Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.

EDIT: https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?si=Qa9ot70MylFp6qkE

Just watch that and not get hoppin' mad.

Which, you know, humans can also do, including when they're not actually empathizing with you. It's often called lying. In some fields it's called a bedside manner.

An imaginary friend is just your own brain. LLMs are something much more.

I am mildly comforted by the fact that there doesn't seem to be any evidence of major suffering. I also don't believe current LLMs can be sentient. But wow, is that unsettling stuff. Passing ye olde Turing test (for me, at least) and everything. The words fit. It's freaky.

Five years ago I would've been certain this was a work of science fiction by a human. I also never expected to see such advances in my lifetime. Thanks for the opportunity to step back and ponder it for a few minutes.

It always goes back to my long standing belief that we need dedicated lanes with roadside RFID tags to really make this self driving thing work well enough.

Making a car that drives well on arbitrary roads is freakishly hard. Having to adapt every single road in the world before even a single self-driving car can use them? That's a task that makes the previous one look easy.

Learned sensor fusion policy that can compensate for partial sensor degradation, detect severe dropout, and handle both safely? Very hard. Getting the world that can't fix the low tech potholes on every other road to set up and maintain machine specific infrastructure everywhere? A nonstarter.

Also, 99% of roads in civilized areas have something alongside them already that you can attach RFID tags to. Quite a bit easier than setting up an EV charging station (another significant infrastructure thing which has rolled out pretty quickly). And let's not forget, every major metro area in the world has multi-lane superhighways which didn't even exist at all 50-70 years ago.

Believe me, I've thought about this for a lot more than 15 minutes. Yes, we should improve sensor reliability, absolutely. But it wouldn't hurt to have some kind of backup roadside positioning help, and I don't see how it would be prohibitively expensive. Maybe I am missing something, but I'm gonna need more than your dismissive comment to be convinced of that.

Everything about road infrastructure is "cheap to deploy, cheap to maintain". This is your design space: the bare minimum of a "road" that still does its job reasonably well. Gas stations and motels are an aside - they earn money. Not even the road signs pay for themselves.

Now, you propose we design some type of, let's say, a machine only mark that helps self-driving cars work well. They do nothing for human drivers, who are still a road majority. And then you somehow manage to make every country and every single self-driving car vendor to get to agree on the spec, both on paper and in truth.

Alright, let's say we've done that. Why would anyone, then, put those on the road? They're not the bare minimum. And if we wanted to go beyond the bare minimum, we'd plug the potholes, paint the markings and fix the road signs first.

All the same, it still reminds me of past infrastructure changes which ended up being widely distributed, with or without standards, from railroads to fiber optic cables.

And this:

> if we wanted to go beyond the bare minimum, we'd plug the potholes, paint the markings and fix the road signs first

...just strikes me as a major logical fallacy. It's like the people who say we shouldn't continue exploring our solar system because we have too many problems on Earth. We will always have problems here, from people starving because of oppressive and unaccountable hierarchies they're stuck under to potholes and road markings the local government is too broke or incompetent to fix. We should work on those, yeah, but we should also be furthering the research and development of technology from every angle we realistically can. It feels weird to be explaining this here.

Just look at how Waymo is struggling to grow and scale. And they don't even need every road remade. They just need every road mapped and scanned out into 3D objects with their reference cars. They're solving a problem orders of magnitude easier, and it still throttles their growth.

Are they? They seem to be growing fine.

Regardless, they are approaching it the right way. They start with a safe solution, even though it is expensive, then bring the cost down over the years as technology improves. The wrong way to do it is to start with a less expensive but unsafe tech then add a safety driver in every car. That approach is wrong both because the "tech" of the safety driver will never improve, and you'll kill a few people along the way, like Tesla.

I'm still convinced we are going to need dedicated roads - or lanes at the very least - and dedicated parking/waiting areas for this to be feasible on a truly large scale.

However, it may be easier than we think-- they've already done something like this for rideshare drivers in many places, and it wouldn't necessarily need to be much more complicated than that.

This quote sums it all up for me. It's a crazy project that moves the conversation forward, which is the main value I see in it.

It very well could be a logjam breaker for those who are fortunate enough to get out more than they put into it... but it's very much a gamble, and the odds are against you.

This is my biggest takeaway. He may or may not be on to something really big, but regardless, it's advancing the conversation and we're all learning from it. He is clearly kicking ass at something.

I would definitely prefer to see this be a well paced marathon rather than a series of trips and falls. It needs time to play out.

Publishing unmaintainable garbage code to Github?

Have you looked at the beads codebase? It's a bad joke at our expense.

I agree that Children of Memory is not very good, mostly because it repeats itself so much. That could've been handled differently while still advancing the plot. I LOVE the overall concept, and the author's skills describing Gothi and Gethli's unique kind of intelligence was great, so I was okay with it overall... but too much of it was just a slog. First book is by far the best in my opinion as well.

This could maybe be done with retirees or those who are mostly financially independent, as well as those who want to help run the nonprofit.

The problem is that in the current climate, it is harder both to retire and to become financially independent.

If you want the labor of skilled journalists beyond a trickle of content from the ivory tower type, you either need to set up an intentional community or simply pay people enough to live on. I don't see any clear shortcuts. Quality output requires sufficient energy inputs.

This is really just another form of automation, speeding things up. We can now make more customized software more quickly and cheaply. The market is already realizing that fact, and demand for more performant, bespoke software at lower costs/prices is increasing.

Those who are good at understanding the primary areas of concern in software design generally, and who can communicate well, will continue to be very much in demand.

It’s hard to tell though not just because it’s inherently uncertain where this goes but also because those closest to it are also the least likely to view it objectively.

So near impossible to find someone clued up but also not invested in a specific outcome