We got taught to be helpless by the industry, so they can help us out.
industry is pretty damn good at figuring out what customers actually want, instead of just what customer say they want and then don't actually buy.
cars are the way they are because that's what the overwhelming majority of car buyers actually want. The average driver doesn't want their car spitting out error codes, they want a check engine light to tell them to take it to a mechanic, and any information beyond that is confusing.
Are you sure that's what customers want, or maybe it's what dealers want?
The check engine light tells you nothing. It tells your local mechanic nothing. Do you can't get the problem fixed easily or cheaply.
What it does, is force you to take the car to a dealer, who has the specialist, proprietary equipment needed to interpret the fault. And these gatekeepers will charge you a fat premium for that.
So no. I don't think this design choices are driven by a desire to serve the customer.
the check engine light tells you there's an OBD code available to be read. you can buy a reader for $20 on amazon, or your local hardware store, or i've even seen them at gas stations. you don't need "specialist proprietary equipment" that "gatekeepers charge a fat premium" for. this isn't magic.
most people take it to a mechanic instead, because that's what they'd rather do.
Not entirely correct. OBD only mandates emissions information to be made available in a standardized way.
There are plenty of proprietary codes that might set a malfunction light and not show up on an OBD reader, or not be interpreted by it.
(there are tools that reverse-engineer the proprietary protocols that can show those codes, but they aren't $20 - more like $200 and up)
I really don't see why you're defending hiding information. Even for someone who doesn't want to mess around and would just take it to a dealer, making the information available without the need for a code reader will not hurt in any way.
my first reaction was that the counter in the top right seemed like a really low number, but i think i was interpreting it wrong - that's the number of rides in progress, not a cumulative counter for the day, right?
from what i can tell, most of this is existing stuff that advocates have been trying to push for a while now.
i think it's a perfect example of why advocates for any policy should have specific, achievable, and well-documented goals - you never know who might be an ally. politicians don't want to do this sort of detailed work, they're looking for preexisting policy they can champion, and if you're standing there ready to hand it to them when they're looking for it you get get good stuff done.
Even before RFK Jr rubbed his metaphorical nutsack all over our healthcare system, doctors pretty much always told me to eat better. They told me to avoid processed foods, avoid sugar, and focus on fiber and protein.
I don't know why RFK Jr. is getting credit for telling people to eat healthy, especially since some of his recommendations (e.g. telling people to eat french fries if they're fried in beef tallow) are actively bad and will likely lead to people becoming more overweight and less healthy.
Because nobody else changed the food pyramid to be somewhat not-garbage until him. Who else would you congratulate for this specific action? Your own personal doctor??
Michelle Obama provided very similar guidance in around 2011 and every conservatively collectively lost their shit over it.
The food pyramid wasn't really used in recent years by the US government, and changed to "MyPlate" in 2011, and if you actually read its guidelines nothing on there is terribly offensive.
I have not seen the pyramid with bread, cereal, rice and pasta at the base pushed for at least ~20 years. Maybe it was 25-30 years ago when I saw it pushed seriously in school and even then I did not see people taking it seriously outside of those lessons, as in people actively calling it questionable.
Where in the world was this old pyramid still being pushed?
It's a pretty straight-forward question - you can just say "Michelle Obama" or whoever you're referring to instead. I never understand the desire to actively present yourself as someone throwing a tantrum.
If that's not who you're referring to, please correct me.
You made a claim about how RFK Jr. was the only person to fix the food pyramid.
It is unlikely that if you are old enough to vote that you do not remember that Michelle Obama tried to make a more healthy food criteria, and as such it’s very easy to assume that you are acting in bad faith when you say something about RFK Jr that is objectively not true.
It’s a pretty bad assumption. You should pay a lot more attention to Hanlon’s Razor.
I don’t know much at all about Michelle’s actions. Similarly, I don’t know much about Melania’s actions. You say she tried to - so… she didn’t do it? If not, I don’t see how this makes my comment “objectively untrue”?
Sure he may be a meathead moron who can only advocate that the military should get jacked, but if the military really DOES need to get in better shape and his brainiac predecessors weren’t actually doing anything about that, he’s actually functionally smarter than them.
