We're still moving thousands of pounds of vehicle around a public highway to carry a 1lb burrito, obviously lightweight aerial drones are the future for food and grocery delivery.
Unless you're cooking at home, you'd still move thousands of pounds of vehicle to drive to the restaurant, so I'm not sure that food delivery is really any worse.
It could be a lot better if multiple deliveries are handled per trip.
High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants. We're seeing restaurant apocalypse happening in places like Seattle and Denver, because high wages result in high prices which causes lower customer volume which causes higher fixed costs per unit, which causes a death spiral. Denver, for example, has 30% fewer restaurants now, because it's so hard to run one profitably.
Lots of little tasty restaurants and high wages for service staff are basically incompatible. Many people in the city don't realize this and advocate for both.
Of course, high wages are desirable if they can be accomplished without tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs are there.
High minimum wages favor high-volume, fast service chain restaurants that are more labor efficient.
Perhaps eventually automation will relax this tradeoff, but I would expect automation to primarily benefit corporate restaurant chains over small local eateries, unless the automation is so general that any restaurant can start using it without technical expertise or R&D.
I think it’s first order the rent (commercial) and second order the wages needed to pay rents (residential). Having seen the rents in the major cities I don’t know how people manage - it’s insanity.
Restaurants are for those who are cash rich, but time poor.
The cheapest way to eat is to buy ingredients and cook it yourself.
Restaurants buy ingredients, and cook, but also have to add costs like rent and labor. Thus as money supply constricts businesses like restaurants see a slow down in customers.
The current economic policies in the US are explicitly designed to raise the prices of goods and services like health care. This will, as a first order effect, reduce the disposable cash available.
Restaurants will suffer first, they are a luxury easily and quickly discarded. But they are the canary. Expect to see all kinds of businesses, especially small businesses suffer, as these policies play out.
And just remember, you voted for this, and many people explicitly support these policies and their effects. These are not bugs, they are explicit design goals.
So sure, I'm not saying 100% of people voted for this. The "you" in this context is 2nd person plural; the collective "you".
As you note, democracy is the will of the majority imposed on the minority. Personally I'm not convinced that's a great approach, but I'm also not a fan of minority rule either. Ultimately I guess, whenever there are choices to be made, someone's not going to like the outcomes.
I sympathize with your current plight. Welcome to the minority. My only approach at this point is to keep reminding people that they chose this, that their vote matters. Perhaps when people understand that causal link then they'll make better choices in their own interest. (Whom I kidding right?)
It is not the (not actually high) minimum wages. Stores I've known that had problems staying open were having to pay more than the minimum wage because housing is so expensive.
Yeah, the ice cream parlor in my neighborhood in Seattle was at one point advertising $27/hr to scoop ice cream because the housing shortage and worker shortage was so tough. That’s well above minimum.
I posted this yesterday on an unrelated thread but it is again relevant here: every problem in Anglo societies comes back to property and housing prices.
Thanks for the recommendation! I went looking for a Kindle edition, and unsurprisingly for a book from the late 19th century, there are quite a few of varying quality. I downloaded several of the free samples, and this one may be my favorite:
It was edited, abridged, and translated to modern language by Bob Drake of the Henry George School of Chicago.
As always, I recommend downloading the free Kindle sample or reading the free preview on the website before buying.
Here's an example, the first two paragraphs of the Preface in the original language:
---
THE views herein set forth were in the main briefly stated in a pamphlet entitled “Our Land and Land Policy,” published in San Francisco in 1871. I then intended, as soon as I could, to present them more fully, but the opportunity did not for a long time occur. In the meanwhile I became even more firmly convinced of their truth, and saw more completely and clearly their relations; and I also saw how many false ideas and erroneous habits of thought stood in the way of their recognition, and how necessary it was to go over the whole ground.
This I have here tried to do, as thoroughly as space would permit. It has been necessary for me to clear away before I could build up, and to write at once for those who have made no previous study of such subjects, and for those who are familiar with economic reasoning; and, so great is the scope of the argument that it has been impossible to treat with the fullness they deserve many of the questions raised. What I have most endeavored to do is to establish general principles, trusting to my readers to carry further their applications where this is needed.
---
And in the modern edition:
---
In 1871, I first published these ideas in a pamphlet entitled Our Land and Land Policy. Over time, I became even more convinced of their truth. Seeing that many misconceptions blocked their recognition, a fuller explanation seemed necessary. Still, it was impossible to answer all the questions as fully as they deserve. I have tried to establish general principles, trusting readers to extend their application.
While this book may be best appreciated by those familiar with economics, no previous study is needed to understand its argument or to judge its conclusions. I have relied upon facts of common knowledge and common observation, which readers can verify for themselves. They can also decide whether the reasoning is valid.
A different analysis of the same situation could be that there were actually too many restaurants that were not profitable and thus couldn't pay their workers a living wage thus needing to close down.
And maybe also that people don't have the means (anymore) to go to the restaurant every other day.
At least in Seattle, I believe the high minimum wage is due to CoL in the city, which is very high due to rent cost, which is high because of geography and not building a lot. If there was a building boom which led to a surplus of rental units, and rents went down, you wouldn't need such a high minimum wage.
I thought Seattle has started addressing the housing shortage? At some point though for a rapidly growing city you can’t really lower housing prices below the cost of building housing, and construction labor and cost of materials becomes a constraining factor (5 story housing projects can’t be built super cheaply).
WA state added a law to override local zoning regulations in order to encourage density.
I have seen new multi apartment construction in Ballard, Cap Hill, and some other places, but there is a construction backlog going on for years.
Also, the problem in Seattle, same as SF, is that there are too many SFHs vs multi apartment buildings/townhomes.
It will take several years until offer surpasses demand.
Seattle will always have high real estate prices due to its relatively high desirability in the world. What it doesn't have is a large supply of immigrants and/or illegal immigrants willing to work for low wages in restaurants, like NYC and California.
I'm sure it'd be better to find graphs about King County or the greater Seattle area, but I found these graphs from the City of Seattle [1]. What I get from the graph is that there is growth in housing units, but there's also growth in population, so there's probably a lot of years at the current trends, before the housing shortage is 'satisfied'.
Thanks for providing the data. I think that backs up my assertion that Seattle doesn't have a housing shortage as such.
The relative growth in housing units since 2010 has been higher than the relative growth in population and jobs, so housing price growth since 2010 can't be explained by a shortage of supply.
