> Is the end result just a couple of minutes later in a 30 minute commute?
More like a few seconds.
Every car that merges in front of you only costs you their following distance. If the average following distance is 1 second, then you are simply 1 second slower than you'd have otherwise been. So unless this is happening continuously every 30 seconds on your 30 minute commute, you will lose less than a minute.
The "but if I kept reasonable following distance, people will keep merging in front of me and I'll lose time" excuse is pretty thin given this analysis.
And an insurance claim can easily eat 40 hours of time between the insurance companies, other lawyers, buying a new car, medical appointments and recovery. That's 19,200 minutes you won't get back, or about 52 years of driving 1 minute slower each day.
Some amount of that is inevitable, but there is another level of defensive driving where you anticipate poor behavior and arrange that it won't cause an accident.
Have a look at a few dash cam accident videos [1]. There are many maladaptive patterns of behavior, but a frequent one that the average good driver can improve on is limiting speed on two occasions: when approaching a blind spot, and when passing stopped or slow traffic.
That second one gets lots of otherwise good drivers. They seem to think that by limiting their speed vs slow/stopped traffic they'd be encouraging people to dart in front of them. Which is somewhat true. But with limited speed, that's an avoidable or less injurious accident. By gunning it past stopped traffic, you make the accident unavoidable and more serious.
Without wanting to paint with too broad a brush, I would say in my experience driving in 10x countries, U.S. drivers, being most habituated to spending their lives in cars, drive in the most distracted, least careful way. Especially in places where the typology is the U.S. default of low-density, car-oriented sprawl. Accordingly there are an appaling number of deaths and injuries on the road: 1 in 43,750 people dies each year in the U.K. in automobile accidents vs. 1 in 8,500 in the U.S.A.
Inb4 deaths per mile driven, I'd argue higher VMT in the U.S.A. only proves the point - too many cars being driven too much because of silly land use. High VMT is acutally a symptom of a dangerous mobility system as much as a cause.
Add to that the relative ease to get a license in the US, and the level of punishment for breaking the laws.
I (an American) was on holiday and Switzerland and was explained the process of getting your license back if you lose it. It is a big disincentive to driving badly and putting yourself at risk of that, to be sure.
Adding on to this, a common reaction I see to online videos of driving incidents is "why did this person just stop? of course you are going to crash into them. They shouldn't have stopped" and many people agreeing with it. It seems they are blind to the fact that if the following driver was using a safe following distance and speed, they should easily be able to stop, making the incident the fault of the driver following too close, not the one stopping.
I haven't checked on this in a long time, but IIRC, the insurance company will always blame the person in back in a rear-end collision, for just this reason. A rear-end collision should always be avoidable.
Usually but not always. A common insurance scam is to pass a car, cut in just in front of it, then brake hard causing a collision. Dash cams video is a good thing to have to fight this if it happens to you.
No, even then. If a car cuts in front of you, you have at least a few seconds of time to start making space for them, and once they are in front of you, you should immediately make a safe amount of space between you and them.
Yes, in a country where safe driving is not internalized you will inevitable have someone rear-ending you while doing this, but if the options are "accident where you're at fault" and "accident where you're not at fault", pick the latter.
Some degree of road safety depends on predictable behavior. I haven’t seen those videos, but suddenly executing a panic stop on the freeway for no good reason at all increases everyone’s risk, even if the car behind you is following at a safe distance. Obviously the following driver bears the most responsibility, but erratic drivers shouldn’t be held to be morally blameless.
People don’t usually act erratically for no reason. Maybe they suddenly stop because they see a deer sprinting towards the road off in the distance, and the person behind them didn’t see it. There are tons of reasons that look like they “erratically stop”, which are actually genuine safe behavior that the other may not know about.
I learned next-level defensive driving by bicycle commuting to work 5.5 miles each way on busy roads in rush hour traffic. On a bicycle you're invisible, and if you expect any less, you're going to get hurt. As it was, I had some very very close calls- at least one of them had the potential to be fatal. Ironically, the only time I ever crashed was my own fault.
