sdeframond

Thank you. I understand that we can put some monetary value on reducing the risk of dying.

How does that make "living and consuming goods" value-creating, exactly ?

I don't understand. Could you elaborate?

I remember some archeologist saying that the first sign of civilization is not some tool or whatever but a healed fractured bone. That means the person that got hurt was cared for by other people who had enough resources to afford for one useless member of the group.

> If we create enough wealth to give them the income without the truck driving... We won? That's the goal here. That's what the economy is _for_.

Assuming such wealth is created by the autonomous trucks replacing said drivers, for the same number of trucks, that would mean we now have to pay for 1 autonomous truck + 1 idle driver. This is more expensive than a regular truck driven by someone.

So either the number of truck increase dramatically or the replaced truckers find another value-creating occupation (or both).

After 15 years on the field, I still lack a lot of expertise. Many teams do, as you say.

LLM can save hours of doc reading for non-critical tools that I would otherwise not use. Its also pretty good at "hacking a bash script" in order to test things out. Not everyone is confortable writing bash scripts.

For all the talk about AI making teams super productive, I don't see much talk about AI improving software quality.

It's a shame, though, because I believe there is a lot of potential there.

I mean, quality is easier with the right tooling (monitoring, linters, property-based tests, theorem prover...). But, given limited resources, it can feel difficult to prioritize investing in quality when business is pressing devs to ship, ship, ship.

But now the cost of writing custom tooling has changed. These custom tools might be sloppy because vibe-coded but we wouldn't have them otherwise! Or we might finally have decided to make that investment after too much time suffering from their absence. Now the cost/benefit changed, so why not invest now?

> Once engineering teams have cleared the backlog, then burned through the decades of tech debt the constraints will switch. And how businesses react to that will be interesting.

I have no doubt someone in business will have more ideas than any team can deliver.

Think about all those product-pitch PPTs. What if one could present a prototype instead? Boom, demand increased 100x.

That's Jevons Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> a corporation is typically "a thing".

What is "a thing", exactly ? Corporations are certainly ambiguous in that regard: they have legal personhood[1] and even free speech[2] in US, apparently.

In the other hand, no corporation ever really "announce its financial report". Someone does it on behalf of the corporation, technically.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Veritasium made a video about CERN's "antimatter factory"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jjp3WC8Unj8

Hmm, what does "civilization" mean actually?

And driver's license

> to set a 20 year expiration on laws

Wait, do we need to pass a law for this?

I feel that we have to mention Stanislav Petrov now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Developing with LLMs is somewhat more expensive than without. That must be a blocker for many hobbyist.

On the other hand, corporations don't spend much on open source.

It is always difficult to justify a 2h30m commute, isn't it ?

Many people do it. I did it myself for a few years. It sucks.

I agree with your sentiment about bike trails!

> Cars scale, because if on one day for some reason only a single person wants to go anywhere, only a single car will be deployed.

They downscale pretty well, although the roads and parking space are still there. In practice downscaling does not happen much, though.

> If you need to take a bike or walk, then why not just go to your destination that way?

Because it would take me a whole day walking and only an hour walking + train ? Also, not every passenger needs a bicycle.

As for carrying stuff, I do have a small car. I still mostly move by bycicle and public transportation because it is often faster, easier, cheaper and I dont have to bring a metric ton a metal to carry my 80kg of body meat.

The car is for visiting remote places with the kids, for example. Public transportation just doesn't work there, agreed.

For the record I never had any real issue with anyone in trains or buses.

I did have to wait for 2h occasionally when there some accident on the line but I also got stuck in jams for hours because of some accident downstream. So it's a tie for me. This said, I never had to wait for 2h because I missed a bus in a well deserved area.

I believe it depends heavily on the place we live in. FWIW I'm in a second tier French city, about 200k inhabitants.

Where are you?

A strange game. The most likely winning move is... not to play.

Out of order:

4. Most cars move around nearly empty. When there are too many people (often 1 per car), you get stuck in jams. So cars do not scale either. In this regard public transportation arguably scale better.

