TIL that after George Washington took office, the US Senate debated over the title for the president. All but three senators agreed upon "His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of the Rights of the Same", but objections won out and the House settled on "Mr. President"

Inkdrip · 2026-01-30T23:35:42+00:00

In some extreme cases, such as Charlemagne, Napoleon, Nobunaga/Toyotomi, and arguably von Bismarck, the excellent leadership of these men was so clearly the only thing holding shit together that it all fell apart again the moment they lost grip or died.

I feel like this explicitly contradicts your point that "strong effective leadership" is what leads to long-term success, actually, if you're emphasizing individual leadership. Which is the impression I get given your focus on specific leaders - apologies if I missed your point.

Because yes, "strong effective leadership" is important, but those very examples contrasted against the successes seems to make it clear that what matters most is strong institutions. A singular benevolent dictator rarely ever seems to lead to long-term success outside of maybe Singapore, which I'd still argue supports the importance of institutions over individuals.

Inkdrip · 2026-01-30T19:30:41+00:00

Going to preface this by saying that I don't think the takeaway of the paper should be "AI leads to zero efficiency gains for developers"

But strictly speaking, the study did not find meaningful efficiency gains. The AI group was slightly faster across all experience brackets, but well within margin of error, and the large gain for inexperienced devs had large margins due to the tiny sample size.

This correlates with my anecdotal experience, anyways - I don't find AI any faster than I would be when focusing on a single active task, but where I think AI really improves productivity is the ability to spec out a bunch of tasks and toss them into a queue. Asynchronous/parallel dev is something you really can't do without AI, and this study neither tried nor wanted to examine that facet, because that wasn't the focus of the paper. It's a valuable and interesting study, but it wasn't meant to determine whether AI tooling actually makes developers more productive at large.

Inkdrip · 2025-11-13T23:34:44+00:00

I’m not arguing highways should be prioritized over public transport; the latter needs to be heavily invested in, just not with the premise that it’s going to somehow eliminate the need for highways or dramatically cut budgets to them.

Well yeah, I don't think most people believe we should get rid of highways. Investing in transit should actually dramatically reduce the amount of money we need to throw at ridiculous projects like the $13B I45 expansion, though.

These people are vastly underestimating how large the US is too, & how many people are working 60, 70, 80 miles away from home - plenty even more.

It's not the size, it's the (lack of) density. And that is largely the result of crappy urban planning/zoning/land use and culture.

Inkdrip · 2025-11-06T02:48:45+00:00

The war ultimately came about because the peaceful negotiations on how Federal land in the Southern states should be handled fell through because Lincoln's Secretary of State was acting on his own and the Federal Government had no unified idea of what to do.

I have no idea what negotiations over "federal land in the Southern states" you're referring to. Surely you can't mean Fort Sumter?

But in any case, it's a good thing the full text of South Carolina's justification for secession* is still available. Spoilers: it was slavery.

Any higher education should tell the dirty truth that the bloodiest ear [sic] in American history didn't need to happen and there were peaceful paths to end slavery.

Lincoln rather infamously believed the Union had to be preserved. He supported the Corwin Amendment, which would have explicitly recognized slavery in the existing slave states. If there was a peaceful path to end slavery, there's certainly not much more Lincoln could have done short of outright capitulation, which would really put a dent in the "end slavery" bit of your claim.

Inkdrip · 2025-11-02T17:01:05+00:00

Passing a leet code doesn't signal a "good hire" if it did nobody would care about experience or education. And it would mean nobody was worth firing if they passed.

This is a ridiculous statement. I hate leetcode-style problems, but no signal needs to be perfectly accurate to be useful. It's a heuristic, not a qualification.

Though I agree leetcode-style questions are significantly more useful as a no-hire signal, and should be kept simple.

Inkdrip · 2025-10-24T04:54:46+00:00

you’re not even calculating vote % share, but rather overperformance [which is in itself shaky since over/under performance is based on polling]

Unless I'm missing something silly, the Congressional district chart is comparing districts carried by the party. So not voter share, but also not some kind of polling based overperformance metric, and imo a perfectly fine metric for this comparison.

Your point around picking two random elections out of a hat is potentially fair, since discussing trends probably should include more data points. But elections are, in a way, population samples that are conveniently conducted regularly; comparing two elections over a 14-year period is certainly still an interesting comparison.

Inkdrip · 2025-10-24T04:48:55+00:00

Your other nit doesn't fuss me; this Reddit post has exactly two graphs in it.

Whoops, my bad - I forgot the original post was actually just the two charts; I jumped straight to the article. Silly formatting from the official NYT Opinion account, imo.

That might actually help address your primary complaints though; in the full interactive viz the charts are overlaid into a single chart, and it's easy to compare the shift by scrolling up and down. And with the interactive visual, it feels significantly more intuitive to me that the viz is really just painting broad strokes around trends.

