That's an illuminating headline compared to the bubble I exist in. Living in the eastside suburbs of Seattle, it's common to see three or four Teslas whizz by one after another.
And they've all been bought last month?
Readit Newsulfw commented on Tesla US sales drop to nearly 4-year low in November reuters.com/business/auto... · Posted by u/doener
The United States is freaking huge. By the time modern transportation arrived, people were already living all over the country in pockets every which where. We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these - and in vast quantities.
We do have dense pockets. NYC, in particular, has a nice metro (it just needs to be cleaner and more modernized - but it's great otherwise).
Most countries are small. Their dense cities are well-served by public transit. America is just too spread out. Insanely spread out.
China is an exception in that, while a huge landmass, its large cities emerged as the country was wholesale industrializing. It was easy for them to allocate lots of points to infrastructure. And given their unmatched population size and density, it makes a lot of sense.
As much as I envy China's infrastructure (I've been on their metros - they're amazing!), it would be a supreme malinvestment here in the United States to try to follow in their footsteps. The situation we have here is optimal for our density and the preferences of our citizens. (As much as people love to complain about cars, even more people than those that complain really love their cars.)
Public transit in the US is probably going to wind down as autonomous driving picks up the slack. Our road infrastructure is the very best in the world - it's more expansive, comprehensive, and well-maintained than any nation on the planet. We'd be wise to double down. It can turn into a super power once the machines take over driving for us.
The fact that we have this extent of totally unmatched road infrastructure might actually turn out to be hugely advantageous over countries that opted for static, expensive heavy rail. Our system is flexible, last mile, to every address in the country. With multiple routes, re-routes, detours. Roads are America's central nervous system.
Our interstate system is flexible, and when cars turn into IP packets, we'll have the thickest and most flexible infrastructure in the world.
We've shit on cars for the last 15 years under the guise that "strong towns" are correct and that cars are bad. But as it may turn out, these sleeping pieces of infrastructure might actually be the best investment we've ever made.
Going to call this now: in 20 years' time, cars will make America OP.
Those things everything complains about - they'll be America's superpower.
The rest of the world with their heavy rail trains and public transit will be jealous. Our highways will turn into smart logistics corridors that get people and goods P2P at high speed and low cost to every inch of the country.
Roads are truly America's circulatory and nervous system.
I'm so stoked for this. I once fell for the "we need more trains meme" - that was a suboptima anachronism, and our peak will be 100x higher than expensive, inflexible heavy rail.
> We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these
You actually believe that?!
A subscription to ChatGPT of course. Not like they'd ever get a job in the new world anyway...
ulfw commented on What Happens When an "Infinite-Money Machine" Unravels newyorker.com/news/the-fi... · Posted by u/pseudolus
The first thing that came to my mind when I read the title with “Infinite-Money Machine” was thinking of Google Search (Ads). Am I the only one?
Not officially. It was implied, but it wasn't hard data about their seriousness in comparison to subsequent hiring as well as their enlisting of Luxshare as a vendor.
What do you mean by not officially? They talk about hardware in the announcement. https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/
This news only came out after The Information leaked that OpenAI is working with Luxshare to begin manufacturing a consumer product [0] a couple months ago.
[0] - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-raids-apple-h...
Wasn't the whole weird Johny Ive and Sam Altman cuddling imagery and announcement their public announcement of a 'device'?
Users can swap their search engines freely on all browsers but they often don't want to.
Because there is simply no need to.
If there was one significantly better overall than Google (and not just a little better or better in just certain niches) people would switch.
ulfw commented on Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image bbc.com/news/articles/cwy... · Posted by u/josephcsible
LLM AI has led to job losses (either indirectly for moving investments into AI instead of people) or directly. Generative imagery has and will lead to more bullshit election outcomes, people getting blackmailed, scamed, things like this train stoppage etc etc. The list is endless. Not even getting into how the AI bubble burst will make most of us poor when the huge stock market crash comes, but hey whatever...
What good has it brought us (not the billionaire owners of AI)? It made us 'more effective' and oh instead of googling something and actually going to a link reading in detail the result we can now not bother with any of that and just believe whatever the LLM outputs (hallucinations be damned).
So I guess that's an upside.
(before the AI god bros come: I am talking purely about LLMs and generative imagery and videos, not ML or AI used for research et al)
ulfw commented on Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business investors.micron.com/news... · Posted by u/simlevesque
“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron
AI is destroying so much. God knows how bad things will get once the bubble bursts.