Many people who've used Tesla's "Full Self Driving" software are pretty excited about it:

I can step into a Tesla today, press a destination, and go there without touching the wheel or pedals. Sure it won't be flawless but the fact is, I can. I can't do the same in any other consumer car, and the closest thing is a Waymo. The effort is there, I think its just a matter of time before we start seeing the legal stuff play out.

I think this is mostly not a legal issue. Let's take perhaps the most favorable conditions for driverless cars:

• A specific highway the manufacturer has checked
• Heavy traffic, under 40mph
• No rain or snow
• No work zones
• Daytime

Tesla could demonstrate their system worked sufficiently reliably in these conditions that the person in the driver's seat could safely work, read, or watch a movie, and Tesla could take full legal responsibility for any crash. We know Tesla could legally do this because (despite what the Secretary of Transportation thinks) Mercedes already does, with Drive Pilot, which they launched in Germany in 2022 and the US in 2023.

Many contra dances have tried a "first-time free" policy, but I think "second-time free" is usually a better choice. Most first-timers show up expecting to pay something, so you might as well take their money. Many first-timers don't end up coming back, so better to reserve your incentive for the ones that do. And it filters out people who are only interested in free experiences. BIDA switched in 2012 and I think this has gone very well.

I think the main case where first-time free would be a better fit is a community where you're having a lot of trouble getting people to come out and try the dance but you're pretty sure that if they do they'll stick around. But while contra can be pretty addictive I don't think it's that addictive.

I do a lot of work on ec2 instances, and one thing that makes this easier is having a few scripts for manipulating them. These are very small, small enough to go in my .bashrc, but still make my life a lot easier.

The first one is start_ec2:

This is a personal post: I'm not speaking for SecureBio or BIDA.

I help organize a contra dance that requires high filtration masks (N95 etc) at half of our dances. When we restarted in 2022 we required masks at all our dances, before switching to half in 2023. We just ran a survey of our dancers, and while there are people who would like to not have to wear masks there are also a lot of people who are only willing to come if they know all the dancers will be masked. [1]

Last week I attended a conference for work with a lot of people thinking about biosecurity, which has me wondering about ways we could have a hall as safe as one where the dancers are all wearing N95s but without the ways N95s make it harder to dance.

Julia recently posted about how we're still donating 50%, which included this chart of monthly spending from our 2024 spending update:

While each year before 2024 we'd been saving some, 2024 was the first year in which we were drawing from savings to make donations. Noticing this prompted David Denkenberger to ask:

If you don't mind me asking, how does the return on your investments factor in? E.g., is the negative savings offset by return such that your net worth is not falling?

This is a good question! Our net worth hasn't been something I've been regularly calculating, but this seemed like a good opportunity to figure out how it's changed over time.

One of the downsides of wearing a mask or respirator is that it makes it hard for people to understand you. That there's stuff getting in the way of free air movement is kind of the point, but ideally it would be possible to let vibration through without net air movement. I recently saw that 3M had updated their respirator line to include an option for a speaking diaphragm, and wanted to test it out.

I compared four options:

• No mask
• Kimtech N95 Duckbill disposable (my favorite!)
• 3M HF-802SD reusable respirator with speaking diaphragm.
• 3M 6200 previous-generation reusable respirator without speaking diaphragm.