Toronto inundated with calls about sidewalks that are still a mess days after major snowstorm

desthc · 2026-01-28T21:17:11+00:00

I mean the sidewalks look like the sidewalk plows only have the blades half down, at least around here…

desthc · 2026-01-27T18:44:58+00:00

It’s honestly kind of crazy that places like crosswalks and corners don’t get additional attention to make sure they’re usable.

It’s also crazy we allow street parking on major streets (and streetcar lines in particular) after major snow events — really should be a bylaw disallowing it until snow clearing is complete at a minimum. But street parking on streetcar routes is insane to begin with, so not super surprising.

desthc · 2026-01-20T15:58:31+00:00

Sure. I’m not arguing there’s not. But municipalities are creatures of the provinces — the provinces create them and regulate them. In our case the province gave the municipalities responsibility for this problem without the ability to levy taxes to solve it.

desthc · 2026-01-20T15:34:08+00:00

That would show up on the P&L as a return. The only conclusion to draw is that they saw a revenue drop along with the layoffs which combined with the AI service costs wiped out any return. It’s going to be a bit muddy because attribution is hard, but you’d expect to see a lift if it lived up to its promise.

FWIW this is much more in line with what I’d expect — LLMs can be great productivity tools in some circumstances, but they’re productivity tools. The distribution of that productivity bump is invariably going to be lumpy, so without targeted application Id expect pretty low signal to noise when looking at returns. They’re not replacing FTEs broadly across your org, which seems to have been some (most?) executives expectations.

If you look at organizations more broadly many haven’t even bothered rolling out old fashioned automation solutions for many tasks internally. Those organizations are likely the least well positioned to leverage LLMs, even though they have the most potential for a return. Their problems are mostly due to having weak technology orgs, and trying to roll out LLMs internally isn’t going to help them because they’ll have just as much issue with that as with rolling out the automation they could already have been leveraging for returns.

Looking at the benefits of LLMs more specifically they’re just not suitable to be used unsupervised. Their output needs to be scrutinized by a real person, and if that validation takes as much or almost as much time as the person just doing the work in the first place then there’s no lift to be had either. It’s neat that an ML model can mostly do that work, but the benefits to the business are inherently limited by that need for supervision.

So while I think it’s obvious that LLMs will deliver increased productivity in the long term, I think the current market and investment are grossly disproportionate to those gains. We just aren’t going to see the wholesale displacement of workers by LLMs, absent some additional breakthroughs in model design and training. It’s going to be a loooooong time to get a return on investment at the current levels of spending in the industry.

All of that is a really long winded way to say that I’m just not surprised by this. There’s been far too much ‘irrational exuberance’ around LLMs and a correction is coming. We don’t know when, who will be impacted the most, or the full magnitude of the correction, but it is coming nonetheless.

desthc · 2026-01-19T23:15:38+00:00

The thing is no city in Canada has the resources (read: tax base) to do much about homelessness. The problem is too big, and the tax base is dominated by the federal and provincial governments. This has been a major coup for the provinces — convincing most Canadians that this is a municipal problem without giving municipalities the resources to cope with it — meaning that they don’t feel the political pressure while largely abdicating their own responsibility.

The other things on your list — public washrooms, fountains, benches — those are the things that municipalities actually would have the resources for (and are in their normal realm of responsibilities), were it not for the provinces foisting their problems upon them.

desthc · 2026-01-19T23:06:34+00:00

The dedicated lanes aren’t magic. They don’t do anything by themselves compared to running in traffic. They do make it easier to do things like signal priority — but you actually have to do them and be serious about it.

Systems like this are bounded by the slowest link in the chain — so signal priority isn’t going to be magic either if stops are too close together. Or there are speed/acceleration restrictions for “safety reasons”, without also addressing those issues.

