Another step closer to revolt. There's only so much pressure the general public will be able to handle. History has taught us when there is a massive unbalance in "haves" and "have nots" things don't play out in ways where we just "sit down and discuss what's going on."
Nah history has taught us mortgages can go way higher. Your part of the online crowd constantly trying to say the next French revolution is coming (been hearing that refrain since the 00s). Also when you buy a house - if you didnt factor in mortgage rates changing thats 95% on you. 6 % isnt even that high. Mortgage is too high offload and move elsewhere. People need to take some responsibility for their purchases.
It’s high when home prices have grown substantially since the last time mortgages were 7%.
Also, it’s not really a “haha, you suck at planning” so much as a new generation is hit with much higher home prices when they are entering buying time of their life.
Mortgages have been 4% for the last 20 years or so, so an entire generation has had 4% mainly due to government subsidization. And now the government can’t or won’t do that any more. If the next generation can’t buy homes because prices and rates are too high, that’s not good for social stability.
I don’t think it’s the French Revolution, but I do think there will be “why are we not paying for social programs when we have mortgage interest rate deductions for people with $750k mortgages [0]. That was palatable when the middle class had mortgages. But people who are stuck perpetually renting will likely vote to stop that.
Also people in most other countries economically comparable to the U.S. have variable rate or 5 year fixed rate mortgages. The U.S. government backstops most 30 year fixed rate mortgages. The banks don't wouldn't offer 30 rates so low, given the interest rate risk.
Yeah, my first mortgage on my house in the late 90s was, I believe, 6 or 7% and that wasn't even considered especially high. (I eventually refinanced for a bit under 5% or something like that.)
Interest rates these days aren't so low you can almost ignore them (e.g. you probably don't want to keep a lot of money in literal cash) but they're not late 70s/80s often double-digits either.
Is that what History taught us? I thought it taught us that humanity could go for literally centuries with a minuscule group of elites owning everything and the rest of the population owning nothing more than their clothes.
Exactly. When people barely survive, they don't have the energy or time to revolt.
Revolutions often historically start from disillusioned middle classes who have the time and energy, desire to have things (political power, economic means, etc.) and means of organising, and/or students. When they have some and don't have to worry about the next meal on the table, but want more.
There are definitely big swathes of the US population which has some political and economic power, yet are severely disenfranchised and ignored politically, and squeezed financially on all sides. Add in severe partisanship and general mistrust, agressive propaganda, and yes, you do have favourable conditions for a revolution. Not in any way guaranteed of course.
The US public seems to have the capacity to absorb an incredible amount of misery while just acting up at tame things like elections. There are occasional protests and riots, but really quite few - and they dissipate quickly.
Hell, we had 30 years of hollowed-out de-industrialization in the Rust Belt, with hardly a peep on the "revolt" front. There's been slow electoral changes, however.
You've seen the stuff that says the vast majority (~80%) of the US can't meet basic army fitness standards, right? You think these people are capable of revolt?
> My portfolio needs to be nothing more than the HTTP equivalent of a tri-fold brochure.
My concern here is that your website _is_ your portfolio - including how you build it. It's not just the content and long narrative that's going to sell you. This new approach has switched from showing what you can do to telling what you can do.
> But in the last 20 years, every journalist confuses journalism (informing people) with activism (changing people).
My concern with this sentiment is that is glosses over far more nefarious motivations here (which I think are more common than we like to admit).
I have met many many people in the corporate world that are more concerned about "what the rules are" as opposed to applying any sort of ethical mindset. I've seen again and again where people will take advantage of others, throw other people under the bus, and fight to take "what is theirs" (meaning what they want - not actually what makes sense) without any sort of self-reflection. If challenged they gaslight everyone around them, including themselves..
I'm willing to believe that this extends to reporters. I would not be surprised if a large number of "reporters" out there that happily go along with whatever they are told to do in the job (or to keep their job): go after eyeballs rather than report facts and (sometimes) on stuff that matters. Take a look at any sort of news network and you can clearly see that all these news anchors are playing parts in this screwed up version of reporting what's going on. It's bound to extend down to people writing the articles as well.
Several dev teams I've been on want retrospectives to help review and make things better. But those places are where devs have a lot of autonomy and ability to change how things operate in the team.
I've seen and been on teams that align more with your reaction but those are at jobs where where the dev teams have very little say in how they do things. Well that or it's filled with a lot of cynical people that don't actually care about what they are doing and don't have much desire for things to improve (they actively fight to keep the status quo).
It likely gets worse in larger companies in that misalignment between groups can be significant and very expensive given the sheer number of people involved.
Yes that's a good chunk of the day to day. But there's also laying out strategic vision for where products and the company goes, what sorts of people get hired, doing the culture curation/setting. It's not for everyone that's for certain. I've met many many people that would struggle with this role (and vice versa).
> In San Francisco, those problems can mean self-driving cars blocking traffic, transit and emergency responders, as well as erratic behavior resulting in close calls with cyclists, pedestrians or other vehicles.
I have mixed feelings about how to test self-driving vehicles (mostly stemming from ignorance). But at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigned to not making progress on this (or very very slow progress)? And considering that "no one was hurt" and "driverless taxis have never killed or seriously injured anyone in the millions of miles they’ve traveled" are were now there?