The issue is that the rapid pace of growth means there isn't much old stock housing on the market to provide cheaper options to homebuyers -- most of the housing on the market will be new stock for which the minimum price will be driven by the cost of construction.
I've been seeing that housing supply / demand and pricing is complicated by many other factors beyond population. It can less or more obvious depending on location.
I've watched one of my favorite cities housing go crazy because of many factors including investors buying up properties for airbnb, developers focusing on catering to the coming influx of higher paid amazon / oracle people, and so many betting on those future increases that everything else goes up.
Adding to that, becoming a popular place for people to buy a second (or third / fourth home) - whether it's for a temporary move, to shelter their kids going to college who have chosen here instead of Chicago, trying a lower tax place to move with remote work being easier post 2020, etc..
Good point about new construction costing more, and that in itself has many factors. and depending on exactly when things were purchased making big differences.
With the limited supply of builders, most are choosing to build more expensive places.
Sadly even if we made this place less attractive for people to move to, many of the properties wouldn't go on the market, many would just hold on to the property as a stable investment.
So population numbers are not the primary weight in the supply / demand equation in many places is something I have been learning.
With food trucks I've learned that rules, regulations, construction costs may be bigger factors.
In most cases if you attach 50 grand worth of stuff to a building and can't pay your rent one month you may be legally required to leave most of your equipment with the landlord, and could be required to pay for additional construction.
Many landlords require certain insurances you can bypass with your truck. The public can't sue the building owner for things.
Inspections are also easier to handle with smaller places to tidy up, and everyone in your restaurant can see an inspector coming before they get inside.
Also if you get a bad inspection or bad reviews, just put a new wrap on your truck and it's not like a bad reputation for a specific building is set in.
Which is some excellent insight on why wages are not the driving cost, but real estate is. There are some insurance costs that get carried with a food truck, but I think the simpler direct ownership structure minimizes them.
Australia has even higher minimum wages and chain restaurants are fairly rare and unpopular. Almost everything I see on the street is a small business with likely only one location.
> High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants
The federal minimum wage in the US is pitiful and yes some cities and states do higher ones, but frankly if you’re operating on such small margins then you need to increase your prices. I’ve seen a trend of new restaurants opening with fixed menus/prices per head. They aren’t cheap, but they aren’t unreasonable, and it’s looking like at least here they are finding real footing. We’ll see in 5-10 years what the survival rate is I suppose.
During Covid I did a lot of interviews with very high-level restauranteurs (mostly chefs) in my city, several of which had James Beard awards and beyond. This is not a flex, it’s purely for context. These are considered some of the best in the city.
They all said the exact same thing: Everyone is pushing their prices too low and promising high-quality, fresh ingredients that are all locally sourced and yada yada. That’s great, but it can’t be done in a sustainable way. Not if you want to actually pay a living wage or offer even the most modest benefits to your employees. The larger population needs to accept the fact that if we want restaurants to actually survive at all, we have to pay more for it and treat it as more of a luxury.
Yes I acknowledged they exist but no it’s not a “large majority.” Roughly 20 IIRC are at the federal minimum. Of those that aren’t many of them are not much above, generally $8-10. I don’t think this is worth nitpicking.
When the number is 50 no, it isn’t. This feels somewhat disingenuous and clearly this doesn’t disprove the larger point. Not to mention, again, several states are barely north of that.
If you want me to acknowledge “some” isn’t enough then fine: “most states are at the minimum wage or up to $10, which is pitiful.” $1600 or less a month is pitiful. Not to mention the states with the lowest minimum wages are by and large the ones with the weakest social safety nets, so the problem is compounded. Can we move on and get back to the real point here?
Drone deliveries are a lot more like social media, hotels or flights, and a lot less like traditional deliveries. Once you build out the infrastructure, your cost-per-delivery (OpEx) rounds to zero. You want to spread out your infrastructure costs across as many deliveries as possible, so it makes sense to increase utilization, even at extremely low delivery prices. This is the "Ryanair model."
Because drone deliveries are so cheap (and so fast, there's no traffic after all), long-range deliveries make much more sense. If you can do long-range, you care a lot less about where your restaurant is located and how many customers you have passing by. This makes your rent go down.
Long range also increases how many customers you can realistically serve. You can exploit this in two ways, either by hyperspecializing in some particular kind of food, or by introducing standardization and automation.
A large part of the reason why restaurants aren't automated is that they just don't have that many customers. It doesn't make sense to pay for expensive machines (or even design them) if you are constrained by both rent and range. If neither are a constraint, you can go wild.
No air traffic until their are drone deliveries. What will the sky look like when you take every _individual_ package from Door Dash, Uber Eats, Postmates, Instacart, Amazon, UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc etc etc and put them on _individual_ drones? Even if the logistics could be sorted out, I worry about the quality of life issues it poses for communities, especially with the amount of noise drones make.
NYC handles 3,000 flights a day; it handles 2,300,000 package deliveries a day.
I've been thinking lately about the merits of the idea of repealing minimum wage coupled with a healthy UBI that's linked to the price of basic housing in a given district. Of course, that's not perfect, as no idea is. But clearly, companies (as an aggregate of the entirety of the commercial economy, and especially the largest ones) are not willing to lower their revenue such that minimum wage increases are not necessary.
The idea that costs should be "what the market will bear" is a cancer in economic thinking, as it encourages testing the waters to see how high one can raise their prices, without increasing wages in tandem to ensure there are still the maximum number of potential customers (if you price me out of purchasing your product, I am no longer a potential customer, and the size of non-customers is rising in almost all fields that aren't B2B)
I don't mean to be spitefully political, but shouldn't we perhaps compare wage costs to other costs in determining whether the business can run profitably? I've seen a lot of small businesses fall to rising real-estate costs.
Wild take. If you can’t pay a living wage your business shouldn’t exist.
Restaurants closing due to wage increases means workers were being exploited to cover unsustainable costs. Rents have to come down or wages need to go up across the board to cover the higher prices.
The billionaire class can’t eat enough food to keep restaurants open. They need to outsource it to the middle class.
I appreciate where you're coming from, but you risk making the perfect be the enemy of the good. What's worse, being paid less than a 'living wage' or being unemployed? The problem with a minimum wage is that if it's set to 20/hr, but some people are only worth 10/hr, then they become unemployable and have 0 income. Price controls result in shortages. In this case it's a shortage of jobs. Same phenomenon results from rent control, you will get a shortage of space at the enforced price level.
