Favorites April 9th 2023
!["It appears drivers are just getting used to the cameras" [read: choosing not to run red lights and actually obeying speed limits]." Compliance = win. It has never been about filling city coffers and has always been about preventing needless bloodshed. foxbaltimore.com Baltimore expects $4 million less from traffic cameras in Fiscal 2024. Here's why. The city of Baltimore is expecting to bring in $4.4 million dollars less in fiscal year 2024 than it did in fiscal year 2023, according to the proposed budget r](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe27b932b-5b35-45df-b5eb-5e11de9f8d45_1178x1256.png "\"It appears drivers are just getting used to the cameras\" [read: choosing not to run red lights and actually obeying speed limits].\" Compliance = win. It has never been about filling city coffers and has always been about preventing needless bloodshed. foxbaltimore.com Baltimore expects $4 million less from traffic cameras in Fiscal 2024. Here's why. The city of Baltimore is expecting to bring in $4.4 million dollars less in fiscal year 2024 than it did in fiscal year 2023, according to the proposed budget r")
This seems good, literally the point of speed/red light cameras. Ideally you get 100% compliance and collect 0 revenue eventually. Saving lives and reducing injuries is better for the city in the long run than the revenue.
Sorta looks like a solarpunk generated image, but it's totally real! Built a while ago, which is how they've had time to grow all those plants.
There was a CNN story about university students using AI for help writing papers, but the description of the use doesn't exactly sound like cheating. Here's a thread about how using it seems a lot like when Wikipedia first became available, there's a learning curve.
No offense to Morocco, but it's a pretty sorry state of affairs when California has 0 miles of functining high speed rail, and Morocco got theirs up and running in 11 years. In somewhat related news, a recent study indicates that high speed rail makes you happier.
He follows up with a link to his story about the history of Nutella, which apparently involves Napoleon?
Threads
• Thread with an explanation of "masked multi-headed self-attention", which is used in large language models.
• Short thread about how manufacturing coming back to America will not mean that many more jobs. TL;DR: for manufacturing to be competitive in the US, it has to be heavily automated, which means fewer, higher-paid, workers, which is a good thing overall.
• Thread summarizing a series of 1955 essays by Lewis Mumford that presciently described urban highways as "The tailor’s remedy for obesity", laying out the problems of induced demand before the term existed. It's a lesson that modern US transportation planners still haven't learned.