Peter Som de Cerff

20 Nov 2025

#JerseyCity #StreetSafety #Path It's rare to get public acknowledgement by a public transit organization about the impact of local publicity campaigns and grass-roots efforts. The Better PATH advocacy group with HCCS has worked tirelessly for about a year, and clearly they are getting noticed!

20 Nov 2025

Let's help them build on this momentum and push for better PATH funding and expansion. A new year is coming and it's high time for a strong push with support from newly electeds. @eleanalittle.bsky.social @mikiesherrill.bsky.social

panynj.govEVERY LINE, EVERY DAY: PORT AUTHORITY PROPOSES MAJOR SERVICE INCREASES ACROSS PATH SYSTEM FOLLOWING CONCLUSION OF THE PATH FORWARD REHABILITATION PROGRAM IN 2026

14 Nov 2025

Port Authority adds PATH runs, for most coverage in 25 years. Just a reminder that mass transit is safe (much safer than driving), and keeps our streets safer for walking (with fewet cars). www.panynj.gov/port-authori... @eleanalittle.bsky.social

Peter Som de Cerff reposted

Tom Flood

@tomflood.bsky.social

8 Nov 2025

Replying to @tomflood.bsky.social

It’s real! Pretty moving to actually see this in person. 🥲

19 Aug 2025

I am again reminded that it is a unrecognized luxury of exquisite value to be able to ignore one's digestive system and to take the functioning of one's organs for granted. Most young people luxuriate without even noticing, and many oldsters lament the unexpected loss.

#jerseycity When last I visited JC, about Feb, a car ran into a house a few blocks from my grandchild's home. A month or two ago, a 73-year-old man was killed in a cross-walk, crossing legally, less than a mile away. Yesterday, a 6-year-old boy on his bike was run over by a UPS driver....

...for a "bus then drive" or a "walk then drive" outbound commute, if needed, and others can drive in for a "park-n-ride" train to NYC. And NOBODY needs to park on neighborhood streets. Let's push for smaller delivery vans, like cargo bikes as used in many global cities, or at least the little...

...Ford-transit (the small one) minivans, instead of box trucks. Let's not have vehicle deliveries overlapping school commute times. Let's charge Ubers extra to pick up in 'hoods, vs at a nearby major arterial. Let's just make cars into second-class citizens, so humans can go first.

...is the primary commute to work, that a few seconds of convenience for a driver is not worth the lives of our children? When will we decide to simply hold our electeds accountable, and vote out those who offer platitudes, or (worst) victim-blaming, while worshipping cars and elevating drivers?

We really don't need $10B spent on a turnpike here. We need a few million spent on bollards, planters, and bulb-outs, and reasonable restrictions on parking and deliveries, and simple enforcement of the laws. Better still, spend the $B on a parking garage at the turnpike, where locals can park...

...halfway between here and the park I take my granddaughter to visit, which is only 8 blocks away. Tonight I attended the vigil, with a thousand or two others. I was really happy to not hear "thoughts and prayers" or anything about "too soon", but instead, amidst the remembrances by family, ...

... teachers, and rabbi, calls to action, and even comments noting that anger is appropriate when our electeds and our communities fail the most vulnerable. When will we all decide that here, in a highly diverse global city, where 1/3 do not drive, and 1/3 are car-light, and mass-transit to NYC ...

For a long time, the US has been energy independent - on a net basis. But NOT on an isolated basis. Our refineries are optimized for heavy oils, from the days of KSA and VZ crude imports. Now, well, up until Trump, we exported much of our light shale oil and imported cheap Canadian sour heavy.

Of course all of this was fine. We sold the good stuff and imported cheap, land-locked oil. But now Canada will export its oil and gas, as quickly as it can turn up pipelines, and the US will have to reinvest in refineries else import some at high prices and sell some against other tariffs.

Normally, I'd say this would make our gas prices go up quite a bit, which bothers me not a whit. But thanks to the recession we will surely have, oil prices will crash, & there will be no interest to invest in US refineries for an uncertain future. Maybe the next administration can repair things?

