I think self driving cars are important for a couple of reasons:
1. Demographics - Aging population needs transportation. God knows we certainly don't need really old people driving themselves. We got a taste of the future in West Portal in that regard not long ago.
2. Human Capital - The US has pretty much demonstrated that there is little desire to import low skilled labor. Where do these theoretical Taxi drivers come from? Or welders or plumbers. Labor is going to become increasing expensive no matter how you slice the pie.
3. Younger US citizens are going to gravitate to non-manual labor jobs. It is not just that every one is being steered toward college. Physical labor (trades) take a toll on the body. I know - I have work in them - and you quickly extrapolate what that will be like when you are 50.
Public transportation solved this before cars were commonplace. Implement ubiquitous and free public transportation in every urban center (where 80% of the American population lives [0]) and you'll save billions from not having to manufacture (and store!) cars.
Don't disagree that public transportation is necessary however one size does not fit all people. There are elderly people that have difficulty navigating public spaces for many reasons. Having a car drive up to your home or pick you up at the doctor is a game changer. A Waymo making tens or hundreds of trips per day has a utilization rate far exceeding the average car.
For public transportation to be broadly appealing it has to be clean, safe, and fast. Which means that you have to prevent people who are antisocial (playing loud music, etc.), violent, or just have terrible hygiene from boarding. You can't expect the bus driver to double-task as a security guard, so you have to somehow figure out a different way to implement security enforcement on the vehicles. You also may have to be ruthless in optimizing overall transportation value, of which speed is a factor, which may mean cutting some stops.
You have to have the political will and support to do all this even as the almost inevitable controversial videos hit social media: people being manhandled by security guards while protesting their innocence, people complaining about how there used to be a stop on their street but now it's gone, etc.
If my city kneecaps bus and metro service bc Waymo swindles them into cutting the transit budget I swear I’m gonna riot. America is almost too far gone as it is, but the ubiquity of self-driving cars will almost certainly cement in all the poor decisions we’ve made
> Implement ubiquitous and free public transportation in every urban center (where 80% of the American population lives [0])
In, or between? Like your link tells, urban is defined by 2,000 houses. At that scale, in-town transport doesn't really make sense. You can already walk just about everywhere in five minutes. A single train station to get you to other towns makes more sense, but...
- We already had exactly that in the past. Perhaps service ended because nobody wanted to use it? ...
- After all, the town already has the town things. The whole point of living in an urban area is so you can walk to all the things you need on a daily basis. If you are leaving the walkable bubble, you're most likely headed to a rural point to access that which cannot be offered in an urban setting. Transport isn't about where people live, but where they are going.
Interoperability is what made the Web possible. Not sure I buy that it will save it without a fundamental change in people's behavior.
Image you are a 1960s household and RCA tries to sell you a TV to only watch ABC and Zenith has a TV to only watch CBS. 60 years later linear TV is unwatchable by normal humans IMO. It's not like "let advertising pay for this" enshittifying an entire industry hasn't happened before.
Agreed - another tool in the old tool pouch. I find it fascinating in that it provides insight into the role of language in intelligence. Certainly not AGI but makes ELIZA seem neolithic;)
I am amazed at the incredible things it can do - only to turnaround and not be able to do a simple task a child can do. Just like people.
Your handle caught my attention - yes - and for folks studying non-linear and dynamical systems, fascinating how much of prompting is sensitive dependence to initial conditions.
One size never fits all. I am old enough to remember what a game changer Spreadsheets (VisiCalc) where. They made the personal computer into a SwissArmy knife for many people that could not justify investing large sums of money into software to solve a niche problem. Until that time PCs simply were not a big thing.
I believe AI will do something similar for programming. The level of complexity in modern apps is high and requires the use of many technologies that most of us cannot remotely claim to be expert in. Getting an idea and getting a prototype will definitely be easier. Production Code is another beast. Dealing with legacy systems etc will still require experts at least for the near future IMHO.
I remember when my dev team included some people using Emacs, some using Eclipse (this was pre-VS Code), and some using IntelliJ.
Developers will always disagree on the best tool for X ... but we should all fear the Luddites who refuse to even try new tools, like AI. That personality type doesn't at all mesh with my idea of a "good programmer".
I will try anything reasonable. And have tried LLM tools for programming. But there's no way I would use it daily. It's too inefficient, too error prone, and will actively make me a worse programmer (as I will be writing less code and making fewer decisions. I will also understand less of the systems I'm building).
All the excellent developers around me are _not_ using AI except for very small, contained tasks.
Are you implying that someone who prefers Eclipse is more likely to be a good software engineer than someone who prefers Emacs? If so, that is so hilariously backwards that I can't even begin to understand the types of experiences that you must've had.
I am sure that you're objectively wrong if that is what you're saying.
I'm reading it as: those unwilling to try both and make an honest evaluation and instead have preconceived notions and bigotry tend to make bad programmers. That preferences are fine, but dogmatism should be avoided.
I went to a James Gosling talk where he excoriated the Emacs users in his audience for clinging to outdated technology and not using a state-of-the-art IDE.
But the IDE he was hawking wasn't Eclipse. I think it was Sun Studio.
Sure, I bet they didn't outright dismiss them as useless to the entire field though! I'm sure they still understood the value those fancy tools provided to their peers.
