For fixed route transit, speed is latency. The faster the bus can make the average trip, the tighter the timetable can be given the same number of buses. Fewer stops also improves consistency which means you can plan to arrive at the stop closer to the scheduled time, and timetables can be tightened even more by reducing the layover times that keep the bus synchronized with the time table.
Separately, the variability problem can be somewhat solved with the real-time location updates that many agencies provide. You'll still have to wait the same amount of time, but some of it can be done comfortably in your house when the bus is running late.
It helps with latency too or schedule padding. Bus schedules are unreliable because of all the stops which slow them down and encourage bunching of busses on a route with a lot of service.
Bus bunching is often blamed on traffic or scheduling, but in my experience in NYC, a lack of enforcement and/or accountability plays a role too. I live near one end of a bus line and commute to the other end 5 days day a week. On a daily basis, there are large gaps where buses miss their scheduled times. Then, as they approach the end of the line, they arrive and depart in groups of three or four, which only worsens the problem.
The buses in SLC are clean and friendly. The only buses I have experienced hostility with are Greyhound, and that hostility came exclusively from the workers. What's the difference between my city and yours? Budget? Population? Probably a mix of both.
It's incredibly unlikely that there is one coherent cause for low or high ridership. All we can do is improve the utility of the service. That means improving comfort (keeping it clean), reliability (running on time with minimal detours), throughput (carrying enough people), speed (minimizing the number of stops on the route), latency (minimizing the wait until the next bus), availability (more stops that service potential destinations), and coherence (more routes that take you directly from A to B, minimizing transfers).
Personally, I feel most undeserved by latency: the routes that are convenient to me run every 30min, and the routes that run most often run every 15min. I would ride the bus way more often if routes ran every 10min. I would ride them all the time if they ran more often than that. This seems like a pretty obvious opportunity that will never happen so long as prospective budget is determined by current ridership.
> We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.
I can finally put into words my frustration with NixOS. The most elegant solution to the ultimate problem already exists, yet no one is actually interested in solving the problem! In the end, we just got another convoluted system of incomprehensible boilerplate to wrap the existing boilerplate with, and incompatibilities are resolved just-in-time with more boilerplate.
As great as GrapheneOS has been, I'm still tempted to switch to LineageOS. Sure, it would be objectively less secure, but at least then I might be able to disable the obnoxious "automatically disabled 3 unused background apps" notifications.
The biggest problem with security culture is its obsessive hyperfocus on security. Any change that could possibly be less secure (even in extremely exclusive circumstances) must be wrong. Even if it improves accessibility, it must be rejected out of hand.
GrapheneOS promises to liberate us from the enshittification of Google's anticompetitive moat; but it focuses that effort exclusively on security. Everything else that was enshittified gets carefully preserved as-is in the name of "security".
All I want is a mobile computer that does what I tell it to. Why is that constantly treated as an unreasonable fantasy?
> Even if it improves accessibility, it must be rejected out of hand
GrapheneOS has many exploit mitigations and those that would break compatability with too much apps are opt-in instead of opt-out. They also have per app toggles so you can decide to use them per app. So they certainly don't sacrifice accessibility for the highest level of security.
> GrapheneOS promises to liberate us from the enshittification of Google's anticompetitive moat
This isn't something GrapheneOS promises anywhere on their website. They aim to offer a secure and private OS with good compatability with Android apps.
> but it focuses that effort exclusively on security.
They focus on privacy and usability as well. Security is actually only focused on because the privacy features aren't enforceable without security.
> Why is that constantly treated as an unreasonable fantasy?
Because tinkering, hackability and unrestricted freedom aren't the purposes for which GrapheneOS was made.
It's good enough for you, and therefore it can't get any better. Interrupting the user with pointless notifications is not security. Removing the ability to disable those notifications is only a security feature if the user wants then in the first place!
The problem here is more than the lack of interest in making a system that is both secure and usable. It's the outright rejection of usability as a goal.
Only difficult because the criteria are misaligned. We diagnose school children more consistently, because we subject school children to strict measured criteria (school), and can point to the data (grades/homework) as objective evidence.
Why do we care so much about objective evidence? Because of prohibition. Prescribing stimulants isn't illegal because it is difficult to diagnose ADHD. It's difficult to diagnose ADHD for the very same reason it's illegal to prescribe stimulants: our society values prohibition of drugs over actual healthcare. An ADHD diagnosis implies a compromise of prohibition, so our society has structured the means to that diagnosis accordingly.
