So average person with cancer does better when any individuals cancer treatment improves and it keeps compounding over time. This doesn’t mean everyone with cancer gets a slight improvement, often it’s specific types or stages that improve without impacting others. Where general progress comes from is it’s not the same improvements year after year.

Sure there’s a wide range of skills and you can’t just hand any task to anyone and expect it to work out but some fresh collage graduates are more capable than the average person with 5 years of professional experience. At the other end you need to focus on whatever they actually are capable of doing. 40+ hours a week can slowly expand even an extremely narrow skillet as long as they’re a hard worker.

1 new Jr every 2 years works quite well for a team of 7+ developers.

But with a team of 7, I can’t believe that giving them all a Claude Code subscription wouldn’t be much cheaper and much more productive than hiring a junior. A junior though with AI is more dangerous than a junior without.

I’ve seen many people stick around for a surprising amount of time while severely under compensated. I suspect that’s why HR does it.

I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems, which means a larger percentage of what’s left over is more cheaply done by Jr’s working without AI assistance.

Fascinating. I am finding the exact opposite, like complete 180

Physical labor may be a tiny fraction of what a team of developers do, but I’ve seen what amounts to several thousand dollars spent on that kind of silly task because teams leverage the tools they have.

The point obviously still stands, and no I am not suggesting using Jr devs for physical labor alone is worth adding them to the team. Rather that “Work” includes a very wide variety of tasks that need to get done.

this part I find fascinating. most places I worked (30 years in, 10 as a contractor so quite a lot) the distinction between Jr, Mid and Sr falls exactly into the kind of works that they do. I, as a Senior, often work on hard shit, Jrs are not (yet) entrusted with those problems and work on entirely different set of problems. I cannot compute how AI makes everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems, problems I am solving today few people on my team are working on and then same goes down the "pyramid"

Automation always runs into diminishing returns for similar reasons. If 99.99% of a workload is embarrassingly parallel, what remains becomes important once you can throw enough cores at the problem.

You’ll see a guy in a multi million dollar crane lifting multi ton objects and then people using ropes attached to that same load for final positioning etc. What you don’t see is people using ropes to lift bricks 20 stories by hand as the crane lifts multi ton pallets of bricks as automation is taking care of that kind of task.

Here the DoD pattern makes it clear what part of the larger acronym is representing.

AI tools don’t prevent people from understanding the code they are producing as it wouldn’t actually take that much time, but there’s a natural tendency to avoid hard work. Of course AI code is generally terrible making the process even more painful, but you where just looking at the context that created it so you have a leg up.

200 years ago the was some hype around how electricity caused mussel contractions in dead flesh, but unless you consider Frankenstein part of the hype cycle it really doesn’t compare to how much people hyped social media etc etc.

Public street lights long predated light bulbs as did both indoor and outdoor Gas lighting 1802 vs 1880’s was just a long time. People were burn, grew up, had kids, and become old between the first electric lighting and the first practical electric bulb. People definitely appreciated the improvement to air quality etc, but the tech simply wasn’t that novel. Rural electrification was definitely promoted but not because what it did was some unknown frontier.

Similarly electric motors had a lot of competition, even today there’s people buying pneumatic shop tools.

It absolutely is. Frankenstein is a seminal work of science-fiction horror, and the mysterious power of electricity to change everything is what made it so chilling to its readers in the 19th century.

> it really doesn’t compare to how much people hyped social media

The media is considerably different now from in 1818, thanks, in significant part, to the power of electricity. I assure you, when the electrical telegraph came on the scene, people were hyped.

Of course, much of that hype was on paper printed on printing presses, so it was, in some sense, "incomparable" to the hype possible on cable television, or the hype that's now possible with online social media.

But if your argument is "Yeah, electricity was kinda hyped, but, you know, not all that hyped, so it proves my point that the more the hype, the less the impact," you have some more research to do. Please just Google "War of the Currents" for a minute.

It was published as Fiction. The vast majority of people didn’t think it was anymore realistic than Interstellar etc.

There’s plenty of stories where we cure cancer, but the 50% improvement in cancer treatments over the last 40 years just doesn’t get much hype because it’s so slow. It’s hard to get excited about the idea cancer may be gone in 200 years because while that will be awesome for people alive then it doesn’t do anything for the people I know.

> electric telegraph came online people where hyped.

Objectively it got way more of a meh reaction than you’d think simply based on the timelines involved.

France was happy to continue using its network of optical telegraphs long after the electrical telegraph became a practical thing. Transatlantic telegraphs got hyped up somewhat, but again the technology took so long from the first serious attempt to a practical working system people understood the limitations inherent to having such limited bandwidth between the contents.

