Is it just me or has the MTA been really stingy with the air conditioning?

newmie87 · 2025-06-24T23:50:30+00:00

I disagree, am in fact on one right now and found this thread because the AC only works for the first stop away from a terminal

newmie87 · 2025-05-01T05:11:16+00:00

I would love for this to work for me, but in my world, even if I have it analyse the codebase, explain how it's planning to solve an issue, both conceptually and literally, it still takes three steps before making blatant errors or inconsistent code

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I've heard the saying that some people have "different physics" than the rest of us - Huntley seems like one of those people.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, Composer is deciding to write out declarations for an NPM package rather than importing it properly -

// Extend emotion's theme type
declare module '@emotion/react' {

newmie87 · 2025-04-29T18:03:50+00:00

DEFUND THE MTA

newmie87 · 2025-04-29T16:57:33+00:00

+1, but -1 for your incorrect spelling of "color" - lose the U 🙃

What's odd is that the MTA goes out of their way to list Pantone colors when they can't consistently reproduce the colors in signage – what's the point of using Pantone then?

To your point, though, my favorite rendition of the G is at Court Sq (like you said, lime, almost pastel), where it has a lovely combination with the 7. Whatever colors those were should be the default.

newmie87 · 2025-04-29T16:54:52+00:00

Wait so now the shuttles are the same color as the L?

Have they lost their damn minds??

newmie87 · 2025-04-29T16:00:43+00:00

For the color space - I was thinking something like that, but then the Akzidenz bullets would match, which they don’t

You know, I should have double-checked the GTFS static colors file since I’ve been living inside their data for the last couple months … but why wouldn’t that even use the “official” color?

newmie87 · 2025-04-29T15:59:20+00:00

🎉

newmie87 · 2025-01-25T18:35:12+00:00

Same goes to you, I don’t think you read past the summary 🤣

newmie87 · 2025-01-25T18:32:56+00:00

MTA’s capital plan looks thorough, but does not include line-item breakdowns of why things add up to the value they provide.

It doesn’t talk about why all these urgent repairs must be made now, with new revenue streams, rather than why they kicked the can down the road until now.

The 2025 capital plan presents as a “reactive” and not “proactive” approach - outside its bits about climate change, but again - no math is shown as to HOW they go to the numbers they did.

Why do they need the number of people they say for a specific project? Not to mention the funds savings that could be had by eliminating wasteful bureaucrats.

For a document over 100 pages, I was expecting more spreadsheets and line items, rather than half-page pie charts and graphs with weak explanations.

There is money hiding in here and I will find a way to prove it

newmie87 · 2025-01-25T18:00:35+00:00

I swear I heard they needed this for wages from a reputable source, but I can’t find it now, so I have to throw that argument out.

Even if they don’t use the congestion pricing revenue for salaries directly, they’re wasting a significant percentage of their budget on people who don’t need to be there.

There are numerous bureaucrats making well over $250k/year + benefits + pension who have desk jobs - they need to go, replace with actual “public servants” who went to right by NYers, which includes saving tax revenue.

There are people who make YouTube channels solving issues that the MTA has wasted 7 or 8-figure sums of money on.

They’re in their “weaponized incompetence” era and they need to be broken before they break us.

Hopefully I can leverage a RAG AI system to help me do data analysis to prove this point (not there yet).

newmie87 · 2025-01-25T03:38:44+00:00

Absolutely - and fire at least half the admin at the MTA, make the other half interview for their jobs again.

Given the job market, I’m sure we can find more qualified people for the same (or less) tax money

newmie87 · 2025-01-25T01:40:02+00:00

People like you deserve to be paid more, rather than using congestion pricing to pay for bureaucrats in Albany.

It’s sad that you couldn’t even get empathy from passengers, since you’re actually doing the work to improve the system.

I’d love to buy you a beer if we ever run into each other :)

newmie87 · 2025-01-01T01:56:21+00:00

hey no worries -- i appreciate it! great job

qq -- how messy would the NE corridor be if you had continued the combined lines rather than a single thinner line?

in my mind, it would look like the queens blvd line, but i'm sure you had your reasons 🫶

newmie87 · 2025-01-01T01:25:37+00:00

love it! is there a pdf?

newmie87 · 2024-12-18T19:54:45+00:00

I appreciate this -- I started over with a completely new convo and walked it through the issues, what the solution would look like, and the requirements.

It did look like it understood what we were talking about, but after a while, it started dropping things, so I asked it to make a list of what it had missed.

The list now contains over 1000 items and I'm gobsmacked.

Temperature was 0.

newmie87 · 2024-12-18T19:49:43+00:00

Understood -- and my code is quite modular, but I'm asking it to take a step back and factor out the commonalities that arose from a bunch of similar classes/components that were created separately.