Experts in the field estimate a very high incidence of undiagnosed ADHD in adults. During the height of the COVID-19 epidemic, telehealth services were made significantly more available, which lead to a huge spike in adult ADHD diagnoses. Instead of reacting to that by making healthcare more ADHD accessible, our society backslid; lamenting telehealth providers as "pill mills", and generating a medication shortage out of thin air.
> Why do we care so much about objective evidence? Because of prohibition.
That may be true for ADHD, but autism diagnoses don't "unlock" any particularly sought-after prescription medication, so I don't think that can be the whole story. In kids, diagnoses do unlock accommodations in schools, but not so much for adults.
That's mostly true, but there is a huge overlap in ASD and ADHD diagnosis. It's very common to be diagnosed with both, and that expectation (from a healthcare provider's perspective) has implications.
I think the most absurd thing to come from the statistical AI boom is how incredibly often people describe a model doing precisely what it should be expected to do as a "pitfall" or a "limitation".
It amazes me that even with first-hand experience, so many people are convinced that "hallucination" exclusively describes what happens when the model generates something undesirable, and "bias" exclusively describes a tendency to generate fallacious reasoning.
These are not pitfalls. They are core features! An LLM is not sometimes biased, it is bias. An LLM does not sometimes hallucinate, it only hallucinates. An LLM is a statistical model that uses bias to hallucinate. No more, no less.
The entire narrative of "cheating" is a giant misdirect. People don't actually care about cheating, they care about fun. If a player is making the game less fun, it does not matter how.
The real problem is that ~10 years ago major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting. This means that the responsibility of moderation is now in their hands. The only way this problem can ever be resolved is by giving the authority to moderate servers back to players. Until then, the responsibility to moderate will be unmet, no matter how fascist and authoritarian game studios become. Fascism cannot guarantee fun!
People are still playing Battlefield 4 (2013) on user-hosted servers. Right now.
The only way that "around the world" can be relevant is ping, and the best way to manage ping is by sorting a list of servers by ping.
Cheating is an arms race that no one needs to participate in. Moderation was a perfectly good workaround until major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting.
My point is that player-moderation scales, while corporate moderation does not. The fact that there are more players on corporate moderated servers only makes this reality more significant.
It's clearly one significant measure. What do you think is going to happen to tournament money if every other tournament has a cheater? How many esports fans want to go play League after watching Faker decimate another team if they have cheaters in their match every other day?
What it tells you most of all is popularity and incentive to cheat. Cast a big enough net and you'll inevitably find cheaters. The bigger the net, the more cheaters you'll collect.
Don't worry about cookies or bother using a VPN, because... you are being tracked anyway? What's the point of including such a defeatist stance?
> the real world across industry, academia, and government.
Gotcha, so no one here gives a shit about privacy. They only care about avoiding the inconveniences of fraud and leaked secrets.
Use a password manager and a feature-complete adblocker (ublock origin on Firefox). Send messages over end-to-end encrypted channels. Use a VPN along with your adblocker and some kind of cookie/browser-id isolation if you don't want your traffic stalked.
BTW, I really would like to have a way to partially clear cookies – i.e., I don't want to be signed out of gmail, and maybe not out of the Mechanic's Bank of Alaska or Amazon or Netflix, but most other things could go. I don't think this is easy in Chrome, Safari or other mainstream browsers, is it?
Yesyes, I do know that Big Ad can mostly stitch together some proxy profile of me anyway, but it would be more blurry.
Doesn’t this leak info when clicking on a link in say gmail opening that link in another profile? Most URL’s have pretty long extra strings in them that I assume are just cookie-equivalent?
What if a 3 day old human knew how to walk? I don't think that would look any different, because they physically can't do it anyway.
The first couple years of human development completely change the structure of the body. Walking is only possible after a significant amount of that process has happened, and the body keeps developing even after you learn how to walk.
A three minute old horse is both structurally and mentally prepared to run. A three year old horse will be taller and heavier, but not structurally different enough to change what walking is to their brain.
What a horse can never do as well as a human, is to learn a completely new behavior. Our brains are unmatched for flexibility in learning. Infant humans don't need to be born with the knowledge or the structure for waking. Both can develop together over time because our brains are able to develop new behavior.
The mystery here is the difference between a horse thinking "legs go" and a human thinking "legs that are just ready to hold me up, do what I see other people do, and don't fall over". We only have a vague linguistic model to express our understanding of the underlying complexity.
I don't care how long it takes to get off the bus nearly as much as I care how long it takes to get on.
reply