In the 90's, we had a balanced budget, a peace dividend, and a reasonable chance to pay off our nat'l debt. In 2008, we had a chance to turn away from financial bloat, bigger cars/trucks, and suburban sprawl. In 2014, we became energy independent, and could have transitioned to renewables.

All along, we could have taxed the wealthy a bit more, held corporations accountable (on a global basis), and improved the lives of individuals. On all the above, we favored the rich, the corporations, the wasteful, and the ignorant, and eschewed equality, humanity, prudence, and education.

Our smartest? We sent them into banking. The most influential? Into getting clicks and marketing on social media. The well-heeled? They pushed on the revolving door from both sides. Only a few percent really gained vast wealth, but we're all going to pay for it now. Not quickly - but decades.

#SystemsThinking It's been a while since I've posted. I took a break from social media to focus on work and family (some time-consuming issues). Plus, I had little to say, post election, except really "well, let's wait and see". Mostly, I can't add much context beyond all the other smart people.

...to scrabble for dollars, you don't divide the current pie, but instead, you shrink the pie. You get less, & so does everybody else. It's easier to break things than make them, and it's easier still to break an info economy. Value is simply going up in smoke by the trillions.

I've spent my career working to innovate and grow value. I honestly never expected I'd see the exact opposite being done deliberately: - Destruction of info & knowledge - Disruption of networks of expertise - Trading of complex businesses for simple extractive industries - Breaking of market trust

- Anybody who understands information, innovation, technology, and modern economics knows that "growth thinking" is the global reality. We don't just divide a pie, but grow it, with strong collaboration. - Yes, the US spends - and borrows - more than it should. Yes, we have too much inequity.

But viewing the world of trade balances as some sort of simple win/loss deal is not only inaccurate, but downright stupid. Why? Because when you have a system that has grown for 100 years based on increased openness, rules, faith, and tech, and you suddenly employ zero-sum thinking...

But, I do have one rather obvious point: - The world is not zero-sum, and Trump and his MAGA cronies pretend that it is for their benefit and our joint peril. - It's natural for simple people - rural sorts & subsistence earners - to think this way. They see land & possessions as concrete reality.

#ArtificialIntelligence Given that AIs are rapidly improving on their performance on HLE (new a month ago, about?), does this imply that the next AI benchmark will need to developed by an AI?

When building a team, it's a common fallacy to hire "people a lot like me" or " a good culture fit", yet in actuality the strongest teams have diversity of skills, backgrounds, and personalities. I guess I see this sort of semi-Turing-Test as a bit more useful than winning at chess or Go, but...

...I think for the next decade we'll be far better off working on AIs that help solve thorny problems that vex human minds, perhaps by employing ways of "thinking" that are move diverse or differently excellent than what we have today.

#ArtificialIntelligence Given that AIs are rapidly improving on their performance on HLE (new a month ago, about?), does this imply that the next AI benchmark will need to developed by an AI?

All of this is interesting, but how important is it to keep devising new tests which better align with human strengths? Maybe by doing so we will stumble on the magic elixir that reaches "General AI" or even consciousness? Surely there are other dimensions where AIs will do vastly better than us

#ArtificialIntelligence Systems Engineering Minute: Narrow AI? I've been traveling a good bit, and haven't much posted. While working an AI slide for work, I happened across a nice graph, and I though it worth passing along.

...or if super-AI is ethical or dangerous. It's coming anyway, and it's going to be a general-impact technology like steam, electricity, computers, and the Internet. It's going to somehow disrupt or pervade EVERYWHERE, and it'll almost surely do so faster than the previous technologies did; each

...was faster than the one before. If you're not already savvy with the AIs in your field of expertise, it's probably time to get that way. The best defense against having your work lifestyle disrupted by AI is to figure out how to make yourself AI-enhanced soon and capably. That's what I'll do.

...and thus certainly isn't "Super (General) AI" in the popular sense -- it's "Super NARROW AI" where we have a variety of AI tools each good at different things. Need a research report? Deep Research. Need language translations? Google. Need a tutorial on polymer synthesis? chatGPT.

