As the article says, the problem with destination dispatch is that it 'locks in' an elevator. The passenger gets told at call time what elevator to go to, and it can't change that mid flight. RSR has the advantage that the passenger has no idea which elevator will come, and so RSR can change the elevator they will get in real-time as conditions change. This was an insight I had not considered before reading the article.
The way I've seen it work is that there's a touch screen in the elevator lobby. You tap a floor, and then screen will say "Car C" (along with an audible message). The problem is that then the system can't reassign you to a different car after that. You'll typically have a bunch of different people going to a bunch of different floors, and there would be no reliable way to communicate to each individual their new assignment. Each car will also typically display which floors it's going to when it arrives. I suppose that, rather than assigning a car immediately, you could have passengers check cars as they arrive to see if they're going to their desired floor. Then the system could do reassignment, but people would be scrambling to check every car to see if it's the right one for them, and that's assuming that they understood the system. It would be way too chaotic in practice.
Little extra "fun" anecdote: my building has two banks of eight elevators, each servicing 20 or so floors, and has six destination dispatch kiosks: one at each end and the middle of each bank. The kiosks originally had nice metal buttons for each floor and you could easily tap yours as you walked by.
Sometime during Covid, the metal buttons were replaced with glass touch screens – which are totally unreadable on sunny days, because in our stunning glass-ceilinged atrium mezzanine they sit directly in sunbeams[0]. So now you have to walk up to the kiosk, shade it with your body, and squint at the screen to make out where to touch it.
You could give each one a diceware-eff-wordlist-like "ID" when they input where they want to go, perhaps have a "group" and "single" button/column per destination in the menu as well to inform the elevator if it's a group traveling together, and importantly have a fast-food-pickup-counter style dispatch screen up top visible from the waiting "hall", that assigns you a cab with an appropriate notice/heads-up period so you can make your way over to the assigned cab.
Display a set of floors on a big overhead screen (in floor order so they're easy to find), have the "elevator" column blank until the elevator is assigned, and let them watch the column that's going to show them which elevator to use.
But yes, this seems like a case of "unfortunately, people".
I think the problem with simulations like this is that it doesn't include the chaos of innatentive humans.
Forcing functions that dump people into well defined funnels can have such a high net positive effect it more than makes up for theoretical losses.
It's like narrow, hard road bike tires losing performance because of deflection from rough road surfaces and how long it took designers to factor that in to real bikes.
Kind of like airplane boarding. The ideal algorithm would be to make people board from back to front, and from window to aisle. However, people are not disciplined enough to strictly sort themselves, they won't all take the same time to sit, and some people want to board together (family with children for example).
Apparently, the fastest known way to fill up a plane in real-life conditions is to let people board in random order, without pre-assigning a seat.
Seems like the obvious solution is to put a bank of floor numbers above each elevator and when one arrives the floors it has been assigned to go to light up and the people going to them get in that one. So each person only needs to quickly to see if it's going to their floor or not, much like they need to look to see if it's going up or down. Then you can dynamically dispatch elevators right up until 5s or so before it arrives at a floor, with full knowledge of not just up/down but also destination. (And hell make 'em say how many people are in their party too so you also know how many people are traveling and where.)
100% agree with this. The irony of this article critical of AI development culture is that the author used AI to write it.
The 'not a, not b, but c' writing style used to be _effective_. If someone wrote that way I paid attention because it was good writing. But because it is everywhere now, it has ceased to be effective, and it has the opposite effect. My mental heuristic sees this and zones out now.
We (in the tech industry) did this to ourselves. The internet my kids have is very different than the internet I had in the 90s. Algorithmically optimized short form video or other content in an infinite scroll is hurting children so much it borders on abuse. They have no brain capability to resist the micro-dopamine hits we are so scientifically delivering to them. The biggest tragedy is that it hits the lower income kids the worst - the ones whose parents are around less often to monitor their device usage.
Parents and policy makers have noticed that their kids attention spans are lower, their ability to read and reason is lower, and most alarming their ability to socialize suffers. Of course they are going to try and stop it. Requiring age verification, and putting the onus on the social media sites seems like a way to do this. We are able to verify ages for all sorts of things online, e.g. gambling sites, opening bank accounts, etc. It shouldn't be too hard for social media sites to figure out how to require age verification to create an account that can access their service.