The main solution is to increase economic freedom and reduce regulatory burdens. Allow people to build. Too often they are prevented by restrictive zoning laws, absurd environmental reviews, everything-bagel mandates for diverse contractors, etc. Ironically, big corporations and billionaires often love regulation because it raises the barrier to entry and reduces competition.
If people are only worth 10/hr, but they need 15/hr to not die, the state has to step in to subsidize the exploitative business. Alternatively, the employees turn to crime, which is again a costly externality the company causes, or they die and the companies back to not having employees (or customers).
I absolutely agree that some of the regulations are bad, and in general building more is the main solution to these problems. Zoning and parking space requirements are especially egregious in the USA.
The example in this thread, of "co-locating" everyday commercial with residential, is another part of the solution. I can move further away from the city if the daily necessities are easier to reach. This would also help with traffic, which would then help people needing to commute.
See, there's a fundamental flaw in your logic, at least based on my own:
I don't believe that any human being is "only worth" $10/hr, or whatever arbitrary level you set.
Every human being deserves to have the resources to live. And to a first approximation, every human being is capable of doing enough work to be worth that. (The exceptions are people with various kinds of disabilities, whom we should be caring for, without question or reservation, and providing accommodations for those who can work, if they aren't just expected to Not Be Disabled.)
If a job wants to create a position to do [thing], but [thing] will only bring in, say, $5/hr worth of profit...then the job simply shouldn't create that position as-is. Either the owner needs to do it themselves, or they need to find a way to change what the job does so that it makes them enough money to cover labor costs.
Your beliefs don't change economic reality. Some workers simply aren't capable of generating $10/hr of economic value. If wages are fixed at a higher rate then all of those people will be unemployed. Employers won't voluntarily hire them and lose money. Instead the work will be automated or not done at all.
One potential solution is for government to subsidize their wages through mechanisms like the Earned Income Tax Credit. That helps low-skill workers to gain some experience and move up the ladder without artificially distorting the labor market.
> Some workers simply aren't capable of generating $10/hr of economic value.
The only ones that I believe this can genuinely be true of are people with various types of disabilities. Which I addressed in my post.
The idea that there's this large percentage of fully able-bodied workers who are completely incapable of ever being trained to do any kind of skilled work doesn't pass the smell test. At best, it reeks of various racist/eugenicist ideas.
I guess your belief is based on "vibes", not on actually hiring low-skilled workers. A lot of people are not medically disabled but are just kind of lazy or incompetent or unreliable. This has nothing to do with race or whatever so it's weird that you would bring that up.
Some of those workers can be trained to be more valuable. But employers generally aren't going to hire them based on hope.
You probably won't like not having employees. Those employees can start their own small cafeterias where the are owners who manage and work their business.
> High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants.
Another way of putting this:
"Small restaurants can only operate at a profit if they're allowed to pay people so little they can't afford to live off of it."
Any business that can only survive by exploiting its workers does not deserve to exist.
The fact that there were many small restaurants that were operating just fine when the minimum wage was, relatively speaking, much higher (ie, you could work full-time waiting tables at minimum wage and still afford a house and kids) strongly suggests that this claim does not hold water.
It's not just wages, it's every single avenue on which the government is forcing them to incur some cost and in every case it favors the big chain that has more locations, more meals, more everything to amortize the costs over. It was ignorable with some mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance when times were good but now that they aren't it's more obvious. Normally it's worth blaming rent to some extent but commercial RE is crap right now so that ain't it
> High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants.
Not as much as one would think.
Rent (literal) and rent seeking (lending in this case) are the biggest drivers in food costs today.
The family restaurant in an owned building is a distant memory.
The wholesale price of food is very low at the point of production (farming) and absolutely bonkers at the retail and wholesale levels. Mostly because at every step of the chain there is debt, and massive interest payments that need to be made.
The HN set is on one side of the K shaped economy and the other half is looking very much like late stage capitalism.
Case in point: Fritos. 4.50 a bag, while the Walmart generic version is under 2 bucks. Why? Because Pepsi (owner of Fritos) is competing with apple for customers, aka SHAREHOLDERS, and has a massive amount of debt compared to Walmart. The primary input in Fritos is corn, whos price is close to 2019 levels.
I don’t think that story illustrates the point you think it does. Prices aren’t based on cost, they’re based on perceived value on the part of the buyer, and the marketing and brand recognition behind Fritos raises its perceived value much higher than the generic brand.
To put it another way: all generic brands are cheaper than their name-brand counterparts, and that fact has nothing to do with debt or cost structures.
The lower bound of a price is the cost (or ability and willingness of a seller to sell), the higher bound of a price is the ability and willingness of a buyer to pay.
> best case scenario is walkable neighborhoods with lots of little tasty restaurants at affordable prices around the corner from everybody.
According to the written history, pre-1906 San Francisco had basically that.
It seems that the normal middle-class could afford high-quality, delicious food at restaurants, multiple times per week, due to the abundance of local ingredients and overall economic conditions.
So, how to get that quality and relative pricing today?
Excerpts from "The City That Was: A Requiem of Old San Francisco" by Will Irwin (free eBook, [0], free audiobook [1], HTML version at [2]):
> San Francisco was famous for its restaurants and cafes.
> they gave the best fare on earth, for the price, at a dollar, seventy-five cents, a half a dollar, or even fifteen cents.
> a public restaurant where there was served the best dollar dinner on earth
> The eating was usually better than the surroundings. Meals that were marvels were served in tumbledown little hotels.
> A number of causes contributed to this. The country all about produced everything that a cook needs and that in abundance—the bay was an almost untapped fishing pound, the fruit farms came up to the very edge of the town, and the surrounding country produced in abundance fine meats, game, all cereals and all vegetables.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3314
[1] https://librivox.org/san-francisco-before-and-after-the-earthquake-by-william-henry-irwin/
[2] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3314/pg3314-images.html
A starting point would be actually having enough housing, so workers don't automatically need wages that can absorb the overhead of commuting an hour both ways just to make burgers.
Adjusted for income, those prices would be $15-$100 today. That seems in the right ballpark to me. I can get a pretty great dinner for $100/plate, especially if I don't need it to be in a fancy restaurant atmosphere.
That's what I thought at first, after trying one inflation calculator: $30 for a decent meal, sure, and double that maybe for a pretty tasty meal, is pretty available. (Even then, I think ingredient purity and true preparation aptitude could be pretty suspect, especially at the lower end.)