But now even when in a car, I retain that "I'm invisible" mentality, which makes me much more aware of what other drivers are doing, and much more skeptical of their ability to make good decisions. This has saved me several times.
The landing page video's first incident is a car coming from behind and from the right, cutting off the filming car. The filming car didn't react at all when instant (but measured) braking would've been safer to start building a distance buffer.
One thing HPDE taught me is that most people under brake in dangerous situations because they simply don't know the limit of their vehicle nor the sensitivity range of the brake pedal.
The hard braking heuristic makes sense when estimating risk of road segments, but not as a proxy for driver competence.
It certainly makes sense as a proxy for competence across a diverse population for insurance purposes. You have a baseline of hard braking events that a competent driver may encounter under normal circumstances. If a driver routinely exceeds that number, they are either unable to correctly estimate closing distance and reaction times, which makes them higher risk for causing accidents, or they are driving abnormally aggressively, which also makes them a higher risk for causing accidents. If you consistently put yourself in situations where hard braking is required, it doesn't matter what your skill is, you've reduced your safety margins and an accident is statistically more probable. You said it correctly with "would've been safer to start building a distance buffer", that is the proxy the insurance companies want to use for risk assessment.
35 years without an accident on my record isn't because I'm a magnificent driver, it's because I always try to leave a way out for when something unexpected happens, because the unexpected _does_ happen.
The fact that some people may have the skill to drive more aggressively means nothing in the aggregate as far as insurance companies are concerned. If you are skilled enough to drive in that manner, you are skilled enough to avoid it as well. It's simply statistics.
> You said it correctly with "would've been safer to start building a distance buffer", that is the proxy the insurance companies want to use for risk assessment.
Then use it? Mandate reaction speed tests or other driving mechanics competency evaluation (not road sign comprehension) and watch insurance margins explode.
The driver in my example did poorly and scored top marks in the heuristic.
> building a distance buffer", that is the proxy the insurance companies want to use for risk assessment.
The cam car did not need to have a hard braking event (HBE) to start building distance.
Even if they did, the insurance companies are looking for a pattern of HBEs to assess risk. I agree that there is a theoretical high-risk driver that never has a HBE because they always try to maneuver instead of breaking. There are other heuristics for this (high lateral acceleration, high jerk). And the ultimate heuristic: failing to avoid accidents, thus having a claim history.
> One thing HPDE taught me is that most people under brake in dangerous situations because they simply don't know the limit of their vehicle nor the sensitivity range of the brake pedal.
On any modern car, just push it all the way and let ABS and stability control figure it out, and don't let the vibrating brake pedal spook you into releasing it. That's just ABS doing its thing.
Really though, getting a license is too easy in the USA. We really need to require some sort of car control course, including obstacle avoidance in the rain. Would be really nice too if it included an obstacle avoidance course in two cars: A huge SUV or pick-up truck and a more reasonably sized sedan. So many drivers think they need a huge vehicle to be safe while being completely unaware of how well smaller cars can likely avoid the crashes to begin with. Would probably get really expensive really quickly, though.
One thing I noticed among dash cam videos is very often the person recording and publishing the video will keep on driving closely behind another car that is clearly driving erratically. Maybe he will honk, but he won't brake or leave any safety distance, and seconds later the idiot's car, which has been behaving weirdly in front of him the whole time, causes him to crash.
I realize this may come off as victim blaming, but I feel you should have an obligation to not endanger yourself even if by the laws of the road you are technically in the right. I would rather get cut off by and idiot and be at my destination thirty seconds later than having to deal with car repairs even when it is legally speaking not my fault.
> Early clock - keeps time anywhere between 0 and 10 minutes fast. For those who like to set their watch ahead to avoid being late. This clock keeps you from trying to "compensate," because you never know how early it is at the moment.
