Awful news for everybody, particularly those in speculative tech jobs.
We may well look back at the attack on Iran as the American tipping point that caused the same kind of financial stagnation as Brexit caused for the UK.
What exactly do you mean by "career politician?" Being a member of the opposition in a dictatorship means giving up material wealth and putting your life & liberty on the line.
This is one cause but another is that agents are mostly trained using the same sets of problems. There are only so many open source projects that can be used for training (ie. benchmarks). There's huge oversampling for a subset of projects like pandas and nothing at all for proprietary datasets. This is a huge problem!
If you want your agent to be really good at working with dates in a functional way or know how to deal with the metric system (as examples), then you need to train on those problems, probably using RFT. The other challenge is that even if you have this problem set in testable fashion running at scale is hard. Some benchmarks have 20k+ test cases and can take well over an hour to run. If you ran each test case sequentially it would take over 2 years to complete.
Right now the only company I'm aware of that lets you do that at scale is runloop (disclaimer, I work there).
You can go to any port town in the US and you will see containers stacked up like tiny towns. The equipment to move the containers is usually the bottleneck not the yard space.
This kind of cross-cutting issue is very challenging for even the best run organizations to deal with. Local government is not equipped to randomly start calling in experts and directing large scale projects because we, collectively, have chosen not to fund and structure our government in a way that allows them to do so.
Also consider for a minute how blindingly obvious it is, in retrospect, to know that containers can -- and should -- be stacked 3+ high vs. how hard it is to walk into a field of 2-stacks and know that they're being stacked inefficiently. Part of the challenge is informational: those that see the problem see it so obviously that they assume that there's a reason why the problem can't be fixed. Those that can't see the problem don't even realize there is a problem!
This article is ridiculous. "It's so easy but nobody expected it to happen!"
Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility!
It's therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn't realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair. This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem and the fact that he resolved it in 8 hours (!) is something to be celebrated, not chided.
Just a warning to those planning to do this: you are taking an incredible risk with your future that I think is undervalued. Circumstances beyond your control can make your plans financially unviable and by retiring so early you have absolutely no room for error. All it takes is one change in health or a regulation for your whole plan to be instantly invalidated.
For those that have the ability and the desire to retire: congratulations! Please be careful!
We may well look back at the attack on Iran as the American tipping point that caused the same kind of financial stagnation as Brexit caused for the UK.