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It's a runaway process of prioritizing safety over convenience -- and it's wrecking their road base just before self-driving cars would allow them to have both.

I was wondering how much convenience is worth one kid's life. This thread reminded me of some interesting terms like "value of statistical life." It appears that all those annoying low speed limits and purposeful obstructions in residential areas really do save lives.

> An evaluation of 20 mph zones in the UK demonstrated that the zones were effective both in reducing traffic speed and in reducing RTIs. In particular child pedestrian injuries were reduced by 70 per cent from 1.24 per year in each area before to 0.37 per year after the zones were introduced

https://www.rospa.com/siteassets/images/road-safety/road-saf...

The "Vision Zero" program was started in Sweden, and is becoming more widely adopted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero


20mph residential is pretty close to standard. Note the Waymo car was going slower than that. That's far from the 5mph GP was reacting too, or the super tight curves.

What an American framing. My convenience at the cost of your eventual safety. I guess this is why we also have toddler death machines with 5-foot grills that we call “full size” vehicles.

If you've ever driven more than 5 miles an hour, you risked hurting someone for your convenience.

Acknowledging life has risk tradeoffs doesn't make you an American, but denying it can make you a self-righteous jerk.


> If you've ever driven more than 5 miles an hour, you risked hurting someone for your convenience.

Taken literally, that's clearly not true.

For example you can easily drive 150mph in the flat desert where there is nothing for a hundred miles and you can see many miles ahead. You have zero risk of hurting anyone else unless they somehow teleport in front of you.

But driving 5mph in tight street full of elementary school kids running around can be extremely dangerous.

It's all about context.


You’re egocentric instead of system-centric. Life has risks, but risk is to be managed, not accepted blindly with disregard of available options. A systemic approach to minimizing risk of injury on roads looks exactly like inconvenience to the individual.

In many civilized countries and locales, even bringing up the word “convenience” in the context of road safety would be considered tasteless. Maybe a phrase like “excessively obstructive” or other euphemisms would be used, but the word “inconvenient” regarding safety measures that would e.g. help prevent the death of toddlers today would be appalling.

There’s this techbro utopia mindset leaking through as well, just like it does for climate change topics, that pragmatic solutions that work for us today are deprioritized because some incredible technology is right around the corner. This is also distinctly American, specifically Silicon Valley, culture.


Gosh, no, the self-driving cars will be forced to drive at safe speeds in pedestrian corridors as opposed to voluntarily driving at safe speeds in pedestrian corridors. How awful.

> prioritizing safety over convenience

this sounds like exactly the right tradeoff, especially since these decisions actually increase convenience for those not in cars


Of course it sound right, because you cut off the word "runaway".

It is possible to go too far in either direction.


When the “safety” bit is “avoiding killing people”, I’m not actually totally convinced that it is possible to go too far.

Does the phrase "5mph speed limit everywhere" convince you it's possible to go too far? If not then I don't think you're in alignment with most of the world.

It is, but it's laughable to suggest it's happening anywhere. Our world is dominated by cars. You likely can't see it precisely because it's so normalized.

“Just before” … this would mean all cars would be required to be self driving and that they’re forced to adhere to the set speed limits. You think this is just around the corner? In a country like Sweden with a lot of snow? Let’s talk about that this when we’re actually close to hitting 100% of self driving cars on the road.

And it’s not “runaway”, it’s exactly the right prioritisation. I’d encourage you to spend some time on Not Just Bikes and the say whether you’d like to live in a Nordic or an American neighbourhood. The Nordic style is also about convenience because car centric infrastructure makes a lot of things less accessible and convenient.


Those things all sound easy to remove in some hypothetical future where there are enough and safe enough self driving cars to have both. Makes sense to design for human driven cars for now though.

If they're actually self-driving they should be able to drive around the obstacles just as well or better than human.

I want to inform readers that the article is about three people. There's no transition when they start talking about the second one, and I didn't remember the names, so I didn't figure it out till the end of the article and missed all the contrasts.

One possible consequence of generating Scratch by writing code is that you can ask an LLM to generate your Scratch. I worry that this could take away the fun of Scratch the same way I can no longer maintain any interest in going to Python night, because the computer can do it all.


