mitthrowaway2 (u/mitthrowaway2)

mitthrowaway2 commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

Archelaos · 20 hours ago

In 2024, global GDP was $111 trillion.[1] Investing 1 or 2 % of that to improve global productivity via AI does not seem exaggerated to me.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD

mitthrowaway2 · 15 hours ago

2% is a lot! There's only fifty things you can invest 2% of GDP in before you occupy the entire economy. But the list of services people need, from food, water, shelter, heating, transportation, education, healthcare, communications, entertainment, mining, materials, construction, research, maintenance, legal services... there's a lot of things on that list. To allocate each one 1% or 2% of the economy may seem small, but pretty quickly you hit 100%.

mitthrowaway2 commented on China Moon Mission: Aiming for 2030 lunar landing spectrum.ieee.org/china-m... · Posted by u/rbanffy

JumpCrisscross · 5 days ago

> I don't see China collapsing anytime soon, nothing like the Soviet Union

I don’t either. But the Soviet Union’s space programme lost its steam in the 1970s. (Venus was its last ambitious achievement.)

If China gets bogged down in Taiwan because Xi fired every military expert who might disagree with him, that’s going to cost them the space race. (Same as if America decides to replicate the Sino-Soviet split with Europe over Greenland. We can’t afford a competitive space programme at that point.)

mitthrowaway2 · 4 days ago

Although I agree the space program lost steam, I'd still count the Mir space station (1985) and Buran space shuttle (1988) to both be ambitious achievements.

mitthrowaway2 commented on Parking lots as economic drains progressandpoverty.substa... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

b0rtb0rt · 5 days ago

Japan also has some other differences from america that are required for this system to function

mitthrowaway2 · 5 days ago

Yes; however America constructed those differences over the course of the 20th century when they removed rail lines and paved everything over with concrete. In the 1920s and 1930s America was exactly like this, with dense high-frequency train networks connecting even smaller towns, and walkable urban centers.

mitthrowaway2 commented on We (As a Society) Peaked in the 90s chris.pagecord.com/we-as-... · Posted by u/stog

oncallthrow · 6 days ago

> I'm jealous of my kids since they are so much better off in every way

Really? It’s interesting how much I see this take online. I never see people saying this IRL.

mitthrowaway2 · 6 days ago

I disagree with the above take. I feel bad that my kids have to grow up in the world of today rather than the world of the 90s.

mitthrowaway2 commented on Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica techcrunch.com/2026/01/29... · Posted by u/voxadam

direwolf20 · 10 days ago

They handled an unpredictable emergency situation better than any human driver.

mitthrowaway2 · 10 days ago

Was it unpredictable? They drove past a blind corner (parked SUV) in a school zone. I'm constantly slowing down in these situations as I expect someone might run out at any second. Waymo seemed to default to the view that if it can't see anyone then nobody is there.

mitthrowaway2 commented on How I estimate work seangoedecke.com/how-i-es... · Posted by u/mattjhall

crazygringo · 14 days ago

If a story-sized task takes 4x more effort than expected, something really went wrong. If it's blocked and it gets delayed then fine, but you can work on other stories in the meantime.

I'm not saying it never happens, but the whole reason for the planning poker process is to surface the things that might turn a 3 point story into a 13 point story, with everyone around the table trying to imagine what could go wrong.

You should not be getting 2-12 variance, unless it's a brand-new team working on a brand new project that is learning how to do everything for the first time. I can't count how many sprint meetings I've been in. That level of variance is not normal for the sizes of stories that fit into sprints.

mitthrowaway2 · 13 days ago

Try systematically collecting some fine grained data comparing your team's initial time estimates against actual working time spent on each ticket. See what distribution you end up with.

Make sure you account for how often someone comes back from working on a 3-point story and says "actually, after getting started on this it turned out to be four 3-point tasks rather than one, so I'm creating new tickets." Or "my first crack at solving this didn't work out, so I'm going to try another approach."

mitthrowaway2 commented on Spanish track was fractured before high-speed train disaster, report finds bbc.com/news/articles/c1m... · Posted by u/Rygian

mkl · 13 days ago

They can go at high speed:

Germany: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab

Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow

France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_Iris_320

China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_railways_CIT_trains

UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Measurement_Train

mitthrowaway2 · 13 days ago

Indeed!

> Line inspection is carried out at full speed, up to 270 km/h or 168 mph on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen and 285 km/h or 177 mph on the Sanyō Shinkansen

mitthrowaway2 commented on How I estimate work seangoedecke.com/how-i-es... · Posted by u/mattjhall

crazygringo · 14 days ago

> 2-12d conveys a very different story than 6-8d.

In agile, 6-8d is considered totally reasonable variance, while 2-12d simply isn't permitted. If that's the level of uncertainty -- i.e. people simply can't decide on points -- you break it up into a small investigation story for this sprint, then decide for the next sprint whether it's worth doing once you have a more accurate estimate. You would never just blindly decide to do it or not if you had no idea if it could be 2 or 12 days. That's a big benefit of the approach, to de-risk that kind of variance up front.

mitthrowaway2 · 14 days ago

If you measure how long a hundred "3-day tasks" actually take, in practice you'll find a range that is about 2-12. The variance doesn't end up getting de-risked. And it doesn't mean the 3-day estimate was a bad guess either. The error bars just tend to be about that big.

mitthrowaway2 commented on How I estimate work seangoedecke.com/how-i-es... · Posted by u/mattjhall

crazygringo · 14 days ago

> I've never met someone for whom points didn't eventually turn into a measurement of time

The goal isn't to avoid time estimation completely, that would be crazy. People estimate how many points get delivered per sprint and sprints have fixed lengths of time. You can do the math, you're supposed to.

The point is that points avoid a false sense of precision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748310

The process is quite easy to implement. And it does wind up with extraordinary efficacy gains on a lot of teams, that's the whole reason why it's so popular. But you do have to actually learn about it. Here:

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/estimatio...

mitthrowaway2 · 14 days ago

If it works for you, then it's a good method, but in my opinion the most transparent way to avoid a false sense of precision for time estimation (as with all else) is by explicitly including error bars, rather than changing the units-of-measure.

mitthrowaway2 commented on The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025) thefabricator.com/thefabr... · Posted by u/itvision

cogman10 · 18 days ago

Temperature is the worst metric unit to pick for this. Both the imperial and metric versions of temperature are completely arbitrary. It's really baffling to me that THIS is the one that most people talking about metric superiority cling to. Where metric shines is when you talk about subunits like mg vs g vs kg. You don't do that with temperature almost ever. So so what if water boils at 212F vs 100C? Pinning 100 at the boiling point of pure water at standard atmospheric pressure is every bit as arbitrary as Fs original 100F pin to the internal body temperature of a horse.

Otherwise I agree with you. I just wish stronger arguments would be made. Measuring distance, speed, weight, volume in metric makes a lot more sense and is more intuitive. It's easy to relate 300mL to 1L. or 1cm to 1m to 1km. And that is where most of the value of metric comes from. The fact that we basically never think in terms of kC or mC is why using temperature is very weak.

mitthrowaway2 · 18 days ago

(A standard horse in standard health, of course).