Of course. The point of machine learning is that the thing learning on its own is much cheaper than engineers figuring out how something works and hand programming a model. People have been talking about this since at least the 50s. It seems the mainstream needs to rediscover it every couple decades though.

Play some early access games. They usually get a lot better with updates. Optimization is a thing.

There is a very real phenomenon where software expands to fill available resources. You might have noticed it happening on your hard drive.

You can notice similar inflation here too, where computers that would have been practically magic 20 years ago are utter garbage. Even more apropos, memory today is outrageously priced, a truly civilization ending catastrophe, when it costs about half as much as it did ten years ago.

By paying for it!

Well, Anthropic isn't supposed to be. Anymore.

Unless you count asking your government to target your competitors of course.

We came back from flying to visit family for Christmas one time and someone had left a light on in the car. The guys at the park and fly lot boosted it for us but my father was concerned that the battery had frozen and cracked. So we drove for a bit and he parked at an autoparts store that sold batteries before turning off the ignition. Unfortunately he'd had the window open because it was too cold for the defroster.

The battery had indeed cracked and was toast. Since the car was loaded with Christmas presents and it was a power window, someone had to stay outside. Since I was the same someone who had left the light on, that someone was me. Which was okay, except the store didn't have any charged batteries so I had to wait in the frozen car with a window open while they charged a new one.

We're all posh divas. I paid extra to get radar cruise control in my current car, which was well worth it. It also came with power (meh) heated (very nice, no more scraping) mirrors. I recognize that my fondness for my first few cars is nostalgia and that I wouldn't like them at all if I were driving them today.

And 70s safety, pedestrian or otherwise, isn't something to aspire to.

It's funny, you'd think things like that would scare the hell out of people. I learned to drive in a full size van and the tiny little windows so far back and giant blind spots scared me every time I had to back up. When I got a small car the visibility was amazing.

You're correct about blinding, but you generally do need a controlled experiment to demonstrate causality. Sometimes that experiment can be natural, e.g. different regulations in countries or states that are otherwise similar.

There are lots of controlled experiments on pedestrian safety and vehicle design. It's part of European safety standards. It's been adopted by the American NHTSA this year, although they've mysteriously decided to use a pass/fail rating rather than their usual five stars.

This study doesn't establish that high hoods are dangerous for pedestrians. It estimates the impact of that already well-established factor in actual road casualties.

I learned to drive in a full size van. The GP's instructor would have gotten me hilariously killed.

They should have required that drivers of commercial trucks require commercial licenses, commercial maintenance schedules and operator hours tracking.

You must have had an awfully fancy truck in the 90s if the lack of anything on that list of "luxury items" is holding you back.

My grandmother bought a car with power windows in the 90s. My father thought it was silly. I had one friend who would probably have paid $20 for a working gas gauge in her truck though.

Better example: what are you going to do with all the asbestos just sitting there waiting to be mined? Make silly string?

Even the summary is confused. Apparently a copy on your hard drive is not physical, and therefore can't be preserved or whatever. The copy of GTA VI you might download from Rockstar is also not physical no matter what you put it on?

So a physical copy is what, printed on paper? Chiselled in stone? I'm not surprised Rockstar decided not to provide their six terabyte game in those formats.

Ah, of course, we're using your personal definitions. You should provide a list of those somewhere along with a warning in your posts that it may be unclear what you mean when you use words.