But ShotSpotter doesn't actually work (almost every alert is a false positive). So what value would this add?

No totally, I can't imagine it either, I was just trying to give it a charitable assumption.

Both SystemVerilog and VHDL have AMS extensions for simulating analog circuits. They work pretty well but you also pay a pretty penny for the simulator licenses for them.

I use AI for side projects because Google gives me a stupid large number of tokens that refresh every 6-24 hours on my existing $10/mo Google One plan. I see it as my civic duty to help increase their costs by producing slop that I generally throw away anyways because it doesn't actually work after it gets generated.

At work, I was told to use AI but it doesn't actually work for anything that I couldn't have handed off to a brand new undergraduate intern. So I use it for things that I don't care about then go spend twice as long rewriting what it output because it made the task longer by being wrong.

In my systems, I just go to an error log that gets posted to a Slack channel then go to the the log file and grep for full message that got dumped to Slack. That then gives me everything that happened before and a state dump after. That state dump can be given to a program to tell us if any state errored and what happened before tells us what the expectation was and what the precise error was. Using a LLM would just be slower and more expensive for this.

I can't get an LLM to properly handle analyzing a single 200K+ line log without making things up so whatever anyone is saying about this "working" is probably a lie.

Heavy rail and light rail costs are very comparable unless you want to bury them. But it doesn't matter which you bury, they still cost about the same.

I also live in Chicago but unlike you, I have musculoskeletal issues that can be minor to the point of not noticing or to the point of it being painful to walk more than 2-3 blocks at a time. So doubling the distance between blocks would be the difference between me being able to use the bus and me needing to drive or use the far more expensive for taxpayers paratransit service.

And beyond that, the 6% of average time savings seen in studies of similar systems would be about the same improvement as adding curb bump outs which would save the bus time by not needing to repeatedly merge back into traffic. And that work is already happening across the city without inconveniencing anyone or causing users with disabilities from being discriminated against by armchair urban planners.

Visa and MC were capped at 0.5% for the network before that change went in as well. But we have no idea what actual rates were beside the cap as they were negotiated with each card issuer based on their risk profile and customer base.

Cars are the cheap part of auto insurance claims.

Only when you are looking at one claim. If all the cars in a city get hail damage the total costs exceed the typical daily claim losses.

I think the point is that it’s much less than all the cars.

And a hailstorm that knocks out 10,000 cars is very rare. But hurricanes or fires that knock out billions in homes happen almost every year.

Exactly this; damaging a building or causing the death of a person can be 10x+ more costly for the insurer.

Yeah they're not really putting out new exciting technologies. But this is cheaper than every other equivalent solution on the market for sale today in the USA.