It’s not that it won’t improve, but it isn’t going to cause a runaway “singularity” event.

Like the drama around the models “escaping” and “amazing hacks” have turned out to be something, but not nearly what people were afraid it was going to be.

A lot of the fundamental limitations have remained, and we are figuring out the scenarios where those limitations are fine or there is a way to create a feedback mechanism to try to reroll the AI until it passes. Lots of success there, but the fundamental disconnects are still there, just not important for the task at hand or can be worked around.

It seems to be just that consumer tech doesn’t evolve like it used to. It was insane how things went from the late nineteenth century to modern era, but lots of signs of slowing down.

While computer tech is going, it’s now only doing so by scaling behind home electrical capacity. The high end server chips are just cranking the wattage because they can’t improve within a more reasonable power envelope anymore. A 2026 laptop that replaced a 2020 laptop that was broken wasn’t really significantly faster. In 2000, a new PC would have been more than 10 fold faster than a 6 year old PC.

Tech progresses, (e.g. just got a phone with a solid state battery that’s crazy better than battery behavior before), it’s just some of the biggest consumer electronics things are hitting physics and things we are used to advancing are just flattening out.

Based on what I saw and what I read, it only took over of it detected you trying to swerve and an obstacle that would hit and change it into an aggressive lane change. The steering into was at least roughly the maneuver desired, but it just corrected it.

Though it may sound scary, it absolutely worked in my scenario. I’ve never ever seen it activate accidentally.

I can’t even be sure whether it activated or not that time, I wasn’t driving. It just seemed like a scenario and maneuver unlikely for a barely driving 15 year old to pull off so perfectly. I’m not so sure even I would have avoided an accident, but even if I did, I doubt I would have hit the maneuver so spot on.

25.9 percent of owners whose cars have adaptive cruise control never switch it on

I know someone with adaptive cruise control who technically turns it on, but only when there’s no car in front of them…

Nearly 18 percent steer clear of lane-keeping assist

I suspect these are also people who don’t like to use turn signals. They don’t like the car fighting their ill-advised lane change.

21.3 percent disable automatic emergency braking

I’ve never experienced actual automatic braking, though I did have a car that had a fairly high false positive rate on the collision alert that could have inspired someone to turn it off, and could easily imagine it if the car actually did brake. There’s also people that are afraid it might have a false positive and turn it off pre-emptively.

Voice assistants go unused by 17.8 percent.

I’m shocked that number is so low. I have so little interest in what my car’s voice assistant can do for me. In a family car I gave it a spin because it purported to be “fancier” but I didn’t like it and it was also pretty useless. I don’t see this as a big “meant to save their lives” thing, it’s just a gimmick.

Augmented reality head-up displays fare no better: 17.1 percent of drivers who have one refuse to turn it on

I know someone in this boat, they don’t like their view being obstructed, and the car model they wanted had this as base equipment. I would also say this is more gimmick than life saving. A glance to a speedometer or nav screen isn’t going to be a super risk thing so long as those displays are appropriately located, they don’t need to be right on the windshield.

massaging seats, just 22 percent say they use them regularly

Ok, really off the topic of the headline now. I have sat in a “massaging seat” in a car and am not surprised. It vaguely vibrates a bit, hardly worth anything.

only 22.4 percent use AR head-up displays when fitted

But they said AR HUD was rejected only by 17.1 percent of drivers? Guess the question would be what the definition of ‘used’ is if they have it on but somehow don’t “use” it?

24.5 percent use remote start functions

In many cases, this is of pretty limited utility. If it’s a keyfob-only capability, you have to be close enough to the car that, by that point, well you might as well get in and start it instead of digging out your keyfob. If it’s got a gas engine, then it’s not something you probably want to do out of sight. I will say for an electric car with internet controllable remote ‘start’, it’s nice to get it going while you are getting ready to leave at the end of a workday or when you are paying the check at a restaurant.

45.7 percent of respondents say they regularly use reversing cameras

I actually saw someone this week who spent years ignoring his backup camera finally decide that his back up camera was handy. He’s also the worst at parking I know, so here’s hoping he starts backing up with his camera and gets better…

41 percent use heated windshields.

So what do the rest do when their window fogs up otherwise? This seems… hard to believe.

My 2015 would have the ‘collision alert’ because a car was in an adjacent turn lane, but the road curved and it didn’t know that.

It also would go off most days on a stretch of road because it was certain I was going to slam into the guardrail of the curve. Again, the system had no cameras, no map awareness, so it just had radar saying ‘something metal ahead’.

It was slightly annoying but left it on, just in case.

