Oddly enough, several professional sports gamblers were aware of a NBA referee manipulating game from their data analysis, well before the NBA became aware of it.
That was probably 10+ years ago and I suspect data analysis by the leagues is much stronger now. Still an insane line that needs to be walked between the leagues getting revenue from the sportsbooks and gambling not impacting that play.
I don’t know how much cheating by referees has got to with it. But many years ago I found the NBA to be a foul shooting contest and gave up on it. It is unwatchable.
Travel from DC through New England is about the only convenient use of Amtrak. Travel times in the midwest are an absolute joke. 12 hours from Pittsburgh to New York City vs. a 1-hour flight to Newark and <30 minute ride to Penn Station.
The Cascadia corridor is pretty decent, too. The train between Seattle to Portland is time-competitive with driving, and much more comfortable. (Amtrak also goes north to Vancouver, but it's been over 20 years since I've taken that route, so I can't attest to its current convenience.)
Be happy if you're even on the network. I'm in Nashville and we're not connected at all. Amtrak has proposed a plan of eventually putting it on the end of a route which would be convenient for going to Chattanooga or Atlanta and likely nowhere else.
Most of the state-supported routes (e.g., the trips between DC and other points in Virginia) are also pretty decent. But any long-distance route is pretty much a crapshoot.
I used to ride Empire service all the time. Very comfortable ride, especially after about half of the train got out at Albany and I could get some quiet time in the dining car, along with one of those disgusting hotdogs or meatball subs or cup noodles. The long delays between Albany and Buffalo were annoying, but apparently that's no longer a problem. I loved the train compared to the bus or flying or driving, great way to travel. Although nothing beats the flexibility of driving, especially if you don't have a pickup (or a reliable taxi) waiting for you at the destination. And that's a big problem in the USA -- no connecting transit in most places, once you get off the train you're basically stranded.
This seems like such a grim value prop. Even if you have a private bedroom, a table service dining option, and bar, you're still on a train, not a hotel. A hotel is not, unless it's a resort, what you're going to the destination for. So rather than spend as little time as possible getting to the destination, trading some amount of comfort, you instead spend about as much time as possible getting to the destination and get very little back from the experience, other than "views".
I'm in the midwest, so rail is not remotely convenient but Amtrak recently announced a three-day ride from Ohio to Florida that I was amazed at because it somehow seemed less appealing than just grinding out the 15-hour family road trip, let alone a 2 hour flight.
If you want more people riding trains, make them faster.
Rail travel on Amtrak is a novelty. The trip is the destination. Outside of a few routes that are essentially commuter routes, it's not cheaper or faster than alternatives, so I'm not sure why anyone considers it. "Ooohh it would be fun to take the train" is basically it, and that's fine. Amtrak is fun if you've got the time and never tried it, as long as you aren't delayed for 12 hours, which is actually pretty common. I tried it once. I was 24 hours late to my destination, and the train experience wore thin pretty quickly. I have not and will not consider it again. I'd rather drive and sleep in my car at rest areas.
The only time I've bought a train ticket is when the wife and I took a trip to see a musical in New York. We're only a four hour drive from New York, but I hate driving near it, and really hate driving in it. So we booked a hotel four blocks from the train station and just rode an early morning Amtrak. That was worth it. It took longer than a drive, but we slept through half the ride anyway.
But it was definitely a luxury "vacation" purchase. I looked at tickets while planning our last trip, going to Boston. It was insane. Hell, it was this past Labor Day weekend, when New Jersey rail was free for almost a week. Even then, of we'd have driven into NJ, took a free train into New York, then took an Amtrak to Boston, the tickets from NY to Boston would be so more than flying from Baltimore. How is New York to Boston not a cheaper line?!
I bought a NYC to Boston ticket for a few weeks from now for $35 this morning. Depends on many factors but once you know you can easily buy the cheap tickets.
I want them to be less expensive and faster; there’s no reason to take a train over airplanes when the trains take an entire day and cost the same or more than airfare.
Think cruise ship which is a hotel on water. However cruise ships are full of activites for when you are stuck on them while a train doesn't have room for a broadway show.
ohio to florida is too far for a train to make sense, but you are correct trains need to move faster to be useful. But faster needs expensive track work (at 300 kmh you look both ways see the tracks are clear and then get killed by the coming train you didn't see) so amtrack tries to cheat with slow service that is more evpensive than flying
Views are pretty great, to be honest! If your job allows remote work and the train route has cell or Wi-Fi coverage, I highly recommend giving it a try. I've had some of my most productive workdays on trains. (Not being able to schedule too many meetings certainly helps.)
> If you want more people riding trains, make them faster.
Amtrak passenger trains mostly run on rails which are owned by big RR corporations - running when, where, and if the corporation doesn't have some more-profitable freight train using the rails. And don't expect construction & maintenance standards (especially maximum speed & roughness of ride) to be any better than what the freight trains need, either.
There were tons of red flags that were completely set aside.
The largest are probably mobile betting and allowing for instant credit card deposits.
There is also the fantasy of being able to win money but the reality that if you actually win money in a consistent fashion, you will be either kicked-off or your action will be severely crippled.
I'd like to think the emerging prediction markets, like Polymarket, are much fairer systems, especially for winning players, and would be much better than sports books like DraftKings, FanDuel, etc.
Polymarket works on mobile and allows instant USDC deposits. Are these somehow red flags elsewhere, but not here?
Not to mention the Pandora's box that prediction markets open, when the order book can begin to influence real life events - from match fixing, to assassination markets.
