kubectl_h (u/kubectl_h)

kubectl_h commented on Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City cnbc.com/2025/08/22/waymo... · Posted by u/achristmascarl

superkuh · 2 days ago

The problem with places that have real winters is that lanes migrate. They are not absolutely positioned. Nor are the sides of the road edges which may project well out into the street and parked cars even further. No road markings visible. Humans make their own lanes. This situation can happen for many weeks-long periods in a typical winter in, say, Minneapolis or Buffalo suburbs.

If a self-driving car does the right thing staying "in lane" while all the human drivers do the wrong thing flocking to new emergent paths (which swing back and forth across the "lanes"), then the self-driving car is wrong and dangerous. I'm not talking about when it's actively snowing either. I mean the snow on the ground just remaining there, covering things.

It's not about dealing with slippage or skill driving, it's about complete lack of context markers. I don't think any current or near future self-driving solution can adapt to this.

kubectl_h · 2 days ago

That's fair and I've certainly experienced this where I live, which is north of Buffalo in latitude. Also frost heaves are no joke in non-city/non-highway roads and present another obstacle to FSD. I guess my point, if I had one, is I would hope FSD would be programmed to be as conservative as possible in adversarial winter conditions and not overreact to such conditions and that alone is enough to increase safety because humans, for various reasons, are not conservative enough. Hard to imagine for sure.

kubectl_h commented on Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City cnbc.com/2025/08/22/waymo... · Posted by u/achristmascarl

ggreer · 2 days ago

Pretty much all electric cars have single speed transmissions, so there's no downshifting. And modern vehicles have electronic stability control, anti-lock brakes, automatic emergency braking, and several other safety systems. It's pretty hard to overreact with those enabled. The main issue is that people exceed safe speeds for the conditions, making them unable to brake or turn in time to avoid a collision.

Right now, most self-driving software will refuse to activate in conditions of poor visibility. I've had that happen with Tesla's FSD, though in that case it was snowing so much that the road should have been closed. Also when the snow is deep enough that your front bumper becomes a plow, it will refuse to activate.

kubectl_h · 2 days ago

> And modern vehicles have electronic stability control, anti-lock brakes, automatic emergency braking, and several other safety systems

In ice none of these really stop overcorrection, or at least they don't in my 2020 truck on icy hill/mountain roads in Maine. And I've seen nice recent Volvos and BMWs with presumably the best safety tech in ditches up in the ski towns. The correct safe speed to drive on icy roads is not to drive at all of course, but people have to get places and people make mistakes. IME the assistive technology defaults don't do great on ice roads on some kind of up/down grade.

AFAIK drivers can still steer and brake themselves into a loss of control situation on ice regardless of safety features. So I guess I'm hoping once you take those two variables out of their hands, the FSD vehicles will be safer. Who knows though.

I went many years without a loss of control and the one time it did happen (logging roads with ice pack) was enough for me to buy Nokian studded winter tires to minimize the effect of ice as much as possible.

kubectl_h commented on Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City cnbc.com/2025/08/22/waymo... · Posted by u/achristmascarl

testfrequency · 2 days ago

Since Waymo is very reliable in LA and SF, you will be just fine in NYC.

Your grid system is far less of a challenge than the amount of hills, twists, narrow streets and low visibility back streets in California.

I genuinely think the most complicated challenge for Waymo in NYC will be…winter snow and ice.

kubectl_h · 2 days ago

I think a well designed winter specific FSD system is probably more safe in snow and ice than a human. For instance downshifting to ensure wheels continue to spin on slippery surfaces, subtle corrective steering to keep the vehicle within its lane, etc. should be easier for a FSD car since it won't panic and over-correct like most people do in those situations.

And if the car reduces speed when appropriate and some assholes start tailgating it, it won't suffer the anxiety of holding up 10 cars that want to drive beyond the safe, reasonable speed for the snowy/icy conditions.

kubectl_h commented on Code review can be better tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025... · Posted by u/sealeck

nop_slide · 4 days ago

I’m considered one of the stronger code reviewers on the team, what grinds my gears is seeing large, obviously AI heavy PRs and finding a ton of dumb things wrong with them. Things like totally different patterns and even bugs. I’ve lost trust that the person putting up the PR has even self reviewed their own code and has verified it does what they intend.

If you’re going to use AI you have to be even more diligent and self reviewed your code, otherwise you’re being a shitty team mate.

kubectl_h · 4 days ago

Same. I work at a place that has gone pretty hard into AI coding, including onboarding managers into using it to get them into the dev lifecycle, and it definitely puts an inordinate amount of pressure on senior engineers to scrutinize PRs much more closely. This includes much more thorough reviews of tests as well since AI writes both the implementation and tests.

It's also caused an uptick in inbound to dev tooling and CI teams since AI can break things in strange ways since it lacks common sense.

kubectl_h commented on Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room nytimes.com/2025/08/18/ar... · Posted by u/asnyder

brummm · 6 days ago

Always enjoyed de_dust more than de_dust2. But I am clearly in the minority on that one.

kubectl_h · 6 days ago

I also liked de_dust more because a well executed T rush to site A was as fun as it got on random servers before voice chat. Was awesome when it all came together and everybody worked together.

kubectl_h commented on Lidar-based GIS map of New Hampshire stone walls nhgranit.maps.arcgis.com/... · Posted by u/rob

paleotrope · 20 days ago

Stone walls were built because of deforestation caused by clearcutting land to make sheep pastures, made wood for fences unavailable.

Hmm I had always thought that the deforestation was caused by demand for wood for heating and cooking.

