I wonder how common this is for evs in general. My vehicle has only gone in once for a recall on the windshield wiper motors, nothing else gone wrong.

The last car I had got off that brand needed quite a few repairs, so it’s remarkably refreshing to have a car that is just working along.

EVs just seen to be an easier thing to make reliable. Temperatures run much lower, fewer fluids in play, not having to deal with thousands of little explosions every minute…

The battery seems to draw all the headache, but even then reports suggest that conservative battery management systems have made those more reliable than people thought they would be. Probably thanks to the mandatory 100k warranty on batteries, the vendors took it seriously.

Fun fact, while shopping for a car in 2022, we looked at a used 2021 bmw x5. I wondered what they replaced it with and the salesman said “oh, he traded it in for a 2022 x5 of the exact same trim”. They know him well because every year he comes in and trades in to make sure he is never driving “last year’s model”.

Particularly stupid because that was the year of shortages where they actually made the new model worse by removing features they couldn’t get supply for, other than removing features, the new car was unchanged from prior year.

You know it’s bad when the last message is essentially “we are just going to stop talking publicly about it”

Allowing Xbox Division to fall so far from grace that it’s barely a blip in the Gaming Scene

This surprised me, as the xBox One launch showed they knew that gamers didn’t actually want games, they wanted to use it to watch TV!

It’s wild that they thought the xbox one launch should have included:

Problem is they barely have reason to care at all about Windows, it’s only 4.2% of their revenue even with their formidable presence in the market. That might even include their microsoft store cut, making the OS itself even less of a significant money driver.

So they feel it becomes more valuable to try to use that to promote their more profitable cloud services, make the users rent everything.

However, a huge warning sign for them should be the relative pittance of “consumer” cloud revenue. Suggests that all the efforts to try to milk the consumer market is for naught, as consumers just don’t want to spend that money on renting office software or storage. So moves that make their consumer desktop user hostile have negligible upside but may ultimately threaten their position in the 70% of their revenue that is business customers. They got those business customers in a consumer-first play where home computers set specific expectations the businesses embrassed, and they could lose that the same way.

Especially in a world where the only software most users use is a web browser, and games are the biggest non-browser software that remains, but Valve is having a decent success pushing non-Windows story.

Some games DRM or anti-cheat makes Windows the only option, but the gamers grow weary of all that BS too.

Sure, but this comic is in English…

I agree, but this isn’t that shoe falling yet.

This is a bunch of people that don’t have experience assuming everything will work and lots of little things not coming together derailing all this stuff. No water, inadequate power, a lack of some local contractors, a disgruntled community, some permitting problem. Any one of these problems surprising them and many many millions of dollars of stuff suddenly in limbo…

On the FAANG/MAAMA, he said explicitly some winners but a whole lot of losers, so you are agreeing with him. Of those titans, only Amazon and Google were arguably dot com darlings. Apple was pretty much left out of it and in bad shape, Microsoft did “ok” but was not really a darling of that bubble. Facebook, Netflix didn’t exist.

The data center explosion has everything to do with the AI boom. That’s the only change around the recent inflection point of growth. They were certainly prolific, but this is beyond. They are now demanding incredibly more power and cooling density than before. OpenAI by itself made purchasing commitments to the tune of 40 percent of the entire supply of ram production across all industries. Probably 75 to 80 percent of the recent plans would not have happened if not for the LLM craze.

Stadia also had people, question is whether it becomes the majority.

They can and do drm their way to subscribing to the game content but still letting the end devices run the game. Cheaper for them compared to hosting, so long as they assure themselves that games can’t be cracked offline, but for multiplayer games they further control the online aspects.

I suppose the point is that those are mostly selling location and networking, the processing is essentially incidental.

They don’t have reason to mind consumers being able to have lots of processing, memory, and storage. They have plenty of hooks to track the users and gain control of their data, and tracking users and holding their content hostage is very profitable without having to fight users.

Self hosting isn’t a threat to them, local gaming rigs isn’t a threat.

Problem is you end up using the third party code indirectly, but without maintenance or a mechanism to notify about discovered flaws.

I wouldn’t touch the npm with a 20 foot pole if I could help it, hard to avoid with a SPA but even then I am very careful and don’t pull in dependencies lightly.

If not running in a browser, then it’s probably golang or c for me, depending on the application. Python of it’s got to be worked together with some other people, but very wary of pip just like npm (but pythons core is richer and easy to use c libraries)

Dating fine, but if going for a long term commitment, it may be rough to be in your 60s with a partner in their 80s. They have to understand if they are theoretically on that path and that their relationship will transform into elder care at some point. Also before that the older one will stop keeping up sexually.

If both see it as a short term fling, probably ok. The 46 year can probably keep up with a 25 year old in the ways that matter, and may have enough money for some interesting experiences to share.

Unfortunately, LLMs tend to be really bad at this. They spit out beginner programmer that can search stack overflow a lot type code.

In one example I saw, it did some very expensive processing before a check to see if that processing would even be applicable, and this was a vibe coded project intended to be an “accelerator”. To the vibe coders dismay, even when it “worked”, it was noticeably even worse than the thing it was supposed to make faster.