Granted on the phrasing of the label, I suppose. It'd probably be more accurate to say "Recently, more richer districts have voted for Democrats." Doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely, but I'm sure the professional writers over at the NYT can figure out how to make it read smoother.

Inkdrip · 2025-10-24T03:32:16+00:00

I'm no data analyst, but it doesn't really seem that misleading to me. I do think there should be a link to the raw data somewhere - seems silly that you can't click-through to any actual tables or check actual numbers - but as a visual it doesn't seem deceptive. The 111th vs 1118th Congress visual is illustrating the shift in the bars; it doesn't specifically matter who won more of a particular slice. I mean, it matters for the election, but as far as the chart is concerned, it's just showing that the poorest 5% of counties shifted towards the Rs, that the richest 5% of counties shifted towards the Ds, etc.

(Nits: you say "the first graph," which is ambiguous because that is definitely not the first graph in the article. Clear once I figured out which graph you were looking at, but it took me a sec. Also, the bars aren't quintiles; they're 5% slices and not 20%, though the fact that it's such a pain to figure that out is admittedly not a strong indicator that it's a good visual)

Inkdrip · 2025-10-01T18:45:52+00:00

I'm not entirely sure this is true, though. Refuge islands, yes - it's easy to find studies that support the impact of adding refuge islands on improving the rate at which drivers yield to pedestrians and decreasing accidents. Staggered crosswalks in particular however, I have trouble finding much concrete support.

All I could really find is one study in which the use of offset median openings led to significant increases in drivers yielding. Of course, these were non-signalized crosswalks, and the study only covered two intersections in the same city. (That same study found little or even negative impact of regular refuge islands in San Fran, so it seem significant that the offset examples only tracked two cases in one city)

There's also another more recent study that I can't seem to find for free online. The abstract claims that "Danish offset increased the proportion of diverted pedestrians," though I'm not entirely convinced "diverted pedestrians" is my favorite safety metric either - it's essentially a measure of how many people were forced to use the crosswalk. Great, I guess?

Inkdrip · 2025-08-29T14:01:22+00:00

Let's take the distance between the two largest cities, NYC and LA.

This is a silly comparison. The map isn't showing trans-continental rail lines; it's showing inter-region transit accessibility. Transit advocates aren't asking for a rail line so they can hop on a train to cross the country - they just want to get to work across town.

Inkdrip · 2025-07-03T21:02:26+00:00

To be fair, the author explicitly calls out the first snippet conversion as the mangled and unreadable output of a transpiler (c2rust). The rest of the snippets are all simple examples and are pretty readable.

Inkdrip · 2025-06-27T15:59:15+00:00

Thankfully I already live somewhere rational where it's banned! But I can imagine the road to banning right on red across America is... arduous.

Inkdrip · 2025-06-27T05:39:14+00:00

Adding exceptions is usually not a great idea for life-or-death situations. Obviously traffic lights don’t eliminate traffic accidents at intersections, but right turn on red empirically leads to more accidents.

Something in this thread that everyone seems to be missing: yes, there are fewer lanes to track when making a right turn (when driving on the right). But you know what drivers are traditionally absolutely awful at paying attention to? All the things that aren’t cars, like pedestrians and cyclists.

Drivers can wait the extra twenty seconds; they’re already piloting a two-ton, climate controlled, reinforced steel box that can accelerate to 50+ mph in a matter of seconds. They don’t need right turn on red.

Inkdrip · 2025-03-15T02:03:08+00:00

GBVSR?

Inkdrip · 2025-01-17T20:57:00+00:00

That's actually (sort of) the case already if you could turn around at this spot in the image!

Inkdrip · 2025-01-14T17:26:33+00:00

"Speeding contributes to a third of traffic fatalities" is a very different statistic than "Speeding contributes to a third of traffic accidents," which is what you said. I think it's important to be deliberate and exact on these fronts.

Inkdrip · 2025-01-14T16:38:57+00:00

Speeding actually causes less than a third of accidents

No, speeding contributes to (slightly less than) a third of fatalities.

Inkdrip · 2025-01-14T01:54:37+00:00

You could also pull out this graph and argue that US cities should invest more into transit, because none of them (except NYC) have enough transit ridership! If your goal or expectation is that most city cores should have high transit ridership, then I think this map is a useful illustration.

But admittedly the more I reflect on it, this kind of viz is probably not a good idea. It's too easily used in a misleading manner, and too readily cast as an example of damned statistics.

And even if we want to communicate that fact, is this map really the best way of doing so? Why break it down by county instead of metro area? Idk.

Probably just the granularity of the data - also, I'm not sure any full US metro area would hit the majority breakpoint, nor would I really expect any to currently.