Something about this sounds incomplete. A farmer isn't going to waste his time making a wall, especially the dodgy disorganized walls that are common in the region. A farmer doesn't need a shallow wall, stone or wood. The walls you come across in new england in the forest look exactly like people expect, a place on the edge of your farm to dump rocks. Now, maybe not frost grown, but New England has lots of rocks everywhere.

kubectl_h · 20 days ago

Wessels does indeed say the stone for fences most likely came from stone dumps in _cultivated_ fields that were clear cut for crop fields and, later, the sheep craze and those rocks were pushed up from the ground in those cultivated fields over the winter.

kubectl_h commented on Telo MT1 telotrucks.com/... · Posted by u/turtleyacht

ricardobeat · 22 days ago

You seem very intent (here, and in the loneliness thread) on projecting your own experiences as the baseline on which things should be evaluated.

It is a known fact that the vast majority of truck owners rarely ever use the truck bed. Millions of school pickups happening on massive trucks - and SUVs - are not ceasing to happen because you loaded your own with a pile of grass. People buy them because they’re “safer”, comfortable and look good. This is coming from research data for years now, and not only in the USA.

It can be hard to relate to changes happening at societal scale that don’t affect your own microcosm, but how else can we be aware of it, and act on, if not through data, averages and trends?

kubectl_h · 22 days ago

> It is a known fact that the vast majority of truck owners rarely ever use the truck bed.

I'm not here to defend brodozers, but you cannot possibly prove this statement. That a _pickup truck_ isn't hauling the majority of the time it is on the road is not some new thing. But of course there are more pickup trucks on the road than ever, so if you argument is aggregate time of all pickup trucks not doing truck things is the highest its ever been is certainly true, but you'd probably have to go back to before the 80s for that number to actually be meaningfully different per truck.

kubectl_h commented on Ana Marie Cox on the Shaky Foundation of Substack as a Business newsletter.anamariecox.co... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

socalgal2 · 22 days ago

> could have been Medium

Did Medium have a way to pay authors? Maybe it would have been easy to add but saying "A could have been B if only" I think misses the picture. Yahoo could have been Google if only they'd chosen a different algo. Flickr could have been Instagram if only they'd made a mobile app with filters. Etc...

I think it's precisely because substack launched with a way to let readers sponser the authors directly they liked that it took off. Medium had a partner program but that's not the same.

kubectl_h · 22 days ago

I'm certainly not arguing against your point. I didn't work at Medium but I had insight into their operations at the time and they didn't really seem to have a coherent vision to make money 12 or so years ago. My comparison of the two is more around their similar goals and audience, which was giving great (or interesting) writers a home for their projects and audiences and somehow make money. Medium was saying the financial part would happen down the line and it was a can they kicked for a long time. Medium seemed more interested in talking about their technology and aesthetics than they did on figuring out the crucial parts. Substack got it right doing what Patreon (and even Twitch) had already proved, people will pay up front for the writers/creators they love.

That said Medium did pay higher profile writers and publications to move to their platform (in some cases quite a bit of money) in a similar way that Substack has, which was to dip into the VC funded bank account.

kubectl_h commented on Ana Marie Cox on the Shaky Foundation of Substack as a Business newsletter.anamariecox.co... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

scyzoryk_xyz · 22 days ago

I've always struggled to understand this part: what is it that Substack came up with that we did not have earlier?

Aren't there a hundred examples out there of medium-sized websites providing a similar infrastructure mix?

kubectl_h · 22 days ago

Substack had a few things that worked for it

* Patreon kind of sucks for writing / newsletters or else they could have captured part of this market. Medium was supposed to fix this but they had an epic collapse.

* Single point where subscribers can manage their subscriptions and preserve a common identity across subscriptions in the comments etc. Again, Medium/collapse.

* A rapid adoption of substack by well known online writers with loyal followings. These writers either had their own blogs or were exiting traditional media or getting dumped out by the collapse of online media (gawker network, buzzfeed news, etc). Again, could have been Medium if not for their collapse.

* I suspect Substack spent a lot of that VC money guaranteeing 2 years of X revenue for a non-trivial number of high profile writers so they would onboard.

Reading this story I didn't realize just how much they had taken over the years (I use to operate in this media space, but haven't in a long time). I'm not sure what the headcount is but that amount of money is staggering and I can only imagine it was all used to acquire DAUs and very little novel technology has been created with it.

I think Substacks first 10m/100m (their keep of rev/total rev from subscriptions) was extremely impressive and fast. But also it was a kind of low hanging fruit. There was a market already there for this and Medium/Patreon couldn't capture it. Now if they are really at 45m/450m that is much less impressive. It will be extremely hard to get to 100m/1000m and IMO impossible to get much higher than that with their current approach.

kubectl_h commented on OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation nytimes.com/2025/08/01/bu... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

Workaccount2 · 23 days ago

Tech people and their friends are like 1% of the population.

Go out on the the street of Anytown in any western country, and people know "ChatGPT".

A friend of mine is a teacher, and told me that at a recent school board meeting there was discussion about implementing AI into the learning curriculum. And to the board, "AI" and "ChatGPT" were used interchangeably. There was no discussion of other providers or models, because "AI" is "ChatGPT".

That's why OpenAI has these huge projections. When average people are asked to reach for AI, they reach for ChatGPT.

kubectl_h · 23 days ago

Exactly, it's hard to dismiss the broad penetration of ChatGPT in the general population. I was an AI skeptic/luddite until almost exactly a year ago when, in a span of a month or so, I had three different friends/family members who work in various administrative jobs tell me that they all used ChatGPT surreptitiously at work to get things done. Now a year later I don't know many people that don't use it at least occasionally. The ones that don't are older and I'm confident eventually they'll be using it like crazy to annoy me.