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Comment Re:What we need to be doing (Score 1) 148

You're still here after all these years?

Notably though if we actually run out of work to do we have a post-scarcity utopia, and that happens when people are so rich that there's basically not a single person who, given even more money, would even be able to think of something to spend it on. That's not going to happen any time soon, so we're basically dealing with a distribution problem, which requires distribution (e.g. minimum wage, set it to 1/3 national hourly GDP, the reason for this takes a while to explain) and redistribution (negative income tax, do it as a universal dividend) policies along with monetary policy to properly increase the money supply to not fall behind productivity growth.

Submission + - Writer turns down grad school acceptance due to AI misinformation (businessinsider.com)

bluefoxlucid writes: A promising young writer rejected her invitation into the University of Sidney's creative writing program on speculation that AI will make creative writers obsolete.

In late 2023, I began noticing changes in the media landscape. Publications were laying off most of their writers, and friends in the industry lost out on great gigs and started competing with AI-generated writing.

As for the book industry, I realized AI will not spend years crafting a thrilling romance novel; it will instead churn out a thousand ebooks a month. For the commercial side of the industry, that will always be enough.

The link used for an example of AI-generated writing consuming the industry discusses cover letters and resumés, and in a great fallacy of equivocation the author decides this means creative writers like Brandon Sanderson, David Webber, and herself will be replaced by ChatGPT.

Instead of AI taking her job, the AI narrative took her job, or at least convinced her to give up on her career as a writer.

Comment Re:This is great but misplaced (Score 0) 87

My language does reflect the new reality. By your own admission EVs are a minority.

Would you say that white people should be called "normal people" in front of a bunch of black people in the US, because the black people are a minority?

You talk about EVs like they're some obscure just-invented thing. They're not esoteric.

We're not talking weight, we're talking wind resistance.

You very much are talking both. For an extreme case, with freight trucks, aero is only like 1/3rd to 1/2 of aero losses. And they have aerodynamically awful shapes and are on very low rolling resistance tyres (though also have very heavy cargos... but also very large frontal areas).

For a passenger vehicle / truck towing a trailer, it will really depend a lot on the vehicle and trailer. It's not even some simple additive process, the aerodynamics is complex; it's actually possible to even lower Cd by towing a trailer in some cases (though not usually). And if by definition of the topic at hand (discussion was of a "big" trailer), then you're talking something like similar to the vehicle's mass (F-150 can tow up to 3 times its mass). Which - if on the same tyres - then doubling your mass equals doubling the rolling resistance. The ratio between rolling and aero resistance at highway speeds varies on speed, vehicle, tyres, weather, etc, but saying 60:40 aero:rolling is probably reasonable at normal "towing" speeds (somewhat lower than drivers without trailers) and averaging across weather conditions. Doubling the rolling drag increases the total drag by 40%. If your cross-section stays the same (again, this depends on the vehicle and the trailer), the Cd would need to rise by 67% to keep the ratio between rolling and aero the same. Which is a really big Cd rise. Now, if you're starting with a very aero vehicle and have a very unaero trailer, sure, you might pull that off and then some (but remember that it's not additive, the airflow is complex). Or if it's a low car and a high trailer, again, same story. But to treat rolling as negligible is just not right. Trailers add a lot of rolling drag, amounts that very much are relevant.

Comment Re:I still get terrible results from "coding" agen (Score 1) 62

It's like visual coding or RAD all over again. Whenever suits and PHBs are told there's a magic wand that'll allow them to do without paying people for the nitty-gritty bits, they get all excited and convince each other in their echo chamber that their dream of a company of all managers and no workers is just around the corner.

Then reality says "hi", the hype dies down, a few scam artists got rich and the world continues as it was, with a couple new cool tools in the toolbox of those who know how to use them correctly - which is generally the same people that were supposedly being replaced.

Comment a free intern for everyone (Score 1) 62

That's how I see AI. I've been writing software for the better part of 40 years. What I see from AI is sometimes astonishing and sometimes pathetic. I would never, ever, ever put AI generated code into production software without carefull checking and refactoring, and I would fire anyone who does.

Code completion is mostly in the "astonishing" part. If I write a couple lines of near-identical stuff, like assigning values from an input to a structured format for processing, the AI most of the time gets right the next line I want to write. Anything more complex than that is hit-and-miss.

Mostly, I use AI the way I would use an intern. "Can you look up how to use this function correctly? What are the parameters and their defaults?" or "Write me some code that's tedious to write (like lots of transformation operations) but not rocket science by far.
Essentially, it does faster and a little bit better what previously I'd have done with Google and Stackoverflow.

I have no fear it'll replace developers anytime soon. Half of the time the code is outright wrong, most of the time it has glaring security issues or isn't half as fault-tolerant as it should be, and for any case where I know how to do it without any research, I'd be faster writing the code myself then going through several iterations with an AI to get it done.

Comment Re:This is great but misplaced (Score 1) 87

First off, "normal car", please. 20% of all new cars sold worldwide are EVs now. Update your language to reflect the new reality.

Secondly, that's just not true. Towing a heavy trailer with a truck will see its MPG drop by like half. The rule of thumb is that every 100 pounds you have a truck tow drops its fuel economy by about 2%. 2500lbs = 50%. That's a very rough rule, but it gives a sense of what's normal.

Comment Re:Yay (Score 3, Insightful) 87

You won't be "hanging out" - your car will be ready to leave before you are. By the time you go in, use the restroom, buy a drink or a snack, and get back to your car, you'll have already added the range you need to go to the next site.

Unless you need to get really full because you're in a charging desert (charging slows near the upper end), it basically is this way already, if you have a fast-charging EV and a powerful charger. And speeds just keep rising.

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