Self-driving cars are cool but I'd rather have good public transit. These vehicles clearly have utility beyond just public transit, but I'd rather they be an edge case rather than considered a main solution. So yeah, from my perspective the problem is being focused on profits instead of trying to solve the real problem with solutions that have already existed for decades.
If you zoom out a bit, your argument would be more-or-less the same when regular automobiles were replacing the functioning transit systems in the USA, specifically in LA.
I've never really understood this "improve public transit instead of autonomous vehicles" argument. They're two entirely distinct funding sources. Nothing is preventing us from improving public transit except the same things that always have.
Obviously funding public transit is good, but people usually phrase funding arguments as zero sum tradeoffs. You wouldn't write "bookstores are cool, but I'd rather have public transit", because there's no trade-off there. I'm assuming the OP actually meant something by writing their post the way they did.
People funding autonomous driving will obviously lobby against increased funding for public transit and they will also fund demonizing public transit.
Look at Musk and Vegas. The vast majority of mass transportation in Vegas should be handled by actual public transit, most likely high speed rail from LA and light rail along the Strip to downtown Vegas and a few other places.
Instead Vegas has a silly monorail, a few buses that don't even get dedicated bus lanes on 8+ lane stroads and something stupid like, dunno, 20 daily flights from LA. Plus Musk setting up tunnels or hyperloops or other stupidities.
I've worked on autonomous vehicles for 16 years and my largest philanthropic effort is improving public transit. The common theme is being really interested in transportation and wanting it to work well for people.
Cruise was also the top funder of one San Francisco's recent MUNI funding ballot propositions (which just barely failed). You can certainly have a cynical take on that, but they still did it.
Musk doesn't need autonomous vehicles to derail public transit. Hyperloop predated FSD, to use your example. Moreover, the objection applies equally to taxis and Uber/Lyft.
It's also not an actionable objection. Let's say we go and ban autonomous vehicles. Why wouldn't the same billionaires simply continue lobbying against public transit improvements and for the repeal of the ban? They have the money to do both.
We haven't failed to invest sufficiently in public transit for 50+ years solely because of billionaire lobbying. That's not the blocker.
It seemed to me to always have been a goalpost relocation. The talking point wasn't even a fringe view beforehand and if anything would be taken as an obvious diversion from those who are big-oil aligned. Instead it was first seen when electrification of transit was achieved by capitalism.
The watermelons simply couldn't accept that, it went against their article of faith that capitalism is responsible for all of the world's problems and could not provide any solutions. IF there is one thing that makes them the most angry it is solving problems without going to their preferred political alignment. So they all downloaded their latest talking points and reprogrammed themselves and declared that electric car's only purpose is to save the auto industry in spite of 48% of global transport carbon emissions coming from cars and vans.
> Self-driving cars are cool but I'd rather have good public transit.
Last mile is a PITA in the US. It is difficult to take the train from San Diego northward if you don't get there at 7AM because the parking will fill up.
At some point, Waymo can cross over into replacing a personal car for the last mile task. Right now, it's a bit expensive: $20/ride 2 ride/day 5 days/week * 50 weeks = $10,000 per year. Purchasing your own car still makes more sense. If that were $1,000 per year? No brainer--I'd dump my car in a heartbeat.
> Self-driving cars are cool but I'd rather have good public transit
False dichotomy.
Good public transport would be self driving cars as a feeder network to mass transit once the self driving tech is cheap enough.
It could only work well as work habits change to stop having peak hours (peak usage for low-utilization self-driving cars doesn't seem likely to be economical).
For many of us "good public transit" would make zero difference in our daily lives in the US. We just don't live somewhere that there will realistically be a bus stop or train stop within easy walking distance. I'm not even a long drive from a train station but it's absolutely unworkable as transportation for most purposes aside from going into the big city 9-5.
I didn't say it was easy. And I'm not talking about individual action. Governments should incentivize and force different things. Conceptually simple example: construction projects should require sustainability and aesthetics reviews, including, for example, use of better materials and green and walkable spaces. For example I find the butt ugly and cheap American solutions for sidewalks (I think continuously poured concrete cut into slabs with circular saws) much worse than the European ones (paving stones, often natural stone). The US is the richer country and it frequently looks cheaper and poorer.
What a terrible idea. I don't want my government to "force" things. Nor should idiot government bureaucrats have any authority over something as subjective as aesthetics.
