> The situation of "kid running out between cars" will likley never be solved
Nuanced disagree (i agree with your physics), in that an element of the issue is design. Kids running out between cars _on streets that stack building --> yard --> sidewalk --> parked cars --> driving cars.
One simple change could be adding a chain link fence / boundary between parked cars and driving cars, increasing the visibility and time.
there's still an inlet and outlet (kinda like hotel pickup/drop off loops). It's not absolutely perfect, but it constrains the space of where kids can dart from every parked car to 2 places.
Also the point isn't the specifics, the point is that the current design is not optimal, it's just the incumbent.
Ok, that's not really a simple change anymore, because you need more space for that. Unless it's really just a drop off queue, but then it's not parked cars, since a parked car blocks the queue.
We would really need to see the site to have an idea of the constraints, Santa Monica has some places where additional roadway can be accomodated and some places where that's not really an option.
Meanwhile the news does not report the other ~7,000 children per year injured as pedestrians in traffic crashes in the US.
I think the overall picture is a pretty fantastic outcome -- even a single event is a newsworthy moment _because it's so rare_ .
> The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation is investigating “whether the Waymo AV exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users.”
Meanwhile in my area of the world parents are busy, stressed, and on their phones, and pressing the accelerator hard because they're time pressured and feel like that will make up for the 5 minutes late they are on a 15 minute drive... The truth is this technology is, as far as i can tell, superior to humans in a high number of situations if only for a lack of emotionality (and inability to text and drive / drink and drive)... but for some reason the world wants to keep nit picking it.
A story, my grandpa drove for longer than he should have. Yes him losing his license would have been the optimal case. But, pragmatically that didn't happen... him being in and using a Waymo (or Cruise, RIP) car would have been a marginal improvement on the situation.
Err, that is not the desirable statistic you seem to think it is. American drivers average ~3 trillion miles per year [1]. That means ~7000 child pedestrian injurys per year [2] would be ~1 per 430 million miles. Waymo has done on the order of 100-200 million miles autonomously. So this would be ~2-4x more injurys than the human average.
However, the child pedestrian injury rate is only a official estimate (it is possible it may be undercounting relative to highly scrutinized Waymo vehicle-miles) and is a whole US average (it might not be a comparable operational domain), but absent more precise and better information, we should default to the calculation of 2-4x the rate.
I suspect that highway miles heavily skew this statistic. There's naturally far fewer pedestrians on highways (lower numerator), people travel longer distances on highways (higher denominator), and Waymo vehicles didn't drive on highways until recently. If you look only at non-highway miles, you'll get a much more accurate comparison.
Then you or Waymo can meet the burden of proof and present that more precise and better information. There is little reason to assume against safety at this point in time except as a intellectual exercise for how more accurate information could be found.
Until then, it is only prudent to defer snap judgements, but increase caution, insist on rigor and transparency, and demand more accurate information.
> we should default to the calculation of 2-4x the rate.
No we should not. We should accept that we don't have any statistically meaningful number at all, since we only have a single incident.
Let's assume we roll a standard die once and it shows a six. Statistically, we only expect a six in one sixth of the cases. But we already got one on a single roll! Concluding Waymo vehicles hit 2 to 4 times as many children as human drivers is like concluding the die in the example is six times as likely to show a six as a fair die.
More data would certainly be better, but it's not as bad as you suggest -- the large number of miles driven till first incident does tell us something statistically meaningful about the incident rate per mile driven. If we view the data as a large sample of miles driven, each with some observed number of incidents, then what we have is "merely" an extremely skewed distribution. I can confidently say that, if you pick any sane family of distributions to model this, then after fitting just this "single" data point, the model will report that P(MTTF < one hundredth of the observed number of miles driven so far) is negligible. This would hold even if there were zero incidents so far.