BUT, TRYING AGAIN: Some inflation calculators do not go back to 1900. But looking further, $0.15 to $1.00 in 1900 would be $5.67 to $38.57 in 2025 dollars, according to https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/
I do wonder if there are discontinuities in inflation calculators for the times before the great fires in each city. Setting that aside, and assuming https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1900?amount=0.15 is accurate, 15 cents in 1900 would be $5.64 in 2025 AFAICT at the moment.
It would be very hard to find a decent sandwich for $5.67 just about anywhere in the USA, much less a multi-course, local, fresh, gourmet meal.
I think it's the general availability of these kinds of pure foods, and their accessibility all about town, prepared to near perfection, even accessible to the poor, that stands out in the Old San Francisco description. To wit:
> ...Hotel de France. This restaurant stood on California street...a big ramshackle house, which had been a mansion of the gold days. Louis, the proprietor, was a Frenchman...his accent was as thick as his peasant soups. The patrons were Frenchmen of the poorer class, or young and poor clerks and journalists who had discovered the delights...
> First ...was the soup mentioned before—thick and clean and good. Next, ...a course of fish—sole, rock cod, flounders or smelt—with a good French sauce. The third course was meat. This came on en bloc; the waiter dropped in the centre of each table a big roast or boiled joint together with a mustard pot and two big dishes of vegetables. Each guest manned the carving knife in turn and helped himself to his satisfaction. After that, ...a big bowl of excellent salad.... For beverage, there stood by each plate a perfectly cylindrical pint glass filled with new, watered claret. The meal closed with "fruit in season"—all that the guest cared to eat....the price was fifteen cents!
> If one wanted black coffee he paid five cents extra...a beer glass full of it. ...he threw in wine and charged extra for after-dinner coffee...
> Adulterated food at that price? Not a bit of it! The olive oil in the salad was pure, California product—why adulterate when he could get it so cheaply? The wine, too, was above reproach.... Every autumn, he brought tons and tons of cheap Mission grapes, ...The fruit was small, and inferior, but fresh...wished his guests would eat nothing but fruit, it came so cheap...
Anecdotally, this is consistent with what I have personally observed in dozens of countries, where the low end cost of eating out is about the same as and hour of work.
I used census data to come up with my guesstimate [0]. In 1905, the largest share of men were making $10-15 per week. Women and children less, of course.
The 2025 equivalent seems to be about $1330 per week. So in [very] round numbers it looks like about 100x.
Aside from Blue Apron doing something of a reboot recently (and I wasn't wild about what they shipped me)--you don't hear much about the delivered meal kits for a variety of reasons. I know I don't care much for them--and it's not just cost.
At a fairly high price, with somewhat arbitrary company control over portion sizes, and locking you into typically two nights of next week’s menu. Many menu options I could replace with a lot of staple recipes from when I was going into office pretty much daily that would actually be faster from a combination of dry and frozen/preserved refrigerator ingredients.
Yes, and I completely agree with this, but the comparison for this type of food delivery should be apples-to-apples.
If you live in a very walkable place, you're less likely to use delivery and when you do it's more likely to be someone on a bike or scooter. Waymo's probably don't apply there. The comparison would be walking vs delivery, and that would obviously come out bad for delivery.
If you don't live in a walkable place then the comparison is you driving vs the delivery driving, and that's a wash or even positive for delivery. The induced demand of delivery vs cooking at home (assuming you grocery shop for the week) would be very bad for delivery though.
>If you live in a very walkable place, you're less likely to use delivery
This makes sense as a theory but it doesn't match my observed reality at all. Everyone I know who frequently orders food on delivery apps live in dense, walkable cities.
I think the main issue is just getting out the door. Whether I walk 5 minutes or drive 10, it doesn't really matter once I get going. The annoying bit is getting off the couch, putting on 'outside' clothes, maybe taking a shower..
This is the correct answer. There are a few pockets in the USA where this is the case like parts of the Boston and New York metro area, but you have be flexible with your definition of "affordable".
And that's the point. These places are less than affordable because there's a much higher demand of people who want to live in these kinds of areas than the supply of them. We should build more!
Phoenix as a city doesn't make sense. It's entire existence is due to Arizona getting wayyyy too much in the way of water rights for the amount of economic activity that should be happening in it.
The Pima and Maricopa tribes were able to create massive agricultural surpluses from pre-Columbian times to the early 19th century thanks to the Salt River. Phoenix is not a rainforest, but it's also not a bone-dry location.
Phoenix today has plenty of water for residential and light industrial use, the problem is the persistence of agriculture. A farm in Phoenix uses something like 100x the amount of water compared to an equal amount of residential use. It was fine when there wasn't a global supply chain that could provide oranges or cotton at acceptable prices, but today the land and water have uses with much higher economic value.
How many millions of people lived in the area in the early 19th century? What did their golf courses look like? Did they also ship those agricultural surpluses the Bani Khalid? Is the climate still the same?
What we're doing to the land and the realities of how much water the area receives today is vastly different from what was done in the early 19th century. It seems meaningless to me to point out that the area managed to easily sustain some population of people in the early 1800s when so many other fundamental things are different.
Many cities or towns don’t make sense, top of mountains, isolated islands, extreme weather. Yet they exist and people live there. They also need services.
A major factor in my choice of house location here in the silicon valley 'burbs was to be near "stuff".
I have a small strip mall type shopping center with a grocery store a 2 block walk away. Brewpub, taqueria, pizza joint, grocery store, starbucks, UPS store, wine bar, fitness studio, yoga place, etc. Plus there's a post office another block away. Hell, yesterday I walked the 2mi roundtrip to the local Stanford medical outpost to have my blood draw done.
In general, that won't pass environmental review. So at least in most of California that's a non-starter. If you want these things you can't have environmental review, and you can't have community planning, and so on. And we (as a society) would much rather have design-by-committee than what you want.
In San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores or not. If you don't want these people to have a voice you can have what you want, but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people then you have to accept that others have different tastes from you.
In what way do walkable neighborhoods not pass environmental review?
> but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people.
Nobody is taking away their right to vote, so it isn't "disenfranchising" someone to put in a second icecream shop in their neighborhood when they only wanted one.
> San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores
SF seems to have a public feedback and planning problem that dysfunctionally favors nimbyism over regional needs and they end up shooting themselves in the foot with it over and over.
Without any snark, what's the reason? I'm assuming it's either made up or exagerated NIMBY nonsense, but what environmental argument could there possibly be against light commercials in residential areas?