In pursuit of autonomous development, they tend to stop if the thing barely passes the tests at all. After doing the work to give it specific enough tests to let it retry until passing, they spend thousands of dollars of retry after retry and you are lucky to even get one barely working pass in the end. To try to have it iterate for optimization is going to be way more expensive, especially since it is thoughtlessly trying stuff without a theory of why a difference would be more optimized or not.

I’ll agree with the assessment, moderately useful, depending on context, but “vibe” coding is a recipe for failure.

It also tends to neglect identifying a library and just embedding code directly, which for one makes me feel uncomfortable about not getting external maintenance and for another goes too far into maybe lifting someone’s work without attribution.

So if I want to make a cli utility, sure I might prompt up the argv parsing since it’s tedious and obvious and not going to be knocking off a viable off the shelf option. But the tech has to be applied very carefully.

It depends on the situation.

If the situation is you are playing in a very well trodden area and you can be flexible in accepting the LLM product even as it didn’t fit what you would have had in mind, it can likely do “ok”. “Make me a super Mario Brothers style game”. The output will not be what you probably wouild have wanted, and further it will be a soul crushingly pointless “game” compared to just playing an existing platformer, but it will crank out something vaguely like you would have guessed. The sort of projects I have generally avoided because they usually reinvent the wheel for pointless reasons and it’s very unrewarding for me. However fairly common in big businesses to make stupid internal applications like this. Very depressingly, I expect steam to be flooded with AI slop just like it has been flooded with stock asset slop.

If you are making something more novel and/or cannot tolerate deviations from a very specific vision, well LLM goes more pointless.

I don’t think a tractor is the right form, but I could imagine a smaller electric drone for mechanical weed control instead of any herbicide. Something small and effective for that purpose but too small and weak to be broadly dangerous.

Like how little robot lawn mowers are adequate to mow but safe for people because it weighs less than 20 pounds and has little 1 inch blades that swivel freely that can’t cut anything tougher than grass.

Tractors are big and potentially dangerous, but for a lot of their tasks, they are only big to have a single human do a lot in a little time. Having dozens of 24/7 drones could do some of those tasks with very meager resources. Tiny equipment, slower movement.

But have to live within the capabilities of AI techniques, which are selectively useful. Machine vision for flagging likely undesirable plants, maybe, operating equipment autonomously, maybe less so.

I think there’s generally always been some hackish way around, and the hackish way frequently changes between releases of installation media.

Also, when Windows Update deploys certain things, if you have a system that did this, you may get a full screen thing telling you to set up a microsoft account roughly “for your own good”. Even when you bypass that, the start menu and notification area generally are eager to suggest hooking your system up to a microsoft account.

They decided that since Android can so aggressively push Google accounts, they should get the same scheme going, but Microsoft has this pesky pre-always-online history of being an offline capable OS.

Yeah, that’s the thing where we get into what I call “superstitious prompting”, like when people say “And make sure you don’t make mistakes” or “Include only factual data without hallucinations” and think it works, until it doesn’t.

It will at least reply in a way that is narratively consistent with being told to do something or another, and will do things like emit the words “Ok, I understand and will promise to only provide fact based feedback”, but doesn’t “understand” at all. It works surprisingly well as being narratively consistent with the prompt frequently looks exactly like following instructions.

With people getting all the more frustrated when their superstitious prompt fails, they told the LLM to do something or specifically not do something and it even promised exactly to do as directed and then it just proceeds to be normal LLM anyway.

Yeah, it is hard grasping why online commenters that are fans are fans, but in my real world interactions, I get a better feel for it.

The people that are all in on the AI, slop and all, are the people I really found annoying to begin with. They tend to think everyone is desperate to hear what they say, that verbosity is king, and generally don’t really know what they are talking about. They are the sort that would spend a ton of time fretting over some ‘design document’ that when finally shared is absolutely nothing actionable, despite 10 pages with of gorp. Any specific outcome has nothing to do with the document, but they’ll take credit for “thought leadership” if it works, and blame the “inadequate team” if it fails. They are used to and cherish verbose yes men and are used to making vague statements and getting results they can’t judge already.

Or on the other end, people who endlessly fell for clickbait. Slop before AI was really a factor in slop. People forwarding those chain letters back in the day.

The people I have held long respect for tend to range between “too annoying to even deal with” to “it’s a little useful in key circumstances”. I have yet to personally meet someone I had long respected who went all in on AI.

The insidious thing is I’m pretty sure they both outnumber and tend to have more power. Those folks who “thought lead” without actionable direction nor even a vague understanding of how the work happens? Those are the ones that got promoted, with the good ones largely overlooked for promotions, mainly because at a certain point promotion requires “professional networking” and making the executives happier with themselves than it is about good work. Now we are in a position where those people who never “got” the work are telling themselves that the LLMs can replace those annoying “nerds” that have leverage over them, and if there’s one thing they can’t stand, it’s having people they don’t understand having anything looking like leverage over them.

Well auto fellating is the trademark tone of LLM output, which the email probably is.