At this point, the most likely scenario for AI producing a serious existential risk is making us all want to bash our heads in because of "the honest options" and other claude-isms.
The last ~60 years have been a process by which the North American auto industry has been so heavily integrated that there is no such thing as a car made entirely in one country or another, especially in the Detroit–Windsor corridor.
Canada has manufacturers that the US doesn't (and won't for at least 5 years) and vice-versa.
No, but baking is still a process that requires skill — and that skill is not 'common sense'.
If making sourdough were 'common sense' then _everyone could do it correctly on their first try_. They don't. Most fail and never try again because the skill level required for sourdough is too high.
I'm an _expert_ cook, but I'm still having to go through the frequent failures of learning how to pickle with brine (fortunately, my failures have been mostly edible and have not turned moldy). Even vinegar pickling requires a certain level of expertise before you can do it successfully, even though that level of expertise is _roughly_ "knowing how to boil water".
Many companies have rules that confidential materials cannot be used as context with LLMs.
These companies (usually rightly) don't trust that there is a sufficient firewall preventing training on confidential materials, rendering the confidential materials effectively public.
The only way to stop congestion is to get cars off the road.
Cars are the congestion. There is no other definition, and no other solution.
HOW you get cars off the road is worthy of debate. Pretending that there's a "war on cars" is not and never has been. Cars and their drivers have been subsidized for more than a century, never paying the full cost of the damage that they do to the environment, the roads, etc.
1. Car taxes / registrations should be based on weight and energy usage inefficiency and ratchet up quickly for personal vehicles that are larger than some sensible size based on pedestrian safety at no more than 30 kph. (Drivers of modern pickup trucks and SUVs cannot see pedestrians shorter than ~1.7m at ~5m, and the fact that their fronts are basically walls mean that those pedestrians are more likely to be killed on impact or bounced under the tires.)
2. There should absolutely be congestion pricing to enter downtown locations during the day or other times when vehicular traffic will be high. Yes, that means that most deliveries by transport truck would need to be staged into smaller vehicles and delivered to the businesses needing them, or delivered overnight.
3. Uber, Lyft, and Waymo are part of the problem and should be treated as such.
4. There should be more investment in public transit. Paid for by increased registrations and congestion pricing, preferentially. Fares should be reduced, ideally to free. More use of public transit makes it safer and incentivizes making it faster.
5. There should absolutely be more bike lanes in pretty much every city. It's called induced demand and once the infrastructure is safe, you will see increased usage by all sorts of alternative mobility users (but mini e-motorcycles should be licensed just like regular motorcycles and should not be using the mobility infrastructure).
6. Pedestrian and wheelchair users matter first and foremost over any other road user (bikes, scooters, cars, etc.).
We've had 50+ years of Robert Moses being proved wrong. It's time to design cities around people, not around cars. Call that a war on cars if you want, but it's not: it's a war for peoples' quality of life. Cars can be part of the solution, but they need to be treated like the problem they are first.
Wrong. Cars are high utility and should remain on roads. They increase quality of life by giving you a fast way to get to exactly where you want on your own schedule. And designing for cars IS designing for people, obviously. Who do you think is inside cars?
What is design for single passenger cars? Most cars can fit 5 people and roads also carry buses, ambulances, and trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
* Probably with the exception of coal and some mining materials.
So you agree that most cars are far larger and heavier than required? First search result for "average car occupancy"[1]:
> In 2022 the Average Number of Occupants Per Trip for Household Vehicles in the United States Was 1.5
This discrepancy is the reason for car pooling, ride-sharing, etc. (Note that Uber, Lyft, etc. are taxi services, not "ride sharing"; since the drivers themselves are not typically intending to travel the routes they drive)
> roads also carry buses
Yes, which is why cars should be removed from such roads, to avoid slowing down buses.
> ambulances
Emergency vehicles can drive in places where cars are forbidden (cycle paths, pedestrianised roads, etc.)
> trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
Again, you're undermining your own argument: the subsidies given to private car infrastructure are so large, that freight companies exploiting that infrastructure can end up more cost-effective than those which use rail; despite rail being more efficient not only in terms of fuel, but also in terms of labour (since so many trucks would be required to do the job of a single freight train, and each of those trucks require a separate driver). Also note that heavier vehicles degrade the road infrastructure disproportionately; which is even more reason to reduce the number of trucks as far as possible.
My quality of life is increased by having more bike lanes so that I can get around _faster_ and _healthier_ than having to use my car. I'm also able to get where I want and need to be on my own schedule by car, bike, public transit, and walking — which mode matters based on the needs of the destination.
I shop at Costco by bike most of the time. Once every couple of months there's enough that needs to be bought that I use the car.
I have a dental appointment tomorrow: I can walk or cycle there faster than I can drive and find parking. I have another appointment on Monday at a hospital and I'll cycle there far faster than I can take public transit _or_ private car, and I won't have to pay ~$15/hour for parking or park a kilometre away.
Get out of your North American car bubble and look at what Paris and the Netherlands have done: they have not banned private car ownership or use, but they have removed some of them from streets. Utrecht just opened a massive underground _bike parking garage_ but it's also one of the busiest cities in the Netherlands in terms of car traffic.
There is no war on cars; that's something that has been invented out of whole cloth. Those of us who agitate for improved _options_ simply want (1) cars to pay their full freight (they don't, not by a long shot); (2) safer roads for pedestrians, cyclists, and those who want alternative mobility options; (3) more public transit; and (3) fewer cars moving slower because that's the only way to alleviate traffic.
You're not in traffic: you are traffic.
Your claim that designing for cars is designing for people is risible. Designing for people first (that's the goal!) means larger sidewalks, more barriers so that distracted or angry drivers find it harder to find themselves on those sidewalks, and fewer cars with clear rules so that vulnerable road users have absolute priority over people in cars. The larger and faster your vehicle, the more responsibility you should have, both in terms of liability when you inevitably collide with an obstruction and in terms of what you pay to keep the roads and surrounding infrastructure maintained.
I thought it was his actual rocket engineers known for landing rockets, where he's routinely kept out of the loop by having to make choices about the duck the queen is holding.
I know Space Coast techies who knew SpaceX people. They were talking about how they had to prevent Musk from making dumb changes whenever he showed up, and this was a decade ago.
Given that the egotistical maniac we're talking about is well known for lashing out at people who don't tell him what he wants to hear…I have no reason to trust primary or secondary sources, aside from what selfsame white supremacist egotistical maniac says about himself through the demonstrably false conspiracies he supports and how he treats his own children.
Like most egotistical maniacs, he must be managed around. Hell, even Jobs had to be managed around because he made incorrect choices as often as he made correct choices -- and he was infinitely more likeable on a bad day than Elon Musk on a good day.
I think that it's extremely healthy to have a hostile negative one of someone who has demonstrated repeatedly that they are assholes.
- He threw a "roman" salute; this is incontrovertible fact
- He routinely misgenders and deadnames his daughter Vivian because he's a man-child
- He routinely says things which are demonstrably untrue and have never been true (there is no "white genocide" going on in SA and has never been)
- He routinely insults people with sexual language and has accused someone he disagreed with of being a "pedo guy" — and was exonerated in US courts because US courts have a much lower standard than most of the rest of the world about making false statements
He's not a nice person. He's not really that smart. He's a wealthy nepo baby who took advantage of his mother's Canadian citizenship to make it easier for him to immigrate to the US and was forced to work with Peter Thiel as part of the "PayPal Mafia" because each of their individual projects was tanking pretty badly since neither one was actually as smart as the engineers they had hired (but they get the credit).
There are a bunch of things that I've read about him that I don't believe to be true or simply don't care, and I am unhappy to see the body dysmorphic criticism leveled at him since that hurts other people with similar body types or issues more than it will hurt this psychopathic egotistical asshole.
