Probably not in the US though, or only in limited circumstances. Otherwise the timeshare sales from major companies wouldn't keep doing what they do. Almost no one knows what they bought, and thinks they bought something else, yet they can't get a court to void the written contract.

No one is asking for this AI bullshit, except for the rich.

This just isn't true - if it was, each chatbot wouldn't have millions of monthly users. You know what happens to stuff no one is asking for? No one uses it and it tends to disappear.

I think lots of people have been asking for AI (as it is now) to replace search for instance, because search has gotten so bad. We can debate how well suited each model is for that, but it's clear there's a search problem.

Yea, I always wonder - like do people just completely forget what their life was like when they were 22 (or pick an age)? How they thought? Heck, just think back to before you were a manager or high level individual contributor or whatever.

Yea, you never rolled your eyes at your superiors (and you're surely not doing it now re the C-Suite right?)... You never talked about how to "game the system" (I imagined all the change jobs every 3 years memes for the aughts through 2020ish).

These people really do need to get over themselves or IDK ask their old bosses how they *really* were.

In the US I absolutely bet that. Or more specifically, there are people who can't even remember to keep their cars fueled. They can make it a couple miles with the light on to the gas station, take 5 minutes, and go on whatever else they needed to do that day. IDK, many have untreated or not sufficiently treated ADHD. But people have trouble keeping their phones charged still. I know a bunch. However, they currently can plug their phones in and still use them.

In the worst case scenario they can have some gas cans around or a battery bank for their phone that covers some of their mishaps, especially if someone else makes sure to refill the cans or force them to do so - which is more realistic when it's a once a month or every few months thing than a every day sort of thing.

And if everyone has a vehicle, you now need as many charge plugs as you have vehicles, which is less and less realistic in more places. Or you have a new complicated scheduling system, especially when people don't actually tell the scheduler person what charge level the vehicles are at.

Now, the above is probably limited to people with ADHD or other issues and those dealing with them, but whats worse is the extra hassle on the longer trips. A full gas station is a 10-15 minute wait for a pump to get freed up in most situations, assuming 3 cars deep waiting and not a bunch of assholes. A full charger means an hour+ wait to start and 20 minutes to charge in the same load. This is a big deal, especially if on popular routes (interstates) during busy times (lots of people take road trips at the same time in the summer because of kids schedules). I could see this easily adding a day and an overnight if you have to charge 2x on the trip and both places are busy. I've certainly had multiple waits for a pump with gas cars.

Wait, I have always been told the way to use an EV was to charge it overnight like my cellphone. Doesn't once every 10 days cause a lot of issues with range? Or time? Like, I get it, I don't get gas every day, but that's because I can get down to 30% or so of range and spend 5-10 minutes filling up. If I knew it would take me hours before I could do things, I would absolutely want to do that every night so I am prepared in case something comes up.

I think the argument is more around rural areas, where there aren't a bunch of banks where there are currently post offices. I still don't really see the appeal, but I go by probably 4 post offices in small towns that don't have a bank, or maybe have one bank on a trip to my "local" Sam's Club.

However, for "reasons" many government tasks still need us to mail things in to them, as do a bunch of small businesses (still only take physical checks, or charge a fee to take a digital payment). Maybe this is just a NY issue, but I don't think so - I recall you have to mail in and get in the mail a new passport for instance.

Now, maybe we'll some go digital with IDs, but I have my doubts about that being well done currently for the US. I also can see the arguments that the government should not be allowed to force us to buy some companies services to undertake government required steps. And could you imagine a full open competition for digital IDs like we have to tax software or online shopping? How would that ever be actually secure? Our governments don't really seem to understand digital stuff much yet anyway.

I guess we might get a digital currency under Trump, though until it's treated the same as cash, i.e. your banks can issue it from a paycheck/direct deposit with no extra fees, and all businesses must take it with no extra fees, I see quite a few people likely to be resistant.

