motivation), AI slop articles are going to be a big turn off for the best talent.

Does anyone know the best way to get a reliably working PS2 nowadays? I happen to have a bunch of old PS2 games and would love to have a reliable PS2 to be able to use them with. But buying online seems fairly fraught - how do you have any guarantee you get a reliable device? And they seem to be fairly expensive now.

(I couldn't read the article because the site was currently down for me, so apologies if this comment is off-topic, but hopefully relevant!)

Note that it was snowy in NYC today, so people were likely dissuaded to drive by other factors than congestion pricing as well. It'll be interesting to see what impact there is as we get further along in the year.

The dashboard is based off of Google Maps travel time data which I'm unsure of the exact accuracy. I imagine the city might also have other more direct metrics that can be used, such as the count of vehicles passing through the tunnels into the congestion zone.

Apparently NJ turned down an offer of $100M+ per year: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/12/18/nj-refusing-generous-...

I wonder if there will be any long term reputational repercussions for Netflix because of this. Amongst SWEs, Netflix is known for hiring the best people and their streaming service normally seems very solid. Other streaming services have definitely caught up a bit and are much more reliable then in the early days, but my impression still has always been that Netflix is a step above the rest technically.

This sure doesn't help with that impression, and it hasn't just been a momentary glitch but hours of instability. And the Netflix status page saying "Netflix is up! We are not currently experiencing an interruption to our streaming service." doesn't help either...

The picture of the roundabout from above at the beginning of the article is extra confusing because it doesn't have the final lane markings yet and the ones you can see are misleading.

The (presumably) final markings[0] make things less confusing.

[0]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/High+Rock+Rd,+Washington+9...

What's the benefit to streetcars over busses with a dedicated, physically separated right of way?

I like the idea of streetcars, but busses seem easier to purchase than streetcars, standard road paving seems easier to maintain than streetcar tracks and power, and likely it's easier to find/train bus operators than streetcar operators (even though I assume streetcars are actually a bit easier to operate).

Checking out on Amazon seems to have been down for a large number of users for the past 5+ hours or so (as of 10PM ET). This is the largest actual Amazon shopping outage I can think of in a long time and interesting how long it's been ongoing.

The context here (since the title isn't too revealing), is that the FDA expanded approval for a drug despite essentially unanimous didagreement from the scientists actually analyzing the drug. Derek Lowe, a well-respected pharma blogger, writes about how this was a big mistake and a very bad look for the FDA.

It is, sort of, through Dependent Care FSA programs which let you contribute money pre-tax and then spend it on child care. For some reason though, the limit is $5000/year which isn't nearly enough to cover any sort of frequent child care. It's also sort of a pain to administer these programs.

There's also a child care tax credit which gives a similar amount of tax savings. So overall you do have some tax benefits to help with daycare costs, but they could be better.

Thanks for the improved tip - I have found it hard to parse through all the address-bar-related about:config options in the past, the UI seems like a better way!

You can also tweak the behavior via `about:config` to emphasize the types of results you care about. I like to set `browser.search.suggest.enabled` to `false` to keep it from showing search suggestions since I almost exclusively want to either type in my own search term or go back to a previous webpage I've visited.

Are teachers really the ones pushing for such early starts of school? Anecdotally, most teachers I know don't love waking up at 5am in order to get ready and get to school on time. I always thought the early start was to have enough time in the afternoon and evening for after-school activities, but not sure.

> "Bring my concerns to the people I have concerns with in private before having to talk about it in public" is just the right way to talk to people about problems.

Yes, it typically is. However making non-falsifiable public accusations that individuals are doing "dirty shit" is not keeping things "private" and is even worse than making a concrete public statement about a concern you may have.

> Interviewer: I suppose if you think that, the next obvious question is do you think Google itself is institutionally racist?

> Dr. Gebru: Yes, Google itself is institutionally racist.

> Interviewer: That's quite a thing to say - you were a Google employee until a short while ago.

> Dr. Gebru: I feel like most if not all tech companies are institutionally racist. I mean, how can I not say that they are not institutionally racist? The Congressional Black Caucus is the one who's forcing them to publish their diversity numbers. It's not by accident that black women have one of the lowest retention rates[, in the technology industry]. So for sure Google and all of the other tech companies are institutionally racist.

There's not really much to discuss or unpack here. There's no defining of 'institutionally racist' in the conversation, so it's impossible to say what standards are being using to determine if something is institutionally racist. Dr. Gebru also provides essentially no facts or evidence for her claims.

Asking if organizations are racist is a fair question, but the conversation will basically only be productive if terms are clearly defined and accusations are based on concrete evidence.