Paving stones are terrible for skates, and not great for running either. Poured concrete is much smoother. And it's not cut with circular saws so I have no idea what you're referring to there.
And it doesn't hurt to plant more trees. American cities, especially in the South, seem to be utterly allergic to trees. Which makes even less sense in hot climates.
Or huge billboards. Lack of general greenery and hedges to block noise. Stroads. I could go on an on. The average built environment in US cities and suburbs is awful and again, cheap.
When I moved from country where I had to use public transit to a country where I could drive, my happiness (re transportation) increased by a large amount.
I am not sure how this relates to the whole "public transit vs cars" argument though.
Why? Why is not "everyone has access" and "wellbeing for everyone" the reward for inventing the future?
Why is "that person gets to be extraordinarily wealthy" for inventing the future rather than "we all chipped in so we could all benefit" for inventing the future?
If Waymos make the world better and safer and more convenient, why are they not simply something we figure out how to make a public good?
In Star Trek you didn't have to pay to take the turbolift or transporter around large spaces, everyone got the benefits of the technology.
> Why is "that person gets to be extraordinarily wealthy" for inventing the future rather than "we all chipped in so we could all benefit" for inventing the future?
Well obviously we want a lot of the benefit to be the latter. But if you don't have some of the former, then almost no multi-billion-dollar-cost inventions get made in the first place.
Yuri Gagarin was the first man in orbit, and that was absolutely a multi-billion dollar invention.
Alan Turing didn't pursue his ideas because he wanted to get wealth beyond imagining.
Mondragon makes billions of dollars annually, and strongly limits executive pay.
I think it's very reasonable to assume that we can, we have historically, and currently do, make multi-billion dollar investments for the good of all. The idea that it requires some profit incentive is, imo, a pernicious falsehood.
> Yuri Gagarin was the first man in orbit, and that was absolutely a multi-billion dollar invention.
That was government-funded. Most projects aren't that lucky. And are any governments funding self-driving cars?
> Alan Turing didn't pursue his ideas because he wanted to get wealth beyond imagining.
I said multi billion dollar cost. Not multi billion dollar benefit. He's not an example.
> Mondragon makes billions of dollars annually, and strongly limits executive pay.
Have they made any inventions that required a billion dollars or more? Ten billion?
But you saying "makes billions" is exactly what I'm talking about. It's great that they don't pay a lot of money to executives and the workers own things. But the company invested money and the company profited. It didn't all go to making the world a better place.
You avoid particularly wealthy people when a coop can self-fund, but the coop is still trying to profit off the result of the research. And if a risky research project ever can't be self-funded, then whatever/whoever makes the loan might make a huge profit. If that incentive isn't there, the loan doesn't happen and the research doesn't happen.
> I think it's very reasonable to assume that we can, we have historically, and currently do, make multi-billion dollar investments for the good of all. The idea that it requires some profit incentive is, imo, a pernicious falsehood.
It doesn't require it, but if you make it possible to profit off research then you end up with much more money spent on research.
You are referencing fiction unironically as an argument which is a rather worrying sign for your connection to objective reality. You also don't have to worry about logistics in RTSes, but that isn't an argument for revolutionizing military strategy.
As for why it isn't something you can figure out how to make a public good? In order for it to truly be a public good you have to either make it as one in the first place via the public sector or at very least pay a large sum of money in order to buy it out (which you have already objected to). Otherwise it is just plain stealing.
While true to a degree, I think this is largely wrong. Wouldn't it still count as a "harness" if we provided these LLMs with full robotic control of two humanoid arms, so that it could hold a Gameboy and play the game that way? I don't think the lack of that level of human-ness takes away from the demonstration of long-context reasoning that the GPP stream showed.
Claude got stuck reasoning its way through one of the more complex puzzle areas. Gemini took a while on it also, but made it through. I don't that difference can be fully attributed up to the harnesses.
Obviously, the best thing to do would be to run a SxS in the same harness of the two models. Maybe that will happen?
I can appreciate that the model is likely still highly capable with a good harness. Still, I think this is more in line with ideas from say, speed running (or hell even reinforcement learning) where you want to prove something profound is possible and to do so before others do, you need to accumulate a series of "tricks" (refining exploits/hacking rewards) in order to achieve the goal. but if you use too many tricks you're no longer proving something as profound as originally claimed. In speed running this tends to splinter into multiple categories.
