Unfortunately when you live in a place (like most American cities) where they’re largely built under the assumption people will drive everywhere, a car is essentially required. It’s expensive owning and maintaining a car, but it also feels demoralizing dealing with limited public transportation and neighborhoods that aren’t walkable. There are walkable metro areas in the United States, but they tend to be very expensive, sometimes more expensive than living in a suburb or exurb and dealing with the cost of commuting. I grew up poor; dealing with hour-long bus waits, late buses, multiple transfers, and limited choices is a powerful motivation to save up for a car.
Well yes but this is a choice. In a place with good public transport and alternative road modes people just use cars a lot less.
The thing is in the US cars are traditionally a huge part of the economic engine. So they get preference. You see something similar in Germany though not nearly as bad.
I love Tokyo (I spent eight months in Kawasaki in 2010), but I can see the appeal of living in a smaller place in Japan (though I’d personally be hesitant to live in a small, isolated town with little or no public transportation). Crowded trains and long lines can get tiring after a while.
I spent last summer in Toyohashi in Aichi Prefecture; I was a visiting researcher at Toyohashi University of Technology. While Toyohashi is not a small town by any means, it is far smaller than Tokyo. I found it nice for day-to-day living. Not crowded at all, and I found the bus service to be good; not world class, but comprehensive and ran frequently enough to be useful. It had plenty of grocery stores and department stores for everyday living. If I needed something unavailable in Toyohashi, Nagoya wasn’t too far away, and if I needed to be in Tokyo, I could get there in 90 minutes on a Hikari train on the Tokaido Shinkansen. I’d do it again; in fact, I’m going back to Toyohashi in a few weeks for another monthly stay.
Not disputing any of the statistics cited, but there is one advantage of being homeless in California compared to other places: favorable weather, especially along the coast. Snow is a once-in-a-generation event outside high-elevation areas, and while it does freeze on some winter nights, it’s rarely below 30 F. There are many parts of the country where temperatures sometimes get low enough to be life-threatening for those with inadequate shelter, heating, and clothing. The coastal areas of California also typically don’t get too hot. Heat is more of an issue inland, particularly the Central Valley and the desert.
This. It’s simply much easier to be homeless in California, one of the easiest places imaginable. Do people think if the state was red that suddenly all those homeless people would become homed? A ridiculous notion.
I doubt that most computer users have more than 16GB of RAM in their systems. There are plenty of users on 8GB systems and some still on 4GB. Even when considering bloated Web apps, 8GB of RAM is passable and 16GB is plenty.
I think people who need more than 16GB of RAM are power users with higher memory requirements, such as those using local LLMs, those who frequently use virtualization, and people doing tasks such as video editing.
Apple did openly court Unix users during the early days of Mac OS X. As a teenager during this era, Macs of this era were my dream machines due to Mac OS X, and I was so happy to buy an 2006 MacBook the summer after my freshman year of college with money earned from a summer research internship.
"With the Power Mac G5, a researcher can now run both productivity applications and high-performance UNIX applications on a single system. Mac OS X Panther includes 64-bit optimized system math, vector and image libraries that take maximum advantage of the 64-bit G5 processor."
There was also a cluster in Virginia made of Power Mac G5s, which Apple also touted.
Yes, as they were fighting for getting out of bankruptcy and were reverse acquired by NeXT.
I also attended a marketing session at CERN, when they came to visit our IT department in 2003, when there were still people using Sun pizza boxes as their desktops (aka SPARCstation).
Anyone that has been around Apple long enough can recognise the old Apple (pre-OS X), on current Apple, now that they can be their old self.
Any good biography on Steve Jobs, like The Next Big Thing, Folkore or Cult of Mac, will show that underlying culture.
When I was in high school in California more than 20 years ago, SAT math alone was insufficient for admissions to STEM programs at mid-ranked and top-ranked universities. I was required to take the SAT Math IIC subject test, which went up to pre-calculus. We were also strongly encouraged to take calculus in high school. There are two AP Calculus exams: AB (which covers the first semester of university calculus) and BC (which covers the first two semesters).
I would love to see a follow-up series that covers the dot com bust, the revival of Silicon Valley’s tech industry thanks to mobile and cloud tech, and the modern AI boom, starting with deep neural networks ran on GPUs and culminating with large language models.
In my opinion, it’s been a problem for a long time. Sure, the titans of industry are very interested in the profitable applications of science, but they are generally less interested in investing in science, let alone the science itself. Science is seen as a cost center, and research is inherently risky. Even in the glory days of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, both were backed by monopolies (the Bell System was the phone monopoly, and Xerox had patents in xerography). The former was subject to special government rules due to AT&T’s constant anti-trust troubles, and the latter’s culture was heavily influenced by ARPA due to ex-ARPA people like Bob Taylor.
I am reminded by this quote from an email exchange between Bret Taylor and Alan Kay, published in 2017:
“As I pointed out in a previous email, Engelbart couldn't get funding from the very people who made fortunes from his inventions.
“It strikes me that many of the tech billionaires have already gotten their "upside" many times over from people like Engelbart and other researchers who were supported by ARPA, Parc, ONR, etc. Why would they insist on more upside, and that their money should be an "investment"? That isn't how the great inventions and fundamental technologies were created that eventually gave rise to the wealth that they tapped into after the fact.
“It would be really worth the while of people who do want to make money -- they think in terms of millions and billions -- to understand how the trillions -- those 3 and 4 extra zeros came about that they have tapped into. And to support that process.”
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