Part of the reason we had the internet we did when we were kids was because it was so new and open. It still is just as new and open! It's mostly that large sites have emerged, and people have decided they like those more than forums, etc.
I have no idea why tbh! But I think an age gated internet is far worse a solution than parents simply enabling device management on mobile phones and filtering on their home networks.
Isn’t there a strong argument that we put too many students in debt with a partially completed or useless degree in a well meaning push for “college for all”? The triumph the author describes - an increase in colleges - came at the expense of a reduction in vocational schools and programs.
Nearly half of college graduates age 22-27 are underemployed (i.e. such that bachelors degrees have jobs that only require a high school diploma or less):
According to https://archive.is/Gyl7y the usual suspects do poorly, such as performance arts, but also things like criminal justice, environmental studies and many of the STEM majors are near or over the 50% mark as well.
People trot out the "college grads earn more" lines ad nauseum but the numbers haven't been looking good for that argument for years.
> all of the STEM majors are near or over the 50% mark as well.
I am not seeing that? Computer Science, to use an easy example, is 19.1% underemployed. Bad, but not 50%. Even restricted to 'recent graduates' it does not look that grim? If I'm misreading the data, please correct me. I have kids approaching the age where they will be considering post-secondary choices so I am trying to keep an eye on things.
Edit: apologies, I just noticed my original comment said "all" instead of "many". That definitely isn't case as you noted.
Original:
Animal and plant sciences: 53%
Biochem: 42
Biology: 51
Chemistry: 42
Engineering technologies: 44
Medical technician: 47
Miscellaneous Biological Science: 47
Miscellaneous Technologies: 49
Those were the ones that caught my eye. I'm assuming the "miscellaneous" categories are for higher degrees in very niche or specific sub fields.
STEM covers all of science, math and tech outside of medicine/ health care, so the computer science and engineering tracks are okay. Even then, I'd be a little suspect, as I'd heard elsewhere that the number of graduates has increased by 110% but the market for jobs hasn't. The good old days of ZIRP and wildly too-small talent pool are likely over for good.
To my own discredit, I do often forget the S in STEM ;-). Thank you for improving the completeness of my knowledge with data.
I've long been under the impression (might be quite wrong, of course) that a number of science fields suffer from a problem where bachelor's degrees have very little practical value because the career expectation in the field is a graduate degree.
This is probably bias on my part since my most direct exposure to the phenomenon is a couple of my extended family members who got degrees in biology but then exited higher education. They can't get jobs in biology, they are stuck working jobs that would have been just as attainable right out of high school.
Wouldn't it also mean, that while ⅕ of CS grads initially work as support (for example), the people with just the education needed for that (vocational school) didn't get that job, because it went to someone with a better degree?
So it's not that bad after all. At least you got the job, while somebody else didn't.
This is just me thinking. Never been to the US and I'm guessing that's what the discussion is about.
Not necessarily. Many employers who don't require a college degree can be reluctant to hire someone who is "over qualified" because they are more likely to quit as soon as they get a better job, and they are more likely to keep looking for one.
With that said, there's also a lot of jobs that list a college degree as a requirement that absolutely don't need one whatsoever. I suspect this is largely to cut down on the number of applicants.
Back when applications were done on paper, I recall turning one in to a prospective employer, who set it on a stack of paper around 15cm tall, which just so happened to be right next to a trash can. Now that you can apply to 50 jobs in an hour because job application sites basically pre-fill applications for you, it's insane what hiring is like in any city bigger than a small town.
there was almost certainly a demand issue with graduates of technical schools. Also increased privatization leading to some really awful scammy institutions. I personally went to college and washed out, and would have been much better served by getting schooled in the trades, but I think this is really a pretty bad multi-dimensional corner we've backed ourselves into (primary, secondary, and post-graduate schooling, employment).
Discussions and concerns we simply dont have in Europe. There are costs, but nothing significant from public schools themselves, rather just accommodation, food, travel etc. Some folks still go to private ones, but those are mostly not for extra prestige but rather different focus, or those who are not that great students themselves.
Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
It costs something, but doesnt have to be ridiculous. Apart from infrastructure and basic security & defense(since we have russia trying to conquer us all in Europe) the only really valuable investments.
> Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
The test of Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" is a pretty good way of cutting through the details and getting to what matters: if you had to be reborn as someone in any country (or, had to choose between two, if we wanted to e.g. rank them), and you couldn't control anything about the circumstances (race, social status, money, intelligence level, disabled or not, et c.) but were leaving it up to a die roll based on the demographics of the place—which would you choose? The ones you're more-inclined to choose are the better ones.
And yeah, stuff like ensuring the worst-likely-case for a resident isn't that bad, and that you get a significant helping hand to improve your lot, helps a ton to make a country more appealing, in this sort of thought experiment. Far, far more than e.g. making sure the few very-best-off really run away with the prize (which improves the appeal of such a place basically not at all).
In the US there've historically been great work and wealth-generating opportunities that weren't as readily available in Europe. That seems to come at the price of less safety net if something goes wrong e:g health problems, disability, job loss. In recent times Europe has become more like the US in the sense of cutting safety nets while being more entrepreneurial. I think this'll lead to less people choosing to move to the US from Europe, compounded by US now having possibly less opportunities and an administration that makes even well qualified legal immigrants feel unsafe. Which will become self-fulfilling, the opportunities of the future will increasingly be outside the US. As to why more Americans haven't historically moved to Europe, my guess would be its simply unawareness of how actually for a lot of people it'd give a better quality of life.
Beaming energy always sucks. Without some very fundamental discoveries in physics nobody will every make this work economically. This isn't just an engineering problem, it's a physics problem.
I recently rented a tesla from hertz - I had made sure my hotel had charging in it's parking lot. I arrive at the hotel to find that the tesla was missing it's j1772 adapter, which is what the hotel charger required. I had to hunt down a supercharger and hang out there for an hour. Pretty lame. When I returned the car I complained and was told that there is no guarantee from hertz that the adapter will be included. Without the guarantee renting an a tesla is a scary prospect - I probably won't do it again.
this from someone who has a model y at home as my daily driver and I love it.
the board was about to vaporize employee equity overnight - the secondary was days away and would have been life changing for many employees and significant for all of them. SA is probably a great a leader but the financial incentives for the employees to support him and ensure the secondary went through were huuuuuuge
Thats putting the carriage before the horse. How did the valuation get there, particularly when it did it before M$off, GOOG, etc?
It was the team. Who put the team together?
We will never know if OpenAI would have succeeded w/o SA. That's unfalsifiable. But they got to a life changing equity because the CEO helped get it there.
My point: SA was likely putting the scaffolding of a 2nd home run in place, right as the board got scared of being on 3rd base going for the run.
And therein lies the problem. The BoD was not playing the long game.
Yep, the boards failure occurred when they allowed the profit motive to take control of the organization. The crisis was merely a manifestation of the inevitable.
How did you market it and do you think listing on mls, having an agent show the house, or paying a buyers broker fee would have gotten you more and higher offers?
We didn’t market it. My found our current house through a friend. The wife of the couple that owned the house and my wife hit it off. They sold the house to use at well below market rate (in fact, afterwards we got a letter from the county tax office basically asking “uh… you bought this house well below the market rate… how did that happen?”). We figured out how much we needed to sell our old house for everything to work out. We told friends that we were looking for a buyer for our house and someone had a coworker that was interested. They came and looked at it and bought it for what we wanted. Everyone was happy at the end of the day.
That’s a great story! Do you know why your friend was willing to sell below market? Was it just 6% below market - what they would have spent on fees anyway?
Well, they built the house (the husband was a contractor). It’s an integrated concrete form (ICF) house. They raised their family in the house and had lived in it long enough that it was all paid off. They didn’t want it to go to just anyone, so they asked us how much we wanted to pay and we came to an agreement on a number. They wanted to build a smaller retirement house and were just looking for enough to build that house (as in, they planned on building it themselves).
I put mine on Zillow after interviewing a realtor and it sold for $1,000 less than the maximum amount he realtor said I could expect. Since I didn't have to pay his commission I came out ahead by a lot.
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