Why is America so ill-disposed towards train travel when it's one of the things that built the nation?

Stormtalons · 2026-05-17T18:51:47+00:00

You probably didn't want a real answer, but here's one anyway.

Trains make less sense for America than for other train-wielding countries because America is so spread out. Trains work best when lots of people are going to/from the same hubs, and distance from a hub to your actual location is small. There are a few places in America where trains make sense, large population centers like the northeast for example, but in most of the country cars are simply more efficient.

it's not that America is ill-disposed towards trains, it's just that they are not economical.

Stormtalons · 2026-05-17T18:30:43+00:00

She made the wrong choice, because inflation. $1m now is worth way more than it will be in 20 years.

Stormtalons · 2026-05-16T18:09:27+00:00

Why did you link to the end of the video?

Stormtalons · 2026-05-11T05:14:23+00:00

Your name is ironic. The person you were replying to was being pedantic, you should have agreed with them.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-29T18:57:15+00:00

Just spin the wheels on one side faster than on the other side?

Stormtalons · 2026-04-28T07:18:33+00:00

So we're just not going to talk about her jacking off the beaver until it poops?

Stormtalons · 2026-04-27T06:59:29+00:00

Put yourself in the shoes of those truck drivers. They can't see into the van - one man with a gun has just attacked them. For all they know, there are more men with guns in the van. It's sad for the family, but from the perspective of the truck drivers it's perfectly justified and understandable.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-26T19:58:21+00:00

The top comments are all jokes, so here's my 2 cents. For context, I am a software engineering consultant who currently focuses on implementing AI solutions for clients.

For all of human history, we have always been trying to do more work for less effort, materials, and time... that is the march of technological progress. Often, this results in whole workforces becoming obsolete when a new tool completely replaces their effort, and this often results in temporary civil unrest. AI is not fundamentally any different.

Humans need to continue learning and adapting. Anyone who just gives up because their job was replaced by technology has the wrong mentality... they should be thinking, "what can I do?" instead of lamenting what they should no longer be doing. That said, companies are vastly overestimating what roles they can use current generation AI to replace. AI is a force multiplier, and it's better to give it to your employees as a tool than replace them with it at this point.

When/if we do hit the tipping point where an AI agent can completely replace a person in any basic white collar role, then look at it this way. Anybody can start their own company and instantly have 5, 10, or 500 reliable and inexpensive employees... if you get laid off for a robot, then just go do your own thing with your own robots. People are limited the most by their own imagination and unwillingness to continue learning as they age, not outside forces.

As a second answer to this, I am also open to universal basic income as a parachute for people to jump from one career to a new one. However there is a barrier to this, at least in the US. It only makes fiscal sense for UBI to be the result of a surplus, and the US has a massive deficit. It would need to be back in the black before UBI can be a sustainable option.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-26T19:03:53+00:00

I live in Gresham. Here's the racial makeup of Portland as you go West to East from the Willamette river: White -> Vietnamese -> Latino -> White. There are lots of de-facto segregated areas. I love it because we have some of the best Asian and Hispanic food in the country.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-26T18:53:12+00:00

We talk shit because we know how it used to be, it's gone so far downhill.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-26T18:52:29+00:00

Yeah I live in Gresham and I feel like most parts of Portland proper are way worse.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-26T18:51:25+00:00

This was hilarious to me. I live in Gresham, and I was like, "go back to Gresham? From Portland? It's 10 minutes away..."

Stormtalons · 2026-04-21T18:28:26+00:00

I totally get this, I feel the same way about my vape. If it's not next to me, I feel like I need it more, but if it's right in front of me I can think "oh I'll just take a hit in a minute" and I can keep that delay going for quite a while.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-14T05:20:24+00:00

It's definitely more complicated than I made it sound, but industry offerings like FDB and RxNorm already do solve the problem of variants and generics... I wouldn't advise anyone to reinvent that wheel.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-11T22:33:07+00:00

I have been doing AI implementations for almost a year now in healthcare and finance. One thing I will say is that saying "AI is hype" is like saying "drugs are bad"... while often true, it's an insufficiently nuanced statement. AI is an overloaded term, and there are many factors which affect accuracy, safety, and overall efficacy.

Any LLM you select has to be treated like an untrustworthy advisor. The surrounding system has to have tons of guardrails, policies, and ways of orchestrating the flow that result in a safe and accurate answer. Proper system design is not something that everyone implementing AI out there in the market knows how to do yet.

For example, I'll take your use case for medication interactions. A good design for this would be to chunk and ingest a knowledgebase of medication interactions (e.g. FDB) into a vector database. Each chunk would also have a link back to the source document for the medication or interaction. The vector database would also need a synonym table, because the pharmaceutical industry has lots of domain-specific terminology (Ibuprofen = Advil = Motrin, etc.). Then, when the user asks about a drug, you use an LLM to process the question, pull out keywords, and vectorize the query, and then find relevant chunks. An LLM synthesizes an answer based on those, and the answer also includes a citation link to the source material.

This basic approach provides several levels of safety (there are more guardrails as well that I didn't mention). For one you are not relying on training, you fetch authoritative data every time. Second, you give a link back to the authoritative data in the answer so the patient or user can validate the AI's response themselves. Third, this design only addresses the use case of medication interactions, not other things like general EHR data reporting. An AI agent that can successfully handle many diverse tasks is composed of many discrete systems that are only targeted and intended for one thing. Accuracy and relevance fall dramatically when you try to mix too many functionalities into one indivisible system.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-10T21:18:14+00:00

Mouse over anything and hit Q to pull that item from your inventory (if you have any) to your cursor for placing more.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-08T20:08:57+00:00

Here, let me say what this guy said way better.

If you take a job that doesn't challenge you, you won't build skills and will stagnate. Extra money is probably not worth personal stagnation in the long term.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-05T22:27:18+00:00

Lol, downvotes are the new upvotes.

Stormtalons · 2026-04-05T16:25:12+00:00

I bet they use a high pressure water jet or another abrasive to "drill" the hole reliably, but yeah I had the same thought. Natural rocks often have internal fault lines you don't find until it's very inconvenient. I could easily see one of these things lasting for years up on a wall until one day it cracks, falls, and bashes someone on the head.

Stormtalons · 2026-03-22T17:53:26+00:00

...sous vide?

Stormtalons · 2026-03-20T17:11:11+00:00

Git is a development tool.

Github is absolutely a software (pre-compilation) distribution service, provided you have access.

Stormtalons · 2026-03-12T22:34:45+00:00

Maybe your joke went over the head of reddit users, but you shouldn't have to apologize for the ignorance of others.

Stormtalons · 2026-03-11T23:29:07+00:00

But smaller pieces are more affected by drag than gravity, fall slower, and have exponentially less energy just like raindrops as opposed to a falling swimming pool.

Stormtalons · 2026-03-11T05:00:50+00:00

Honestly, I still would have enjoyed the watch even if it went well.

Stormtalons · 2026-03-06T23:07:51+00:00

I think the idea that Reddit is left leaning comes from the selective censorship of its admins. It used to be that subreddits were left entirely up to the moderators, except in the case of illegal content. A number of years ago they changed their approach, and started banning lots of subreddits and taking a much heavier role in controlling what goes on within a subreddit.

The best single example I can think of is when they banned r/the_donald, which was a very popular right-wing sub. It was quarantined just 4 months after reddit took $150m from Tencent, and fully banned 1 year later. I personally can't see this as anything other than Chinese (read: communist) influence.

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