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What Happens When the Marginal Driver Is a Robot?
Today, congestion is partly constrained by human tolerance. At some point, a trip becomes slow enough that the marginal driver decides it is not worth making. But what happens when the marginal driver is no longer a person? What if it is an empty robotaxi repositioning itself, or a self-driving car carrying a Chipotle burrito…
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The Feedback Loop for Superintelligence
AI agents may eventually participate in improving their own successors. AI models can run inside an agent harness that can execute commands, write code, run experiments, train new models, and evaluate the results. The agent could use those tools to build a candidate successor. If the new model performs better, the system could activate it.…
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Cities Need Heat Sewers
I think cities should create something like a sewer system for heat. Air conditioners just move heat from inside buildings to the street, while adding even more heat from the electricity they consume. In dense cities, thousands of AC units collectively intensify the urban heat island effect, making the outdoor environment significantly hotter than surrounding…
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Is Uber or Lyft cheaper?
I use ride-hailing apps fairly often, so I was curious whether Uber or Lyft is cheaper on average. To find out, I downloaded my complete ride history from both companies and compared what I paid across 477 trips. The short answer is that Lyft was cheaper most of the time. Across 340 Uber rides and…
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America’s Quiet War on Renters
In the United States, homeownership is rarely presented as one housing option among several. It is treated as a milestone, a financial necessity, and evidence that someone has successfully entered adulthood. Politicians promise to increase the homeownership rate. Financial advice often treats renting as a temporary condition to escape. Rent payments are described as “throwing…
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Rethinking Suburbs in the Age of Self-Driving Cars
If you look at how many U.S. suburbs are built today, a clear pattern emerges. There’s the wide arterial road, often called a stroad. It’s usually six to eight lanes, built for speed. Along both sides sit strip malls, big-box stores, and standalone restaurants, each surrounded by large parking lots. Branching off these roads are…
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The Case for Prediction Markets (Even If People Hate Them)
I’ve been thinking a lot about prediction markets lately. And honestly, I keep running into people who really don’t like them. Not just mild skepticism, more like “these should be banned” or even outright illegal. That reaction kind of bums me out. I’ve been into the idea for a long time, even before there were…
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Strip Malls Could Be America’s New Main Streets
I’ve never liked strip malls, but for a long time I couldn’t quite explain why. The buildings themselves aren’t especially offensive. If you strip away the context, a strip mall is not so different from a row of shops that you might find present on a quaint walkable Main Street in a small town. The…
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The Toll No One Charges but Everyone Pays
When you drive on a busy road, you always pay a price. The real question is how you pay it, with money or with time. In most of the United States, we have chosen to charge drivers in time. There is no toll for entering a congested road, but during peak hours you might spend…
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Testing AR Glasses as a Treadmill Companion
I’ve always found treadmill walking to be exceptionally boring. If I’m outside, on a park trail, a greenway, or any kind of walking path, I can walk for hours without thinking about it. The time just disappears. Put me on a treadmill indoors, staring forward at the same wall or the same row of machines,…
Kyle Piira 