Maybe not for *everyone*, but can be fine for folks driving on average less than 50 miles a day, which is a decent chunk of people.

That said, I think it would be a tough sell to have your car charging at a relative trickle all the time. Folks would be much more comfortable if they can plug into 240V. Which isn't a *crazy* thing to get, especially if you just get a NEMA 15-40 outlet or already have one within distance of parking.

Note I included the EVSE in my cost, and yeah, I needed a new 240V/60A circurit.

As said, I wish I had just done a 50A plug instead, the hard wired was superfluous and that outlet could have been more broadly usable. Though I could downgrade the breaker and put an outlet there easy enough if I cared that much... But just ended up spending money on an EVSE when the bundled one would have charged fast enough..

Not specific to AI, and I frankly can't speak to NHS specifically, but it sounds awfully familiar...

So many things where bureaucratic junk demands awkward forms and processes, and efforts to automate all that stuff instead of streamlining the underlying mess...

To the extent this works (and I can believe it based on other bureaucracies I've been involved with), it's because there's all sorts of dumb boilerplate crap in the process, lots of material generated that is never read, lots of fields to populate that don't matter to anyone. To the extent it ever matters that goes away as the people just stuff meaningless crap in those fields...

The human is still having to provide the crux of the important bit, but there's just so much fluff that is blatantly obvious that LLM can do whatever with that could have been omitted or dealt with better.

Look, I get it, you personally don't like EVs. There are plenty of ICE vehicles for you to choose from, you don't have to be so aggressively disdainful every time anyone mentions that their EV experience is nice.

Cost to install an EVSE for me was about $800, a *far* cry from the $7500 of the tax credit, and I find it hard to believe that any EVSE install would have gone that expensive. If anyone actually quoted that, then they are either trying to rip someone off or don't actually want to do the job and wants to scare a customer off. I could have just installed a NEMA 15-50 for less to go with the bundled mobile charger too, but I just wanted the fastest possible supported charge, which in retrospect I probably should have just done an outlet, would have been cheaper and more flexible and *plenty* fast for my needs.

A calculator can do arithmetic much faster than a human can.

A google search can find web pages way faster than any human can.

LLM is another class of traditionally human-like but not human things happening, in some contexts "good enough" or "better than a human" in others not really applicable, but it's not directly comparable to human thinking.

Well, it lets some people have long cooldowns make the rest of their ecosystem suckers.

Of course, this *also* means the people with high cooldowns get to be vulnerable to security problems longer because they will be applying cooldown to security fixes...

But yes, some sort of actual curation would be the best mitigation, particularly to allow trustworthy critical security updates through quickly instead of those getting caught in the cooldown.

Altman wants some public ownership, but not 50% which, presuming it would be a voting stake, would actually potentially matter for decision making. It's not a majority but if enough private market shareholders side with the public ownership, then it matters.

Instead, he wants enough for the public to have a stake specifically in the "approved" AI companies so that the companies are unambiguously "too big to fail". A chance to hold hostage a big enough chunk of wealth so that the government is stuck doing whatever it can to protect and ensure the selected companies, whether it be in the face of a souring market or upstart companies that didn't have the good fortune of being selected by the company. Meanwhile, the actual governance and decision making remain firmly status quo. Including decisions about how much to send back to "investors" and how much to "reinvest" (including setting their own compensation). They may even structure it so they can classify public ownership differently from private market, and reward investors in each class differently.

Just another ambition to privatize the gains and socialize the losses.

Timing *chains* are not universal, but they do help. Timing belts are quite common. Headgaskets still go and are still a massive labor cost. Within the last couple of years I've had to pay for timing belt change, a new radiator, new hoses due to leaks, a new evap canister, a new alternator. This is on a 2015. I'm told I'm "lucky" the turbo hasn't keeled over on me as this model is notorious for turbo issues. My colleague has had to pay for *two* headgaskets on a 2017 in the last few years. These aren't "solved" problems because it's pretty fundamental physics. Some things are more solved, e.g. I would have had to pay money probably for power steering problems, but the switch to electric power steering pumps greatly helps.

Because it's preventative maintenance and if you have one, you are expected to change it every 100,000 miles. Since we have interference engines, you don't want to push your luck since a failed timing belt will ruin the engine.

So my house has EV and gas vehicles, and by far taking the gas vehicle to a gas station is way more annoying than plugging it in at home. Not to mention the maintenance (oil change? nope air filter change? nope brakes? just like hybrids the brakes barely get used). No random surprises like "oh great, some fluid on the ground, smoke is coming out the exhaust.