Need to read a breast x-ray for cancer, or fold proteins for a new medicine? Well, I don't know, but I bet there is one...or soon will be. And that's the point of this post. It really doesn't matter what you think about AI, the hype, the problems with hallucinations, the idiot-savant limitations,

What's noteworthy is this graph doesn't include Deep Research, the newest OpenAI offering, which is specifically intended to do internet research. As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, we are entering a new region of AI which isn't really historical "Narrow AI", isn't human-type "General AI", ...

3 Feb 2025

Got hassled at border entry into Quebec for not having an invite letter. First time for this. Thanks, Trump.

#ArtificialIntelligence #SystemsEngineering Here's a short Systems Engineering Minute on my pragmatic views on AI, as an interested but only lightly educated technical layman. Take it with a grain of salt. When people about AGI - artificial general intelligence - they often mean "human thinking".

"The Most Human Human", about the human voted "most obviously human" in a Turing Test. Interesting notion, but nobody talks much about the Least Human Human, who most readily gets mis-identified as an AI. Like the park ranger, when asked why they didn't build better bear-proof trash cans, quipped:

"Ma'am, it turns out there is a significant overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human." Surely, it won't be hard to find ways that smart AIs can valuably contribute, even if they are mostly just really smart bears, or dogs, or oddball savants.

The dog clearly isn't human, and has capabilities that exceed and fall short of humans, in various areas, but together the pair - man and dog - does better than either would alone. Give the man a horse, and the three do better still. So, let's not dismiss today's AIs out of hand, because...

...they can't pass a Turing Test, or beat every human on every test. Let's work to understand where they do better than humans can today, and partner up to solve hard problems. Tomorrow will surely bring better AIs, but that tomorrow can take care of itself. Final note: I read a fun book,

But they were also highly valuable, and solved problems that the company absolutely needed to have solved, and they often did so better and in different ways than the Mgmt expected. That's the way we should strive to be with AIs. Don't expect and easy-going, accurately communicative, ...

...socially-adept polymath, but a savant you need to adapt to. We've all done this with computers for decades, teach ourselves to "think like the computer", and this will be similar. Think of it like this: a shepherd doesn't need an AI shepherd to help with a flock of sheep; he needs a dog.

...human workers or specialized sub-human savant AIs can contribute a LOT. As noted in a previous thread, I'd call these ASNIs - Artificially super narrow intelligences - not really today's narrow AIs nor a future super-AGI, but something useful and really smart. I've worked in places with ...

...floors of PhDs, and some were, to put it nicely, not easy for typical managers and coworkers to deal with. Some R&D managers would simply refuse to work with them, and others had combative relationships, and most were the bane of Program Managers trying to keep a schedule. Some, not all...

...to not realize or admit such, even to ourselves, but if asked we'll rationalize up a new explanation to resolve the apparent shift from "old self" and "new self". Why would we want AI's to match this? Maybe part of our problem with today's AIs is that they already tend a bit too much this way?

Instead, we should be pragmatic about "what is useful?". Sure, some want human-quality AIs to replace a bunch of human workers (labor) with machines (capital), for the good of, naturally, capitalists. But that's kinda silly. What we SHOULD want is "productivity", and that means augmented...

For me, this is an arbitrary and silly goal, because, for one thing, we don't really understand well HOW humans think, but we KNOW (thanks to Kahneman and others) that our value systems are oddly biased and quirky (ok, well, maybe just full of short-cuts and bugs). We are NOT balanced and nuanced

...judges of complex situations, nor deeply logical and organized problem solvers; at least, not most of the time. We are pretty good at deciding immediately, emotionally, and then rationalizing a better-sounding explanation for our views. And, if we change our beliefs, not only are we likely ...

constructiondive.comDOT says it will tie funding to birth, marriage ratesThe agency issued a memo after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took the reins this week and authorized a series of actions to advance Trump’s agenda.

1 Feb 2025

If this is actually done, it will mostly support poorer, uneducated white communities. Educated people tend to have fewer kids, and later. Surely some minority areas have high birth rates too, though, so that'll be interesting.

Assigned Media@assignedmedia.org

ConstructionDrive [Jan 31] -- Dept of Transportation reflecting WCN emphasis on procreation, announces it will prioritize fertile families thru “preference to communities with marriage & birth rates higher than average.” In other words DEI for white communities. [by @rikiwilchins.bsky.social‬]