Environmentalists usually are pro-sprawl because they mistakenly think that if they’re near trees they’re good for the environment. It’s why everything from the Sierra Club in the US down to environmentalists associated with socialist groups opposes infill housing and renewable energy.
So yes, mostly the NIMBY shit you refer to. Though apparently the other chap lives in a place where they managed to solve that so we will see soon enough how they did when he says where.
Portland has been putting in effort making things more walkable, bikeable and putting in medium density developments that are in walkeable areas. There's plenty to improve but clear progress towards that direction.
In another comment you claim that environmentalists are usually pro sprawl. That...very much does not match my experience. How did you form this opinion?
Most serious environmentalists I know support urban densification, not sprawl because densification increases efficiency, decreases polution and decreases habitat destruction.
Or people learning to cook instead of being lazy slobs. Knowing to cook is like knowing to read and write and to ride a bicycle. A grown up person who can't do it has been stunted in her development, and needs to fix this urgently. There are no excuses, except for severe physical handicaps.
Plus it is cheaper, faster, healthier and tastier than eating out.
But eating out is of course a nice social activity. Ordering DoorDash isn't.
Tell us your lifestyle and we will definitely be able to point out a lot of crazy things, but I’m sure they do make sense for you for whatever reason. Perhaps someone ordering DoorDash so that their family can spend more time together. Any blanket statement is short shortsighted.
Eehhh.. I'm a decent cook, I can adjust things for my taste but there's no way I can compete with people who do this for 40h/week over multiple years with kitchen appliances worth as much as a decent second hand car. Hell, good restaurants have access to produce I can't really get since I'm not going to tour 4 farms to make 1-4 portions of food.
Sounds like you're comparing your cooking to the top shelf of restaurants. Most of the mid ones and all of the chains buy frozen goods, fresh produce and ready-made stuff like sauces from Sysco. I promise you, you can compete with Sysco.
Yeah, the cheap shit I win against. Maybe my perspective was/is bad since I already cook unless I'm going to a good place or at least a mediocre place with cuisine I can't cook.
Of course you can. Those appliances have the purpose of making their job faster and more practical. There's no recipe that you can't make at home, and YouTube is full of videos where the top chefs from the world's most famous restaurants show you how to cook their plates at home.
Yes, and to be honest if you know how to read, you can also cook. Just google a recipe with good reviews and follow it to the letter, the outcome will most likely be good enough.
You'd think this, but google results for recipes are full of slop (AI and otherwise) and what I assume are fake reviews.
I know people whose cooking is "good enough" for themselves, but suspect enough from my point of view that I now decline any invitations for dinner where they're cooking.
> Or people learning to cook instead of being lazy slobs.
There are many reasons people eat out beside lack of cooking knowledge or desire to be social. You seem like you value feeling superior to these people. Perhaps you can find a way to value yourself without looking down on everyone who makes different choices?
> Plus it is cheaper, faster, healthier and tastier than eating out.
You can get some of those 4 but in my experience, getting all 4 at the same time doesn't happen often.
Yeah those places are super tiny and run by one or two people. Or they are running them under an awning and the whole restaurant is built on a bicycle. Try setting up a bicycle restaurant anywhere in the US and see what happens. You can barely set up a taco truck here. Unfortunately to run a restaurant here you need really expensive restaurant real estate.
We have a ton of these food trucks all over Austin. Most of them ... just aren't very good. So, apparently, regulations aren't too onerous.
And a food truck isn't exempt from the fact that ridiculous commercial real estate prices cause people to be too spread out to be able to service in walking range.
And the regulations got tighter because these trucks were blowing up and killing people. I haven't heard about one exploding in a while, so apparently the regulations had an effect.
Absolutely. I think either learning to cook or moving to another place or country, is a whole lot easier than forcing an entirely new urban structure where you currently live.
The delivery option is more convenient and takes less time out of your day than driving to a restaurant. My suspicion is that most frequent delivery app users are ordering food more frequently and from further away than they would drive to if the delivery apps were not an option.
In a similar vein, widespread full-autonomous driving cars will likely lead to more people taking longer commutes by commoditizing the cost of a ride and freeing up the time that would otherwise be spent driving.
Yeah, induced demand is a real thing, and a huge reason to invest in public transit and walkable neighborhoods in the first place, since they benefit from induced demand as well.
I personally really support autonomous cars for safety reasons, and to hopefully reduce car ownership, but the definitely didn't solve traffic or the external costs of cars. I hope there's an indirect path from then towards increased public transit.
Single occupancy vehicles make up most of the traffic on the road. For most people, the most significant cost of being on the road is their time. With self driving cars, our roads will be full of zero occupancy vehicles.
What about small wheeled robots like this moving by sidewalks? [1] Unlike drones, they don't fall on people's head. And kids love to play with them by blocking their way and seeing how they try to find another way.
Their platform is exactly like this, maybe bigger and faster. Nowhere near thousands of pounds, and is way more efficient than an aerial drone. (also it seems they saw random people riding Yandex robots and made theirs inconvenient to ride)
these things are such a nuisance on sidewalks. i wish cities would prevent the rollout of new commercial automated vehicles that make it harder for real people to make use of existing pedestrian infrastructure.
Maybe the sidewalks should be wider? I agree that in historical part of the city they can be pretty narrow (can be fixed by narrowing or removing the car lanes though), but in 20th century (Soviet) developed areas the sidewalks are pretty wide, they can be like 10 meters (30 feet) wide on large streets or more.
They could also use bicycle lanes, but cyclists won't like it.
The problem is it all needs to grow with use and buildings aren't very mobile. You build something with plenty of road/sidewalk at the edge of the city, city grows, traffic increases, land gets expensive so the buildings get as big as possible and split into smaller apartments, street and sidewalk need to grow, there's nowhere to grow, street eats some of the sidewalk since it's more 'necessary'/utilitarian as pedestrians deal with congestion better than cars and western governments are allergic to motorcycles/scooters. Eventually as a middle point a bicycle lane might sprout since it's kind of the mid point of utility and leisure.
But you can't make things obscenely large in the beginning since then if the area doesn't take off you have a huge amount of infrastructure that still needs maintenance and it also feels like a ghost town with less usage.
