... except instead of shoes becoming the only profitable product to manufacture, it's chatbots. Nobody knows why, but when it's all over, the only survivors will be those who evolved into computer-illiterate deaf-mutes.
The Metro wouldn't be safe by modern standards. Of course an old Honda Civic hatchback wouldn't be, either.
Agreed; but it is possible to make a Metro-sized car that is safe by modern standards and still gets 40+mpg. The Smart ForTwo and the Scion IQ are two examples.
The 3 cylinder Geo Metro in the 1990s achieved over 40 miles per gallon. 30 years later you're telling me we lost that ability?
Yes, but only because most Americans are unwilling to drive a Metro-sized car anymore. They've been conditioned to think small/lightweight cars are unsafe or unmanly or etc.
The fact that the government is mandating fuel efficiency means that most people don't care. If they cared, nobody would buy the inefficient cars so the manufacturers wouldn't make them, no need for government intervention.
The invisible hand of the free market solves a lot of things, but it's never quite figured out how to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Everybody wants to live on a livable planet, but nobody wants to pay for the technology required to keep that way.
I traveled to poor countries where traffic is 90% scooters. This is all they can afford. I hope we can do better.
Being inexpensive to purchase and operate is one advantage scooters have over automobiles; the other is that they are small enough to maneuver quickly through heavy traffic and easier to find a parking spot for in congested areas.
That's actually a good question. Inks have changed somewhat over the past 5,000 years, and there's no particular reason to think that tattoo inks have been equally mobile across this timeframe.
But now we come to a deeper point. Basically, tattoos (as I've always understand it) are surgically-engineered scars, with the scar tissue supposedly locking the ink in place. It's quite probable that my understanding is wrong - this isn't exactly an area I've really looked into in any depth, so the probability of me being right is rather slim. Nonetheless, if I had been correct, then you might well expect the stuff to stay there. Skin is highly permeable, but scar tissue less so. As long as the molecules exceed the size that can migrate, then you'd think it would be fine.
That it isn't fine shows that one or more of these ideas must be wrong.
I don't think slashdot has had any actual developers working on its since the early 2000s. It's a mature legacy codebase, destined to run as-is until it can't anymore, then go away.
Because we don't want them to instantly kill the first kid who jumps the fence, or the next careless service technician. Automated industrial robots (which is what these cars are, really) have these things for a reason.
I really hope that Waymo's cars aren't relying on their Nader-beepers to avoid killing people. They should be (and AFAIK are) relying instead on their video cameras, LIDARs, and other sensors to stop the car before it hits the wayward kid/technician.
Remember that these are the people who invented the use of CTRL-ALT-DEL hardware interrupts to "secure" the Windows login screen. That tells you all you need to know really.
Yes, they should have done it the right way instead!
Err, what was the right way? It's not obvious to me, given that Microsoft doesn't have design control over the hardware its software runs on.
Do you really think Karen in Finance is going to request an RDS instance and vibe code a nice react frontend for her CRUD??
At this point, my biggest fear is that she will -- and then call me over to debug the AI-generated codebase, when it inevitably doesn't work quite right.
It's simple economics.
Degrees, undergrad or grad, have to be measured in terms of:
1. Raw cost
2. Opportunity cost during the time you go for the degree
3. Time left in your working life in order to recoup #1 and #2.
Once upon a time, for the cost of a few summers working, and a part time job during the school year, you could afford to get a college degree at a public university. The cost was reasonable, and the boost in career opportunities outweighed the lost income during the 4(ish) years you spent in school. If school suited you, this was a slam dunk.
Then at a certain point you needed loans in addition to working to get through undergrad. Rather expensive ones too. However, if you were in state, you'd get a discount. The cost went up, but the boost in career opportunities outweighed the higher cost and the lost income during the time you spent in school. Again, if school suited you, it would take longer for the benefit to show in your life, but if you expected to work for a few decades, the difference in earning power and job opportunity (especially during an era where the US was hollowing out alternatives to white collar jobs), would pay off.
At some point, the raw cost and the opportunity cost reached an equilibrium point with your ability to recoup the cost over your working life... and people started noticing that the bet that they were taking - that they'd remain employed long enough post-higher education, at a rate of pay better than what they would have had without the degree, was not as solid as they would have liked.
One wonders if during this time period, if there had been a competitive alternative to higher education tracked in US schools, such as apprenticeships (normally starting at the start of high school), whether we would have hit this "crisis" of higher education. I think with viable non-college career paths, which would have paid from the onset, and provided an applied pathway for schooling (you still need an education even as a plumber or welder, it's just not credentialed as a college degree), there would have been checks against runaway college costs. The lack of competition, coupled with railroading students K-12 onto a college track, allowed colleges and universities to respond to increased demand by... raising prices.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that OpenAI and its competitors are trying to do the right thing here and make their AIs as harm-free as possible.
Not everyone will be that responsible, however. Now that it has been demonstrated that a suitably sycophantic AI can compromise the psyches of significant numbers of people, it's only a matter of time before various bad actors start weaponizing their own AI models specifically to take advantage of that ability. "Pig butchering" will be one of the first job categories to be successfully replaced by AI.
Row, row, row your bits, gently down the stream...
