https://news.ysimulator.run/item/3125

I'm not doing a good job of explaining it, so here's a visual:

   V V V 
  | l l | l l |
  | l l | l l |
         ↑
  -------·
  | l l | l l |
  | l l | l l |
         ^ ^ ^

I wonder if this is related to the Foundation Model: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/ai-and-ml-at-waymo

While in Austin, I was in a Waymo that blocked 3 lanes of incoming traffic while attempting to merge into a lane going into the opposite direction. It was a super unorthodox move, but none of the drivers (even while stopped for a red light) would let the Waymo* merge into their lane.

Thank God for the tinted windows, people were pulling their phones out to record (rightly so). It felt like I was responsible for holding up a major portion of Austin 5 pm traffic on a Friday.

Wish it just asserted itself ever-so-slightly to get itself out.

There's a good amount of debugging going on over there.

Hope you have some luck!

  But if (I thought) I mentioned that detail 
  She’d pounce upon it as upon a fond 
  Affinity, a sacramental bond,
  Uniting mystically her and me,
  And in a jiffy our two souls would be 
  Brother and sister trembling on the brink 
  Of tender incest.

Maybe it's the novelty of it, but only a few buildings in the US have given me the same awe as brutalist architecture in former Soviet nations.

There's definitely a repetitive pattern to these buildings, but there's also something so captivating about those concrete slabs and jagged edges.

As a younger adult and fresh college dropout I used to cling to stoicism around the time "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius become popular again.

Super embarrassing, but I even had a picture of Elon Musk hanging on my mirror. But, this also helped me ignore some painful aspects about my life and move on.

When I could finally do something about my problems, the idea of stoicism slowly outlived its utility for me. Sure as hell didn't stop me from burning out multiple times afterwards.

I picked up Chekhov years ago and this quote from Ward No. 6 helped me gain some perspective:

"You should go and preach that philosophy in Greece ... Diogenes did not need a study or a warm habitation; it's hot there without. You can lie in your tub and eat oranges and olives. But bring him to Russia to live: he'd be begging to be let indoors in May, let alone December. He'd be doubled up with the cold.

At this point I just believe that most of these high-minded ideas are after-the-fact reasonings about how or why ones life went well or poorly.