It was all a lot easier in the 20th century because there wasn't this mix of speed/capability. The cars were shit, horse carriages aren't exactly fast, bicycles were shit... You had | 20hp trabantesque cars - 5hp horse carriage - bicycle - pedestrian |. Now you have | 400 hp cars - faster (e)bicycles - pedestrians | combined with increased safety culture so you need more splittage and more barriers (be it trees, an actual barrier, curvy roads built to slow people down, etc)
Have you ever seen one? Because the ones I have seen IRL doing deliveries where especially lost in open spaces. They do not make sense how they are moving and its not that obvious where its going. Like a goose on the side-walk: you need to be vary because you cannot really determine what it will do next. But in theory, they should work great ...
Drones don't just "fall on people's head[s]". Zipline, the only US-approved BVLOS drone operator I know of besides maybe Google's Wing, had to show the FAA millions of accident-free flight miles they did overseas in other countries, in order to get regulatory approval.
One major difference with Zipline versus others is the use of fixed wing craft (in addition to providing critical supplies in areas that are otherwise challenging). The failure mode for fixed wing or even helicopters in the air is way less catastrophic than quadcopters. People like quads because all the DJI stuff that makes it easy, but they're also both by far the least energy and capacity inefficient and most dangerous if there's an issue that causes lift to stop. Given how much people already shit themselves about GA aircraft and recreational RC aircraft, as well as the problems above, I have my doubts about delivery drones becoming a big thing for things like food.
Zipline's platform 2 is VTOL and is essentially a quad rotor + 1 rear swivel motor, during delivery. A fixed wing won't help you much if you have a failure while hovering. Google's Wing is a very similar design (6 hover motors on a boom, two booms, one along each wing). The key is flight system redundancies, something consumer drones simply don't have, and Zipline also has a ballistic parachute in case of severe failures since their aircraft is fairly large.
Maybe they won't ever become a "big thing", but Zipline is already delivering food directly to consumers in TX and elsewhere.
Everything boils down to terrible (USA?) "city" planning - instead of having anything relatively close-by so you can walk to to get the groceries or the "burrito" can be delivered on bike it has to involved absurdly heavy car...
It’s crazy that Americans have to come up with such absurd schemes like self driving cars to move burritos. Rather than just walking outside and to the restaurant.
Very much treating the symptoms rather than the root problems.
How's the bike infrastructure? Do bikes have to share the road with cars? Are protected bike lanes ubiquitous, or do bikers have to worry about being run over by a distracted driver?
There's a lot of empirical evidence that people will chose bikes over cars if the infrastructure made it safe and convenient, even with terrible weather. Paris, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam come to mind, but there are many more examples.
It is expensive like London is expensive. There are rich people and there are not rich people like other expensive places around the world. Median income in la county is only $38k however.
Oh I tried at one point to get paid while I'm spending time biking anyhow. Doordash wasnt taking new dashers. Ubereats let me sign up but 3 days of having the app open I got no orders so I gave up. I guess they deprioritize bike delivery that heavily. Little do they know I am faster than cars on surface streets.
Look at the very low rate of accidents for cyclists and then consider the fact that the bulk of that dataset at least among american populations is going to be comprised of cyclists who are drunk, high, both, mentally ill, or otherwise showing little regard for the rule of law on the road. Don't be drunk, be sane, follow the rules of traffic, and you have shifted to an extremely low risk demographic where the accident rate may well be close to zero.
Small delivery robots are in several (walkable) cities since a few years now. Starship was the first brand (they say in 270 cities, campuses etc.): https://www.starship.xyz/
(City center properties don't have drone drop/landing areas.)
(The couriers here use e-bikes and similar light vehicles as they can navigate quicker in the traffic.)
Then it's time for cities to not be cowards, and go all in on the food bus hyperloop model. It needs to be like those conveyor sushi places, except on the scale of a city. Places like mcdonalds should have fleets of busses with hot-and-ready food just doing loops around town, only returning when they re stock.
Companies could even share busses. Or delivery companies like door dash could switch to the collective bus model and turn thier drivers into bus drivers.
I need to be able to just walk outside and flag down the burrito man, just like you would for an ice creme truck
Most fast food is largely cooked to order and pretty rapidly degrades once you try to hold it for more any real amount of time before consumption. /Maybe/ partially assembled burgers could have patties cooked right before serving or for pizza do a model like the pizza vending machines where it's baked right before it's dispensed but I don't see the version becoming popular where it's a lot of food fully precooked and assembled being predictively shuttled around town.
Beyond quality issues it'd just lead to a massive amount of food waste too. In order to always have the order available you'd have to stock everything in excess of demand and food only holds for so long before it has to be disposed of for safety reasons.
In China, they use E-bikes, I'm not sure why that wouldn't work here? Autonomous E-bikes shouldn't be that hard to manage, ya, they would need to balance themselves like segways, but I'm sure the tech is already there for it. There is no need for them to be full sized cars, even for crash safety...since it is just food that would get damaged in an accident.
Ebikes and small scooters make up the vast majority of deliveries in major cities. Can't remember the last time a delivery driver came in a car in NYC.
Some anecdata; E-bikes are definitely used in other major cities. I lived up against the Hudson in Jersey City and worked out of Manhattan and that was the primary means by which Doordash/Ubereats was moved around.
It's already happening -- Zipline partnered with Walmart and has been actively performing deliveries in TX and I think a few other places. Google's Wing may also be doing commercial deliveries but I don't know as much about their current status.
Mark Rober showed a version that was very quiet. Somebody figured out how to make a different propeller design that greatly minimized the noise. I'm interested to see if this could actually be feasible and make for very quiet services.
FPV missiles have little interest in keeping the area around them a pleasant environment to live in, and are disposable one time use items. I suspect drone delivery places a higher premium on lowering noise pollution.
If one keeps going down the rabbit hole, one might infer that the way our cities are designed is entirely wrong but probably with 60-70 year of invested capital difficult to change fast enough
Around me there are small robots that follow sidewalks and bike paths to deliver foods. They're essentially the size of a medium or large cooler with six wheels that can climb some stairs and curbs.
Use a catapult/trebuchet/cannon to launch the drone as close as possible to the target area - maybe use a discardable biodegradable sheath to improve aerodynamics. At the optimal distance and height, switch the drone from ballistic to powered mode and complete the delivery. Maybe increases payload (the drone doesn’t have to take off carrying the payload). And definitely increases range, as we are not having to use onboard power for flight for part of the laden delivery, so there is more energy available for the unladen return trip.
Personally I would love to see cannon launches but most localities are unlikely to approve (maybe Texas?)
