Public transit systems are only effective in highly-dense, urban settings.
Toll roads are often not within dense urban cities - usually on the outskirts, suburbs, highways, bridges and more. Public transit simply doesn't work in these places because of how large and spread-out the US is.
You’re forgetting how this is all interconnected. Creating the large freeways creates sparse housing that requires freeways. Creating public transport does the reverse.
Before all these massive road developments it’s not like people just sat at home and couldn’t go anywhere.
So what's your proposal? Go back in time 200 years and create a public-transit system?
The US is huge. There is no feasible way to support public transit for 95%+ of it's land-mass. That's not going to change anytime soon, or ever.
Also, most mass-transit systems in the US operate at significant loss, even with government (ie. taxpayer) funding and collecting rider-fare. A lot of public transit systems are in complete disrepair and are severely lacking. Buses and lightrails are never going to be "cheaper", as convenient or accessible as roads and vehicles are.
What I would do is the same as what most cities around the world are doing, spending more on public transport, spending less on roads, implementing tolls and congestion charges, and over time reshaping cities to be better for walking, PT, and cycling.
The US is not unique in having fully adopted cars and ripped up old PT networks. It happened all over Australia which is also a massive very spread out country. But significant effort has gone in to reversing the damage.
There is something deeply wrong about a society that can afford to create hundred billionaires but can’t afford busses.
I subscribe to the opinion that there are probably some good reasons why people in the US tend to spread out when they have the option. I think the problem of collective human action is complex enough that optimizing at the individual level is probably the best we can do. I would rather spend time thinking about how to serve people in ways that they actually want instead of “big idea” approaches.
The government built infrastructure for low density living because the vast majority of people want to live in low density suburbs, not high density urban areas. Forcing people to live in ways they don’t want to when there are viable alternatives just leads to the government being replaced.
Maybe we have different concepts of what a group chat is. To me, group chats have my friends, and we will never invite anybody who is not already a friend of everybody. They are supposed to be high-trust environments.
Somewhat different. Most of the group chats I’m in are related to house parties where the host knows everyone but I don’t. Or they are interest / hobby related.
I slowed myself down to savour this comment for a full 20s. Enough time to linger on each word for a long moment. Just like parent was asking for.
I pictured it spoken with a heavy Californian surfer accent. He wanted elaborate but a huge wave was breaking and he really didn’t want to miss the next one. Was in far too much of a rush to even leave punctuation behind.
So long, dude, I hope the waves keep coming for you.
I do agree, playing open world games without fast travel can be a bit of a slog though. I considered playing Skyrim without fast travel but many of the quests make you run half way across the map and back multiple times.
Without fast travel you’d be forced to plan your trips more and bundle all the tasks in an area which would be cool. But it’s probably too much to ask for the general public who will see it as annoying.
Completely agree. I don’t have a car anymore so I walk a lot, and my mental image of the streets is so much more in depth now to the point I could visualise streets down to the stickers on poles.
I think we really are in the last moments of the public internet. In the future you won’t be able to contact anyone you don’t know. If you want to thank Rob Pike for his work you’ll have to meet him in person.
Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.
> Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.
There is no possible way to do this that won't quickly be abused by people/groups who don't care. All efforts like this will do is destroy privacy and freedom on the Internet for normal people.
The internet is facing an existential threat to its very existence. If it becomes nearly impossible to determine signal in the noise, then there is no internet. Not for normal people, not for anyone.
So we need some mechanism to verify the content is from a human. If no privacy preserving technical solution can be found, then expect the non-privacy preserving to be the only model.
> If no privacy preserving technical solution can be found, then expect the non-privacy preserving to be the only model.
There is no technical solution, privacy preserving or otherwise, that can stave off this purported threat.
Out of curiosity, what is the timeline here? LLMs have been a thing for a while now, and I've been reading about how they're going to bring about the death of the Internet since day 1.
> Out of curiosity, what is the timeline here? LLMs have been a thing for a while now, and I've been reading about how they're going to bring about the death of the Internet since day 1.
It’s slowly, but inexorably increasing. The constraints are the normal constraints of a new technology; money, time, quality. Particularly money.
Still, token generation keeps going down in cost, making it possible to produce more and more content. Quality, and the ability to obfuscate origins, seems to be on a continual improve also. Anecdotally, I’m seeing a steady increase in the number of HN front page articles that turn out to be AI written.
I don’t know how far away the “botnet of spam AI content” is from becoming reality; however it would appear that the success of AI is tightly coupled with that eventuality.
So far we have already seen widespread damage. Many sites require a login to view content now, almost all of them have quite restrictive measures to prevent LLM scraping. Many sites are requiring phone number verification. Much of social media is becoming generated slop.
And now people are receiving generated emails. And it’s only getting worse.
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