That's pretty genius for many ADHD-type folks. Only problem is a modern household has many clocks in view, so you'd need to commit to just not setting them.
Oh now that would be a fun version 2 challenge: have all the clocks in one household synchronize such that they're all early by the same amount at any given time.
Easy enough for wifi enabled ones: a UDP broadcast to discover other clocks on the network, then sync how you will.
For non-wifi-enabled clocks, perhaps something like a CH572 would do the trick: a $0.20 RISC-V microcontroller with BLE support that all the clocks in the same vicinity could use to talk to each other.
You could really mess with your neighbors if they had the same clocks and you were within range...
Looking at the code [1], it looks like if the actual time is 1 hour ahead of the displayed time, then we get 10 pulses per second to leap forward. Otherwise, the clock stops running for an hour to fall back.
You have two choices: either assume everyone is asleep at 2 am and won't notice when it happens, or else advance 11 hours. My LaCrosse clock does the latter.
And that's pretty much fine for a project like this, seeing as most (all?) locations jump you between DST and not DST at night. So the clock will be off at most for an hour during the night.
The author seems to mistake having to update Node.js for a security patch to be a curse rather than a blessing.
The alternative is that your bespoke solution has undiscovered security vulnerabilities, probably no security community, and no easy fix for either of those.
You get the privilege of patching Node.js.
Similarly, as a hiring manager, you can hire a React developer. You can't hire a "proprietary AI coded integrated project" developer.
This piece seems to say more about React than it says about a general shift in software engineering.
Don't like React? Easiest it's ever been not to use it.
Don't like libraries, abstractions and code reuse in general? Avoid them at your peril. You will quickly reach the frontier of your domain knowledge and resourcing, and start producing bespoke square wheels without a maintenance plan.
Yeah, I really don't get it. So instead of using someone else's framework, you're using an AI to write a (probably inferior and less thoroughly tested and considered) framework. And your robot employee is probably pulling a bunch of stuff (not quite verbatim, of course) from existing relevant open source frameworks anyway. Big whoop?
It's quite easy to make things without react, it's not our fault that business leaders don't let devs choose how to solve problems but hey who am I to complain? React projects allow me to pay my bills! I've never seen a good "react" project yet and I've been working professionally with react since before class components were a thing.
Every react code base has their own unique failures due to npm ecosystem, this will never change. In fact, the best way to anticipate what kind patterns are in a given react project is to look at their package.json.
This speech is anything but clear from an engineering or analytical perspective.
"Outsized success" is always in relation to the value of the allocated resources. "Conventional success" is making slightly more than liquidating those resources and following a passive investment strategy, like index funds yielding 8% APR.
So what "Satya" is saying here is "I want higher risk, higher reward strategies", but "don't be unlucky" (don't "make a habit of" failure).
I'm no exec, but I'm my opinion, this is a poor strategy in the consumer and especially enterprise software and services space.
"Satya" is wrong: there are 3 knobs. The missing knob is risk allocation. This works in two ways: some areas are intrinsically risky, and some areas you choose to take risk in. Either way, you allocate that risk with strategy and resource allocation (the other two knobs). If an area can't fail, you may spend more resources to de-risk or hedge, or strategically avoid change or the area. If an area has outsized opportunity, the strategy and allocation takes more risk there.
"Satya" is telling the whole room that their area should favor high-risk, high reward strategy and allocation, when he should be telling them that they must determine if their area should favor or avoid risk to maximize the entire company's return on investment.
The real estate team should not be a risk center. It should not fire 90% of the janitors in favor of "AI first" robot vacuums. It should not decide that real estate as a service (WeWork) is a good strategy over buying real estate in advance of need. It should avoid capacity crunches while putting holdings in LLCs to reduce downside risk. It should vertically integrate the data centers (land, connectivity, power, water, regulation/politics/PR).
