bunderbunder

Build quality was indeed pretty good. But it was still obviously a cheap car. The RCR review correctly pointed out that it was noisy as heck on the highway, had trouble getting up to 65mph, was just kind of generally uncomfortable, etc.

Contrast with, e.g., my stepmom's Jeep Grand Cherokee that was expensive and loaded with luxury features but had awful build quality and was constantly in the shop.

I realize. I'm just not prepared to assume that that's an automatic fail from a TCO perspective.

Suppose for the sake of argument that replacing the whole unit is expensive enough that any part of it failing is effectively the end of the car's life. You could still end up with a more economical car as long as the % reduction in the car's mean time between failures is less than the % reduction in sticker price.

It's kind of like how the most economical car I've ever owned was a rusted out pickup truck that was theoretically on its last legs when I got it. But I only paid $700 for it in the first place, and it lasted me another 3 years with only routine maintenance and wear items needing to be replaced. My 2010 Kia Soul would have to go 26 more years without any major repairs to reach the same price per year of service.

That doesn't seem to be too far off from the status quo for typical American cars, which are fully capable of being totaled by a collision that only damages the bumper.

https://financeliterate.blog/can-fender-bender-total-car-ins...

Well, that's the other side of it. If we say they are making a trade-off decision, that means that they are choosing not to sell to paying customers. Who are these paying customers that Anthropic is turning down? I haven't heard any headlines saying they've instituted token quotas or started putting potential new customers on a waiting list.

Instead what's happening is more or less the opposite of that. They've been trying to goose demand by cutting prices: https://www.cio.com/article/4225643/openai-anthropic-cut-ai-...

I'm sort of reminded of the Regular Car Reviews review of the Geo Metro, where he spent the first maybe 5 minutes of the video trying to manage viewers expectations. So he talked for a while about judging a thing based on how good it is at being what it's trying to be, not how bad it is at being something else. And then he talked for a while about how the Geo Metro's entire purpose is to be as economical as possible.

And then he spent the rest of the review talking about all the features about the car that people typically hated on, but in a positive light. Because if your primary goal is to make the cheapest car, with the highest fuel economy, for the benefit of people who don't have a whole lot of spending money, those were exactly the design compromises to be making.

Luxury seems like a tricky move for EVs. All those extra features add weight, which eats into range. I would guess that undermines your own sales pitch because people who want to spend a lot on their car are generally going to be people who expect to spend a lot of time in their car.

I imagine it's just a fundamentally more palatable compromise for an ICE vehicle. You maybe bump the size of the fuel tank a bit and assume your clientele aren't going to be all that much more cost sensitive about fuel than they are about sticker price and maintenance.

Yeah. I’d say that by 2014 a lot of the shift had already happened.

I don't buy it. A company like Anthropic is not going to just walk away from revenue. If external demand were really that high, then they should take the money first. And not just for the revenue; customer demand being that high is also an indication that the product is already great as-is so they stand to improve their bottom line by easing off on the R&D spend.

There are many good reasons why the industry largely moved away from having DBAs as a specialist position. But one downside I've seen is that it's increasingly common to have teams decide to just switch platforms without fully exploring whether that's really necessary.

I'm not really surprised. Data storage and data access technology is a pretty large subject all by itself, and a "jack of all, master of none" developer might never develop the expertise needed to properly optimize a database.

That might be part of it, but it’s ultimately up to leadership to get the right people, direct them well, and create an environment where they can collaborate effectively.

I had heard elsewhere that the decision to give live service a go came from Bioware’s own leadership and was not thrust upon them by EA.

I can imagine a universe where Bioware stuck with scripted single player RPGs and faded along with the genre. In which case we might have been at the same point by now, just with a different list of games to use as conversation fodder.

I heard elsewhere - I forget the name of the journalist - that the real root cause was that EA pushed for a yearly release cadence like they’re used to with their sports and sim titles. That version of the story has Bioware juat generally struggling to adapt, and the specific questionable decisions are just symptoms of the underlying problem.

I like it because it fits nicely with the immediate situation: 50 people working on a game that will need a huge headcount ramp-up and multiple years to ship, and EA just deciding they would rather put their money into a more immediate payoff.

I still don’t follow. You’ve said a lot of things about regulation and insurance requirements and all that, but I don’t see how any of it is necessary to get to “centralized management.” Let alone goofing up the centralized management.

I’m just a software person, not a supermarket expert, so maybe I’m being a bit simpleminded here, but for the entirety of my career I’ve participated in a constant trend toward centralizing and automating operations. That’s been the case regardless of how highly regulated the industry was. The motivating force has always been making things easier, cheaper and less error prone.

I suppose we could throw a rant about regulation into the mix, but, in the words of Laplace, I have no need of that hypothesis.

That desperation narrative is illusory. Consumer demand is low and has been ever since this stuff stopped being a free fun novelty. And the only people who seem to be claiming AI demand is through the roof are the datacenter operators and frontier model vendors. But claiming high demand for your own products has been a standard part of the pitchman’s playbook for so long that we now have a term for people who will readily believe that sort of thing: “easy mark.”

