Two notes on this as someone who works in the sector.

It’s “completely normal”, but only if you’re not having a full time driver for each vehicle, which is what the article sounds like… Then the vehicles wouldn’t be autonomous, they’d just be teleoperated.

And the second part, why is this an industry standard and why are investors ok with it? Imagine you have a product (robotaxi) that is autonomous but can’t deal with absolutely everything on its own (not even Waymo is that advanced). The key component that you need to build into the system is the ability to come to a stop safely, and be recovered remotely. Then these “teleoperators” can recover the vehicles if/when they fail, and given a sufficiently low failure rate, you can have one operator for each X vehicles. Even if this is more than “0 drivers”, having 1 driver per 10 vehicles is a massive cost saving. Plus zooming out and thinking of other things than robotaxis, there are sectors like mining where they don’t care (that much) about the number of drivers - their primary goal is to have the drivers away from a dangerous mine. They can save money from simplifying operations that way.

I’ve seen this claim recently and it’s rubbish.

Yes, if by “nothing” we mean writing next to no code, because they’re busy either:

• architecting software solutions, as they’re knowledgeable enough that they should be doing this instead of writing code
• understanding a lot of what is going on in components and/or the system so that when there’s an issue they say “oh, this is likely because of X” and the resolution takes days instead of weeks.

I.e. yes, there is a percentage of developers who we pile other tasks on and they don’t get to write code.

My experience is that the more knowledgeable developers get, the less code they write.

Then neurodivergent peeps are different - an Autistic dev might be super knowledgeable and happy writing unit tests because they don’t enjoy the uncertainty of large problems, or an ADHD developer might have a large system-wide view but write what seem like small contributions.

IMO the only problem with it is calling it “Art”. Stock photos are also slop, except man-made. That, or the soulless corporate-style illustrations in PowerPoints are the sort of thing it replaces well.

Not the “I poured my feelings onto a canvas/film” actual art. AI images are in my opinion a tool just as valid as the next - just a tool, not art.

I hope AMD keep pushing to do things well, because right now the value proposition of anything with an Intel processor is more ridiculous than when Apple charges $300 for an extra 8GB of RAM. Their $600 processors currently offer performance on par with the entry-level Apple Silicon M4. Which is great news for Apple, but not for anyone who wants to use Linux or “the other Mainstream OS”.

Something I find incredibly weird about US company culture is how they talk about overtime like it’s a good thing.

“Our employees worked weekends, days and nights to make this happen! We wouldn’t have succeeded without people who are willing to give up their personal lives!”

I hope they not only succeed but get shares. Doing weekends or nights for a company you don’t (partially) own feels like a con.

If they keep duplicating the ask, soon they’ll be asking for a googol from Google. Hehe.

I’m not sure I’m following, it says developers can opt out!

I don’t think anything with the word “intel” can be taken seriously in value comparisons…

When I got my last laptop I ended up with a MBP because there were no high end options for Linux laptops with AMD. Now the options are better, but back then, the only realistic alternative to a MacBook Pro would have had a third of the real-world battery life if not less, even if I decided to spend £3k. That didn’t seem like an acceptable compromise so there were virtually no laptops in existence that could compete with an M2 MBP.

16 GB of RAM are kinda meh, but I can’t think of many $600 devices that can run three 6K monitors simultaneously at 60 Hz, plus then one at a lower res but still 60 Hz.

How do people have the time to organise vigils and get into “coalitions” and politics in the workplace?

Granted I don’t work at Microsoft, but I feel me and everyone around me is overworked enough that when we have the time to stop working… We head home (or close the laptop if WFH) and rest, not engage in additional activities in the workplace.

Yeah, this sounds like a problem for only the 5% of the world who live in a specific country.

That’s not efficient enough, why don’t we make them larger and carry over 400 people instead? And we can do special low friction routes where people want to go, so that there’s even better efficiency!

Or, why don’t we accept maybe that there’s the need for different modes of transport and I’m happy commuting to work 8 miles in a bicycle but my 78-year-old mum sometimes physically can’t walk half a mile to a bus stop to take her to the doctor’s and she needs taxis to exist?

Then that might not be the model the previous poster is talking about, because I have to press perplexity really hard to get it to hallucinate. Search-augmented LLMs are pretty neat.

That’s because it doesn’t learn, it’s a snapshot of its training data frozen in time.

I like Perplexity (a lot) because instead of using its data to answer your question, it uses your data to craft web searches, gather content, and summarise it into a response. It’s like a student that uses their knowledge to look for the answer in the books, instead of trying to answer from memory whether they know the answer or not.

It is not perfect, it does hallucinate from time to time, but it’s rare enough that I use it way more than regular web searches at this point. I can throw quite obscure questions at it and it will dig the answer for me.

As someone with ADHD with a somewhat compulsive need to understand random facts (e.g. “I need to know right now how the motor speed in a coffee grinder affects the taste of the coffee”) this is an absolute godsend.

I’m not affiliated or anything, and if anything better comes my way I’ll be happy to ditch it. But for now I really enjoy it.

You can’t measure this, because it has drivers behind the wheel. Even if it did three “pedestrian-killing” mistakes every 10 miles, chances are the driver will catch every mistake per 10000 miles and not let it crash.

But on the other hand, if we were to measure every time the driver takes over the number would be artificially high - because we can’t predict the future and drivers are likely to be overcautious and take over even in circumstances that would have turned out OK.

The only way to do this IMO is by

• measuring every driver intervention
• only letting it be driverless and marketable as self-driving when it achieves a very low number of interventions ( < 1 per 10000 miles?)
• in the meantime, market it as “driver assist” and have the responsibility fall into the driver, and treat it like the “somewhat advanced” cruise control that it is.

There’s a lot of context we’re missing here. For example this happens with my company and the reason is tax implications - if they provided “free money” that would be additional salary and taxed as such, whereas “free meals” are taxed completely differently. There could be completely legitimate reasons. Maybe if they let people use it for whatever purpose, the $25 would turn into $15 due to tax.

What I won’t defend is firing people for this reason. I don’t see how that can be ethically acceptable…

Visibility is a very real problem in environmental measures that I rarely see discussed.

The example that comes to mind is Madrid. Over the past few years there have been many measures to divert the traffic from the city centre. At a “visible” level this is great, which results in less pollution in the city centre, less traffic, less noise. All amazing. If you delve a bit deeper though, this hasn’t been backed up properly by additional public transport, or encouraging working from home, or anything like that. So people who work in the area are having to drive more kilometres, so that they can go around the city centre, resulting in more emissions and pollution overall. The catch? It’s in the impoverished areas of the outskirts. Therefore invisible.

The governments look amazing at improving the pollution in the city centres not by addressing it, but by moving it somewhere else. Most times they opt for what is “visibly” good rather than what will actually result in a measurably better outcome. The negative effects of nuclear are very visible, so that weighs a lot in the decisions unfortunately.

Well what were you expecting? This is like when people install GrapheneOS on Pixels, because it’s still the best platform to have a Google-free device.

It’s entirely possible that someone wants to buy a Kindle because of it being a great device, but not want to be tied to Amazon’s data mining exercises and/or buy books from them because of their behaviour as a publishing company.

Yes, that there are no smartphone sized Intel Atom processors anymore.

The zenphone 2 performed similarly to much more expensive phones. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9251/the-asus-zenfone-2-review/4

I’m not going to be the person defending intel in 2024, but back in 2015, that atom was competitive.

They were comparable to the rest of the phones at the time. Not great, not terrible. Compared to anything in 2024 they were obviously trash, but that’s mostly because we’ve made 10 years of progress since then.