Obviously new technology gets attention because it’s a net improvement, being able to send messages across the US much faster was useful. But hype is different, it’s focused on second order effects not what it does but what will change. The original iPhone isn’t just another cellphone that also takes pictures, it’s “the internet in your pocket.”

Technology can be quite useful directly and have significant second order effect, hype is about the second order effects being overblown. Second order effects are difficult to predict when something is actually novel, will LLM’s make programming obsolete is harder to answer in 2023 than 2063.

Home automation like dishwashers really did meaningfully impact how much effort was needed to keep a home livable, but we didn’t predict the kind of helicopter parenting that happened because of more free time especially after smaller families became common. Thus a great majority of incorrect predictions where just hype.

The faster new technology becomes widespread the harder it is to predict those second order effects and thus more hype you see.

Smoking for example wasn’t believed to be particularly deadly for a surprisingly long time.

Arguably the connotation has changed slightly, but AI slop caught on because it fit so well.

It's uncommon, and associated with old timey prisons and orphanages.

The word itself has existed for hundreds of years.

So calling it a constant throughout history is only true in the way that slavery still exists today, in that you could find it somewhere on the globe.

That didn’t change until the Age of Sail opened up new frontiers and the wheel turned again.

“A block or 2” each way at the start and destination is a significant difference (4-8 blocks) for most elderly people.

Busses fill two different roles, as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation. They can serve a vital role for cities without the kind of investment it would take to make most typical HN reader consider them as a primary means of transportation.

As such latency isn’t necessarily as critical vs coverage here.

In the US, buses (and public transport in general), are thought of as social programmes. Anyone can use them, but they are really for people who can't drive or are too poor to own a car.

The rider makeup then looks like that. The elderly and the poor, sadly. Services run at a huge loss and are dependent on massive and unpopular government subsidies. Quality of service is bad. There's a stigma to using it. You end up with long, slow bus lines because this allows as many of the current demographic (elderly, poor) to take the bus. And there are always bailouts or brutal cuts on the horizon. You end up at a sort-of local maxima of inadequacy.

In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving.

This alternate universe is a city like London. Transport for London has a balanced budget, and despite what grumpy Brits like to say, quality of service is on an ever-upwards trajectory.

In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term. You make public transport attractive to more demographics.

These means the trains constantly improve and there's no poltitians trying to cut funding or under budgetting. The 10 companies in Tokyo I can name are JR East, Eiden, Toei, Tokyu, Seibu, Tobu, Odakyu, Keio, Keikyu, Keisei. There are actually more but they generally run 1 line each, at least at the moment.

Of those, only Toei (4 lines) are run by the government. Eiden (the Tokyo Subway) is private but gets some goverment backing. The others are all private. JR East was public in the 70s. The other 7 have always been private.

Unsurprisingly, only Toei, the government run one, is not setup with all of the positive feedback loops that keep the others going.

Note that it's similar in the Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe area. JR West and 5 other big companies, 3 subway companies, a bunch of other 1/2 line companies.

Another thing to note is, AFAICT, the population density of Kyoto is generally less than Los Angeles but they have great transporation from these private companies.

Conversely, the London Underground has had notorious underfunding issues.

1. Where the Government wants to subsidize some group (e.g. help the disadvantaged by giving them discounts) they should pay the fair price to the transit agency out of the budget of Welfare, not drag on the financials of the transport agency. In other words, it shouldn't be possible that the transport agency is insolvent only because most of their customers are paying next to nothing. Discussions about whether we should spend a certain sum on subsidizing the poor to ride the bus/train/etc are purely welfare budget discussions.

2. The Government should move additional money into the system when they realize an expansion of transport helps further societal goals: e.g. congestion pricing funds should help to expand transit, or the government pays part of the cost to build new rail service to reduce congestion on the roads.

Instead of TfL being forced to take the loss, they are reimbursed by local government cost of the transport.

As an aside, I also take some issue with this pass being completely free to use. In my experience, people end up using it to go a single stop just because it's free, so why not -- which slows bus service for everyone else. I think it should be 20p per journey or something like that.

Another counterpoint: if the bus isn't overloaded, taking an additional passenger costs next to nothing, while delivering significant value to the passenger. Don't we want to create as much value as possible?

The bus has to stop, let the passenger on, and later let them off.

This affects everyone else on the bus and reduces the quality of service.

You can see that a long-distance train has doors only at the end of carriages, and stops for several minutes, but a subway has doors about every 10 seats, and stops for 20 seconds.

