People write applications that work with the S3 API but may want to host their own storage for a variety of reasons. Personally I make use of S3-compatible services for pre-signed url access to data on disks I own. The distributed aspect is only one reason why someone might want an S3-like service.
Yeah, having your agent write 3x the code in exhaustive tests (I tried this recently and got 600 lines of tests for my 100 lines of code!) sure makes things look great, but when you actually look at the content of the tests they’re meaningless. Good tests validate the use of design patterns, ensure that dependencies hold, and are meaningful (e.g. shortcut debugging by setting up useful state) when they break.
Maybe I'm entirely out of the loop and a complete idiot, but I am really not sure at all what people mean when they talk about this stuff. I use AI agents every day, but people who say they spend 'most of my time writing agents and tools' must be living in an absolutely different world.
I don't understand how people are making anything that has any level of usefulness without a feedback loop with them at the center. My agents often can go off for a few minutes, maybe 10, and write some feature. Half of the time they will get it wrong, I realize I prompted wrong, and I will have to re-do it myself or re-do the prompt. A quarter of the time, they have no idea what they're doing, and I realize I can fix the issue that they're writing a thousand lines for with a single line change. The final quarter of the time I need to follow up and refine their solution either manually or through additional prompting.
That's also only a small portion of my time... The rest is curating data (which you've pretty much got to do manually), writing code by hand (gasp!), working on deployments, and discussing with actual people.
Maybe this is a limitation of the models, but I don't think so. To get to the vision in my head, there needs to be a feedback loop... Or are people just willing to abdicate that vision-making to the model? If you do that, how do you know you're solving the problem you actually want to?
At some level this is driven by street design. The reason bus stops are so close in Philadelphia is because they stop every block, and there's a stop sign every block. The blocks are very small.
I don't know that 'removing' these as bus-stops would actually change anything. I think a larger question is whether route changes should occur.
There was a large effort in Philly called the 'Bus Revolution' [1] that aimed to re-balance routes (I have a map from the 50s on my wall and the bus routes are the same, including numbers, as they are today). The problem there was that there was a funding crisis that massively delayed the implementation [2]. These services are massively under-funded, and that's the primary issue; implementing the article's suggestions are not free.
Removing the stops helps a lot. As an example on SEPTA, the 124/125 [1][2] to Wissahickon T.C. takes 10+ minutes longer than taking the 27 [3] when starting at J.F.K. & 15th.
(for context: the 124/5 operate locally west through center city before getting on the highway while the 27 only makes 1-2 more stops in center city before getting on the highway)
Making these extra stops causes the bus to 'miss' the light cycle at almost every stop.
> Making these extra stops causes the bus to 'miss' the light cycle at almost every stop.
This would be a much bigger change, but it's also possible for the lights to give priority to buses. When a bus approaches a light, that should trigger the lights to advance to the part of the cycle that gives the bus the green light. That way, you prioritize the 20 people in the bus rather than the 10 people each in their own car.
This happens with trams in the German city I live in. The other advantage is energy efficiency, apparently - if you can keep them traveling at a consistent speed, then they can maintain momentum, as opposed to if they're constantly stopping and starting and need to spend more energy getting up to speed.
It's slightly irritating as a pedestrian when you're waiting to cross the road to get to a tram stop, and you see that the tram is coming in less than a minute, and you know you're not going to be able to cross in time. But that's the sort of slight irritation I'm okay with for better fuel efficiency and faster trams.
> The reason bus stops are so close in Philadelphia is because they stop every block
Which is the issue. Philadelphia's blocks were sized in the 1600s, they weren't designed to be the optimal spacing for bus stops. Given how tiny the blocks are, there is no need to stop at every block.
Quite a big difference between stopping at a stop sign and a bus stop. Also there isn't a stop sign every block, on the larger streets that most of the busses run on there are lights at the intersections. While Philly does a pretty poor job coordinating its traffic lights, that's a separate issue.
> I have a map from the 50s on my wall and the bus routes are the same, including numbers, as they are today
A surprising number of bus routes in Dublin still follow, to a large extent, tram routes laid out in the 1870s. And use the same numbers. This stuff is _sticky_ (partly because significantly redesigning an existing route tends to annoy people; there's a fairly strong tendency to just make a new one and leave the existing one running in some capacity).
Racing and street driving are completely different. Racing involves detailed knowledge of vehicle dynamics and grip. Street driving is mainly obstacle recognition and avoidance. No waymo ever operates anywhere close to the limit of grip, which is where you are all the time when racing.
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