Basically, the gane being conpleted by gemini was in an inferior category (however minuscule) of experiment.
I get it though. People demanded these types of changes in the CPP twitch chat, because the pain of watching the model fail in slow motion is simply too much.
Agree. Apple needs to clean up shop - MacOS has been egregiously worsening year over year. Some features like Universal Control and Continuity Camera are legitimately awesome, but they do not make up for the INSANELY slow System Settings app that gets harder to navigate with each release and which has >2s wait times for the right pane to respond to a change in the left pane. Steve Jobs would have fired the person responsible for that overhaul three years ago, it's embarrassing. Messages too needs a ground-up rewrite. Getting more elaborate emoji tapbacks doesn't make up for fundamental instability and poor syncing behavior. C'mon!
Absolutely. I love the work they have been doing on the backend, like PQ3 [1], but it just doesn't work for me when the Stickers and Emojis extensions on Mac leak several GBs of RAM and I have to terminate it several times a day to free up memory.
Another thing I dislike is that it stores the whole message history on the device. It's nice to have at times, but I send a lot of photos, which adds up in storage over time. I pay for iCloud, and store my messages there. Why does my Mac need to hold every single photo I have ever sent?
Local iMessage storage is debilitating. I have over 90GB of iMessage history that I don't want deleted. The keep messages for x days removes it from iCloud and the Mac though. Why?
System Settings is awful. Whoever decided to hide tons of settings inside innocuous "(i)" non-buttons should be kept far away from UX design. It's the hamburger menu of macOS.
> Getting more elaborate emoji tapbacks doesn't make up for fundamental instability and poor syncing behavior. C'mon!
Oh but you forgot about the “catch up” button they added 2 releases ago that takes you to the last unread message! …
… but only if said last message is within the N most recent messages, in the messages which are already “fetched” from local storage. If it’s more unread messages than that, the button is nowhere to be found.
Like they said “ok we can implement a catch up button but it’ll be hard to solve due to how we do paging.” “Ok we just won’t put the button on screen if we have to page then. Save the hard problem for the next release.” Then they just forgot about it.
Whoa! I've been so annoyed by this for years, so interesting that you figured it out. It's the kind of inelegance in design that would have had Steve Jobs yelling at everyone to fix, just ruins immersion in music and had no obvious way to fix.
That sounds like an app issue, it might be doing non-realtime-safe operations on a realtime thread. But generally speaking, if you have an issue, use feedback assistant.
> Everyone at the time recognized that Roe v. Wade was shitty law, but they put their objections on the back burner and kicked the can down the road so they wouldn't have to have the Mother of all Debates.
Well, no. It codified roughly what the public thought was appropriate at the time - the stable achievable policy equilibrium. And in the past 50 years, public sentiment has remained mostly unchanged; it's just trended a tiny bit towards more permissiveness around abortion.
> Two years after the court’s decision, 54 percent of U.S. adults said they supported abortion under certain circumstances and another 21 percent said abortion always should be legal, according to Gallup polling from 1975, while 22 percent of Americans said it should be illegal.
> By 2018, Gallup pollsters found little change [...]
Yeah - in the past two weeks, shipping to a major metro area, not one, not two, but three orders ended up "Running Late". One of the items was a $180 AirPods Pro, which I ended up never receiving and getting a refund for. The other two are several days beyond the estimate. This is totally new - I've only had this happen once before, and it makes me wonder whether there's been a rapid rise in Amazon supply chain theft going on.
(Grabbed the AirPods for the same price from Costco while Amazon figures out what on earth is going on...)
There's a "progressive web app" - if you're in Chrome on chat.google.com, there's a new icon on the right hand side of the URL bar which permits you to download it. Not discoverable at all - this was mentioned in the help pages [https://support.google.com/chat/answer/9455386]
What kinds of technical skills do you see as particularly specialized/uncommon and necessary for high-performance data infrastructure work? Curious for some detail there
Intel makes rather pessimistic assumptions about AMD and uses the model name to pick which code path to use and ignores the CPU flags for floating point, etc.
So if you want to compare performance fairly I'd use gcc (or at least a non-intel compiler) and one of the MKL like libraries (ACML, gotoblas, openblas, etc). AMD has been directly contributing to various projects to optimize for AMD CPUs. They used to have their own compiler (that went from SGI -> cray -> pathscale or similar), but since then I believe have been contributing to GCC, LLVM, and various libraries.