> at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigned to not making progress on this
It's not my problem whether Waymo makes progress on their technology, but they make it my problem when they hit me with their car.
I do have sympathy for wanting to make the progress: we might make better pacemakers faster by testing out 20 designs on 20 people. But nobody wants to be the one that gets the one that doesn't work. And in this case the victims aren't even involved. They didn't opt-in to beta testing the road full of half-baked robots, they're just trying to get to work.
In the interest of having a discussion, let's assume that AVs are a meaningful goal to work towards for whatever reason. But given that, how do we get vehicles from the drawing board to actually being viable products without on-road testing? I've never seen a complex product that went from non-existent to perfect in the first deployment, so it doesn't seem realistic to expect that here.
Instead, they should be developed iteratively, with design prototypes that proceed from closed-course testing to supervised public testing to closed course autonomous testing, to on-road autonomy over the course of many years. This is what Waymo did. There's a reasonable argument to be made that they did this too quickly, but I can't reconcile that with your argument that they shouldn't have done it at all.
In an ideal world, there'd also be effective government oversight and public safety monitoring at every stage of the above process. Regulators haven't stepped up to do this, though AV companies have done quite a bit to stymie the oversight process as well.
Sadly, I come only with problems and not solutions. I take it as axiomatic that beta-testing with peoples' lives that didn't agree to do so is unacceptable. That closes off a lot of the solution space that you're proposing. That sucks and you're free to disagree but again I take it ethically unassailable.
Teleportation would also be a societal game changer but if the only way there is to beta test it on unwilling participants I'd also believe that, well, we just don't get teleportation then.
It's up to Waymo to figure out how to get there, not to me. I do not take it as axiomatic that just because it'd be useful that the ends justify the means. And it certainly isn't up to Waymo whether you or I can be sacrificed.
And Waymo and Cruise are only rolling out gradually into settings they have reason to think they can handle. And unlike for humans, every time they learn a new lesson, the improvement spreads to their whole fleet. Humans lack that ability -- in a sense, we're the ones who are untrainable.
(If you want to point at Uber before they stopped, I agree they were irresponsible.)
Uber’s driverless vehicle killed someone jaywalking at night in another state. So you can’t say they’ve never killed anyone. Plus Teslas have killed their own occupants plenty of times.
I'm debating about renewing my truck license for this reason. If it's taking this long for automobiles to be approved and accepted, it'll be 30 years before trucking is automated.
The two decades during which human oversight of automated systems will be mandatory would be long enough for me to finish off my career getting paid to drive while I sit in a cab writing code, periodically checking over the status of my lead truck and the two or three slaved trucks following me.
I'm debating about renewing my truck license for this reason. If it's taking this long for automobiles to be approved and accepted, it'll be 30 years before trucking is automated.
Trucks and cars are different. They've been running automated big rigs between Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso for a few years now.
Given the significant weight and danger of death for other drivers, it'll be years until legislators allow their "safety drivers" to be eliminated from the equation. This makes the AI system more akin to enhanced cruise control than robotic trucking.
It's been in the newspapers down there quite a bit. Mostly Houston and San Antonio.
Here's one article about Volvo:
"Companies such as IKEA, UPS and FedEx have begun using autonomous trucks to make long haul trips across Texas, most often along I-45 between Dallas and Houston. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Transportation designated Texas as one of that nation's 10 proving grounds for autonomous vehicle testing. And Texas lawmakers have encouraged autonomous-vehicle development by making sure traffic laws do not encumber the companies."
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/retail/article/vol...
I think there will be a strong demand for truck drivers long after most people would expect.
We’re far from self driving vehicles still, and trucks will be the last to be automated, and once they are, I expect they’ll require human supervision just like you predict.
This is a good point. The statement I made about not killing anyone (in quotes) is from the article, which is only a subset of the overall domain we're talking about.
This seems like a good start and has the potential to be useful. But some of the documents are hard to consume because it looks like you need more context to understand nuance and how they fit together with other things.
I'm not very familiar with Notion. Will this be something that is easy to expand with Notion or is this the wrong platform for such things?
There is probably nothing better for a technical wiki. It's usually bundled as part of the cpanel software on cheap webhosting sites.
For $5/m or less you can have something professional looking, rather than the notion document linked above.
And if your community can't collectively (eventually) cough up $5/m for the hosting costs, then you don't have a community anyway, so it would be pointless having a wiki.
dokuwiki is nice. It's a bit different than mediawiki, so you might want to try both and compare to see which you like better.
One of the biggest differences is that Mediawiki is database-backed while dokuwiki is filesystem-backed. Another is that dokuwiki is closer to markdown syntax while mediawiki has its own more complex syntax.
Overall, dokuwiki is notably simpler and easier, but mediawiki might have some more management stuff that could be helpful if the site has lots of activity and needs more moderation.
For a lot of uses, they're pretty comparable and it would come down to preference.
It's exciting to see experienced people in the game industry trying to break down barriers to show how things are/can be done. Everyone seems to do it differently, especially at smaller game studios. It's so easy to get caught in your bubble of how to make games and not figure out all the different tools out here that can pop you out of your comfort zone, biases, and blind spots.
I second Game Programming Patterns! I created a little indie game [1] using the design patterns mentioned in that book. Still not quite complete, (good) games are HARD, but even this small game would've fumbled into a mess of spaghetti if it weren't for what I learned from that book.