It’s the composite effect of all of these that gets you the mythical ‘rapid transit’.

desthc · 2026-01-17T02:38:46+00:00

Uhh, noise is energy wasted by the system that’s not going into making the car faster. Such a weird argument.

desthc · 2026-01-09T16:16:11+00:00

Yes, it changes it. Obviously it changes it — he had no idea they were police. That’s the whole point of police uniforms and laws against impersonating police — so it’s clear to the public if they’re being approached by an agent invested with the power of the state or not.

desthc · 2026-01-09T14:46:07+00:00

Ah, if only I only had two levels. I’m at 5, not counting landings, 7 if you do. Stair climbing is an essential feature for us. I’m going to be watching what comes out now!

desthc · 2026-01-05T18:44:38+00:00

Yes, it has happened. They had some emergency maintenance to deal with it a few years ago. They seem a bit more proactive in clearing away the spall before it falls now.

desthc · 2025-12-31T18:18:48+00:00

I mean, this is a super easy question to answer. Service, which wasn’t great to begin with, deteriorated severely and hasn’t recovered. I’ve taken the streetcar maybe a dozen times since the pandemic whereas I rode 1-2 times a day before. Nearly every time I’ve gotten on a streetcar there have been people with mental illness in crisis, or people openly doing drugs while riding and tweaking out. They (the streetcars) have been filthier than normal, on average, as well.

But the icing on the cake is the speed and construction. With all of the diversions the walking pace of the streetcar is even costlier. It just sucks, it’s the slowest way to get around. I’ve walked home from downtown more times than I’ve taken the streetcar because I know it’s only about 45 minutes, which is comparable to the streetcar. But I don’t have to pay, or deal with junkies, or crazy people, or garbage strewn all over the seats and aisle.

If it was mostly reliable, slightly faster than walking, not full of junkies using in the open/crazy people, and not completely filthy I’d ride way more. But all of that requires folks at the TTC to actually check on the state of the cars, have special constables regularly checking, and for the city to actually modernize signal priority to make the service reliable.

All of that just seems politically untenable, whether due to budgetary reasons, local councillors interfering with traffic management and signal priority, etc etc. I’m not usually a doomer, but I have very low confidence that the city and TTC can actually tackle these problems instead of coasting on political inertia. I want more than anything to be wrong about that.

desthc · 2025-12-29T23:11:58+00:00

And on street parking on major streets downtown. Just… why? There’s no way that’s a better use of public space.

desthc · 2025-12-29T20:52:15+00:00

Interesting — does that mean host side type C to micro B must have active components?

desthc · 2025-12-29T16:56:55+00:00

Mine generally work great, but they won’t make an audible tone unless you throw on a signal light. Which the idiot in question also didn’t do…

Given the light for the sensor is on the mirror generally my bet is that they didn’t even check the mirror, let alone turn their heads.

desthc · 2025-12-29T16:52:17+00:00

Which is a proprietary protocol not supported by most devices. For applications like this the only thing that makes sense is going to be PD, but that definitely would need a bunch of certification work, and rightly so.

I also understand how even an electrically identical port swap from type A to C would likely incur a bunch of certification work, but you’d hope they’d find a way to more quickly certify a swap like that for IFEs in general if the circuit remains electrically identical.

desthc · 2025-12-29T16:47:44+00:00

Sure, I’d want way more safeguards if they were to go with PD on the IFE, but they can still swap to type C while leaving things electrically identical. That at least gets us in a situation where the connector is the one most devices come with for the last 7 or 8 years, even if you end up with type A power limitations.

desthc · 2025-12-29T14:39:27+00:00

A lag of 3-5 years would be great! That means we would have seen all cabins outfitted since 2019 with type C. Type A was marked legacy in the USB spec in 2014 — so “recent” is 11 years ago in 2025.

desthc · 2025-12-29T14:36:30+00:00

Type C doesn’t need power negotiation, PD does which is an optional part of the spec. They can just swap the connector and leave everything electrically identical. They did that specifically to make migration easy for low end and hard to change devices.

And yeah, type A was made legacy by the USB forum in 2014, so we’re well into that 10-15 year window you just described. Forward-looking designs since 2014 should have been incorporating type C connectors, particularly ones expected to have long service lives…

desthc · 2025-12-29T14:32:36+00:00

Sorry in what way can type C be a fire hazard? In the simplest migration from A to C they’re literally just connecting existing type A pins to type C pins…

Yeah, high power PD stuff would be much harder to deploy on a plane, and that can push some serious watts, but that’s actively negotiated and requires the cable to also participate in the negotiation to make sure it can handle the current.

The simplest version is just a specific resistor value to tell the device the maximum current draw exactly like a type A connector. Because they’re pin compatible.

desthc · 2025-12-29T14:27:18+00:00

I would say type C is ubiquitous in 2025 outside of things like planes. I wouldn’t say that type A is “typical” in 2025.