Sure, but we shouldn't stretch the analogy too far. Die rolls are discrete events, while miles driven are continuous. We expect the number of sixes we get to follow a binomial distribution, while we expect the number of accidents to follow a Poisson distribution. Either way, trying to guess the mean value of the distribution after a single incident of the event will never give you a statistically meaningful lower bound, only an upper bound.
The Poisson distribution is well approximated by the binomial distribution when n is high and p is low, which is exactly the case here. Despite the high variance in the sample mean, we can still make high-confidence statements about what range of incident rates are likely -- basically, dramatically higher rates are extremely unlikely. (Not sure, but I think it will turn out that confidence in statements about the true incident rate being lower than observed will be much lower.)
Would this Waymo incident be counted as an injury? Sounds like the victim was relatively unharmed? Presumably there are human-driver incidents like this where a car hits a child at low speeds, with effectively no injuries, but is never recorded as such?
People's standards for when they're willing to cede control over their lives both as the passenger and the pedestrian in the situation to a machine are higher than a human.
And for not totally irrational reasons like machine follows programming and does not fear death, or with 100% certainty machine has bugs which will eventually end up killing someone for a really stupid reason—and nobody wants that to be them. Then there's just the general https://xkcd.com/2030/ problem of people rightfully not trusting technology because we are really bad at it, and our systems are set up in such a way that once you reach critical mass of money consequences become other people's problem.
Washington banned automatic subway train operation for 15 years after one incident that wasn't the computer's fault, and they still make a human sit in the cab. That's the bar. In that light it's hard not to see these cars as playing fast and loose with people's safety by comparison.
>People's standards for when they're willing to cede control over their lives both as the passenger and the pedestrian in the situation to a machine are higher than a human.
Are they? It is now clear that Tesla FSD is much worse than a human driver and yet there has been basically no attempt by anyone in government to stop them.
FSD is already better than at least one class of drivers. If FSD is engaged and the driver passes out, FSD will pull over to the side of the road and stop. And before we leap to conclusions that it only helps in the case of drunk drivers who shouldn't be driving in the first place (which, they shouldn't be), random strokes and seizures happen to people all the time.
We I 787 I 879-0215 I I I ui 87⁸⁸78⁸877777777 I 77 I⁸7 I 87888887788 I 7788 I I 8 I 8 I 788 I 7⁷88 I 8⁸I 7788 I 787888877788888787 7pm I 87 I⁸77 I ui 77887 I 87787 I 7777888787788787887787877777⁷777⁷879-0215 7777 I 7pm⁷I⁷879-0215 777⁷IIRC 7 7pm 87787777877 I I I⁷⁷7 ui ui 7⁷879-0215 I IIRC 77 ui 777 I 77777 I7777 ui I 7877777778 I7 I 77887 I 87⁷8777⁸8⁷⁷⁸⁸7⁸⁸⁸87⁸⁸⁸⁸8⁷87⁸⁸87888⁷878⁷878887⁸⁸⁸88⁸878888888888888888888887878778788888888787788888888888888888888888888887 ui is 888888888887 7
I saw a thing from HealthyGamerGG youtube[1] that he said one of the things about depression is that it causes/influences one to avoid the things that would make their life less depressing.
eg just to paint the picture: you're depressed so you don't get out of bed, therefore you don't go do your workout, therefore you lack endorphins and look in the mirror and see squishy, you're sad about how squishy you are and so you get more depressed. You're more depressed so you also don't do your dishes, when you do get out of bed you are depressed you feel like a slob and you're squishy, so you get more depressed...
Whereas adding anti-depressants, and other virtuous cycle things like vitD/O3, exercise et al. Give the boost necessary to _make your life less depressing_ ...
So if you know someone who's depressed, it might be helpful to help them make their life less depressing too. (in addition to all the best medical advice!)