So to answer your question, if RFK is doing the thing that needs to be done, he should get the credit.
I don’t know enough about the military to say for sure if Pete Hegseth’s stuff is stupid or reductive. I suspect it is, I am pretty sure that the military has had pretty aggressive physical training for decades and he contributed literally nothing to this conversation (like basically everything the Trump admin does that isn’t actively destructive), but maybe I am wrong.
The food pyramid was removed in 2011 and replaced with MyPlate, which was much more reasonable than the food pyramid. Of course, it was heavily criticized by conservatives because they claimed it was a “nanny state”.
But of course, like everyone in Trump’s circle, RFK Jr. rebrands someone else’s work, pretends he is the first person to ever suggest eating healthy, and then every stupid Trump voter with the apparent memory retention of a goldfish acts like he was the first person to ever suggest eating healthy.
I think they will eventually. It’s always been a very incoherent sales pitch that your expensive PCs are packed full of expensive hardware that’s supposed to do AI things, but your cheap PCs that have none of that are still capable of doing 100% of the AI tasks that customers actually care about: accessing chatGPT.
Also, what kind of AI tasks is the average person doing? The people thinking about this stuff are detached from reality. For most people a computer is a gateway to talking to friends and family, sharing pictures, browsing social media, and looking up recipes and how-to guides. Maybe they do some tracking of things as well in something like Excel or Google Sheets.
Consumer AI has never really made any sense. It's going to end up in the same category of things as 3D TV's, smart appliances, etc.
I don't remember any other time in the tech industry's history when "what companies and CEOs want to push" was less connected to "what customers want." Nobody transformed their business around 3D TVs like current companies are transforming themselves to deliver "AI-everything".
If memory shortages make existing products non-viable (e.g. 50% price increases on mini PCs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514794), will consumers flock to new/AI products like OpenAI "pen" or reject those outright?
I think it does make sense if you're at a certain level of user hardware. If you make local computing infeasible because of the computational or hardware cost it makes it much easier to sell compute as a service. Since about 2014 almost every single change to paid software has been to make it a recurring fee rather than a single payment, and now they can do that with hardware as well. To the financially illiterate paying a $15 a month subscription to two LLMs from their phone they have a $40 monthly payment on for two years seems like a better deal than paying $1,200 for a desktop computer with free software that they'll use a tenth as much as the phone. This is why Nvidia is offering GForce Now the same way in one hundred hour increments, as they can get $20 a month that goes directly to them, with the chance of getting up to an additional $42 maximum if the person buys additional extensions of equal amount (another one hundred hours). That ends up with $744 a year directly to Nvidia without any board partners getting a cut, while a mid grade GPU with better performance and no network latency would cost that much and last the user five entire years. Most people won't realize that long before they reach the end of the useful lifetime of the service they'll have paid three to four times as much as if they had just bought the hardware outright.
With more of the compute being pushed off of local hardware they can cheapen out on said hardware with smaller batteries, fewer ports and features, and weaker CPUs. This lessens the pressure they feel from consumers who were taught by corporations in the 20th century that improvements will always come year over year. They can sell less complex hardware and make up for it with software.
For the hardware companies it's all rent seeking from the top down. And the push to put "AI" into everything is a blitz offensive to make this impossible to escape. They just need to normalize non-local computing and have it succeed this time, unlike when they tried it with the "cloud" craze a few years ago. But the companies didn't learn the intended lesson last time when users straight up said that they don't like others gatekeeping the devices they're holding right in their hands. Instead the companies learned they have to deny all other options so users are forced to acquiesce to the gatekeeping.
Suggested amendment: the customers are CEOs dreaming of Wall Street seeing them as a CEO who will deliver a human-free work force. The press release is the product. The reality of payrolls are incidental to what they really want: stock price go up.
It's all optics, it's all grift, it's all gambling.
Just off the top of my head of some "consumer" areas that I personally encounter...
I don't want AI involved in my laundry machines. The only possible exception I could see would be some sort of emergency-off system, but I don't think that even needs to be "AI". But I don't want AI determining when my laundry is adequately washed or dried; I know what I'm doing, and I neither need nor want help from AI.