I recently discovered that Chrome "More Tools" lets you "Name Window", so you can find the tab you want with alt-tab even if you opened some other tabs in front of it. Like I have one for "Gemini Enterprise", "AWS Console", etc. I might have some other tabs open with AWS Console but I can use this to find my main one.


I've spent hundreds of hours on the GOG version of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Every community recommends the GOG version over the Steam HD one. I didn't think how important GOG was to me, but now I'm going to find that patron program they're talking about. It would be great if in 30 years I can still play Master of Magic and that won't happen by itself.


> Master of Magic

I picked up a bargain bin CD ROM of this game in 1996 and it works under dosbox as well as it ever did. Which is to say mostly ok but sometimes hilariously crashy. I think what needs to happen for us to spend another 30 years crafting overpowered plate mail is for there to continue being good emulators for the mid 90s DOS environment.


You might be interested in VCMI, which is an open source engine for HoMM3.

https://vcmi.eu/


Do you ever play online multiplayer HOMM3? Is it a thing nowadays?


You should delete the bonus content from this post too because you started with a good point that doesn't deserve to get deleted for irrelevant and confessed-intentional spam.


Insightful. Thank you.


What are the files like router.sample_1.schema? Is that a convention you use for your Pydantic models or something generated by OpenApi?


https://github.com/allmonday/composition-oriented-developmen...

those are clusters based on modules, you can swith off by toggle 'show module cluster'


So this isn't really "visualize FastAPI endpoints", it's "visualize the inheritance cascade caused by using the pydantic-resolve approach to data fetching/transformation, which involves adding post-hooks to compositions of Pydantic objects". A vanilla FastAPI user like myself is going to have trouble understanding it without realizing how tied it is to that framework.


While at it, what do you use to parse / validate / cast request data into nice typechecked objects?


the return value in resolve/post method will be automatically validated by the pydantic class defined in field annotation.


to better describe the relationship, it borrows the concept 'subset' from pydantic-resolve, which act like pick several fields from original class but you can still reference to it.

@subset(User) class PickedUser: ....


it's not bound with pydantic-resolve, for vanilla fastapi user if the business model are well designed and composed, it can benefited from this visualization approach too.

the goal is to make the dependencies clear for developers, and figure out the potential impacts from one node to others.

pydantic-resolve is just another my project to make the process of data composition close to ER model and get rid of glue codes like 'for loops'.


This is all interesting, but is there a reason trianglular and rectangular sails can't be bolt on after thoughts?


For the sails to be an effective means of propulsion they need to transfer a lot of force through the mast and stays to the hull. This require the attachment points to be very solid. Not something you can easily do as a retrofit. You'd need to reinforc the hull aroud the mast and stay attachments.


They likely can but with reduced changes for being optimal. Sails, keel and rudder should be balanced so that adjusted sails cause minimal pivoting force to mitigate with the rudder. Also the supports below the mast and plates for the stays likely need planning to allow sufficient structure without limiting the working angles of boom too much.


Optimizing them for speed makes them flexible: when they're not full, you can go fast, and when they're full, they can degrade gracefully to 30-35 mph.


> If a straight stretch of road has 4 intersections with stop lights for cross traffic, and one of those lights is green for 20 seconds for the straight road and green for 40 seconds for the cross traffic, then the end-to-end throughput of that road (ignoring turns on/off for the sake of simplicity) is 1/3 of its hourly capacity, or 600 cars per hour. Widening the road won’t fix that intersection.

I don't see how the intersection affects road-widening calculations at all. Doubling the lanes will double the throughput, to 1200 cars per hour. We weren't expecting widening the road to also eliminate red lights.


You're right that paragraph is misleading.

The lane widening and whatnot basically acts as a cache for the bottleneck intersection (or other feature).

A good example is getting the small % of left turning traffic out of a lane where much of the traffic wants to go straight and there is much oncoming traffic. When there's a break, you've got a car cached right there. When there's not you can push any left turning traffic into the cache for later. Massive improvement, even if all the out flows from the light are the same throughput.


is the relationship between lanes and throughput linear? even where it's illegal people will change lanes and do all sorts of suboptimal things with the additional space; particularly if people need to shift multiple lanes to be in the correct legal lane.


author here, you are right, I missed that. In my pathetic defense, the normal argument around here (Cambridge, MA) is about literal lane widening and narrowing, and not adding and subtracting.


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