If only France and Mexico shared a border, Paris could have converted their pneumatic mail delivery system to burrito delivery system. That would have been good alternate reality
Or small autonomous carts that drive on the bicycle and pedestrian roads. Safest, simplest, easiest to implement. The biggest hurdle is not technology, but politics and infrastructure.
Society really does not need food delivery at all. It would greatly benefit everyone involved if they went to get their food, either from the supermarket or some restaurant, by themselves.
> everyone involved if they went to get their food
Remember, food ingredients and people move around in large multi-ton vehicles as well. If you think people going from A-B is OK, then food going from B-A should be similarly OK.
Infact, once you can pool together food, then the equation flips and favors food moving from B-A, rather than many people taking different paths from A-B
I live in one of the biggest cities in the world, and we get a big grocery delivery to our door bi-weekly. It's a huge help to buy in bulk vs going to get a few things daily.
Millions of years of selection have given you a body designed to walk 10+ miles a day for your daily resources. Use it or lose it as they say. Foraging is good for you.
So my 85 year old aunt with dementia is going drive(which she can't) to get food? Or I can just order food and groceries for her off an app living 300 miles away.
Food delivery is how walking to the supermarket every day for the remaining items is viable for us. If delivery wasn't an option I'd be far more likely to get a car.
How would restaurants get food if there was no food delivery? How would grocery stores re-stock? It sound to me like we one hundred percent need food delivery and you're just arguing about the specifics.
I think we should go back to Pneumatic tubes. I wonder if justifiable size could be made. But still after infra is build we could move lot of food and package delivery to the system.
What's the KWh/mile of a drone versus an EV? Should factor in that the small drone can only deliver a single small package, but the EV can carry more and make multiple stops.
You could make the vehicle very aerodynamic since it only needs to carry a burrito or a pizza, and drag is not that even that big of an issue in cities because speeds are so low that you are essentially limited to bicycle speeds anyway.
I guess phoenix is good for them since they're in the area already, but you'd think it'd be more helpful to run this in a market where they're actively trialing. At least then they'd be doing some useful work while ramping up.
Are aerial drones really any better in terms of energy expended? Not to mention the massive amount of noise, which has already shut down several attempts at drone delivery.
... and then we have millions of drones up in the sky to carry a 1lb burrito, obviously a robot that can make the burrito for you at home is the future.
why there aren't autonomous bicycles or the autonomous things in that class? I remember those "cockroaches" on Castro in the mid-201x, saw recently another significantly larger "cockroach" around Palo Alto, yet they slow, and cumbersome in their presence on the sidewalk, and don't seem to be made for the road.
Looking at the bicyclists "texting while biking" i think the delivery wouldn't be the only market for an autonomous bicycles.
Sidenote: heard that Tesla added an "aggressive mode" to its FSD in which it would drive at higher speeds and would make more aggressive maneuvers. I suppose it isn't just Tesla as after more than decade of docile behavior of Waymo cars i've been recently aggressively cut by a Waymo, and few weeks before that a Waymo car asserted it's well out-of-normal left turn trajectory forcing us to give it way to avoid being barreled by it. Interesting whether such an aggressive autonomous driving would shorten the burrito delivery time.
The robot wouldn’t mind getting to the side and letting traffic pass, and the drivers would appreciate such polite and considerate road behavior which thus will generate a lot of positive attitude toward the robots. I think we can state the 0th law of robots as “don’t be an ass”.
We're also still moving thousands of pounds of vehicle around a public highway to carry a 150lb human... so? I don't think it's a big deal. But yes drone delivery would be much nicer...for burritos.
You're correct, bikes are not practical. That's step one of analyis. Now we have to ask why bikes are not practical.
It's because everything is really far and we design our cities to burn as much land as humanly possible.
One side effect of that is that bikes are inconvenient. Another is that nobody can afford housing and starving homeless people are harassing you for money.
That's short sighted. A burrito is a perfect candidate for ballistic trajectory. They can easily absorb the high g-force associated with traditional mortar-style launch system, even up to exotic "space gun" capable of intercontinental delivery.
Still not thinking big enough, say it with me: "Fully Automated Space Kitchen constellations". Cryogenically frozen burritos. dropped from orbit, and reheated by connecting combinations of copper heatpipes to the fiery heatshield at precise times during re-entry. Global delivery in 30 minutes or less*.
* No refunds on orders damaged en route by SAM, or delivery mechanism malfunction. Customer waives their right to any claims for compensation for property damage, injury or loss of life due to elevated delivery velocity.
Why have installations or stores at all? Just have a self driving and self making burrito trucks. You order one up, and on the way to you, it's being made in the back. Little hatch on the side, shoots out onto your doorstep or through your window.
Then, of course, you've now got an arms race of self making burrito trucks roaming about. Chipotle has one, Taco bell too. And, of course, if a Taco Bell truck knows that a Chipotle truck is next to it on the freeway, well, I mean, there's no one inside it of course. How could you prove that those nails came out of the bottom of the truck anyways?
Pretty soon, we've got burrito trucks duking it out, battle bots style, on the freeways and streets. And then you gotta deploy countermeasures, armor, etc. Just to get your burrito to you. Order up two from different companies and you've got dinner and a show.
And, honestly, is this not the future we all really want? Giant junk food filled mech-cars blasting each other at high speeds from the comfort of our couches.
You're still thinking too small. Think back to the heady days of intense Java popularity and strain your brain to remember your Gang Of Four...
What's better than a Factory?
A FactoryFactory!
Why order a burrito that is made in a truck, when you can order a BurritoFactory that is constructed en route to you, to your exact specifications, and from then on, will make you endless burritos from the comfort of your own home?!?
That's small strategy thinking. You really need to use a service that creates factories to create factories that create factories. f3, our next startup! The goal it push it on the market via our tie in with oracle, all compliant Java Dev Kits will have to support f3.
Still too inefficient. We can replace our stomachs with small modular nuclear reactors and instead of wasting money on inefficiently produced burritos, we’d only have to swallow one uranium pellet every 10 years.
But they're more like taquitos than burritos for aerodynamic reasons, also they get flame grilled as they re-enter. The secret sauce IP is getting the ablative tortilla just right so it doesn't totally burn off during reentry but also isn't to thick once it gets in the hand.
No worries, the v4 starship will finally work, and somehow through musk stock manipulation it will be really cheap (ignore the current excitement around v3 starship about to start flight).
I managed to write a fairly large GTK application without the GTK type system encroaching on my code at all. It just meant hooking a bunch of lambdas in where they want you to be inheriting from and extending their own classes to allow all the parts to communicate together.