[1]- he's a real Dr... Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K), a Harvard-trained psychiatrist (MD, MPH) specializing in modern mental health
Careful, he is also a believer in Ayurveda[1]. Which basically basically categorizes people into different elements like fire and water and then tries to change their diet and habits to match their elemental style or something. You can hear him talking about it here [2]. Kinda reminds me of Humorism [3]. Dr. K seems like a nice enough guy but don't get too lured in by the "Harvard-trained" credentialism.
I agree there's nuance, but he's way above the "has a webcam and yeti blue" bar that most of youtube falls under, that was my point in putting his credential up. Not to rise him to a perfect status, but to not allow him being on youtube to fall to the minimum bar of youtube.
Definitely agree. He sometimes says things that sound interesting or true, but for the most part I believe he is full of it.
The field of psychology is barely removed from charlatanism anyway, having a diploma from Harvard doesn't change that.
Part of the issue is taking it's output as conclusion rather than as a signal / lead.
I would never let an LLM make an amputate or not decision, but it could convince me to go talk with an expert who sees me in person and takes a holistic view.
> The challenge is there really isn't a good way to incentivize that work.
What if we got Undergrads (with hope of graduate studies) to do it? Could be a great way to train them on the skills required for research without the pressure of it also being novel?
Those undergrads still need to be advised and they use lab resources.
If you're a tenure-track academic, your livelihood is much safer from having them try new ideas (that you will be the corresponding author on, increasing your prestige and ability to procure funding) instead of incrementing.
And if you already have tenure, maybe you have the undergrad do just that. But the tenure process heavily filters for ambitious researchers, so it's unlikely this would be a priority.
If instead you did it as coursework, you could get them to maybe reproduce the work, but if you only have the students for a semester, that's not enough time to write up the paper and make it through peer review (which can take months between iterations)
Unfortunately, that might just lead to a bunch of type II errors instead, if an effect requires very precise experimental conditions that undergrads lack the expertise for.
Could it be useful as a first line of defence? A failed initial reproduction would not be seen as disqualifying, but it would bring the paper to the attention of more senior people who could try to reproduce it themselves. (Maybe they still wouldn't bother, but hopefully they'd at least be more likely to.)
Most interesting results are not so simple to recreate that would could reliably expect undergrads to do perform the replication even if we ignore the cost of the equipment and consumables that replication would need and the time/supervision required to walk them through the process.
And if you look at pricing as a proxy for capital flows, SMMD which is Russell 3000 minus S&P500 has had a heck of a run in 3 months. IMO People are retreating the mag7
I hadn’t noticed that , that is interesting. Makes sense to me. That’s not good for the S&P considering that ten stocks make up 40% of the index.
And since the wealth effect is really the only thing keeping the US out of a recession, if the MAG7 fail then we’re looking at serious economic problems.
China is intentionally undermining the dollar in order to try to make the Yuan the world currency[1,2,3]. My current hypothesis is that the growth in the _price_ of the US Stock market (eg S&P 500) is actually devaluation of the dollar. Compared to real money (Gold) the S&P500 is down over the past 10 years. [4]
I don’t think that’s feasible because China’s capital markets aren’t secure for foreign investors and never will be unless China changes the very thing that they want to be. They’d have to open their markets, be open to direct foreign investment, no more China-only ownership of companies, and no more artificial devaluation of the Yuan.
Also the US capital market is huge. Surprisingly huge, even, and there is very little that can change that for the foreseeable future.
They already allow this somewhat. Tesla's Gigafactory in Shanghai is fully owned by Tesla, and is the first wholly foreign-owned car manufacturing plant in China, operating without a required local joint venture partner.
Does using the Renminbi require investing in securities?
It's a very different thing to trust that China will maintain the value of its currency, than to trust that investment in Chinese companies will remain liquid and not be arbitrarily cut to a price of zero.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I also don't fully understand the need to have grander access to capital markets. Perhaps access to the equivalent of US Treasury auctions?