This seems like it was a very casual interview, so I'm not faulting Dr. Gebru for not providing more evidence here, just saying that this interview is not super helpful in the larger conversation around racism. Because an accusation of racism is a serious accusation to make, I wish in these situations that there was more substantiated evidence provided.

It's a bug for sure, but conclusions like this are over the top for a single small bug:

> This isn’t an Apple which has any concern over the quality of its products, or for its users. It’s just another leviathan corporation which has stopped caring or taking pride. One small bug reveals a deep and pervasive problem.

I'd rather see a more measured approach to drawing conclusions from a single anecdote.

Clickbait title. Actual title should be: [Orcas] Can Make Great White Sharks Flee in Fear

A large stretch of Queens Boulevard has a bike lane alongside of its local lanes now. I just biked the length of it the other day, it's actually quite a pleasant urban biking experience in terms of safety (though not in terms of scenery). The lane is wide, separated from traffic, and the intersections with cars are sensibly designed[0].

(In the map view below, the bike lane is the green lane, where the tan painted area is designated for pedestrians. But almost no pedestrians are going to be walking parallel with the road between the local and through lanes. And if they are, they're likely going to be on the actual median instead of in the painted area. So it's safe to bike in the tan paint, and leave the entire green bike lane as a buffer area. This may sound disrespectful to pedestrians, but when I biked the entire length of the bike lane the other day, I didn't see a single pedestrian walking in this area or even on the median.)

[0]: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7389203,-73.8891268,64m/data...

It's interesting that so many people would enjoy AMP, because on my Android, viewing AMP sites in Google's main app often feels much slower than regular web browsing in Firefox for Android.

The difference? I have an ad-blocker in Firefox, but not in Google's app.

So Ad-blocking > AMP > Regular (as far as user-experience from a speed perspective). Obviously Google has a lot of incentive to make sure people don't go the ad-blocking route.

Though not sure what is keeping ad-blocking from growing given its superiority - likely just a lack of awareness about the option. If ad-blocking ever did grow massively though, the internet would change in ways we haven't yet seen. Either ad-serving companies would win the arms battle and ad-blockers would become ineffective, or, the web would have to move to a new payment model (Brave-like perhaps).

I'm not entirely sure what the ideal is - likely a model where users can choose between ads or micropayments is the most pragmatic world.

Time makes a lot more sense than stops: for example, at Columbus Circle in NYC, a downtown A train that's one stop away is about 3.5 miles out. A downtown 1 train that's one stop away is less than a half mile out. Except if the downtown A train is running local, in which case it's then about a half mile out.

Time, on the other hand, can be meaningfully displayed to a rider no matter what information they already know. (It's also fairly accurate in practice in my experience.)

Quality declining is an interesting point that's hard to quantify. I went to a very well-viewed public school, and a large potion of my classes were quite unimpressive. (Think poor teaching; questions/answers to exams basically provided to you the night before the exam by the TA, exams graded on a ludicrous curve such that you don't really have to master anything, etc.)

Friends of mine who have stayed around the university swear that things have only gotten worse since our time, with the rise of more and more online classes and less and less true understanding expected.

I can't provide hard data on whether quality of education is declining, but I can say that large parts of my education were somewhat suspect.

> Amazon executives met two weeks ago with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the governor’s Manhattan office, said one of the people briefed on the process, adding that the state had offered potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies

> “I am doing everything I can,” Governor Cuomo told reporters when asked Monday about the state’s efforts to lure the company. “We have a great incentive package,” he said.

> “I’ll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that’s what it takes,” Governor Cuomo said. “Because it would be a great economic boost.”

If these quotes are truly representative of Cuomo's attitude towards Amazon, that's an incredible amount of pandering for the governor of the state containing New York City to be doing. Isn't large amounts of incentives for Amazon essentially a trickle-down economics policy? Interesting to see that Cuomo, ostensibly a progressive, would be for such a thing.

Fair points, though I don't know how high of an expected value I'd give to 50k of Box options. It's hard for me to imagine that options given that late are that valuable. I'd imagine the equity compensation at lots of other places would be better.

Don't feel bad though, these high salaries typically happen at large companies in extremely expensive areas. So, the money isn't as much as it seems, and you likely will feel like a small cog in a giant-money-making corporation. In other words, chasing the money is often not worth it.

I'm actually surprised that as a 'Principal Architect' he was only making $208,000 a year. Considering that entry-level positions at large companies which can have cash compensation of around $150,000+, it seems he may have been 'underpaid'.

Of course $208,000 is nothing to scoff at, and money is hardly the most important thing when it comes to life. Just interesting to see that a reasonably large Bay-area company would pay such a high-level engineer barely more than new grads can get.

I actually quite like Google Keep. Curious why you view it as so bad?