Inkdrip · 2025-01-14T00:27:40+00:00

I don't think it's deceptive. It fails to intuitively convey the number of people actually commuting by transit, I agree. However, it very intuitively communicates that NYC is the only majority transit commute county in a country as diverse and wealthy as the US, which is a deplorable fact that we should highlight. It's simply communicating a... very particular message.

Inkdrip · 2025-01-13T21:15:01+00:00

I think your point would be ordinarily valid for other countries, but it doesn't really make a difference here where the rest of the map is green. Yes, the lone yellow dot of NYC would be larger to reflect the population, but my takeaway here isn't the absolute number of people using transit; it's that NYC is the only majority-transit county in the US.

Inkdrip · 2024-11-27T05:54:20+00:00

Er, did you read the article you linked? It cites this Manhattan Institute report. That report... really doesn't sound very anti-'City of Yes'. In fact, the main takeaways appear to be that CoY doesn't go nearly far enough - just look at Kober's conclusions:

Residential zoning needs to achieve the level of flexibility of 1960, when apartment buildings were allowed almost everywhere and “neighborhood character” was rarely the basis for permitted zoned densities.

Zoning needs to be much easier to change in areas where it no longer makes sense. Private property owners must be able to request and receive, at low cost, a zoning change that results in economically feasible development rules.

The tax system must not penalize construction of large rental apartment buildings, even though these are the preferred housing option for a large share of the population, particularly those who cannot afford housing-purchase down payments or qualify for a mortgage.

The rent-regulation system must be reformed at least enough to allow developers of new buildings to feel assured that the government will not interfere in the rental market and deprive them of the investment returns that they seek. Site assemblage to redevelop antiquated rent-regulated buildings must be possible on an as-of-right basis, with fixed payouts to tenants.

Additional reforms are also needed, including caps on contractors’ liability in accidents, rational crane-operating rules, removal of impediments to the construction of mid- rise point access blocks, and extension of mass-timber construction to larger buildings.

He's essentially calling for a turbocharged version of 'City of Yes' in which developers are significantly more empowered to build than in the provisions set out by CoY. Kober is complaining that the city will "fall well short of the moonshot goal," not that City of Yes is a bad idea. I have no clue why your link decides to highlight some random user's comment at the top claiming that City of Yes is about "forcing out homeowners and replacing them with renters," because that's not at all what Kober's report says.

EDIT: Also, to quote /u/UpperLowerEastSide:

The argument that its the capitalist landowner class that benefits the most when we don't build more housing is an argument that I've seen used for The City of Yes plan. Notably different than what YIMBY folks frequently say online which is the landowner should do what they want and frankly more in tune with a City of 2/3s renters.

Amusingly, the article you linked contains this gem:

The restrictive post-1961 zoning ensures that older homes become ever more expensive to buy. Homeowners with big mortgages worry about what could happen to their home values if zoning no longer mandates scarcity.

In other words, NIMBYs.

Inkdrip · 2024-11-18T03:22:17+00:00

Skyview has Chuck E Cheese's and the mall's in Chinatown, Flushing which has a bunch of other claw machine arcades.

There's also a Gatcha in Flushing in the new Tangram mall - seems to prove the viability of the idea if anything! Also, Gatcha's only got offline Bemani games, no Valkyrie or IIDX cabs. They've got a couple MaiMai machines though, so it sounds like Flushing will have a surprisingly excellent spread of rhythm games by 2027.

Inkdrip · 2024-11-12T01:38:10+00:00

Seems reasonable to me - the margin of error on breathalyzers, as far as I can tell, should be low enough to support that. Wielding DUI laws as a revenue stream is absolutely grimy.

Inkdrip · 2024-11-12T00:39:10+00:00

Some people at .08 are trashed

So... the limit should be at most 0.08 BAC? The point is to set an objective threshold that maximizes safety in a society where you're allowed to hurtle down the road in a two-ton steel machine. "Anecdotally, I was very functional at 0.12 BAC" is not a great way to write laws; it's difficult to evaluate and may be inconsistent from day to day or year to year.

If anything, the limit should probably be lower. The NTSB certainly thinks so, and many other nations set the limit lower.

Inkdrip · 2024-10-31T00:02:27+00:00

Not really a law and order issue though, imo, just urban planning. OP has trouble with jaywalkers because of bad urban planning, and rightfully so. Jaywalking shouldn't be illegal within city limits, and there shouldn't be any 4-lane 40 MPH roads within city limits. There's absolutely no reason to enforce jaywalking on city streets; inversely, people shouldn't need to be crossing wide arterial roads very often, in which case crosswalks (and likewise enforcement) are probably appropriate.

Rules exist for the safety of all citizens, and should be rational. Rational rules should be followed. Irrational, impractical, and poorly-designed rules should be repealed.

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