In the end it wasn't that messy, but probably confusing for anyone used to writing dogmatic GTK applications.
Foreign countries are already banned from owning TV stations in the United States so this is certainly not a speech issue. I dont think its clear that Trump can really save TikTok without passing a law through congress though.
Several years before it became fashionable to dismiss everything as a Makov chain.
Given a simple history can be mapped into a higher dimensional state, Markov chains are much more common than they first seem, so it's basically* always possible to dismiss any physically implementable system as "a Markov chain" if you're so inclined.
* While I wouldn't be surprised if someone has come up with laws of physics that can't be described by a Markov chain, mere quantum mechanics can.
Quantum mechanics can be described as a Markov chain? That seems plausible but I haven't worked with MCs enough to see exactly how. Could you please elaborate? It seems interesting.
If you want to study a quantum mechanical system in equilibrium at inverse temperature β, the interesting quantity is the partition function Z = tr exp[-β H]. This can be converted into a path integral Z = ∫ dφ exp[-S[φ]] which can be importance-sampled via the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm [mh] via Markov-chain Monte Carlo.
This approach is commonly used in lattice field theory [lft], where the Hamiltonian H is that of a discretized spacetime (or the problem is formulated in terms of the action S to begin with).
Real-time problems in quantum mechanics involve exp[i t H] which brings a horrible complication called the sign problem [sign]. The one-sentence summary is that exp[-β H] is positive-definite but exp[i t H] is not and it's not clear how to incorporate a complex Boltzmann weight as a probability for MCMC.
A Markov process is a random process where the new state only depends on the old state, not anything else. This can be stretched to include almost anything, since you can expand the definition of the state to record history or whatever you want, although you may make the process much more difficult to work with mathematically. In other words, the fact that something may be a Markov process is generally not interesting, because it is a very broad definition, and doesn't guarantee any interesting properties without further assumptions.
The wavefunction in QM doesn't evolve randomly, so I would say it is not technically a Markov process. On the other hand you can create a theory of observables derived from QM that is "random" (depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics).
You will have a hard time constructing Markov Chain that correctly models the real-time evolution of physical quantum-mechanical observables. The problem is that the transition matrix that governs quantum-mechanical evolution is exp[i t H], which is not a well-formed probability distribution.
I would have said something very close to zeofig's answer, with the one significant change being to say that a deterministic system is itself a very boring kind of Markov chain where all states' transition probabilities are exactly 0 or 1.
Still a misnomer in my opinion, but I noticed that this part of the algorithm was missing from all the articles that followed (mine included). People are basically implementing sudoku solvers :)
Since people started using marketing tactics to promote themselves. WFC is a $100 name for a $1 concept. Other entries in the tech hall of shame are mersenne twister and dependency injection
>There are two main complaints from academic community concerning this work, the first one is about "reinventing and ignoring previous ideas", the second one is about "improper naming and popularizing", as shown in some debates in 2008 and 2015.[33] In particular, it was pointed out in a letter[34] to the editor of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks that the idea of using a hidden layer connected to the inputs by random untrained weights was already suggested in the original papers on RBF networks in the late 1980s; Guang-Bin Huang replied by pointing out subtle differences.[35] In a 2015 paper,[1] Huang responded to complaints about his invention of the name ELM for already-existing methods, complaining of "very negative and unhelpful comments on ELM in neither academic nor professional manner due to various reasons and intentions" and an "irresponsible anonymous attack which intends to destroy harmony research environment", arguing that his work "provides a unifying learning platform" for various types of neural nets,[1] including hierarchical structured ELM.[28] In 2015, Huang also gave a formal rebuttal to what he considered as "malign and attack."[36] Recent research replaces the random weights with constrained random weights.[6][37]
But at least it's easier to say, rolls off the tongue smoothly, and makes better click bait for awesome blog postings!
I also love how the cool buzzwords "Reservoir Computing" and "Liquid State Machines" sounds like such deep stuff.
Yukio-Pegio Gunji, Yuta Nishiyama. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Kobe University, Kobe 657-8501, Japan.
Andrew Adamatzky. Unconventional Computing Centre. University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom.
Abstract
Soldier crabs Mictyris guinotae exhibit pronounced swarming behavior. Swarms of the crabs are tolerant of perturbations. In computer models and laboratory experiments we demonstrate that swarms of soldier crabs can implement logical gates when placed in a geometrically constrained environment.
The difference between Deepak Chopra's abuse of Quantum Physics terminology and WFC's is that WFC actually works and is useful for something, and its coiner publishes his results for free as open source software and papers, so he deserves more poetic license than a pretentious new-age shill hawking books and promises of immortality for cash like Deepak.
Here are some notes I wrote and links I found when researching WFC (which is admittedly a catchier name than "Variable State Independent Decaying Sum (VSIDS) branching heuristics in conflict-driven clause-learning (CDCL) Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers"):
Here are some notes I wrote and links I found when researching Wave
Function Collapse (WFC). -Don Hopkins
Wave Function Collapse
Maxim Gumin
Paul Merrell
https://paulmerrell.org/research/
https://paulmerrell.org/model-synthesis/
Liang et al
Jia Hui Liang, Vijay Ganesh, Ed Zulkoski, Atulan Zaman, and
Krzysztof Czarnecki. 2015. Understanding VSIDS branching heuristics
in conflict-driven clauselearning SAT solvers. In Haifa Verification
Conference. Springer, 225–241.
WaveFunctionCollapse is constraint solving in the wild
https://escholarship.org/content/qt1f29235t/qt1f29235t.pdf?t=qwp94i
Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP)
Machine Learning (ML)
It splits an image to cells by using convolutions, derives a set of constraints of how cells can be combined and then generates combinations that satisfy the constraints. It's a form of machine learning based on combinatorial optimisation, really.
Far as I can tell it doesn't apply any Markov assumptions anywhere, but I might just not have noticed it so please prove me wrong on that one.
We aren't used to draconian internet control in the west yet, in China and Russia the population is. Everyone who's anyone just uses a VPN and uses western internet when they like. China banned western social media for the exact same reason that the US wanted to, they were just ready to do it earlier.
Aren't the civilians in Kherson largely Russian citizens according to the official Russian line here? It's one of the territories they officially annexed.
Yeah but why would a passenger in a locked car that's loaded with cameras and connected to a call center be considered an easy target? And it's hard to tell if there's even someone in the Waymo because of the tinted windows.