Not so much excuses as most people can't afford multiple vehicles per person so have less interest in a "does 80%" sort of solution when they can get a "does 100%" option. Even if that extra 20% costs them a lot of money, and realistically may only be needed infrequently, it's a lot of mental worry they'd like to avoid. It's also usually the case that getting that extra 20% capability is cheaper than two or more vehicles.

Also, I don't think the goalposts have moved in the ~10 years I've been paying attention. The ones I've seen is

1) Go around 300 miles without needing refueling.
2) Cost around the average new car price.
3) Used options around the average used car price.
4) Have equivalent vehicles (some want/need trucks, some want sports cars, some want minivans, some want off roading SUVs etc)
5) Ease of refueling similar to existing. Most will accept 20ish minutes as long as they're not in a line so they end up "stranded" for 1-3 cars ahead of them so they're there for 40min to 2 hours.

That's really it. Americans want a direct replacement. Or something better that lets them do the same things. I.e. Smart Phones didn't replace flip phones because they only did part of what flip phones did, no they do many times what flip phones did. Smartphones didn't eat into computers at the beginning because they only did a subset. Once they got more powerful and ubiquitous because they replaced flip phones they also started doing ever more and now many things are mobile first because it's more convenient. I don't run to my PC do do Amazon anymore - I can do it on my phone wherever I happen to be.

Many many of us would like the less maintenance of EVs. I don't like paying for oil changes, or brake changes, or spark plugs etc. They just don't make an affordable to me EV that does what I mainly use my vehicle for. And in a lot of ways they don't make an EV that does it yet - because I mostly use my vehicle for long road trips with several adults where we're going 1-3 days away and need to get gas ~ 2 times a day while driving hundreds of miles. In places I don't know the area. I also need some off road capability and limited towing can be a convenience when not on a trip. We take a lot of luggage on these multi week trips, including hobby stuff like camera gear. We also take a battery and portable fridge/freezer combo so we can take food with us - less waste that way. I don't have a garage, I just park outside, but I could pay a bunch (maybe) to run a new line from our pole out to where we park (the house panel is full and small sadly). IDK what that would cost, when I had someone run a similar distance for a generator hook up it cost me $2,500 years ago. But it could be done.

The main limit is the driving that EVs are good at is getting me to and from an office in good weather. But I do that maybe 24 times a year now, maybe twice a month. That's the "unusual" use.

This is just true of any complex jargon. You can do it with theoretical physics, with advanced mathematics and with medicine to name some more STEMy versions. Some people make a lot of money bloviating jargon at some mass of people who don't really understand what they're saying so can't notice the gibberish.

Have you considered not letting your kids use the Internet then?

Are you also harping on Amazon for selling sex toys, Netflix for having anything but G rated movies on it, and maybe HBO should just be shut down completely. It's not like HBO "checks the age" of whoever walks into the room while the cable is tuned to the channel.

And why should everyone else on earth be limited in what they could otherwise legally consume because you can't parent your kids? We didn't ask you to have kids you know.

The University I'm near and the college I went to regularly build new buildings for numerous reasons. A new college (Computer Science became a degree path maybe 20 years ago at a lot of places), a new research center (some things need new buildings to house newer technologies), new dorm buildings so they can increase admission / house more people coming to college. Some buildings age out and need stuff like more power plugs, or wifi, or are just falling apart (depending on various things), or are up for meeting new building codes like as ADA is implemented or new fire safety codes or whatever.

Universites also add property and satellite campuses for various reasons.

Costs for staff, healthcare, new regulations, whole new fields of study cost money. Staff tends to grow as you have more students because we haven't yet implemented AI teachers, tutors, cafeteria workers, janitors, groundskeepers etc.

As to what specifically tuition should cover, I will point out that most research universities also have classes that at higher levels will include time doing research as directed by professors etc. Granted, this is often summer courses for undergrads, but PhD students often are using large expensive facilities to learn about how to do research and the specific field they are going towards.

One of the things that Autodesk has that AutoCAD works with is Vault Professional. This is customized source control for groups of drafters. It's integrated with and in AutoCAD, Inventor and more. It's not just SVN or Git with binary file support, it's into the linked assemblies and custom parts that are linked into the larger drawings etc.