Unless someone is trolling, it’s rare for people to deem it as “useless”. Most counterpoints have been about ethics and issues that surround LLM usage. Things like licensing, coding vs review time, correctness and maintainability of the generated code, etc… Unless you believe we’re in a software engineering utopia, I think it’s fair to call those out.
a sculptor or a painter are doing something inherently different from someone who describes the outcome and have it created by someone else.
in my world they are called product managers or product owners (scrum) but they are not programmers. prompting an LLM is producing a product but it is not programming.
i refuse to use AI because i want to remain a programmer, and not become a manager.
I agree. I remember working as a front end web developer years ago and needing to parse and transform xml/xslt from an api, and spending days and days trying to get it to work. The problem was the version of the IIs web server, version of xslt parser, and version format of the xslt etc. spent days on stack overflow trying to get a working solution. With ai I would have solved that idiotic problem in 1 minute.
Ai is tool, that lets us do what we want to do.
I also remember trying to create my first iOS app in Xcode and thinking «this is simply beyond me». Wouldn’t say app coding is trivial with ai, but its at least feasible now.
The bad part that none of us have a competitive edge anymore, and are close to unemployable. We can’t all be self taught founders who starts our own businesses. It’s going to get weird.
AI has not been used to write any comment that I have ever posted on Hacker News. You can observe my previous comments over the years, even prior to the adoption of modern LLMs, which demonstrate how I communicate.
(While the patterns may be similar, I have a tendency to be more loquacious due to my larger token limit! %)
You can always tell when there is a problem. When things are fine the companies keep the profits to themselves. When things start to get dicey - foist it off onto retail investers.
Private equity (PE) is increasingly being introduced into 401(k) plans, driven by a 2025 executive order encouraging "democratization" of alternative assets. - Google AI
It's why as a retail investor, never buy things that would otherwise have not been available to you (but was to those "elite"/institutional investors previously).
Think pre-IPO buy-in. Investors in the know and other well connected institutional investors get first dibs on all of the good ones. The bad ones are pawned off to retail investors. It's no different with private credit and private equity. These sorts of deals have good ones and bad ones - the good ones will have been taken by the time it flows down to retail.
Google and Apple didn't go through ten funding rounds like today's startups do. Apple had one angel and three rounds, Google had one angel and literally just an A round after that; then retail investors could capture all the upside. Now there's way more time for private investors to pick the bones clean before it gets dumped on the public.
I think you're both right. Those were great opportunities, but the proportion of such opportunities which are made available to retail traders has greatly diminished over time.
There's a great chart out there somewhere (I couldn't find it) which breaks down the impact of private equity on the availability of such opportunities in public markets. It showed a dozen or so companies (like Google, Apple, Uber, Stripe, etc) and broke down their market cap gains into two parts, "pre IPO" and "post IPO" gains. Of course, the pre-IPO gains were only available to private equity (or, at best, accredited investors), whereas the post-IPO gains were available to retail traders as well.
"Older" companies like GOOG & AAPL were much more likely to have experienced that vast majority of gains after their IPOs, meaning retail investors could have made big money by betting on them early. Meanwhile newer companies (like Facebook, Uber, Stripe, etc) were much more likely to have yielded the vast majority of their gains before their IPOs, meaning retail investors didn't have the opportunity to benefit from big returns.
I suspect that the reason those "newer" companies were able to have the majority of their gains reaped pre-IPO was that during that time period, it was easy to acquire capital from investors without resorting to public market IPOs, where as the era of google and apple have not got the same level of private investment.
And i think it has to do with low interest rates. During the google early years, it is difficult to obtain low-cost loans (for private investors that is). Therefore, public markets look like an easier path for companies to raise money.
The "newer" companies in your list are mostly post-GFC, during a period of ultra-low interest rate. This makes money easy for private investors to obtain, and so companies have an easier time getting funding from those private sources. The IPO is realistically not a funding mechanism, but an exit mechanism for those early private investors.
If you're familiar with Ray Kurzweil's work, I wonder whether this phenomenon might be related. Kurzweil notes that better technology begets better technology in a self-reinforcing and ever-accelerating cycle of technological advancement. His thesis implies rapidly evolving capital requirements. Massive amounts of nimble private capital, secure in the hands of highly competent people with relevant domain expertise, may well be an important precondition for continual acceleration.
Survivorship bias and the corporate finance world of today is completely unrecognizable from the world of Google and Apple. Just look at the resulting performance of the SPAC craze
Even for good assets there's a price you shouldn't pay. People are joking(?) about triple-layer SPVs where you can get pre-IPO exposure but at higher-than-IPO price.
> Private equity (PE) is increasingly being introduced into 401(k) plans, driven by a 2025 executive order encouraging "democratization" of alternative assets
Thanks for the reminder! I need to switch my plan away from a TDF to avoid this.
To answer your question: LLMs don't have free speech, because they aren't companies/businesses, they are a tool (that is used by companies/businesses).
Whether a company/business uses an LLM or a real human to write a particular piece of text, that piece of text is entitled to free speech protections on the basis of the company signing off on it. Not on the basis of how that piece of writing was produced.
1. Demographics - Aging population needs transportation. God knows we certainly don't need really old people driving themselves. We got a taste of the future in West Portal in that regard not long ago.
2. Human Capital - The US has pretty much demonstrated that there is little desire to import low skilled labor. Where do these theoretical Taxi drivers come from? Or welders or plumbers. Labor is going to become increasing expensive no matter how you slice the pie.
3. Younger US citizens are going to gravitate to non-manual labor jobs. It is not just that every one is being steered toward college. Physical labor (trades) take a toll on the body. I know - I have work in them - and you quickly extrapolate what that will be like when you are 50.
reply