What's unhealthy is the need for some people to defend someone who is objectively an asshole for his most assholish moves. I felt the same way when people defended Jobs for asshole behaviour.
Unsurprisingly, you're wrong and likely projecting.
I don't hate Elon. I hate what shitty things he does. I do my best not to think about him, but then there are people who mindlessly defend him because…I have no clue why.
There are at least a billion people worth celebrating in this world more than celebrating an egotistical maniac who has demonstrated that not only does he have no empathy _at all_ (which is, as I understand it, one of the main signs of psychopathy) but has declared that it's a weakness.
Mostly? I try not to think about Elon. He's not worth my time. I left Twitter shortly after he bought it and I refuse to buy anything that he's associated with. Voting with my dollars is all I can do, realistically, and as such Cursor is permanently on my "do not touch" list.
When I see people playing sycophant to him is when I speak up. He doesn't need your ass-kissing and he likely doesn't even notice it. But he's been instrumental in destroying American soft power which is going to destroy America's sole positive role in the world. I also believe that he through "Doge" is indirectly responsible for the premature deaths of millions of people who were being helped by American aid — and I don't call that as mainly Trump's or Stephen Miller's, because Elon gleefully did what was requested.
But for a lot of people, he wouldn't lose his standing for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day because they've attached their identity to him. And that's just sad, because he's not even an interesting cult figure. He's a boring old white supremacist repeating the same bullshit.
Mostly because people are pretending that it's abnormal to call out asinine behaviour.
Like your bad take. Like the jackass who called my response "racism".
These are threads full of the dumbest takes, and your presumption that focusing on an egotistical maniac's many failings for a few posts with many hours between them where people respond with the absolute worst takes that they could (like yours above) says so much more about you.
I probably won't have anything else to say about Elon unless someone else says something really stupid like "it's his rockets". Talk about erasing people who actually contributed something to the world…
I can agree that a simplistic “it’s his rockets” takes are not really contributory. To me, i see Elon as a pretty smart guy who is slightly immature at times, aka a human. Flawed
"Slightly immature." You make it sound like his biggest sin is farting in an elevator and laughing about it.
Would you tolerate the sort of behavior Musk exhibits from your own children? (I'm assuming you are fully aware of all the unlawful, deceitful, and morally questionable acts he has taken throughout his life.)
Dude. You can check out my GitHub Profile (it's the same as my HN handle).
This isn't racism, this is calling out fact. EM takes credit for other peoples' hard work. He's ludicrously rich. He's an asshole. All facts.
Also a fact: he's white and he's definitely a white South African with everything _that_ means he grew up with as a privileged child on the oppressor side of SA Apartheid.
It's all facts and none of it racism. Don't be stupid.
I find it easier to do when I bike to Costco _without_ my trailer.
(I have two good sized panniers and can end up with ~$150 of foodstuffs packed well in them no problem. More often than not, I get less than that and add more stops to the trip to pick up from 3-4 places while out. And I get my exercise while I'm at it.)
Back in the dark ages of the 80s when I was taking the SAT and ACT, these tests were considered good predictors for the first semester's performance.
That's it.
I did well on both tests and did well on my first semester. It's the semesters after where my performance tanked because I didn't have some of the work habits that solid B students had. (I will also be clear and say that at least some of the problem is attributable to the university and how it handled advisors. My advisor was completely useless and let me schedule for _way_ too much hard stuff.)
There was also a really good predictor of how one would do on the SAT or ACT: NoBitH. The Number of Bathrooms in the House.
Yup. The SAT and ACT at the time were better measures of economic advantage than innate intelligence. I have no reason to believe that this isn't still the case, especially since they're more entrenched in the system than ever.
Well, sure, but first semester performance is also a good predictor of second semester performance. And second semester of third, and so on.
But more to the point: If you do poorly in your first semester and drop out, then it doesn’t really matter if the SAT would have done a good job of predicting your second semester performance.
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