Lots of Microsoft failures look like risk misallocation to me. Windows phone was allocated risk too late in moving away from Windows CE. Windows Vista took too much risk and failed to release until features were rolled back. Windows 11 (financialization of the OS) seems like they are betting the farm to secure some ad and subscription revenue, and keep their low margin PC maker partners happy, while they make the platform the least attractive it's ever been.
In my mind, Satya is demanding outsized returns from the resources he’s allocated to them. He is delegating strategy to them. What we get and what Microsoft produces is a product of a dysfunctional organization without any coherent strategy. Slapping Copilot on existing products is not a strategy.
You make a good point I think the blog post still works.
"The real estate team should not be a risk center." - Why not? Sure, I agree with you it doesn't make a ton of sense _to me_ to fire 90% of the janitors.
Satya said he wants his team to be "Intellectually honest".
I'd argue that a plan to fire 90% of the janitors today is not that realistic, but if some real estate exec thinks they honestly have a plan that could be successful, are tracking data, and change their plan if they're wrong - what's the problem?
Maybe they're crazy enough to have figured something out we don't know....or not in which case Satya says you'll be gone if you make it a habit.
> Risk is much more tolerable in the last mile than the first one
Is that objectively true? I think you could also make the argument the other way that things compound when you innovate at the root.
I think it's your opinion that that's the case, and it generally makes sense to me as well, but I'm still saying it's a judgement call.
There are a lot of things / decisions at a company that don't strictly matter for the customer immediately but they still eventually matter for the customer - because they have a downstream impact. In this case, maybe you save that money and spend it somewhere else.
Just in case anyone thinks this doesn't apply to them: self-driving cars and taxis are robots (just not "industrial").
They also operate in an adversarial environment, where other drivers, pedestrians, etc. need to be safeguarded, but also can't be trusted with an e-stop.
So make it allowed that the insurance is tied to the gun. You buy a lifetime policy for that serial number, provide payment, and you're done. Payment can be provided anonymously at a window in cash, if that's your thing.
If you want discounts because you live in a low-crime area, have a gun safe, have many guns, etc. then obviously the storage location for the weapon needs to be declared to the insurance company.
The scammer will show up to a bar in Bucharest. They are probably not even legally allowed in the U.S.
None of this scam requires the scammer to be in the U.S.
Even the New York driver's license, even if it is real, could be muled. More likely it is just a photoshop.
And even if they do show up to the meet, what are you going to do? Call the police? Will they even show up quickly? When they do, whose photo ID will the believe? Seems like a good way to spend a night at the station while the police sort some things out.
What is it about mobile phone chipsets that makes the unsuitable for a TV stick or STB?
Is it that there is special TV-specific hardware like tuners, HW accelerated audio and video decoders, and PQ/AQ accelerators?
Apple has adapter their A15 chipsets for use in the Apple TV, so it seems possible. But obviously the Apple TV products don't have tuners, aren't driving a display natively, and probably don't have enough I/O interfaces to add all the extra hardware you'd need to embed it in a panel or STB.
It's a good question and I'm not actually sure as I'm not a hardware guy, just a user who's looked into these productz. So far, the popular Android TV set-top boxes (or sticks) I've seen use SoCs that seem dedicated to set-top applications. It may that mobile phone chipsets have different integration to support cellular modems and air interfaces.
There are some boxes which use use Android instead of Android TV but these tend to require using versions of the streaming apps made for mobile phones. I haven't really looked into these as they tend not to work well with remote controls so I haven't been interested.
More like a few seconds.
Every car that merges in front of you only costs you their following distance. If the average following distance is 1 second, then you are simply 1 second slower than you'd have otherwise been. So unless this is happening continuously every 30 seconds on your 30 minute commute, you will lose less than a minute.
The "but if I kept reasonable following distance, people will keep merging in front of me and I'll lose time" excuse is pretty thin given this analysis.
And an insurance claim can easily eat 40 hours of time between the insurance companies, other lawyers, buying a new car, medical appointments and recovery. That's 19,200 minutes you won't get back, or about 52 years of driving 1 minute slower each day.
Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
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