Yes, it would be a big change. But if Europe needs to bring out the Anti-Coercion Instrument against the US, an economic weapon it invented to be used against China, the world is in a very different place in belief of what could be safe.
If China signals that it is changing its attitude on its currency, that it wants to be the reserve currency and establish a consumer economy, it wouldn't take much for people to shift these days. Nobody needs to adopt the Renminbi 100% right away, they can transition to multiple currencies for a while as a hedge against the US, and the situation will evolve. Dedollarization won't happen in a month or a year, it will be a multi-year process once it kicks off. But once it kicks off, it will be because of such a loss of confidence in the US that it probably won't be possible to stop it.
> I'm not saying you're wrong, but I also don't fully understand the need to have grander access to capital markets.
Well if you use the renminbi or yuan as just a medium of exchange, well, why bother when you already have the dollar?
To answer your question better, what is the point of access to capital markets of a country and how does that stabilize or strengthen its currency, or make it more highly sought after?
That is an excellent point! My intuition is that the yuan could be viewed as more reliable than the dollar, when the dollar is propped up precisely on the good will that gets destroyed by threatening invasion of allies. China does threaten plenty of invasions, but not in Europe or most of the rest of the world yet.
Reliable how? How would you obtain the currency, and what would you do with it?
> when the dollar is propped up precisely on the good will
The dollar isn't valuable because of good will. Central banks in Europe, or Japan, or elsewhere don't hold dollars because they want to be nice to the United States. They hold them because the United States is incredibly wealthy, has incredibly deep capital markets, high liquidity, and because the dollar is a great medium of exchange.
Unless China wants it to happen, it won't have the reserve currency. It would require big changes in China's part to make it happen. I fully agree with you that they wouldn't open up things like equities markets in a way that could be trusted by outsiders. But I do think they could open up access to the currency.
Right, but what I'm arguing is that the currency isn't going to be that valuable without doing things like opening their markets to outside investors. You could just go with the Euro even if you didn't like the dollar.
That's the thing I keep coming back to. What are the specific features of the currency that make it more valuable than the other reserve currencies that exist today? I don't think China is willing to do what they would need to do add those features, because it requires CCP to loosen control and they can't do that.
If China "democratized" it would unlock a ton of potential and go on to dominate the globe. But doing that requires untenable changes for the CCP so it won't happen.
Plus everyone is going to be mad and distrustful once they invade Taiwan.
not even P/E ratios resetting back to historic norms? Or have we finally entered a new age where highly elevated P/E are a permanent feature of markets?
If this is the complaint the dollar is safe. And international holders of dollars aren't idiots. They hold Treasuries, which more or less preserve their purchasing power. (Nobody outside the poor, who have to, and nutters, who don't know better, hold cash as an asset. It's so thoroughly assumed that in finance, cash refers to cash and cash equivalents.)
I keep wondering what would happen if China and the EU came together and agreed to move all trade to the Euro as a pushback of all the current insanity. I don't think the Yuan can ever be the global trade currency given China's current structure.
It's down over the last 5, 10, 20, and 30 year windows; which I think is mostly a timing coincidence, but it's a "fun" observation. It took a big drop this last year.
In the UK we have a convenient way of observing this phenomenon.
The FTSE100 is mostly multinational companies valued in pounds. The FTSE250 is mostly British companies valued in pounds. If the FTSE100 goes up while the FTSE250 stays flat or falls then it means the currency got devalued and there's no real growth.
Makes it look like the US peaked at Sep 2000 and has been downhill ever since. Doesn't track at all with GDP which has almost doubled since 2000. I.e. it doesn't track with growth, but does track with dollar index somewhat, which makes sense because it's tracking a dollar value intermediate when considering "how much gold it takes to buy S&P 500", which means it really ends up tracking something else entirely.
> Compared to real money (Gold) the S&P500 is down over the past 10 years. [4]
Isn't this the real chart to look at for that? Completely different story when you select max on the timeline.