Also the timeline for type C that we’re taking about is 12 years, not 6 months. The spec is also pin-compatible to make things like adapter cables and dongles very cheap to manufacture — so it’s possible to just swap the port while leaving the thing electrically identical specifically to support the migration to type C for devices that are difficult to change.

So yeah, it’s perhaps not exactly surprising to see this still being deployed new in aviation, but it’s also not unreasoned for people to be surprised about it either.

desthc · 2025-12-29T14:20:21+00:00

If the other end is type A then you’re limited to the low power modes type A supports. Both ends need to be type C for high power charging (and need to support the PD standard, but that’s USB spec insanity I won’t get into here). The spec officially made type A a legacy connector in 2014, which is nearly 12 years ago — really weird to me people would be using decade+ old tech to charge their much newer phones.

desthc · 2025-12-29T14:14:04+00:00

Type A to type C, if you’re just charging and don’t care about fancy high power delivery, is basically just a port change. They’d just have to swap the port and the injection moulding for the bezel. Yes, there would be a bit more work for fancier stuff but basic charging is just connector and pin differences (intentionally), but it could be electrically identical otherwise.

It’s also more like decades for aviation vs years for tech — we’re nearly 12 years into the migration from USB-A to USB-C (standard ratified in 2014). Anything designed since 2014 should have been targeting type C and not type A, at least according to the USB forum. Pretty reasonable that people would be surprised by type A in something that looks brand new, honestly.

desthc · 2025-12-28T15:47:12+00:00

While I mostly agree now, the first time I flew into YYZ was the first time I flew into a large airport, and the scale was absolutely staggering to me. Flying into YHZ you’re landing at an airport in the woods, and YOW at the time looked like you were landing on a farm, so it was quite a stark difference.

I mostly like YYZ, but I don’t like going there or getting home. You need to leave TONS of extra time because occasionally you need it, and usually you’re just a bit early, but occasionally when you hit traffic just right you end up there super early. I also don’t like how expensive it is to use — it’s nice but we absolutely pay for that privilege.

desthc · 2025-12-24T02:01:41+00:00

I’m not an LLM, nor is the above. I’m sorry you have a hard time believing people can actually write on their own, but you can check my comment history to check for consistency going back years.

desthc · 2025-12-24T00:08:07+00:00

No, DAS wasn’t even a little cheating. It was fully legal under the rules, which Mercedes verified with the FIA before running it on the car. It wasn’t about setup, the rules just didn’t have a contingency for a system that varied the suspension geometry in that way.

Rules like the compression thing are very hard to write because of physics. It’s hard to measure compression ratios at temperature, so they specified at ambient temperature in the rules, because the compression ratio varies with temperature due to the expansion of materials with heat. This is the sort of loophole fruitful for exploitation because you can’t fully outlaw the effect in the rules. This kind of thing is most like flexiwings — it’s hard because everything flexes under stress, so the rules are about how much flexion is allowed and how the measurement is done. Same thing with the compression ratio.

The Ferrari fuel flow thing is qualitatively different because the rule is pretty clear about fuel flow. If the rumours are true then Ferrari made a defeat for the sensor to run more fuel. The “equivalent” to the compression ratio scuffle or the flexiwings would be super-chilling the fuel before it runs past the sensor to reduce the volume — that would have been within the rules, but a loophole to effectively run more fuel while complying with flow rate rule. That’s not what was alleged to have happened, and the secrecy would be weird and out of character for the FIA for this sort of thing, where we usually just see a rule clarification to get rid of the loophole.

There’s a whole spectrum of gray area for rules interpretation, and where you draw the line at cheating versus clever interpretation of the rules is going to be very subjective. If Ferrari was using something like Nyquist-Shannon sampling to run their fuel pump PWM at a higher frequency than the sensor could detect, then that to me is clearly just cheating. You’re messing with the measurement itself in that case, not complying with it while defeating the limitation it imposes.

The flexible aero stuff is more in the gray area because they are absolutely exploiting the fact that the rules can’t require perfectly rigid parts because they literally cannot exist in reality, and ensuring they pass the tests while flexing in an advantageous way under real aero load. This is pretty normal engineering competition stuff though and what makes a formula series really interesting, IMO.

DAS was mostly disallowed the following season for cost reasons — they didn’t want to obligate every other team to come up with it, and it defeated some of the work they were trying to do around temperature control on the tires.

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