I don't want AI involved in my cooking. Admittedly, I have asked ChatGPT for some cooking information (sometimes easier than finding it on slop-and-ad-ridden Google), but I don't want AI in the oven or in the refrigerator or in the stove.
I don't want AI controlling my thermostat. I don't want AI controlling my water heater. I don't want AI controlling my garage door. I don't want AI balancing my checkbook.
I am totally fine with involving computers and technology in these things, but I don't want it to be "AI". I have way less trust in nondeterministic neural network systems than I do in basic well-tested sensors, microcontrollers, and tiny low-level C programs.
I do think it makes some sense in limited capacity.
Have some half decent model integrated with OS's builtin image editing app so average user can do basic fixing of their vacation photos by some prompts
Have some local model with access to files automatically tag your photos, maybe even ask some questions and add tags based on that and then use that for search ("give me photo of that person from last year's vacation"
Similarly with chat records
But once you start throwing it in cloud... people get anxious about their data getting lost, or might not exactly see the value in subscription
You and I live in different bubbles. ChatGPT is the go-to for my non-techie friends to ask for advice on basically everything. Women asking it for relationship advice and medical questions, to guys with business ideas and lawsuit stuff.
On the other hand everyone non-technical I know under 40 uses LLMs and my 74 year old dad just started using ChatGPT.
You could use a search engine and hope someone answered a close enough question (and wade through the SEO slop), or just get an AI to actually help you.
Completely insane, who doesn't get to have coffee breaks without manager permission? Surely any org that treats its employees as adults would not have this problem.
i don't think mountain rescue is asking for a better vehicle. traditional helicopters work.
flying taxi startups, drone companies, jetpack companies, and all the other fantastical flying startyps keep trying to say they have applications in mountain rescue, but i'm pretty sure that's providing a lot more benefit to the flying taxi startup's pitch deck than it is to any mountain rescue operation.
Traditional helicopters also have the effective lift-weight ratios to tackle the density*altitude of mountain rescue that these "air-taxis" have _zero_ hope to achieve with the the vastly lower power-weight of electrical drive-trains and their lift-inefficient multi-rotor designs.
it's pretty silly to have a tax that incentivizes the opposite behaviour to what you want. registration surcharges benefit the people who drive the most, at the expense of the people who drive the least.
if you're trying to pay for wear and tear on the roads, or reduce congestion, making people feel like they have to "get their moneys worth" on the registration surcharge really isn't helping.
>focusing on 246 deceased drivers who were tested for THC following a fatal crash”. That means there could be selection bias at play.
that wording definitely sets off warning alarms for selection bias. but it looks like there were approximately 350 traffic deaths in montgomery county during that period [1]. that probably about lines up with 246 drivers dying during that period, so it seems likely they tested all or almost all deceased drivers.
if we're talking about logs from our own applications that we have written, the program should know because we can write it in a way that it knows.
user-defined config should be verified before it is used. make a ping to port 25 to see if it works before you start using that config for actual operation. if it fails the verification step, that's not an error that needs to be logged.
What about when the mail server endpoint has changed, and for whatever reason, this configuration wasn’t updated? This is a common scenario when dealing with legacy infrastructure in my experience.
the whole point of the essay here is that you should make a distinction between errors that you care about and plan to fix, and errors that you don't care about and don't intend to do anything about. and if you don't intend to do anything about it, it shouldn't be logged as error.
i'm following the author's example that an SMTP connection error is something you want to investigate and fix. if you have a different system with different assumptions where your response to a mailserver being unreachable is to ignore it, obviously that example doesn't apply for you. i'm not saying, and i don't think the author is saying that SMTP errors should always or never be logged as errors.
when the mailserver endpoint has changed, you should do the thing that makes sense in the context of your application. if it's not something that the person responsible for reviewing the logs needs to know about, don't log it. if it is, then log it.
So when the random error on a remote party happens at one time your system ignores it, bu when it happens at another time, it prevents the server from booting? That's a very brittle system.
industry is pretty damn good at figuring out what customers actually want, instead of just what customer say they want and then don't actually buy.
cars are the way they are because that's what the overwhelming majority of car buyers actually want. The average driver doesn't want their car spitting out error codes, they want a check engine light to tell them to take it to a mechanic, and any information beyond that is confusing.
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