To liken this back to the old days - the difference in time between flashing a valid transfer slip (of paper) and having to drop change into the automated till.

Elderly will have to do that, too, because a) I expect they still want to track usage, and b) allowing some passengers to hop on a bus without checking in makes it too easy for those ineligible to do that (e.g. elderly who do not live in London) to try and do that, too.

Unfortunately the bus passes and freedom passes are not interchangeable and sometimes have to be manually checked if not in the local region,

The usual pattern is when a bus only lane is proposed, drivers complain because they view the bus as a social program. Local legislators often take the drivers' side because they also view the bus as a social program. Even if you get the political capital to push a bus only lane, traffic enforcement will routinely ignore bus lane violations. LA is making waves on the latter problem by attaching cameras to buses which automatically write tickets for cars blocking the bus lane.

Ultimately it's a politics problem. If nobody wants to spend political capital on running a bus system as a transport program, it ends up as a social program.

The problem with this in the US is that it's nearly impossible for the bus to be faster than a car without making the car slower on purpose, and the latter is the thing which is going to create the most opposition, because you're essentially screwing people over during the transition period -- which would take years if not decades.

In the meantime people still can't take the bus because the higher density housing that makes mass transit viable where they live hasn't been built yet etc., and as long as they're stuck in a car they're going to fight you hard if you try to make being stuck in a car even worse.

Meanwhile, cars are expensive. ~$500/mo for a typical car payment, another $100+ for insurance, another $100+ for gas, you're already at $8400+/year per vehicle before adding repairs and maintenance etc. For a two-car household that's more than 20% of the median household income. Make mass transit completely free and people start preferring the housing where mass transit is viable, which means more of it gets built, which is the thing you need to actually make it work.

Switching a car lane to a bus lane actually makes the cars in the remaining lanes move faster.

But it's especially rubbish when converting an existing lane, because the existing lane will have already allowed the demand to be high, e.g. people already built houses outside the range of mass transit and those residents are now locked in to using that road in cars, and you then remove the lane even though the demand is sticky.

LA average vehicle speed during rush hour is 27.6km/h (17 mph) according to Tom Tom [1]. So a 10 mph bus would turn that 27 minute journey into 46 minutes which I'll admit is more than desirable, hardly catastrophic though.

But remember that each bus can carry about fifty people which would remove close to fifty cars from the road resulting in less congestion and faster buses. Fifty cars need 400 m of road, one bus needs only 20 m.

And on your way home you can doze in your seat without causing an accident.

[1] https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/city/los-angeles-ca

There is another interesting US-centric perspective here. For some reason, US consumers feel the need to drive new or nearly-new cars.

$5000 can get you a reliable but unsexy used car. I think there is a sort of "Parkinson's law" of consumer spending at play, where financial outgoings will expand to match disposable income.

I also think there's a problem with fixed spend (e.g. car payment, insurance) vs per-trip spend. Per-trip costs are felt more.

A reason that public transport is often more popular in European cities because driving isn't even an option. There's literally nowhere to park. Even the rich need to get around, and this creates pressure to improve non-car transport from all sides.

$5000 can get you a 10+ year old used car with 100,000+ miles on it and no warranty. That's fine if you know how to do repairs and maintenance yourself, because then you're buying a part from the internet with a low markup and installing it yourself instead of paying four times as much for someone else to do it. But not every knows how to do that, or has time, or knows how to tell if a used car with no warranty will be reliable before buying it. And if you plop $5000 down on something with no warranty and then have to scrap it after the first year because your $5000 car needs a $5500 new engine, you're not saving money.

There is also the matter of where used cars come from. You can get one for $5000 because someone paid $30,000 to buy it new ten years ago. If more people did that, fewer new cars are sold and then fewer enter the used market and used car prices go up. So you can buy a used car for $5000, but it's not possible for "most people" to do that because if they tried to, they would no longer be available for $5000.

> I also think there's a problem with fixed spend (e.g. car payment, insurance) vs per-trip spend. Per-trip costs are felt more.

Which is the problem with mass transit. You get in your car and it feels like it costs nothing, the only thing that changed is the gas gauge went down by half a tank and the odometer went up. Meanwhile the amortized cost was actually over $100. Then you go to get on the train and you immediately have to swipe your card and get a bill for $40, which feels like a lot for one trip.

Worse, the car is $100+ per trip only if you're amortizing the fixed costs, i.e. comparing to the alternative of not having a car at all. If the fixed costs of having the car are sunk, the incremental cost of the trip is maybe $15, and then when the train is $40, nobody with a car is saving money to take the train when they can.

Whereas if the train is $0, then it's "hey that goes right where I'm going this time and I don't have to buy gas". Which, if it happens often enough, means more people don't need a car to begin with.

