nerd_light

I think that your consideration is a good one, but I think it comes down to numbers. Will a no-additional-cost-per-ride pass increase the "unnecessary" load on the system so much that they need to start using additional transit vehicles, thus increasing emissions? What percentage of trips are "unnecessary"? Will the growth of the system for "necessary" trips be able to handle the "unnecessary" load anyway?

Aside: for "unnecessary" trips, I'm setting aside the possibility of other options, such as "I already own a car and will now use that instead of paying 1 EUR".

Thanks for the detailed response! And nice to hear how much you've managed to keep humans involved in the process. I used to work on a content review automation system for a big company, so it's always fun to hear about how others handle similar cases.

And there's a lot of overlap between how that system acted and what you're describing. It makes we wonder if there's space for a company that offers this sort of model training + content tagging + review tooling capability as a service, or if there's too many variation on what "good" and "bad" input is to make it generalizable.

I think they meant (and I am interested in hearing about) appealing a "block" decision that was made by your automation.

If I'm a real human and trying to post a "good" post, but the model classifies it as bad and automatically blocks it, how do I appeal that decision? Can I? Or is my post totally blocked with no recourse?

Respectfully: no, the authors did not. The method used can be found in the published paper, which is linked from the submitted article.

edit: clarify a pronoun

The article links to the paper, which answers your question in appendix B (at least for the purposes of this study).

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29053/w290...

First names: "We draw racially distinctive first names from two sources. First, we use the same set of names in Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004), which are in turn drawn from Massachusetts birth records covering 1974 to 1979. Second, we supplement with names drawn from administrative records on speeding infractions and arrests provided by the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts and covering 2006 to 2018. We pick the most common names among drivers born between 1974 and 1979 with race- and gender-specific shares of at least 90%"

Last names: "Last names are drawn from 2010 Decennial Census data. We use the names with highest race-specific shares that occur at least 10,000 times, picking 26 total for each race group"

Apple purchased Siri from a startup of the same name. The startup founder chose the name because he liked it, having first heard of it because it was the name of a former coworker.

So, while perhaps less usual, it was chosen with the knowledge that it was very definitely a name used by people.

May I ask why you think that? (Sincere question, not meant to be snarky). Even assuming electric car assembly is simpler than an ICE powered car, there are still a lot of large, heavy, and expensive components. And that's setting aside all the regulations around it being a "street legal" vehicle, which can place odd constraints and vary from location to location.

I could see there being ways to build your own, just as you could build your own house or laptop if you acquire the right parts. What makes you think that people will broadly want and use kits? (or am I misinterpreting what you're saying?)

"Sample: 52% of the company's IMs were being sent between 6pm and midnight."

Sounded unbelievable to me! As it turns out, it's not true.

The author links to another of his articles that links to the Harvard Business Review paywalled article, but Microsoft has directly published the actual statistic behind this claim.

"Workplace Analytics data showed the share of IMs sent between 6 PM and midnight has increased by 52 percent on average."

https://insights.office.com/workplace-analytics/balancing-wo...

There are a lot more IMs being sent in that time range relative to pre-pandemic, but by the given chart, it's clearly nowhere near half.

I've been helping teach high school CS classes for years, and even just being able to use some free accounts with students to share code and workspaces has been flawlessly simple. I've always (even pre-pandemic) been a remote instructor, and Repl.it has been one of my best tool experiences. Thanks for the great work!

What considerations do you put into how to handle versioning? I'm thinking mostly of the "decider" logic.

For example, in SWF + Flow land, I maintain different versions just by keeping the old implementation and using version numbers. For Temporal, your team's recommended way is to have a single decider get the execution's version, and write conditionals into the business logic for both cases (https://docs.temporal.io/docs/java-versioning). Is the change in approach intentional, or just a matter of what's been built so far?

Ah, I think we're both right here, just on slightly different things. You're correct, trolley with diesel backup isn't new and is in fairly wide usage around the world. To the original comment:

"retaining the ability to drive disconnected from the wires and constantly charge when in an area with the wires"

Seemed to refer to trolley buses with rechargeable battery backups, which are much less common. Admittedly, I don't have non-US stats, just that there are only a handful of cities in the US that use them.

Like most thing, its an "it depends" situation. The tech exists, but isn't in wide usage. There's a higher upfront infra cost to pay back, and while short distance reroutes can be accommodated, you do set the general routing in stone. This works fine for larger, denser areas with routes that are more or less fixed.

King County metro (includes Seattle) is one of the agencies that's made major investments in trolley buses.

2011 study: https://metro.kingcounty.gov/up/projects/trolleyevaluation.h... (recommended trolleys with batteries for off-wire capability)

2015 press release on arrival of new trolley wire/battery backup buses: https://kingcounty.gov/elected/executive/constantine/news/re...

Battery only bus tech is also growing. I don't think it's viable for large scale usage yet, but KC Metro has been working on and piloting it seriously for a few years. It's possible that by the time more places would look into trolley buses during fleet replacement, battery ones will be ready.