Sorry for the interruption. We're an indie business with no banner ads, and our newsletter helps us keep the lights on. Hope you enjoyed the piece up to that point.
There was a big step change in my experience, enabled by the adoption of Teams for remote work and the resulting ease of scheduling meetings. Previously meetings had always required the organiser to book a room.
That would be a bad design for an A/B study (and NYC congestion pricing is not a “study” anyway), because cities are few and not alike and have an enormous list of other things that are different. What NYC equivalent would you pick?
In any case, not every policy change needs to be an academic exercise.
Yup, that is indeed a part of the problem. You'll notice I did say, "Obviously not feasible in practice."
I've got a textbook on field experiments that refers to these kinds of questions as FUQ - acronym for "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions". You can collect suggestive evidence, but firmly establishing cause and effect is something you've just got to let go of.
In my experience, when you’re within 24 hours or so of an upcoming renewal, you have to contact support to stop the renewal. And there isn’t a prominent way to contact support, because the contact form is hidden until you view a past order. That’s not really an edge case…
On another note, an actual edge case that happened to me is that I was in a different country when my Uber One was about to renew, but I had no way to cancel because the app kept geolocating me and displayed a UI specific to my visiting country. I got no Uber One benefits in that country anyway. So I had to send an email to stop renewal, and while I was waiting for a reply, I got charged. Support said they can’t refund me, and I ended up having to do a chargeback.
I just asked ChatGPT with a lazy prompt: "Come up with a formula to impose reciprocal tariffs that will reduce America's trade deficit to zero" and it came up with basically the same formula.
Oh man if people in the White House are just using ChatGPT...
The Terminator franchise had it that the AI has to nuke humanity and fight a giant war including time travel to take over.
Nah, all it has to do is offer to be "helpful" and do stuff for us and we'd be like "sure, go ahead, take over, here let me cut and paste your advice right into a policy document."
reply