> A reason that public transport is often more popular in European cities because driving isn't even an option.

Obviously if you make something unavailable then people use alternatives. But in the US it's the other way around -- half the population lives in the suburbs where there is no public transport, nor can there be because the density is too low.

So then you need to find ways to make public transit more attractive (like eliminating the fares) rather than making cars less attractive, because making cars less attractive is going to encounter major opposition from the people who have no available option other than to use cars.

I can't make any excuses for the social and class implications, but if it got more people on the bus, it might only need to be a temporary measure.

At least that’s what I think. But if you’re right, and there’s a version of bus transport that’s viable without subsidy, then there should be a market opportunity for a private business to provide that type of bus transport. This actually exists for long range intercity buses already, but you’d think it should be possible inside of some cities. I haven’t looked into this in a lot of detail but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was effectively impossible to try and start a private bus service in most cities, specifically because that would reduce ridership of city transit and threaten all of the unionized public sector jobs in that system. In which case the bus system isn’t really even for the poor and elderly anymore; it’s for the transit workers union, which undoubtedly is a player in city politics.

Of course, there's still plenty of drivers, but the nice thing is that you have options here. Why would I want to drive if I can just take the metro, or tram, or train, or hell just cycle? Within Dutch cities cycling is often much faster than any other mode of transport, and the great thing is that everyone uses the cycling infra, young or old, rich or poor, able bodied and otherwise.

(Even then, it depends on the destination - if it's to another city then the intercity trains are still better but for 2+ people it ends up being the premium/expensive option and the car is cheaper.)

The city heavily discourages car use for commuting.

Offices have no parking spaces.

Any parking you do find in central London will be paid at an extreme rate.

To drive into the city costs around $20 per day, increasing much further if you have an older, polluting vehicle.

There is so much congestion that it is usually faster to walk than drive.

It’s a large percentage of total bus revenue by design, and a significant expense for some local governments. But the number only look large because of how we split the vast majority of government spending into federal and state budgets with local budgets being relatively anemic by comparison.

Perhaps the tiny subsidies (in absolute terms) are because the bus systems are just so small?

SFMTA's farebox recovery is around 25%. London Underground is about 130%. Osaka Subway is 209%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

Busses are light compared to 18 wheelers and other heavy equipment, they also replace many cars and SUV’s which keep getting heavier.

Finally that rule of thumb isn’t really that accurate, “A 1988 report by the Australian Road Research Board stated that the rule is a good approximation for rutting damage, but an exponent of 2 (rather than 4) is more appropriate to estimate fatigue cracking.” Rutting really isn’t that significant in most cases, but can instantly destroy road surfaces when fully loaded construction vehicles etc drive over something once.

Your former doesn't imply the latter. Here in Seattle we even still have cobblestone roads without heavy traffic and they spend very little money on them.

We have extensive rutting damage on the lanes use by busses and requires more expensive, deeper road base when they get replaced. This cost is due to the heavy traffic.

Even if squared, the buses are still 22 tons instead of 2-3 tons. 49 times more damage isn't good.

Also that visible ware is noticeable because it hasn’t been replaced. Looking worse when you resurface on the same schedule isn’t an actual cost.

We also have many concrete roads and closely-spaced axles, if they had them, would not help.

> Looking worse when you resurface on the same schedule isn’t an actual cost.

I addressed this: they have to dig much deeper and replace with much thicker road. Much more expensive. It's not "looking worse", it's actively dangerous to cyclists and other road users, so the surface must be replaced more often too.

But this is where you need to do a deeper analysis than just a simple rule of thumb. Even adding extra wheels to the same axle makes a big difference to road surfaces.

> so the surface must be replaced more often too.

Level of ruts you see are considered acceptable or they would be replaced.

However, ultimately the same entity is paying for the busses and road maintenance. If lighter busses saved taxpayers money that’s what they would use which is a major sign your analysis is inherently flawed.

I guess you don't know how the USA works, and Seattle in particular. We are spending a fraction of what is necessary to keep infrastructure from failing. We had a major bridge nearly collapse and was out of commission for years. https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-dep...

Many of our roads are not what we call acceptable.

> However, ultimately the same entity is paying for the busses and road maintenance.

Hahaha nope. We have so many different organizations with their own funding sources. Roads come from State and local funds. Metro is primarily funded with dedicated sales tax.

> If lighter busses saved taxpayers money that’s what they would use which is a major sign your analysis is inherently flawed.

Sorry, but this is possibly the most naive thing I've ever heard.

