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Per hour they will be much cheaper. Part of self-fulfilling prophecy is that per hour price is mostly inelastic, so as trains get slower and take more time the price rises. And higher price means less people take trains...

Per hour walking is even cheaper.

> Per hour they will be much cheaper.

How many people do you think care about the per-hour cost of travel. I feel confident saying that the vast majority of the traveling public wants to spend as little time and money as possible to get to their destinations.


If I’m not mistaken, that’s the joke.

D’oh! It completely flew over my head. Thanks. I’ve heard people who are really into trains bill rail travel as being worth it purely for the experience, so it sounded plausible that they were arguing it seriously

I think it's less a joke than an observation. There's some per hour cost that's approximately fixed, so for a given mode of travel the slower it gets the more expensive it becomes. The lack of investment in rail is a vicious cycle.

> The economists who claim that tariffs will harm normal Americans were also the economists who claimed that sanctions would destroy the Russian economy.

Nobody can predict the future, least of all economists. Having said that I think economists were not wrong on the headwinds that Russian economy would face. They just failed to account for extraordinary measures that dictatorship could take.

And even with said measures there had been a steady deterioration of the economic situation... The real question is what is the state of their mineral (cough gold cough) production rates and reserves. They might just be able to buy their way out of the current situationship.


> It is a transaction.

That is a purely rational take, but people are seldom rational. My pet theory is that inertia is a huge reason why people choose college. Majority of people who go to college do it as a continuation of 10-12 years of continuous schooling (or partying). As they climb educational or social hierarchies they are constantly reminded that college is a next step. Thus going to college feels far more familiar and less scary than joining the workforce. Thus, going to college is a default choice for many.

After the gut decision is made it can be wrapped into whatever rational argument.


The degree is still highly preferred (if not a hard requirement) for basically all white collar/middle class jobs. It's still, generally, a +EV proposition, so I don't think it's a convincing claim that it's just a post hoc rationalization.


I see a warning about rechargeable batteries in checked in luggage almost every time I check into a flight. I wonder what explains our difference of experiences. Maybe it's the fact that I mostly do electronic checkins vs just showing up at luggage drop off.


I also see this every time I check in for my Air NZ and Jetstar flights here in New Zealand. But I suspect like many I just by habit press 'No, I don't have any hazardous things to declare.' to move to the next stage of the check in process as quickly as possible! There are also signs and stickers on check in desks for those checking in manually -- but not sure how good the agents are at bringing people's attention to that.


Luggage drop-off asks the same question, here in Australia anyway


A few days ago my iPhone would show the same message despite not being exposed to water. A reboot has fixed it, but that makes me wonder what is the false positive rate on that.


I had that on a Samsung phone. Eventually it got so bad I had to switch phone because it would constantly believe there was water in the USB port even though it was bone dry.

It may have been some sort of short internally, but to me it just meant a defective phone.


Lint in port getting damp often caused this for me


> They only care about the potential hit to the bottom line, and if that's perceived as callous silence, they don't care.

I don't think that is true. I think people care a lot... just not about the consumers. People care about themselves - they also don't want to be fired. So the decision is punted up the chain, all the way to executives. And executives want to mitigate the damage to themselves first, their orgs second, maybe consumers third.


Which is ultimately another way of saying they don’t care about customers and only care about their bottom line (?)


This is a somewhat nihilistic take with an optimistic ending. I believe humans will never fix hallucinations. Amount of totally or partially untrue statements people make is significant. Especially in tech, it's rare for people to admit that they do not know something. And yet, despite all of that the progress keeps marching forward and maybe even accelerating.


Yeah, I think a lot of people talk about "fixing hallucinations" as the end goal, rather than "LLMs providing value", which misses the forest for the trees; it's obviously already true that we don't need totally hallucination-free output to get value from these models.


Even as language models can partially solve a few problems, we remain with the problem of achieving Artificial General Intelligence, that the presence of LLMs has exacerbated because they so often reveal to be artificial morons.

Intelligence finds solutions - actual, solid solutions.

More than "fixing" hallucinations, the problem is going beyond them (arriving to "sobriety").


I’m not sure I follow. Sure, people lie, and make stuff up all the time. If an LLM goes and parrots that, then I would argue that it isn’t hallucinating. Hallucinating would be where it makes something up that is not in its training site nor logically deducible from it.


I think most humans are perfectly capable of admitting to themselves when they do not know something. Computers ought to do better.


You must interact with a very different set of humans than most.


Once one starts thinking of them as "concept models" rather than language models or fact models, "hallucinations" become something not to be so fixated on. We transform tokens into 12k+ length embeddings... right at the start. They stop being language immediately.

They aren't fact machines. They are concept machines.


Not an argument. "Many people are delirious, yet some people create progress". What is that supposed to imply?


All data is linear when plotted on a loglog scale with a thick marker.


the joy of an engineer is to find a straight line in a double logarithmic diagram


But in my explanation, there is no x axis.


No but it holds more generally. Taking the log of data tends to make it look "more correct" even when it's not theoretically justified, and this can lead to very wrong conclusions.


Matt Parker says it's because that's how humans are naturally inclined to think, and used the midway point between 1 and 9 to illustrate. We'd say five but "children and others not exposed to math would say 3" and then gave some explanation with beads or coins. It didn't make sense to me but I do know that if a graph is log scale I need to actually look at it harder to make sure they're not trying to pull a fast one on us here folks.


I think there is another dimension there - volume. Apple volume is on another level and it takes time to scale up factories to build latest and greatest things.


>Apple volume is on another level and it takes time to scale up factories to build latest and greatest things.

Bad take. Samsung sells as many phones as Apple while using the latest and greatest parts on the flagships.


Good point, do you know the breakdown of Samsung device sales by generation and what chipsets they use? My layman expectation is that most of the android headset sales are lower end models. However, Samsung might be a different beast.


Many rocket engines, especially the reusable sort, require active cooling of the throttle and combustion chamber. A portion of the fuel is split into channels which run through the combustion chamber, throat, and the nozzle. Generally it is a close loop system, so the fuel makes back to be injected into the combustion chamber.

To get max performance modern engines run hot, aka ox rich, and the regen cooling is generally not enough. So in addition to that, critical surfaces such as nozzle also get protected by injecting a thin layer of fuel. This biases combustion to be fuel heavy in localized areas which is less hot. Of course all of this happens in an extremely dynamic environment where gasses are moving at 2km/s+.


> To get max performance modern engines run hot, aka ox rich

Oxygen-rich means you have extra oxygen which doesn’t combust. That necessarily reduces performance. Most rocket engines run fuel rich because hot oxygen is a chemical terrorist.


Was actually going to post a similar comment re: NASA and the SSME engines for the Space Shuttle. This graphic shows the coolant system circulation that pumps cold fuel through the outer casing to warm it up to proper temperatures before use. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25#/media/File:Ssme_schemat...


Not just the reusable ones. Almost all of them do. Exception are monoprop ones where the temperatures are just not high enough.


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