School buses only work if you don't have after school activities. Band, sports, theater, etc. are all fundamentally incompatible with a carless society unless you have high enough density to warrant a proper city bus system. Same with AP classes before school.

Potato, potahto. There are places that you have to go, e.g. work, school. If the amount of time it takes is too long, it completely breaks your ability to function. Whether the reason for it taking too long is because of distance or because somebody thought it would be fun to make cars go horribly slowly to convince you to bike for an hour is mostly an implementation detail.

I bike two to three hours every Saturday and Sunday. But there's no way I'd be willing to accept an hour of biking each way as a minimum requirement to get to work or school. Life's too short, and I'd be too exhausted when I got there to do anything.

True, but you're still kind of missing the point, which is that not everybody lives in cities. Public transit is provably not cost effective at rural densities.

Unfortunately, finding anyone under 40 who still knows how is almost impossible. Undergrad CS programs have been little more than glorified programming boot camps since at least y2k, and not particularly good ones. They'll be familiar with the latest industry fads, sure, but little else. We have people 15 years into their career that think that memory addresses are an advanced topic. It's beyond reason.

I remember complaining about colleges abandoning C for Java. "Oh, don't worry!" said the masses on this very site "No one writes their own structures these days. Kids just need to know what they are and how to use them." 25+ years later and you can't find anyone who could tell you the difference between a hash map and linked list. A few years back, I saw a junior confusingly choose to use a set instead of an array because, "each entry would be unique" and so "a set should be faster". You can't make this stuff up.

We let industry demands rather than academics drive education and now we're reaping what we've sewn.

Of course. Python is the world's least efficient language, but that wasn't the point. The absurdity I wanted to highlight was that someone imported a large library unnecessarily under the delusion that doing so would make their code "more efficient". The problem here is that the hapless developer heard somewhere that that library's arrays were "more efficient" than the language's built-ins and concluded that using them would necessarily be better in all circumstances.

There's similar belief about library code in general. That is, because libraries are used by many projects, they must necessarily be "more efficient" or "highly optimized" (along with "more secure", handle more "corner cases" or "edge cases", and other nonsense...) This one is so common that I've seen developers almost apologetic / ashamed when they confess that they wrote something themselves, as though doing so was some sort of personal failing on their part. It's no wonder even seemingly trivial projects now often have hundreds of files and a complex build process. The leftpad incident was almost 10 years ago and things are worse than ever.

Don't like the Beatles, Elvis, D&D and Ozzy. News at 11.

Actually, what will happen is that people will move away from places that do this, or they will continue to drive, but more slowly, or they will ignore the speed limits and pay the tickets.

The only way to shorten trips is to increase density, and that can't just magically happen.

Walking and biking are fine if you are only a couple of blocks away from where you are going. They don't work for long distances. So they don't solve the problem, either.

You either have urban density or you don't. If you do, then cars don't work very well. If you don't, then alternatives don't work very well. There's a grey area in between where neither one works very well.

I'm thinking about my rural hometown in west Tennessee, and imagining middle school kids biking to school for up to an hour each way while carrying books, musical instruments, gym clothes, etc., and I'm laughing at how well your "magic cure" would work. It's the sort of thinking I'd expect from someone who has never lived somewhere with fewer than half a million people.

+1. As soon as you get out of the core of Paris and its inner suburbs (Hauts-de-Seine), a lot of metro Paris is suburbia with zero-lot-line single-family houses.

Mind you, it's not "a hundred houses all alike" suburbia, because it was built up before folks started doing that sort of mass development, but it's still suburbs.

I think you missed the joke, which was that you can delete two words from the quote and get "I believe you are a racist."

Bets about whether they stop working with HomeKit in February of 2026?

Developing it was a bear though and I can see why Kodak didn't want to deal with this anymore.

have never been with the driver. Cleanliness is usually the the big issue and all the GPUs and sensors in the world won't fix this.

Three more years.

According to the graph the best model was off in predicting by 100km after 48 hours. Not breathtaking.

It's not a law of nature. It's also quite a stretch from what he actually said. This is where it comes from

   

The industry has forgotten how to write efficient software. We've had multiple generations brought up believing that memory is free and that increasingly fast computers will magically solve any performance problems.

For reasons I can't even begin to comprehend, people still believe that nonsense.

Ages ago, we'd caution developers against 'premature optimization' as a hedge against needless complexity. These days, the trade-off is the same, just flipped on its head: The code that's easy to read and maintain is likely to also be more efficient than the bloated and calcified monstrosities the average oversized agile team accretes.

I saw a python script earlier today where the "developer" imported numpy just so he could make a single integer array to pass to a function in the same ~300-line script that he wrote. His justification for that absurdity? "Efficiency".

We're doomed.

the last time I read an article about IBM that didn't involve their quarterly 30K person lay-offs. I'm surprised there's anyone left there, at all.

What does this company actually do?

In practice, storing energy for a longer period of time is basically never done, with the only real exception I can think of being space travel. And it's not how long the storage period is that matters. It's how quickly you need to get the energy when you're done. Sure, if you store a year worth of energy in a day and dribble it out over a year, a tiny fuel cell and a huge tank is great for cost. But literally space travel is the only practical application of that. For every real-world application other than space travel, you need to be able to dump the entire contents of the fuel cell in at most maybe five to ten times the period of time over which it was built up, if not less. That means either big fuel cells or a lot of fuel cells.

See above. And to that, I would add that converting electricity to hydrogen with electrolysis of water and back is likely to result in a loss of somewhere around 60% to 70% of the energy that you put in. So even if you somehow manage to find some rare edge case (e.g. trying to do solar in Alaska or something similarly nuts) where you really do want to store power long-term and spread it out over a long period of time, the loss of energy is still going to be around 5x as high from fuel cells as lithium ion batteries even factoring in the self-discharge rate over several months.

And that's before you factor in the additional losses from having to pressurize the hydrogen, which adds further the losses. In fact, you'd actually be better off building air tanks and pressurizing them and using the air pressure to turn turbines than doing electrolysis, pressurizing hydrogen, and dumping it into a fuel cell. That will give you a loss of only 25% to 50% of the energy that goes in. Sure, it will take up more space, but you won't have hydrogen making the metal brittle after a few years, requiring you to replace the whole system over and over again, so it makes *way* more sense.

When I say that IMO, there is literally no case where hydrogen fuel cells make sense other than space travel, I mean that. It is utterly terrible efficiency-wise, so much so that almost anything is better, including things that are way simpler and cheaper than hydrogen, like a giant air tank and an air turbine.