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doctoboggan commented on The Waymo World Model   waymo.com/blog/2026/02/th... · Posted by u/xnx
scoofy · 2 days ago
As someone who lives in the Bay Area we already have trains, and they're literally past the point of bankruptcy because they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of operations, (2) don't actually make people pay at all, and (3) don't actually enforce any quality of life concerns short of breaking up literal fights. All of this creates negative synergies that pushes a huge, mostly silent segment of the potential ridership away from these systems.

So many people advocate for public transit, but are unwilling to deal with the current market tradeoffs and decisions people are making on the ground. As long as that keeps happening, expect modes of transit -- like Waymo -- that deliver the level of service that they promise to keep exceeding expectations.

I've spent my entire adult life advocating for transportation alternatives, and at every turn in America, the vast majority of other transit advocates just expect people to be okay with anti-social behavior going completely unenforced, and expecting "good citizens" to keep paying when the expected value for any rational person is to engage in freeloading. Then they point to "enforcing the fare box" as a tradeoff between money to collect vs cost of enforcement, when the actually tradeoff is the signalling to every anti-social actor in the system that they can do whatever they want without any consequences.

I currently only see a future in bike-share, because it's the only system that actually delivers on what it promises.

doctoboggan · 2 days ago
> they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of operations

Why do you expect them to make money? Roads don't make money and no one thinks to complain about that. One of the purposes of government is to make investment in things that have more nebulous returns. Moving more people to public transit makes better cities, healthier and happier citizens, stronger communities, and lets us save money on road infrastructure.

doctoboggan commented on GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams   iankduncan.com/engineerin... · Posted by u/codesuki
doctoboggan · 3 days ago
This is an AI written comment (as admitted on the profile page).

Please keep HN comments for humans.

doctoboggan commented on Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions   code.claude.com/docs/en/a... · Posted by u/davidbarker
tclancy · 3 days ago
How does this not use up tokens incredibly fast though? I have a Pro subscription and bang up against the limits pretty regularly.
doctoboggan · 3 days ago
It _does_ use up tokens incredibly fast, which is probably why Anthropic is developing this feature. This is mostly for corporations using the API, not individuals on a plan.
doctoboggan commented on ICE seeks industry input on ad tech location data for investigative use   biometricupdate.com/20260... · Posted by u/WaitWaitWha
doctoboggan · 4 days ago
Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies - it's no longer a hypothetical future where the tools you are building might be abused, it's today.
doctoboggan commented on Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
thundergolfer · 6 days ago
I presume if you invest in Google you are indirectly (but significantly) invested in Waymo, like it is with Anthropic?

Waymo is the best service I've used in many, many years. The jump from Uber->Waymo is similar to the quality jump from Taxi->Uber 12 years ago, but I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified.

doctoboggan · 6 days ago
> I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified.

Oh ye of little faith! Here are some ideas off the top of my head, I am sure the suits at Google already have a bigger list.

  * Ads in vehicle 
  * Adjust route so you see partner companies or billboards
  * Offering alternative destinations (I see you are going to Burger King, would you rather go to our partner McDonalds?)
  * Listening to conversations in car
  * Selling ride data.

doctoboggan commented on Chuck Klosterman on why we've never actually seen a real football game   latimes.com/entertainment... · Posted by u/proposal
nlawalker · 12 days ago
>During the college football playoffs, ESPN’s family of networks will sometimes show the same game on multiple channels, with one channel broadcasting the whole affair from the Skycam camera. This is a remote camera hovering above and behind the line of scrimmage, replicating the perspective one sees in a video game. Coaches call this the “All‑22” view, because all 22 players on the field are simultaneously observable.

I remember there being discussion here about coverage of when the NFL first made all-22 available for public viewing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4549832

doctoboggan · 12 days ago
I stumbled across an all-22 broadcast during this recent CFP and really liked it, however they didn't have any commentary at all. I do like to hear the color commentary from people who know how to analyze the game (usually former players).
doctoboggan commented on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found   nytimes.com/2026/01/26/sc... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
drakythe · 12 days ago
430,000 years? Am I reading this headline correctly? (since the site seems to have fallen victim to the HN-hug-of-death). That seems wildly further back than I understood humans to have tools, or even homo sapiens to have existed.

ETA: Today I learned I had a much much larger gap in knowledge than I thought I did. Thanks to everyone for the information and links!

doctoboggan · 12 days ago
Yes it's definitely further back than homo sapiens have existed (200k - 300k years), but our ancestor species were known to have used tools and control fire. I believe we have evidence of tool use going back 1 million years. So this article is referencing the oldest known _wooden_ tools, which are obviously much less likely to be preserved across the ages.
doctoboggan commented on eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update   valueaddedresource.net/eb... · Posted by u/bdcravens
advisedwang · 18 days ago
LLM-initiated purchases probably rack up chargebacks, support calls, etc for mistakes the LLM makes. I'm not surprised they want to limit it.
doctoboggan · 18 days ago
More likely, they want to be the exclusive provider of LLMs that can purchase off of eBay, or at least charge for API access.
doctoboggan commented on Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro   twitter.com/neelsomani/st... · Posted by u/nl
doctoboggan · 22 days ago
Can anyone give a little more color on the nature of Erdos problems? Are these problems that many mathematicians have spend years tackling with no result? Or do some of the problems evade scrutiny and go un-attempted for most of the time?

EDIT: After reading a link someone else posted to Terrance Tao's wiki page, he has a paragraph that somewhat answers this question:

> Erdős problems vary widely in difficulty (by several orders of magnitude), with a core of very interesting, but extremely difficult problems at one end of the spectrum, and a "long tail" of under-explored problems at the other, many of which are "low hanging fruit" that are very suitable for being attacked by current AI tools. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell in advance which category a given problem falls into, short of an expert literature review. (However, if an Erdős problem is only stated once in the literature, and there is scant record of any followup work on the problem, this suggests that the problem may be of the second category.)

from here: https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution...

doctoboggan commented on Wind power slashed 4.6B euros off electricity bills in Spain last year   surinenglish.com/spain/wi... · Posted by u/mooreds
gretch · 25 days ago
An interesting thing I learned from reading the article is that Spain is the 4th largest exporter of turbines behind only China, Germany, and Denmark.

Reading the other comments, it's really a shame we can't have a discussion about something happening in the world before it immediately becomes about the US, on topics that are barely relevant.

doctoboggan · 25 days ago
Spain is also big in the utility scale solar and storage industry with the Power Electronics company providing inverters or other components to many of the worlds largest plants.

u/doctoboggan

KarmaCake day5966July 25, 2011
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