It's not like that box has been firmly closed until now. Every time someone stands to profit from one outcome over another they already have an incentive to influence the outcome, prediction market existing or not. And stock markets already act as a sort of prediction basket about future events that will influence the trajectory of a company (e.g. the outcome of trade negotiations, wars, court decisions, elections, the health of their CEO etc. etc.)
The upside of prediction markets is that it incentives people with information to make their honest estimates legible to society. E.g. an opinion piece in a newspaper has little skin in the game, other than the author's reputation.
> There is also the fantasy of being able to win money but the reality that if you actually win money in a consistent fashion, you will be either kicked-off or your action will be severely crippled.
This does not apply to all bookmakers. Also, betting exchanges exist where the players bet against each other therefore there is no incentive for the operator to ban winning players.
For comparison, Apple's stock about 20x'd during Ballmer's tenure and that was after atrocious AAPL performance from 2000-2003.
Balmer's biggest failures were mirrored by Apple's enormous success. The two areas this article calls out as Balmer's missteps were the exact areas Apple flourished in -- hardware innovation and operating system.
I don't see how you can "underrate" Ballmer as CEO given his mistakes allowed a nearly-dead rival to grow to be larger than Microsoft. The opportunity for Microsoft to capture a significant chunk of that was completed squandered.
I keep hearing about people using these for coding. Seems like it would be extremely easy to miss something and then spend more time debugging than it would be to do yourself.
I tried recently to have ChatGPT an .htaccess RewriteCond/Rule for me and it was extremely confident you couldn't do something I needed to do. When I told it that it just needed to add a flag to the end of the rule (I was curious and was purposely non-specific about what flag it needed), it suddenly knew exactly what to do. Thankfully I knew what it needed but otherwise I might have walked away thinking it couldn't be accomplished.
My experience is that it will simply make up methods, properties and fields that do NOT exist in well-documented APIs. If something isn't possible, that's fine, just tell me it's not possible. I spent an hour trying to get ChatGPT (4/4o and 3.5) to write some code to do one specific thing (dump/log detailed memory allocation data from the current .NET application process) for diagnosing an intermittent out of memory exception in a production application. The answer as far as I can tell is that it's not possible in-process. Maybe it's possible out of process using the profiling API, but that doesn't help me in a locked-down k8s pod/container in AWS.
I think once you understand that they're prone to do that, it's less of a problem in practice. You just don't ask it questions that requires detailed knowledge of an API unless it's _extremely_ popular. Like in kubernetes terms, it's safe to ask it about a pod spec, less safe to ask it details about istio configuration and even less safe to ask it about some random operator with 50 stars on github.
Mostly it's good at structure and syntax, so I'll often find the library/spec I want, paste in the relevant documentation and ask it to write my function for me.
This may seem like a waste of time because once you've got the documentation you can just write the code yourself, but A: that takes 5 times as long and B: I think people
underestimate how much general domain knowledge is buried in chatgpt so it's pretty good at inferring the details of what you're looking for or what you should have asked about.
In general, I think the more your interaction with chatgpt is framed as a dialogue and less as a 'fill in the blanks' exercise, the more you'll get out of it.
If you are still seeing the issue with memory and GC, you can submit it to https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues especially if you are doing something that is expected to just work(tm).
* difficult as in retrieving data detailed enough to trace individual allocations, otherwise `GC.GetGCMemoryInfo()` and adjacent methods can give you high-level overview. There are more advanced tools but I always had the option to either use remote debugging in Windows Server days and dotnet-dump and dotnet-trace for containerized applications to diagnose the issues, so haven't really explored what is needed for the more locked down environments.
This problem applies almost universally as far as I can tell.
If you are knowledgeable on a subject matter you're asking for help with, the LLM can be guided to value. This means you do have to throw out bad or flat out wrong output regularly.
This becomes a problem when you have no prior experience in a domain. For example reviewing legal contracts about a real estate transaction. If you aren't familiar enough with the workflow and details of steps you can't provide critique and follow-on guidance.
However, the response still stands before you, and it can be tempting to glom onto it.
This is not all that different from the current experience with search engines, though. Where if you're trying to get an answer to a question, you may wade through and even initially accept answers from websites that are completely wrong.
For example, products to apply to the foundation of an old basement. Some sites will recommend products that are not good at all, but do so because the content owners get associate compensation for it.
The difference is that LLM responses appear less biased (no associate links, no SEO keyword targeting), but are still wrong.
All that said, sometimes LLMs just crush it when details don't matter. For example, building a simple cross-platform pyqt-based application. Search engine results can not do this. Wheras, at least for rapid prototyping, GPT is very, very good.
I can't imagine an office full of people driving their gas vehicles 50+ miles per day creates less pollution than those people being at home. Lighting costs are extremely marginal these days, so really heating/AC would be the big driver.
I know prices may not be a perfect corollary to pollution but people driving that much to work are pretty likely to spend more money fueling their vehicles than they are on electric + gas for their homes.
The vast majority of people don’t stop all power consumption at home just because they’re not at home. Even modern thermostats like Nest don’t save as much as they claim, usually.
It's a great site when you need to buy this sort of thing. However, given how lauded it is for functional usability, I noticed I need to rage click the back button in order to get to the site I came from after clicking one of their links.
That was probably 10+ years ago and I suspect data analysis by the leagues is much stronger now. Still an insane line that needs to be walked between the leagues getting revenue from the sportsbooks and gambling not impacting that play.