Then, much like Office from 2003 era or Adobe or whatever, there's likely decades of history all organized, commented, linked, and integrated into other processes in at least some places Vaults. Terabytes of data.

There's no easy conversion of the historical data, much of which is like building blueprints so the lifespan of the data might be 50-100 years. Forget about taking any and all trained people on Autodesk software and starting them over with completely foreign UI, workflow, etc.

There are many reasons I don't love Autodesk, but I also don't see a way for businesses to easily transition.

Nah, I mostly write short one off scripts that are literally "just need to work". So far AI has completely failed 5 out of 6 times. I think the issue is not that it can't write an effective script but that the scripts I write are to glue things together in my environment and it has no environmental context.

Our environment has *quirks*. My most recent failure was trying to convert an AD group membership on AD joined Alma computers (using SSSD) into .k5login files as a cron task using bash.

AI came up with a perfectly good script using getent except for "reasons" SSSD sometimes doesn't actually fill the getent results for a group membership. So in practice in the environment, depending on the computer you ran it on and the phase of the moon, you got null results for group memberships.

Now, stepping back you could argue we should spend time fixing that bug, but all other IT processes just use LDAP anyway. But there's no way for AI to have known that unless I thought to tell it. However, that's also "knowledge" I didn't think to share, and certainly wouldn't expect to put in a extremely long and detailed prompt a la the "vibe coding". If I'm going to psuedo code it out for an hour or two to make sure I provide a lot of context, I might as well have just written the script by then in many cases.

One obvious improvement is that eventually we'll be able to run a powerful model somewhere with sufficient security and data sovereignty and privacy guarantees that we can "ingest all our written docs" and get the AI at least the context a newly hired person would have. IDK when that political issue will happen though so I can't comment on if that "fully fixes" this or not. Most optimistic estimates I've seen from local stakeholders is 18 months.

Ok, but now I've told it to use LDAP. You'd think this would also be well defined and understood, but then AI proceeded to fuck up string mangling and whatever for another hour till I realized I was debugging awk to a level I'd have done if I just was hacking it together myself anyway and called it as any sort of productivity enhancement for me.

Granted, I was fully trying to "vibe code" this because I don't live in AWK and always have to basically iterate test iterate anyway. After I kinda ranted about this in our group chat, a colleague of mine said: "Why don't you just do the filtering and name conversions in LDAP in your initial query?" To which I said something like "whut?". TBH, I personally minimally use LDAP and it's filter format makes my brain melt. But they gave me a 2 line ldapsearch command that did exactly what was needed, that AI had failed to create and in fact had made pages long loops that I know weren't performant... and also didn't end up working at all.

So, the long and short of it is - if getent / SSSD worked 100% of the time, AI would have 110x my script writing. Because it doesn't for "reasons", and fixing that would -100x us as mostly a tangent, in reality it was a wash at best. I'm still going to try to vibe code using the stuff my colleague gave me and wrap the rest of it just to "keep up with AI" but as is obvious this isn't a priority which is why I was vibing around in the first place.

It doesn't bode well though IMO if toy examples yet tied to a real world complex environment have the same issues. I found the one time AI did work for me it was entirely self contained stand alone windows script that didn't interact outside the OSs it was run on.

I won't say that AI won't fix these issues, but IMO fundamentally the limit there is human / business legal / political and how many people want to or can upload all their docs, existing code etc to an AI company, and then can the AIs handle the context size properly.

I'm pretty sure that's not true given MCP, AI agents, and even just web enabled search. They can check other sources now anyway - but I'm not really sure that would prevent them hallucinating cases without additional training and such, maybe a verifier agent or something. Now of course that it's gotten appealed, they probably did this a couple years ago when AI was far more limited.

https://www.thestudiesshowpod....

Has sources in the list of links on that page. Makes a good case that antibiotic resistance has been overblown over the last 20 years.

I would agree, don't take antibiotics for no reason - but delaying treatment when there's a ticking clock for things like anaplasmosis is probably a worse idea than perhaps taking an unnecessary dose of doxycyclene.