I can’t help but chuckle at the idea you actually believe that. Stop reading headlines and do some actual research into what’s actually going on.

If the US was utterly failing in maintenance you’d see ~6,000 random bridge failures per year based on the number of bridges in existence instead they are incredibly rare showing that we are actually doing a great job overall.

They don’t replace nearly enough cars and SUV’s to make up for the difference in fourth power of axle weight. But yes, 18 wheelers are worse.

A modest bus holds 40-50 people. Most commuter traffic is single driver, single vehicle. I don't know to which power the difference in axle weight would have to be to surpass the efficiency gains of replacing 40 to 50 American sized SUVs with a city bus, but I suspect it's more than four.

(I don't really understand how the fourth power of axel weight thing can possibly be true, though. Why would joining two vehicles together into a mega vehicle with double the weight and double the wheel count suddenly cause the combined vehicle to inflict 16x more wear than before you joined the two together? It makes no sense.)

A Ford F-150 weighs about 2 tons and has two axles, for an axle weight of 1 ton. 1^4=1.

A garbage truck weighs maybe 30 tons and has three axles, for an axle weight of 10 tons. 10^4=10,000.

So if you drive an F-150, you’re doing as much road damage driving down the street 10,000 times as the garbage truck does once. Rural areas that don’t have garbage trucks and just expect everyone to haul their garbage to the dump in the back of their pickups are onto something.

So, scenario A:

    4 ton vehicle, 2 axles
    load per axle is 2 tonnes.
    2^4 is 16
    2 axles - so load is 32.
    Another vehicle the same - also loading 32
    Total: 64

    8 ton vehicle, 4 axles
    load per axle is 2 tonnes
    2^4 is 16
    4 axles - load load is 64
    Total: 64

In Europe, the numbers differ even more. Lighter weight cars typically 1.5-2 tons, a new London bus can be upto 18 tons when loaded - that's ~5-16 units of wear for the car to 104,976 units for the bus...

But this is all supposing we're optimising for road wear, which isn't really the point of a bus system.

Doubling the weight and doubling the wheel count leaves the axle weight unchanged.

Here in Seattle, the busy roads with older lanes used for buses are obvious, because they have two deep canyons while the lane next to them is fine. In fact King County Metro has to pay millions in fines to the state because the buses are excessively heavy.

No roads without bus traffic have the same type of damage.

Which is part of the reason to know that axle weight alone isn't a sufficient scale. If you connect 2 cars axle to axle, they won't start doing 8x as much damage. What matters is axle weight divided by tire width.

I wish you did a little more studying before talking so authoritatively.

Yesterday I came across a couple articles that encapsulate this thought.

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/zohran-mamdani-efficiency-nyc-bu...

And

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/11/15/excellence-over-mediocrity...

One bus route can't wear two hats. Faster, sparser routes are typically complemented by slow, meandering collector routes which provide the kind of backstop you describe. Moreover, elderly and disabled people can use paratransit [1], which exists precisely to serve people with mobility issues too severe for regular transit.

Anyway, I reject the notion of buses as a second-tier transit option reserved for poor and disabled people. The only way poor people ever get decent service is when they use the same infrastructure that affluent people do. A bus system that doesn't serve the middle class is a system that will quickly lose its funding and become inadequate for anyone to use.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratransit

Paratransit is for a far smaller percentage of the population due to the significant expense.

Fundamentally as another commenter here said, a bus "can't wear two hats." In most large US cities, the bus, and sometimes the subway (if one exists), is mostly a welfare program, and its target demographic is the elderly, the poor, and the homeless. Two of those groups are rarely in any hurry.

The fact that urban professionals also rely on transit to actually get to work is not very much considered in the decisions ultimately made. This is why any changes to it are so fraught.

To actually serve both populations, you'd need to have two independent systems, but that would represent a tremendous amount of incremental cost. That's why they used to have (do they still? I'd guess not, post-pandemic) buses paid for by Apple, Google, Facebook etc. to shuttle people to work -- it's something the city government could never accomplish because the choices that make transit useful to those with jobs make it problematic for the other group.

Nothing stops you have adding express bus routes, thus allowing busses to work for yet another population. Further, bus networks are inherently cheap as long as they see reasonable ridership numbers it’s more economically efficient than cars.

When living in many a European city, I have chosen to walk instead of using a bus route due to the frequent stops making the bus trip a lot more expensive and marginally quicker. I have also lived in places where the eldery get a separate service, tailored to them, if they need it. Works a lot better IMO.

Alternate buses stop on the one-mile points only.

Solar is historically a great example where public / private collaboration actually had a place. Even if today it’s time to let market forces work.