So let’s not be easy marks. Let’s be a bit skeptical and look for some corroborating evidence. One obvious place is to check whether the AI market actually behaves like what we expect to see when demand outstrips supply. First and foremost, we would expect to see rapidly rising prices and very high profits for suppliers.

But we don’t see that. Anthropic and OpenAI are very much competing on price. Which, funny, is the opposite of what you would expect of companies that are supposedly struggling to keep up with demand. And apparently razor thin if not negative profit margins, too. Why is that? If demand is so high, then why are they keeping their prices so low it hurts? They aren’t running a charity here.

It’s not quite that simple. A few small companies are speculatively buying up all the production capacity going on into the future. At the same time they aren’t actually using it all; a bunch is juat sitting in warehouses not doing anybody any good. And there are real questions about whether this represents any sort of consumer demand, or if it’s primarily fueled by billionaires’ desire to lay off all their workers and replace them with chatbots.

So we’ve got rent seeking behavior squeezing everyday people on both sides, and if anyone says, “hey, I don’t like how this is going”, your answer is to say, “So then set up a factory?”

That’s so tone deaf it makes “let them eat cake” sound downright empathetic by comparison.

Compare it more to movie production and book publishing. Where we also see a pattern of the big budget stuff being risk averse and the really creative stuff happening downmarket. Often so far downmarket that the creators themselves end up being the primary financiers.

I suspect you may be getting ahead of yourself by going straight to thinking about landing a paying gig. Everyone I know who ever even thought about getting into games started out by making them as a hobby. You might need a few years’ worth of that under your belt before you would have enough of a portfolio to compete for jobs.

It also gives you a chance to see how much you like it before you commit. If you don’t enjoy it enough to keep up doing it purely for fun, you might not like it enough to want to do it as a high pressure career choice.

For my part, I’m not looking to run models locally. I just want the price of ereaders not to double overnight.

I’d be more impressed with this scarcity argument if all the RAM companies are buying up were actually getting put online, instead of sitting around in warehouses as currently seems to be the case.

If you are the cause of artificial scarcity due to hoarding, you don’t also get to claim to be the solution to the problem. That’s just running a racket.

That seems like a pretty wild nonsequitur at first glance. How exactly do we get to “too much regulation” from “a subset of stores’ centrally managed equipment was left off the VPN”?

If you want to be able to do that monitoring from a central location then at some point you will need some form of internetwork to support transferring data between local networks. And nowadays there is really only the one obvious choice of internetwork.

I’ve been studying and working in AI for almost 3 decades now, and made at least an amateur’s study of the field’s 70-ish year history. Much has changed, including the word we use for this concept, but one immutable constant is that we have always been teetering on the brink of the singularity.

Now isn’t even the first time people got so excited about an automatic proof finder that they declared that it’s already here.

I go to Hacker News to hear people say that LLMs will automagically make software clean and efficient again.

Then I go back to Cursor’s agent chat window and spend another day endlessly struggling to keep LLMs from inserting needless complexity and N+1 queries into the code at a faster rate than mere humans could ever hope to achieve.

This is the kind of thing that needs a “things every programmer should know about…” blog post.

I would estimate that a single digit percentage of my colleagues are aware that, according to `top`, sitting around picking at your fingernails while you wait on the memory controller to run across town and back counts as working your ass off.

I usually start with simpler things like paying attention to locality of reference and adjusting data so that it takes up less space in memory.

It’s especially the “cinematic” bit that got me. It’s technically impressive, but isn’t as visually interesting as what lower budget games have been doing with less polygons and more inspiration.

I’ll admit I lost the plot a long time ago, but there’s a part of me that wonders if the main purpose behind the game engine and graphics card treadmill is to line the pockets of people who sell games engines and graphics cards. My subjective sense of the connection between technology and enjoyment as a player started to degrade about a decade back.

I’ve had code review pushback against reorganizing data structures to be more cache-friendly on the grounds that it was “premature optimization” even though I pre-emotively justified the decision with benchmark results indicating that the performance difference was large and business relevant, and addressed a real performance bottleneck that I observed during testing.

This was on a team and at a time where Clean Code was very popular. I somewhat wonder if the problem is that, in the 2010s, many people became convinced that certain aesthetic standards were both objectively, provably correct, and more important than anything else.

Look, as long as nobody looks inside my .doom.d directory nobody has to get hurt.

That experiment also felt more cute than actually minimalist to me.

When I decided to take a break from being terminally online, I didn’t turn off the phone feature but leave Wi-Fi on so I could still check my socials on the office Wi-Fi; that wouldn’t have actually done much. I forced my phone off the bulk of the internet by turning off Wi-Fi and disabling cellular data for everything but a few core apps like Messages and Maps.

Yes, and it’s been a quarter century or so but this is how I remember BeOS doing it. Every window got a dedicated thread for handling events and GUI updates, and other code would communicate with it via message passing. The OS had a standard message passing system that was pervasive; if I remember right every thread got a mailbox by default.

But it was 90s era C++, so probably that was all just a polite agreement and the reality was that circumventing the message passing to directly call methods on objects that belong to other threads was common, and just as likely to happen by accident as on purpose.