1. Bicycles, electric scooters or even walking answer 90% of that concern unless your city is designed against its users.

3. When you need to carry lotta stuff then yes, use a car (either yours or rental). Does it justify bringing your whole car when you do not need to carry anything?

5. True, but I am concerned about what that means about your relationship with society. Or the society you live in.

2. You would NOT wait up to 2 hours in any decent public transportation system.

So yes, cars are still the best solution in some cases. No one argues against that. It is just a poor default.

"This is not a safety-optimized car"

Indeed, even for the demo they did not put a human inside.

IRL I can think of so many failure modes it makes this "car" unpractical for anything but a tech demo.

> This is my disconnect with this kind of speed, how are they avoiding the janky crap?

Because you are using LLMs to write code that you would be writing by hand.

Use it to write thing you wouldn't have time to write by hand and that are not mission critical: custom linters, support tools and so on. You know, each time you think to yourself "hey, I would write something to automate this chore, if only I could set aside one or two days".

You can also use it to document silly things you wouldn't take time to but that provide context to agents. Ask it to do a performance audit and to give you a few SQL queries and bash commands to gather stats about prod and logs. Then commit this document.

Will you read it? No. But your agent will use it to write code that's fit.

Keep doing this and 1/ you will be more productive, 2/ your agent will progressively improve so that you will let it do more and more.

> I've learnt more since the advent of LLMs than I did in the 10 years prior. And it's not just me; that is most people's experience with LLMs.

I wonder. I agree that LLMs are great teaching assistants but, also, I often feel like watching the game instead of playing it. Sure I'll be an expert at football after watching all the games, but will I be an athlete?

Having laws is generally a good thing when they are enforced. A law that is not enforced, selectively enforced or not enforceable is actually worse than no law since it gives power and agency to the enforcer without providing much to the people.

Edit: this being said, the New Hampshire laws above seem to be mandating that the data is deleted. Not that it is not accessed. It seems like pretty good start.

But there also could be a law stating "do not set up mass surveillance camera network in public areas".

I wonder. Cat's tongues are pretty rough!

The first step would be not to set up a surveillance system.

> You can't build enforcement infrastructure around something that isn't yet illegal!

Yes. Yet merely making something illegal must not be an excuse to set up something that is sooo easy to breach.

In other words, stealing being illegal does not make it a good idea to recklessly leave stacked banknotes unattended on my lawn.

As for other industries where safety is mandated by law, law itself came only after many disastrous events.

What's truly original here - and suspicious if you ask me - is that said industry asks for regulation. Did mining, tobacco or airplanes companies ask for regulation? No, not even after many people died.

So some american AI companies are like "look at me! I am soo dangerous! Regulate me!". Ah, come on. Do your crimes, get in jail, then we'll regulate.

I dont believe in "IApocalypse". Not without many warning shots such as "oops, my swarm took down your system, sooooorry".

I cant make coffee in an arbitary house kitchen. People tend to put stuff anywhere but where at look for them...

Hm, this reminds me how the marshmallow experiment [1], initially thought to show differences in character, turned out to surface differences in wealth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

Interesting !

On a similar note, as a Frenchman, I felt somewhat closer to the Japanese described in "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" by Ruth Benedict than to the Americans, although the Japanese are the "aliens" from the point of view of that book.

I find that we dont need to go all in. I can use LLMs to make tooling custom to my project: linters, skills, rules, some doc etc. Then iteratively improve on that.

For example, write a skill that finds some kind of code smell, say duplication, and generate a report. Give it some supporting scripts.

Then, use this report to file a few tickets. Then make the agent fix those tickets. Then, as you grow confident, automate more of this process.

It does not replace human supervision but it may enhance it. Especially in a team where people start generating PRs faster that anyone can review them.

Continue this improvement process long enough and you may find yourself with an AI Software Factory.

Why would we care wether something truly is AGI or not?

It is useful. It may be dangerous. It has an impact. I care about that.