jezzamon (u/jezzamon)

jezzamon commented on How America's "truck-driver shortage" freightwaves.com/news/how... · Posted by u/ilamont

cs702 · 13 days ago

I just looked briefly at the data provided by the NHTSA, and what I see is a jump after the pandemic, followed by declines in 2022 and 2023, contradicting the OP:

https://www.nhtsa.gov/crash-data-systems/fatality-analysis-r...

https://highways.dot.gov/safety/learn-safety/roadway-safety-...

jezzamon · 12 days ago

Good find!

jezzamon commented on How America's "truck-driver shortage" freightwaves.com/news/how... · Posted by u/ilamont

cs702 · 13 days ago

Yes, the OP claims many small-fleet drivers are being overworked, but provides zero evidence of it. By evidence, I mean data, not anecdotes. Do you have data on this?

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EDIT: Link to data is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46173013

It looks like crash rates jumped after the pandemic, then declined in 2022 and 2023, contradicting the OP.

jezzamon · 13 days ago

The article provide this: "Despite billions spent on safety technology, fatal truck-involved crashes are up ≈40% since 2014"

Though I wonder how much that number compares to how much the trucking industry grew in that time. If it grew 200% that would actually mean a big win for safety.

Edit: some quick, AI driven research suggests it might've grown 20%. So... Still an issue

jezzamon commented on I DM'd a Korean presidential candidate and ended up building his core campaign medium.com/@wjsdj2008/i-d... · Posted by u/wjsdj2009

jezzamon · 22 days ago

Enjoyed reading this! Nice job in throwing together something polished in such a short time

jezzamon commented on Using an Array of Needles to Create Solid Knitted Shapes dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/37... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

willvarfar · 24 days ago

Are there croquet machines yet? Googling is really confusing with lots of forum people saying there aren't any true ones, and lots of webshops claiming to sell them.

jezzamon · 23 days ago

No. Machines cannot do that reliably, it's still in the realm of research. Crochet is much less simplifiable compared to knitting

jezzamon commented on Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware blog.google/technology/re... · Posted by u/AbhishekParmar

josefritzishere · 2 months ago

Quantum is the new AI. It's just the new hype cycle of doom.

jezzamon · 2 months ago

The barrier to entry seems a little higher than AI so it's at least a little limited in scope

jezzamon commented on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1 health.aws.amazon.com/hea... · Posted by u/kondro

bob1029 · 2 months ago

One thing has become quite clear to me over the years. Much of the thinking around uptime of information systems has become hyperbolic and self-serving.

There are very few businesses that genuinely cannot handle an outage like this. The only examples I've personally experienced are payment processing and semiconductor manufacturing. A severe IT outage in either of these businesses is an actual crisis. Contrast with the South Korean government who seems largely unaffected by the recent loss of an entire building full of machines with no backups.

I've worked in a retail store that had a total electricity outage and saw virtually no reduction in sales numbers for the day. I have seen a bank operate with a broken core system for weeks. I have never heard of someone actually cancelling a subscription over a transient outage in YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, Steam, etc.

The takeaway I always have from these events is that you should engineer your business to be resilient to the real tradeoff that AWS offers. If you don't overreact to the occasional outage and have reasonable measures to work around for a day or 2, it's almost certainly easier and cheaper than building a multi cloud complexity hellscape or dragging it all back on prem.

Thinking in terms of competition and game theory, you'll probably win even if your competitor has a perfect failover strategy. The cost of maintaining a flawless eject button for an entire cloud is like an anvil around your neck. Every IT decision has to be filtered through this axis. When you can just slap another EC2 on the pile, you can run laps around your peers.

jezzamon · 2 months ago

Tech companies, and in particular ad-driven companies, keep a very close eye on their metrics and can fairly accurately measure the cost of an outage in real dollars

jezzamon commented on Abandoned land drives dangerous heat in Houston, study finds stories.tamu.edu/news/202... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

ciconia · 2 months ago

I've been having this idea of designing a neighborhood where the proportions of natural and built-up areas are reversed. Instead of having a basically artificial setting where trees live in little holes in the sidewalk, the basic setting is natural soil and vegetation, and the buildings are situated between and under the trees.

This brings up a lot of other questions: what about water and sewage infrastructure, electrical and fiber? What about maintenance of the vegetation? But it seems to me like a really cool idea, maybe even within the setting of a single homestead, where the basic setting is a forest, with some buildings nested within it.

jezzamon · 2 months ago

You haven't explained what you'd do for the car-based infrastructure, which seems to be the main problem here

jezzamon commented on Subway Builder: A realistic subway simulation game subwaybuilder.com/... · Posted by u/0xbeefcab

shagie · 2 months ago

At $30, I've got a lot of expectations. At $40, I've got a lot more. Neither of those price points are the impulse buy for "it might be a nice game that I could waste a few hours on." It's competing with things like Satisfactory and Factorio for promise of enduring in my library gaming.

This feels something closer to Puffin Planes ($12), Rail Route ($25), Station Flow ($18).

The difference between $25 and $30 isn't too much, but there's another significant hurdle to get up to a perceived $40 value.

It does look interesting, but for a purchase at that price point, I'm going to need to feel that its worth more than a weekend or two of gaming and something that will be a game that I want to pick up again after a month or two away from it.

jezzamon · 2 months ago

This seems like a game with a niche audience, and I'm sure it'll be worth $30 to the right people

jezzamon commented on Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity rodneybrooks.com/why-toda... · Posted by u/chmaynard

jezzamon · 3 months ago

If you asked someone 300 years ago what an automated dishwashing machine would've looked like, it would be a lot more like a person than the wet cupboard we have now. I'm assuming many tasks will be like that -- it's more of a lack of imagination for why we say we need a humanoid robot to solve that task. I'm assuming it'll be the minority of tasks where it make it makes sense for that

jezzamon commented on The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit unherd.com/2025/09/the-so... · Posted by u/johngabbar

mrguyorama · 3 months ago

It's not Baumols cost disease, it's a completely captured audience.

You are getting older and can't take care of yourself. You worked hard your entire life so you have non-zero assets.

Your options are: Sign away everything you have and more to a company in the hope that they will take care of you according to the contract. Or die in your own filth or from tripping and falling in the tub.

Medicare doesn't take care of you until you are destitute, so your only option is to pay whatever a company is asking.

These companies charge $20k a month, but pay their actual laborers peanuts, like we are talking hourly wages that are barely competitive with good construction jobs despite requiring training and spending all day literally wiping down human shit. You will be lucky to have one employee taking care of 30 of you.

All that money is just fed back to shareholders. And building real-estate in the priciest parts of built up cities. Grandma literally can't leave the facility because she's got the dementia and the kids are all in another state so why even build the facility in the middle of a city with skyrocketing housing costs and real-estate prices? Because your clients will pay anything, and that will leave you with a great high value asset that a facility out in a cheaper area would not.

It's just a neat little system for ensuring all those savings and retirement accounts built up by the boomers will not be inherited, and instead will be captured by very very wealthy people.

What possible mechanism could there even be for downward pressure on prices in this system? What are you going to do, NOT need help in your old age?

jezzamon · 3 months ago

I'm reminded of the recent article about hospitals owned by private equity. I guess a fair system would allow people to not be locked in to one place so they could leave and move into a better one?