Personally I am about $10M USD poorer for listening to people on the internet. I wish people would not spread falsities about finance that can actually ruin lives. (Albeit to be fair, the trend is towards conservative advice...my life was uniquely affected in terms of limiting upside, so I am at least grateful that most online posts work very hard to limit downside.)
No, the perplexity chart is actually a really bad one to look at. It tracks a derivative of gold from 1975 onwards from which the S&P already accrued over 350% in returns. They also started the gold derivative off at a price of $178 while using the initial price of $17.57 to calculate S&P returns.
> Personally I am about $10M USD poorer for listening to people on the internet. I wish people would not spread falsities about finance that can actually ruin lives.
Ideally no one would blindly follow advice they don't understand or can't accept into their own mental model.
Any advice that you both understand and fits perfectly into your mental model is probably coming from whatever dogma you already follow and is therefore useless.
Any advice you don't understand is, of course, useless.
Any advice you do understand but doesn't fit into your mental model will just get rejected.
“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”
― Oscar Wilde
Although certain "advice" is actually SOP, in that case it is good to know (like stop, drop, and roll).
> Any advice that you both understand and fits perfectly into your mental model is probably coming from whatever dogma you already follow
I don't know what you mean by "fits perfectly" into one's mental model, but one can certainly accept new information validated against their own understanding of the world. People don't put an equal amount of weight in each of their beliefs and there are axiomatic ones that can be used in logical arguments to disprove the inconsistencies of others.
S&P gets you dividends though, so the interpretation of that chart is tricky.
Holding the S&P, you can still do better than holding gold, even when the GOLD/S&P ratio is positive.
The issue isn't it's usefulness in small transactions. The issue is who decides. In the case of gold a huge distributed system decides the valuation of Gold. Yes we usually use USD as the comparator. But there is a Gold:RealEstate ratio, Gold:Oil Ratio, Gold:Bread ratio. No single or small number of actors can change that in a meaningful/reliable way.[1] Whereas USD can, and has been, printed at an exponential rate.
[1] -(Let's exclude intentional market manipulations like if a world leader were to buy a bunch of gold and then saber rattle to drive up fear).
A goat or a sheep cost roughly the same in gold today as it cost 2000 years ago during the Roman Empire. Gold is the only “real money” in the sense that it is the only stable measure of the value of basic needs over centuries.
Unless there's something I'm missing, there isn't even a response at the link - just a question.
(And if that was how the user posed the question, I'd be concerned that priming the chat with "is it true that..." biased the response towards "yes, it's true".)
A goat costs exactly (not roughly) the same in goats today as it cost 2000 years ago. So by that measure a goat is the only stable measure of the value of basic needs over centuries.
Goat production is overall much cheaper now so wouldn't we expect the "real" price to be less? That it tracks the price of goats and sheep makes me think it's not a particularly stable unit of value since I don't expect goat or sheep to be valued in a stable way, especially across millenia.
A developer is just someone who has the ability to create things with technology. Every iteration we do not "replace" developers. We lower the bar such that more and more people can be Developers. (Wether thats time investment/education, IQ, or other elements that were previously barriers)
When electronic spreadsheets were invented there was thought that it was gameover for accountants. There are more accountants per dollar of GDP today than back then. When a thing becomes cheaper we do not just consume the backlog and quit. We actually do more of that thing. Part of the reason is is that there is a very large set of software that was not financially viable to create pre vibe coding. Now it's financially viable to create... Even just throwaway software. Single use software. etc.
Until coding agents are capable of doing engineering superior to like the 90thile _of well trained and experienced engineers_ we will probably have human developers, likely more and more of them.
Nuanced disagree (i agree with your physics), in that an element of the issue is design. Kids running out between cars _on streets that stack building --> yard --> sidewalk --> parked cars --> driving cars.
One simple change could be adding a chain link fence / boundary between parked cars and driving cars, increasing the visibility and time.
reply