The battery is the big one, and the tendency to be heavier means faster tire wear, but the plugging in for a lot of people is a *plus* not a minus. Meanwhile the gas car has a few hundred here, a couple thousand there, and by the time I might have to replace the battery, I am pretty sure I have racked up equivalent costs over a much more annoying series of repairs and maintenance.

Tip, as soon as you say "copilot says", no one will take you seriously.

Yes, an *engine* can last a while, but that's far from the full picture.

Headgasket will likely not last that long, and while *technically* the engine "lasts" through that repair, that was an expensive repair.

Timing belt won't last that long, and that's an expensive maintenance item.

The transmissions for ICE wear more than EV, and those tend to have a relatively shorter life than cited, and that also is pretty pricey.

Further ignores things like oil changes constantly incurring expenses. Brakes on EVs and hybrids last way longer. If you can charge at home, your fuel savings are huge (public charging, maybe not so much).

Yes, when the battery goes, it will be expensive, but in that same time you probably have otherwise accumulated a comparable cumulative maintenance and repair bill for petrol-exclusive issues.

As they said, 8x code output is a flawed metric. By volume they are getting in.

One could even reasonably argue that they tend to be good at catching critical little details that are difficult for humans, like the consequences of a shallow copy buried in a sea of code creating a security disaster. A "needle in a haystack" scenario, where AI does comparatively well with the relentless attention span.

But in other ways, they are verbose messes, and will toss a whole lot of pull requests. Each of those pull requests may be a lot more volume than needed. For example, I got a CodeGen pull request for "close a gap between two elements after updating the UI framework to new version". Yes, real issue, and.. well, the referenced gap *did* close, but with a lot of dubious side effects. The issue called for a single CSS rule to be tweaked. It instead was hundreds of lines of CSS, sometimes verbatim repeated 4 times (the originator said he had to ask the prompt multiple times because it failed the first few times, it seemed Claude thought maybe adding the same rules it already added might have helped). Others might have just run the code saw the gap closed and accepted it, despite the baggage of 99% of the lines changed having no particular intent behind it.

This is in a normal where a lot of developers think even simple things need to be complex. Hello world needs to run in Azure Pipelines using Kubernetes, Helm, and Ansible spawning at least 6 microservices. They think they need all of that and yet it's unmanageably convoluted, so the AI kind of lets them have all that superfluous complexity without actually managing it.

Thanks to work, I'm using it all the time.

It is true that even opus 4.8 cannot always bring a mundane code to life credibly. It can depending on what we are taking about, but the sorts of things it fails at are well short of the complexity of what it would mean to rewrite itself in any credible way.

They are finding a plateau with where the LLMs can go and could use the narrative of a "pause" to explain why capabilities are going to iterate in a more 'evolutionary' way instead of the revolutionary way folks are expecting.

There isn't to my knowledge a mechanism for the models to "self-improve", whatever one may think, at least the output doesn't have access to change the model in any way. The narrative of "oops the AI started evolving itself on accident" doesn't have a way to happen.

Considering that even the vaunted Opus 4.8 can't always develop mundane traditional software beginning, it's hard to imagine it could rework the model itself even if it had such access.

So they know damned well that a huge facet of technology is consistent, deterministic interfaces and behavior. Sure, there's a demand for AI to also provide more flexible interaction in some scenarios which is desired, but many scenarios are benefitted by the dependable interaction of apps.

So on the face of it, the concept of a platform that is a strict subset of the capabilities of platforms already out there (the "app" devices are plenty capable of running the "AI" interfaces) is dumb. This has proven out with the Humane Pin and Rabbit R1, dumb devices that did nothing better and simply signaled affinity with AI.

But Microsoft isn't quite as stupid, so what's the real point... well...

That's really the goal, to reset expectations from having capable personal devices with generally perpetual entitlement to renting every single thing you do from Microsoft. You can have your 'PC' run those deterministic applications you are used to, but it's just going to be a virtual desktop to Azure now.

Well, not quite....

Time zone alone is enough to make them dislike that arrangement.

Another is that navigating foreign employment, or perhaps even worse dealing with a middle man to take care of that for you is a nightmare.

Now you *are* in competition with people who might be later career and are happy to take a more basic salary in exchange from being able to maintain their lifestyle while living wherever they like. I know a few people that said they decided to commit their last decade or so to some rural living and taking just whatever job that goes with that, to keep their benefits alive and mostly keep letting their passive income grow.