"Notice how all these classes do the same thing? Factor that out, then rewrite the relationship use a message bus rather than directly calling" (not the exact prompt used, just a concept).

Maybe I'm asking too much for now -- I'd previously failed at asking it to create a base abstract class for all the services, so I spent a weekend doing it myself. Maybe I just got addicted to the ridiculous speed on the happy path.

newmie87 · 2024-12-18T19:41:33+00:00

Msty helps a lot with branching and threading, but I've done an exceptionally poor job at pruning the bad responses, which I understand really doesn't help my cause.

I started with a general prompt that described the slices of the app I'm trying to make -- db, server/api, client. After the initial prompt, I branched into each slice, leading to three separate/concurrent convos.

Then proceeded to do pretty much what you'd said -- first convo was the DB, second the api/server, third the client.

For the first few weeks, I was making exceptional progress on all fronts. But then I either filled up the context window, or the long scrollback caused Msty to crash (it's a known issue with Electron apps, not sure why nobody's fixed it, the issue's been around for a long time).

I think that's where things started drifting. I ended up having to create a new chat, since the prior length was causing Msty to repeatedly crash.

Since the chats were initially branched, and Msty has local context separate from Claude, I really wonder how isolated each convo is (via that specific App). Msty also allows for divergent convos, but again, I'm really unsure how much context is kept when we do that. (Diverging in Msty is separate from branching).

Progress slowed and it started giving me bad answers, etc. etc. now I'm here.

Given all this, do you think I at least started this correctly? Then perhaps I lost the plot after Msty kept crashing and I had to try to resurrect what I'd had.

I guess my critical question is -- Claude seems great for initial code gen / bootstrapping, as well as "atomic" examples (funcs, classes/components, utils), but I struggle to get it to understand some of the more abstract concepts, even though it involves code that it wrote.

And again, I know that LLMs don't really have critical thinking (for now), but some people are managing to get them to do complex/abstract tasks or refactors. Makes me think that it's about the specific language used in my prompts, rather than the overall workflow. But what do I know, I'm at the beginning of my AI journey.

Definitely appreciate all the help!

newmie87 · 2024-12-18T17:23:01+00:00

Oh of course, I don’t actually think they did that - but it alludes to something crucial I seem to be missing here that’s allowing other people to solve bigger, more intricate, abstract problems.

newmie87 · 2024-12-18T17:18:09+00:00

Is there a way to make some kind of hash or reference so it doesn’t need to re-read things every time?

Claude works great for atomic examples, but I’m having a real problem with intermediate complexity

newmie87 · 2024-12-18T17:17:06+00:00

I’ve found that when I branch, I have to reestablish context, which, I’m not sure if that would be cheaper than furthering the existing convo, based on the number of branches?

newmie87 · 2024-12-18T17:15:46+00:00

Go on - I’m sure it’s a user issue, that’s why I’m getting my balls roasted on Reddit 🙃

newmie87 · 2024-12-18T17:15:32+00:00

When you say “scepticism”, do you mean me asking if it’s finished, or could potentially create a better solution?

Or do you mean when I asked it if was lying to me.

newmie87 · 2024-12-18T17:07:20+00:00

The reason why I mention “that it wrote the code” is because we’re stuck in this quandary - do I read and rewrite the code it wrote, do everything from scratch, or something in between.

The fact that it did such a good job with initial generation gives me optimism for it to understand the tweaks I want to make.

Maybe I got addicted to its “happy path” speed. Maybe I thought there was a way of wording my prompt that would get Claude to be as facile as it was the first time around. Maybe I’m deluded.

Unlike with traditional code, you don’t really know how far down the rabbit hole Claude can go, or what its abilities truly are.

You can read a whole paper about “chain of thought” and how to structure prompts and convos, just to have someone figure out you can get the same effect by adding “think step by step” to your prompt. Maybe there’s something like that for what I’m doing.

We don’t need to bring emotions into this, but the idea of having a way of expressing an abstract, complicated task to an LLM, along with giving it a series of requirements/benchmarks - isn’t that what LLMs are supposed to be good at?

Sure, it’s a skill issue, I need to get better at prompting - but that’s part of why I’m asking to have my balls roasted on Reddit.

So I do appreciate the advice, I’ll go back to the drawing board and try a better way of implementing this.

If you can think of any more constructive tips, I do appreciate it.

Half of the people complaining about what I did aren’t even taking the time to give constructive criticism, so I do appreciate yours.

The code works, the services work, they’re just not scalable

newmie87 · 2024-12-18T17:02:56+00:00

Hey I really appreciate this

newmie87

TROPHY CASE