Dev Notes 21: AV Article Progress and November Reflections

Dev Notes (DN) document progress towards a larger article. Discussion is preliminary

Today's notes reflect mostly progress on the AV policy draft from yesterday. I pushed v0.2 of the article, which expands several sections, but does not quite bring it to completion. Originally I just planned to call that v0.2 push my post for today, but last minute pivoted these notes to give more cleanly a post for each day of November (so these notes are rushed).

AV Progress

Additions

I added statistics on costs and vehicle usage. I spent some time digging through the National Highway Travel Survey and some related government reports. There is a lot there, and probably an interesting article just from reading from these 500 page reports and the raw data and writing a bit of commentary.

I also tried to decide the positions trying to choose around labor policy interactions. Job displacement is a huge problem without clear answers. My loose view is that AVs are some of the least positive biased forms of automation. We need progress on the problems of automation and job loss, but that is somewhat orthogonal to the needs of AV policy.

I wrote a few paragraphs there, but unclear how much want to actually build on this topic.

Trying to Sort Through What it Is

The article now around 1600 words. This is problematic as there is still several sections that need to be written. This puts on track to be around 3000 words. The goal of the article isn't a bad replication of a research report, but to function as a general interest conversation starter on policy needs backed by some research statistics. Thus it is likely getting too long.

I am conflicted between some kind of restructuring vs some kind of aggressive usage of accordion sections. I want to design some kind of fancy "abstractive accordion" feature. Unlike a typical accordion where it's kind of just open or closed, I want to show some shadow text which somewhat summarizes what is being said or lets you show the key quotes within the section. Clicking on summary text fully expands it. I briefly played around with implementations here, but didn't yet get something I'm aesthetically and functionally satisfied with.

Location Aware Writing

When writing this I have struggled to figure out who I'm writing for.

There is a interesting version of the article that is very Bay Area specific, but less general interesting or requires a lot of explanation on bay area topics (what is BART, understanding bay bridge and proposed crossing proposals).

There's an interesting feature of web writing where can have multiple versions which can be toggled (and autoselected from estimated IP location). So slightly different versions if in California vs in the US vs out of the US. This complicates things though and unclear it is worth it. In theory this is an area LLMs could help, and would be curious to explore how multiversioning can while still feel in control of the content.

30 posts in 30 days

This post is also the last of posting every day of November. Broadly I think a success. I had about 3 fully complete articles ( Street Names Study, IMDb Data Analysis, Laser Cutting). These reached thousands of people and were generally well recieved. There's also three working drafts for the Wikidata project, AV policy project, and the vibe data viz guide. These are more alive then just sitting on my computer. Then there was some stand alone "miniblogs" like the most common street names and the meta notes on site design.

I also got to document progress on researching these and other projects like the GPT-OSS project in 21 dev notes. I've had the chance to share these dev notes to get or provide feedback in a way typically don't have. This has been a really interesting experience and dramatic perspective shift from years of grad school. I definitely expect to continue some form of continued blogging and dev notes research journalling. I'm unclear what this will exactly this will look like.

After more time passes and I can better assess the outcomes of this, I might create a more prescriptive post on situations on where something like this is good.

Thanks to all those who supported me during this process! :)