I suspect that this would result in absurdly long routes. Imagine trying to go up a mountain while minimizing grade... you'd end up zig-zagging back and forth endlessly.
Isn’t that exactly how you build a trail up a mountainside? They are usually a series of switchbacks.
Most people on most bikes can only take so much grade before climbing becomes impossible. A maximum grade setting would be very helpful for that exact reason.
Oh, yeah, I interpreted the parent comment as "minimize the grade" but if it's instead "keep grade below threshold" (for reasonable thresholds) that would make more sense.
I feel like even if the distances are equal, it's faster to walk a bike up a steep grade and bike the rest flat than it is to bike up a moderate grade the whole way. This topic has probably been discussed somewhere else.
People can generally only output their max power for short durations. The output level they can sustain is generally much lower. I bet you could try to model higher limits for short distances, but what those should be could vary greatly depending on personal fitness.
I think that too favors walking the bike up the incline. Anyone able-bodied should be able to do it, some faster than others, but biking up an SF incline is more hit or miss, especially when considering different bikes.
My reasoning for the bike-hike being faster is that legs are designed for it. Legs are only inefficient on flatter ground because you have no equivalent of high gear (like extendible legs), so all that torque is going to waste.
That's some of it too, but in a way legs aren't all that different from wheels in how they work. Most of it is the gearing. Like there's a gear on every mountain bike that will make your feet go down at the same intervals as walking. That sucks on flat terrain. Legs are also not perfectly designed to push pedals, especially for people who don't bike often.
Unless you are on foot (and even then) the route needs to follow existing roads, you can only zig zag as much as existing roads do it not endlessly.
And almost any practical routing system will have a mechanism for tradeoffs of different aspects. Often there is a distance/time tradeoff which directly relates to speed on corresponding segments. But the tradeoff can also be in the form of "on average x seconds spent waiting green light in each intersection or time to stop before railroad crossing. So there is no reason for a system optimizing grade to completely ignore all other factors, it's just a question of weights and curves of each of them.
Like the ascent to Mt. Hamilton (southern Bay Area). You can see the peak for like an hour but so much twisting back and forth, going mostly perpendicular to the max gradient. It is an old road and hence graded for mules to carry up telescopes.
I think it's got two components - first, people don't actually understand the tenants of mainstream EA. For instance, some people think that one of the core principles of EA is "make as much money as possible at any cost", which is incorrect.
Second, EA is a small movement with an above average amount of crazy people (IE someone who does think you should make as much money as possible at any cost), who then basically monopolize the media attention. This then feeds into the first component.
EA is in a fairly bad spot where nobody seems to be really attempting to understand it or meaningfully engage with it's ideas, instead just parroting the same few talking points (SBF anyone?)
Is it just me or is this a pattern that's been repeating throughout our society. Let me know if you see this too.
Step one somebody comes up with a philosophy that would be a big improvement on what we've all been doing.
Step two people start living it and it seems to work for them. It seems to make them happy and it seems to make the world a better place.
Step three dark tetrad types show up and hijack the good thing as cover for the bad things they're doing. It's a wolf in sheep's clothing type maneuver.
Step four people who have never engaged with the philosophy recognize that there's lots of dark tetrad people hiding under it and start using the philosophy as a heuristic for bad person.
Step five the authentic practitioners start to question whether the good thing was really good because people treat them like they're bad for it.
I think they're valuable, both because they get you to think through the actual functionality (and underlying implementation) of the software, and the make sure that you and the [person you're developing for] are roughly on the same page. Plus, every edge case or design issue you catch while writing the spec saves you a ton of time.
That said, I think a big weakness of specs is that it's just not possible to write a perfect spec that doesn't have any blind spots and covers all the edge cases and issues you'll run into when actually developing. This makes it more difficult to hold the customer accountable to the spec, since you (the designer and devs) can't really be accountable to the spec unless you want to deliver some overly literal, not-actually-helpful product.
Fun piece of trivia, Joel published one of his functional specs.[0]
As a huge fan of Joel's writing and engineering ideas, I was actually underwhelmed by his spec. It wasn't bad but it also felt like he missed a lot of opportunities to articulate design decisions to the reader more quickly or clearly.
One obvious mistake is that there's over a page (in a 20-page spec) just dedicated to coding conventions and what prefixes variable names will have. I think Joel later conceded that it was a mistake to cover naming conventions in a spec, though I can't find a link now.
I definitely agree that it's not perfect. I think he's a great starting point though, because when trying to get engineers to document stuff (something typically approached with similar enthusiasm to having their teeth removed with a hammer) it really helps if the "how to write a spec" doc is somewhat fun to read.
Unrelated - I really dig your "my [x]th year as a bootstraped founder" series.
Everyone writing off AI-related risk in this thread should think about what would need to happen for them to consider AI a serious existential risk. It can be outlandish and unlikely (close call with a bioweapon? unsupervised persistence in a data center?) but people should honestly call their shots and then stick with them.
No. The person making the improbable argument is required to provide an affirmative case for that argument.
It's not my job to make the argument for them.
For what it's worth, I have done your suggested exercise, and I find every causal link (including the ones brought up by luminaries like Amodei) to be outrageous and poorly argued. But it's not my job expend effort to make their outrageous arguments better.
But it doesn't do that. "Imagine how you'll be wrong in the future" is just as shiftable as anything else, and has the distinct rhetorical advantage of being unfalsifiable.
The substantive difference is that you're asking me to dream up ridiculously improbable scenarios, which is probably the actual point. Just like "The End is Near Accept Jesus" guy on the street corner gets what he wants as soon as I engage.
To quote a famous movie about doomy AI scenarios: "the only winning move is not to play."
I think I'm coming across as confrontational, which is genuinely not my intention - sorry about that. Not trying to score points or anything, just encourage people to introspect a bit :)
I think your viewpoint is totally valid, and I'm not trying to argue against it.
The bar is high, but there's probably some combination of events (combined with a high confidence in my own lucidity over an extended period of time) that would convince me.
It can be subjective, because it's internal to you and not something that gets litigated or whatever. A close call is anything that you personally consider to be a close call.
I'm not asking you to post it here, I'm asking you to think about it and then remember it in the future, should the event ever occur.
I'm not asking for justification, just for people to introspect about what, if anything, it would take for them to consider AI a serious threat. No justification needed, and really no need to post it here, just think about it and remember it in the future.
At this point, the most likely scenario for AI producing a serious existential risk is making us all want to bash our heads in because of "the honest options" and other claude-isms.
I was surprised at the high voltage required… but resistance loss scales with the square of amperage, so it makes sense that for long distance power transmission, you have to keep amperage low and voltage high.
The total came to roughly $150 for the cards and another $100 for shipping + import fees -- so roughly $8 each. That's more than I hoped, but the ENIG finish, 0.8mm thickness, and higher-quality silkscreen added up.
If I were to purchase, say, 150, the marginal cost would go down greatly, and $8 is low enough that I'm still happy to give them to folks at career fairs.