Now my 2023 on the other hand hasn’t had a false positive that I can recall, in fact if not for one incident, I wouldn’t even know it was doing anything. Someone pulled right out in front of my kid learning to drive. I had just enough time to think “oh, we are going to hit or my kid is going to yank this thing off the road”. Instead, my kid executed a shockingly perfect evasive swerve that landed perfectly into the free lane. Then I find out that it also would take over steering and as a result, I’m pretty certain it saved me a pretty significant wreck.

they use the fucking model to step into my lane

An extension of the “they think it can do everyone’s job (except their own)”. Even weirder, they tend to think that the people enjoy their obnoxious attempts to diminish their jobs. Then you just have one more thing to try to explain to management why the code generation from a sales guy doesn’t actually do what the sales guy thinks it does.

I will say at least around me, it has gotten less bad on this front as of late. Either a lot of these folks got bitten and learned the codegen doesn’t magically make them capable, or they just got bored of trying. Either way, it’s nice to have them quiet down a bit.

I saw precisely this, that the AI are pretty terrible at generating switch configuration, which surprised me as I thought that would have gone pretty well.

And sure, people might guess and some people guess with similar confidence, but I can’t stand those folks already (extends to AI).

But the plausible looking config with supreme confidence already convinced the non technical management that we should rely heavily upon it.

I hate doing a lot of code review all at once, and AI vomits a lot of code. Hopefully the mistake is obviously big and up front, but all too often the mistake dwells in the details that I would likely be too tired to notice after a lot of plausible code.

With human code to review at least the volume is generally workable and when it’s wrong, it tends to be more obviously wrong. A human that takes care of very detailed facets with care inspires trust in their thoroughness, but codegen looks that way without the thorough consideration.

I find it anti addictive. Work is pretty aggressive (but now not too aggressive thanks to cost, but still a bit aggressive). So everyone is expected to show some utilization or be shunned. For the first time, I find myself thinking it might be nice to get out of this entire industry, if only I could afford to

Anyway, I managed to consume what was my monthly quota in a week and was quite happy that I could credibly ignore AI for the next three weeks.

Then disappointed as an administrator quintupled my quota the next day.

Though nothing is nearly as annoying as everyone else’s use is AI. I hate using it, and it’s just even worse dealing with the consequences of other people using it.

Note on shorts they removed the thumbs down button shortly after AI slop became a huge thing in shorts.

That seems to indicate a certain direction to me.

Private companies are allowed to decline to host at their will. USA nor EU mandate that a platform must host content they don’t want to.

In practice, it’s possible that China companies operating outside of China won’t implement the same restrictions that they do within China. Whatever the Chinese government thinks the importance of maintaining censorship within the borders, it seems probable that the government and companies will be more pragmatic about realities in other nations.

On purpose? Not much.

The bigger concern would be when a criticism of China would be an important facet of a topic that would be covered, and omitting that would detract from the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the content.

Imagine if video hosting platforms couldn’t call out any of the stuff Trump does as wrong or incompetent. So so many topics would have to be ignored entirely to avoid offending the administration. Currently China criticism is a little less critical in the moment by comparison, but things shift over time.

For American consumer, sure.

But there may be price relief as the ultra rich datacenters insist they need to be able to source that Chinese memory and get some special exemptions, probably after a few million in bribes to Trump. That might free up some supply.

There is some decent Chinese stuff. Sometimes it’s hard to know though with the flood of crap. For example Anker seems consistently decent, but anything that sounds like Qihoon or Xiyomao or whatever random brand word they pop into existence on the other hand…

Note that the negative impact of these facilities are, by designed, concentrated on the communities that get stuck with them. The overall percentage has to be considered in the context of them focusing that impact into relatively small, super dense footprints.

Also, the percentage is higher than 1%, and in the US is about 5%. This reflects the current situation that the AI companies lament is just too constrained on them, with ambitions of getting to 20% if circumstances allow them to build up the way they want. So it’s already somewhat significant, especially with the way it gets concentrated, and further they want to bump it up at least four fold beyond what they’ve managed to do so far.

In anticipation of that, energy strategies that planned to be more tame and grow by renewables got pushed aside in favor of more natural gas, and especially portable power generation which tends to be more polluting.

The politicians of those communities have failed their constituents.

Sure, but have they failed their own bank accounts? Need to ask the important questions…

True, though not a whole lot of people think as highly about Eclipse or Apache as folks do Linux.

I don’t think companies are jumping up and down to try to manipulate their way to having nominal affinity to those projects compared to how so many companies want to have the ‘Linux approved’ impression with people not paying close attention to the ‘foundation’.

And in fact, I frequently have disagreed with the Linux foundation and think it shouldn’t carry the name Linux, as most of their projects aren’t particularly related to Linux work.

It’s been a way for corporations to attach the Linux marketing value to their pet projects for a long time.

Based on my AI enthusiast colleagues, I totally believe 100x productive.

100 x 0 == 0

So funny thing, a colleague of mine was arguing that there’s no reason to do a compiler because he got Claude to generate ELF binary directly for a hello world…

Some of the AI bros are very extremely bullish on it too the point of saying compilers are a waste of time…