What struck me is a complete lack of urgency and accountability, combined with out-of-control meddling by politicians pursuing completely unrelated goals. The project spent several years in EIR and initial planning, which is to be expected. Then for over a decade, San Francisco's board of supervisors held the project hostage because they wanted to demolish a freeway south of where the actual project is, while bolting on an unrelated and unrealistic tunneling project (the "Pennsylvania Avenue alignment") and taking over the governance of the Caltrain board (Caltrain is the least dysfunctional transit system in the Bay Area, so the Caltrain board was not too keen on this proposal). Eventually, after wasting many years and tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars, the balance of power on the BoS shifted and they agreed to stop holding the project hostage, restructure the board (TJPA), and re-hire staff to actually plan the tunnel.

I've seen multiple project managers/directors come and go, and countless community input meetings happen discussing completely hypothetical project concepts. The money set aside for the project from the original Transbay budget is long gone, and numerous funding opportunities have passed by because the TJPA and its stakeholders were not ready to plan and submit a viable proposal in time.

Here are some things I would want to change going forward:

- Transit projects should be centrally planned by the state government (i.e. a regional subdivision of an agency similar to Caltrans) with structured opportunities for resident feedback and authority to override most input from local governments. This should include exemptions from CEQA and other review, and strong eminent domain powers.

- The Caltrans-like agency should have independent regional metro divisions (i.e. Bay Area, LA area, etc) with dedicated sources of regionally collected funding as well as a mandate to own and lease out land adjacent to transit stations as part of its funding. The divisions should have budgets to retain project management staff who accumulate long-term experience and manage multiple projects. They should have the independent authority to issue bonds and be required to publish construction efficiency and ridership statistics.

- Labor unions should be systematically prevented from influencing the course of planning, construction, and project execution. Unions meddle and cause many delays and project complications.

Unfortunately, even a structure like that is not a panacea. If you look at CHSRA, it actually has some of the features that I listed above. When CHSRA was first started, the planning process fell victim to meddling from state legislators (most famously the one who forced the route to go through Palmdale), followed by many wasted years fighting NIMBYs and doing useless planning. Ultimately, the only hope I see is to insulate the planners from political interference, set them up with independent funding, have one agency head who is responsible and accountable, and reduce the veto powers that California grants to citizens and governments.

(For those who don't know, the Grad is the most produced MLRS ever, and the Russian army's weapon of choice for indiscriminately bombarding enemy territory)

I didn't make it slow and buggy on purpose though. Apple did that for me with Liquid glass. Which I guess works!

I think the quality of your power is determined mainly by the size of the transformer serving your neighborhood as well as the presence of noisy heavy power equipment like AC with poor/no soft starters or big brush motors among the consumers. It's noticeably worse on our street compared to where we previously lived.

Yes.

(I don't disagree that a diverse mix is good, and I'm all for nuclear, I'm just saying the old "it's intermittent and can't grid form" boogeyman is no longer true. It would also really behoove Western countries to start manufacturing batteries at scale if we don't want to get a bloody nose in the future, because they're good for more than just the grid)

This doesn't make sense, in the context of the author's chosen example (postgres). Postgres connections are very heavy and there is a huge performance penalty for cycling them quickly, and a whole range of silly workarounds for this fact (pgbouncer). Maybe the author meant to say that sessions are brief.

This whole time (the past 15 years) git has been getting faster without most of us noticing, because big companies have been investing in speeding it up. The reason you don't notice or care is that they work on a very different scale. Thousands of users, thousands of PRs per day, millions of CI/CD jobs all hitting the repo.

Now the cycle is repeating again because these numbers are shooting through the roof because of agentic coding.

The actual solution is to boil small quantities of water. I can boil one cup in 90 seconds or so, even with the 120v handicap.

I also found it funny how they mentioned that modern clothing keeps you warmer longer once you stop moving, then tried to minimize the significance of that. There's a reason "cotton kills" is a cliche. Modern fabrics, windbreaker shells, and engineered layers don't make a huge difference in warm, dry, active conditions - it's when things go sideways that they can be the difference between comfort and fatal hypothermia.