Favorites October 8th 2024

Disneyland, April 2024

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Wild that we've passed peak obesity. What an amazing win.

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These are cool looking cars, I'm glad to see Waymo working with Hyundai. Tim Lee interviewed Waymo CEO Dolgov recently, and he said they plan to grow the fleet significantly. Their rollout in Austin went from mapping to public launch in 7 months. Tim Lee also did some back-of-the-napkin math and finds it costs maybe about half a million dollars to map all of the SF Bay Area (cached) for Waymo. There's no advantage to driving without high res maps.

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This is great, but it's worth noting that people drive way more than they used to, so when you graph deaths per 100k people it doesn't look like as much of an improvement.

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The signs were there the whole time

Longer Reads

• A short thread with details of how Chinese hackers compromised US telecom infrastructure for wiretapping. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

"Reverse Robin Hood" is pretty good phrasing (src)(cached)
– Video of ballistic missile engagement, some in outer space, between Iran and Israel (src)(cached)
– Berkeley's tallest building has just been approved. 456 units, 36 car parking spaces. 304 bike spaces. Pretty good. (src)(cached)
– There's an FPV production line in Ukraine that's built 100,000 drones this month, but they need even more. (src)(cached)
– Median income in every US state is higher than median income in every Canadian province. Dang. (src)(cached)
– Firefighter's union decided not to endorse anyone, they're the ones blocking single-stair reform. Time to overrule them. (src)(cached)
– Pete Buttigieg was apparently instrumental in ending the dockworker strike. He really does seem to be a very good transportation secretary. (src)(cached)
– Discretionary approvals are a great opportunity to accept bribes to speed things up, which is exactly what just happened in Atlanta. (src)(cached)
– Yet another example of automation in shipping being a big deal: switching to standard containers lead to way way less liquor getting stolen in transit. (src)(cached)
– The reason to argue regularly and publicly for more homes is that there are real academics out there arguing for no new homes to be built, check out this short thread on details of that paper. (src)(cached)
– In iOS apps, the commonly used UserDefaults system behaves very strangely. (src)
– Right wing influencers keep saying that it's really easy to vote illegally, their followers try it, and then get caught and sent to prison. (src)(cached)
– Great anecdote about MLK insisting his followers not to hurt someone who had just hit him. (src)(cached)