Comment Re:3D printing wasn't the problem (Score 1) 87
The situation was worse than I thought. According to the AAIB report, they tested the material and found the glass transition temperature to be about 53C, so the jackass printed it in PLA.
The situation was worse than I thought. According to the AAIB report, they tested the material and found the glass transition temperature to be about 53C, so the jackass printed it in PLA.
Also, since it's Poly Lactic Acid, our metabolism is already well equipped to deal with the breakdown product.
It's great for things that will be indoors at room temperature. I made a snap-on camera mount for my monitor that has held up great. But if it was a dash mount, it would need to be PETG or CF-PA6 to not sag in the summer.
I suppose I wasn't clear, when I said they are dutifully generating code, I mean they *are* using the AI tools. So the leadership is left with the possibilities that either AI isn't fit for the task of suddenly halving their headcount without any transition plan or the employees are to blame, and so they are deciding the employees are to blame.
The leadership cut entire teams and then just assigned their projects to the other half who had never seen the codebase, never used or talked to users of those projects, no knowledge associated with meetings and emails and instant messages, only tickets and a codebase to go on. AI was the stated answer as to why not only could they double the workload, they could AI-away the traditional need for typical transition efforts.
Getting their jobs sent to American AI won't be noticeably better for American workers than getting their jobs sent to Chinese AIs.
According to an AAIB Field Investigation report (pg. 4), two samples from the intake were tested and found to have a glass transition temperature of 54.0C and 52.8C
So some idiot printed them in PLA. PLA is great but is very much NOT temperature resistant. It has been known to sag in a hot car.
Now look at the ratio of human driven cars vs. Waymo cars.
The problem was using a cheap substitute part. I'm guessing an injection molded ABS part would also have failed in that scenario.
CF-ABS is NOT like fiberglass at all. The CF is chopped into fine bits. They lend some stiffness at room temperature but not strength to the part. Certainly the carbon fiber bits don't lend any heat resistance.
The trend even in theory doesn't seem to keep pace with the depreciation on the assets.
My subjective experience is opposite, after an initial rapid improvement in LLM behavior, the subjective experience has plateaued. Doing a better job with getting the right stuff into context without having to manually stuff it with certain tools, and that counts for a lot, but given the same context the outputs are about as unreliable as they have been, including gemini 3. If it generates too much code, then it's more trouble to fix that code than it's worth. Digestable snippets are useful... sometimes to save on tedium, but the investment seems to expect to just replace people, and it's not going to be there from what I see.
And the marketing has been obnoxious, pretty much going back to GPT3 I keep seeing some advocates saying "It can write your code for you!" followed with the next iteration of "well, admittedly, it couldn't before, but *now* it can!" GPT4, Claude, Gemini, I keep seeing the claims and then dismissing the previous claim to say "this time it's true!". This is starting to really impact companies, I know of a company that laid off over half their developers without any warning or prep, with execs telling the remaining people "you can just use AI to maintain and improve the code, it's going to be no incremental burden". They seem very disappointed that a bunch of things have stopped happening and have been saying the devs must be some sort of luddites refusing to use AI to just do the work, even as they are dutifully generating code.
You spend whatever investment money it takes to achieve market dominance, and then it's gravy train.
Historically speaking, that last part is frequently elusive. Lots of crashing and burning of once "sure thing" tech companies. Some have survived, but it's hardly an assumption that can be made.
That's why I suggest a mitigation to the increases for industry based on local employment. Data centers employ very few people per-Killowatt and so contribute a lot less to the local economy compared to those other industries.
It would make sense in conjunction with an employment based mitigation. Data centers employ very few people once operational (they're not called lights-out facilities for nothing), so no mitigation. Major manufacturer provides many steady jobs, more mitigation for them.
Of course, things get complicated. There are mini data centers being set up in people's back yards where the waste heat warms the home owners house. That doesn't employ a lot of people but gets effectively double use of the energy for at least a good part of the year, offsetting other energy use, so it should see some form of mitigation as well.
The bigger question though is how long until the data centers are abandoned? The big AI companies and their investors are operating at a loss as they jocky for market share and train ever larger models. But will people actually find the AI useful enough to pay for it once the investors start demanding their ROI? Will managers come to realize that they might be better off hiring people suffering schizophrenia with frequent psychotic episodes?
Reminds me of when an executive left our company and higher ups were rushing to assure us that we shouldn't be too worried and don't let this hurt morale while mostly we either didn't care or were kind of glad to see the idiot go. Meanwhile the execs speaking would get obviously angry at the guy for betraying them and leaving.
It was clear that day that the executives actually think we give a crap about any one of them.
Not knowing anything at all about Apple and Dye and Lemay, the story seems depressingly familiar and totally believable based on my experience with big companies.
Someone useless occupies a high position because he convinces peers he is somehow insightful, everyone hates him for his crappy 'leadership', his departure pisses off the leadership team so much that all his allies are dead to them.... Yep, all of this absolutely looks like things I've seen at other companies...
End to end encryption, for a toilet? Frankny I do not want a TOILET to connect me "end-to-end" with anybody. They're doing it wrong.
Time to pull up the sheet on IOT. Not only has it gone up it's own backside, now it's trying to go up ours too.
Life's the same, except for the shoes. - The Cars