Genuinely interested, why is this post rated as a Troll? Please explain.

Ooh yeah, motorcyles! I imagine they are a good place to start from, since you can access everything so much easier. Uh... I've mostly avoided them because I want to live to an old age.

I love manuals and driving also. But I'll say keyless entry fobs have definitely won me over. Once I got used to them with my 2018 crosstrek and then my 2019 sti, keys feel awkward. Cars with buttons and knobs are extremely intuitive and safe IMO.

My son is an aspiring mechanic and I want him to succeed, so I've helped him learn (and learned at the same time myself). We did his first engine swap when he was 14 and now at 17 we've done several. We've been doing track days at our local track (evergreen speedway) for the last few years, and I find the more I learn about driving/mechanics the more I like it. It's a weird hobby (being interested in cars feels weird to me), but fun! You make friends with a lot of different kinds of people.

Electric cars? I'd love to find the right one or build one - it's expensive and I've already spent ~$80k building the STI... it'll happen someday I'm sure. A manual CR-V with 60k miles? :) Definitely a keeper. One of my favorite things is driving a slow car fast. I would be really fun to build an old Honda Civic or Fit into a cup car.

No joke mate. I don't imagine they would kill a product after getting it so deeply integrated into the automobile industry. It just doesn't make sense. Yeah they have killed a lot of products, some of which I thought were cool and used. But I'm willing to listen to your reasoning if you care to share it.

Bro you are going off the hook here. Ease up. He didn't say any of that stuff. Maybe guy is a competent mechanic and likes physical buttons and doesn't need his car to be a "smart car".

Feel free to tell me to toss off if this is just a personal beef between you and Mr Bot.

Maybe, but also consider that it doesn't get bad until lock in occurs. And maybe I'm a fool, but I do agree with you, it isn't in google's track record to make things super shitty.

OT but I find the slow Subaru driver one a weird stereotype. CR-V's yeah though. In Seattle most drivers are generally slow.

When I think of Subaru drivers, I think of Subaru "enjoyers/enthusiasts".

Give any normal street car some basic suspension upgrades and good tires and you can drive much faster, without speeding significantly. Despite driving faster than 99% of the other cars on the road, I've never gotten a speeding ticket or caused an accident.

Yes. I screwed up once, giving a chatbot instructions to open a PR again my fork of a public repo...

It pushed and then opened the PR against the actual public repo. That's not what I asked for, but it did it, assuming I was ready to upstream the changes.

And that's how I learned to not give them permission to push.

Also, I've seen them break their sandboxes in various ways to accomplish what I've asked them to do, but had forgotten to relax the sandbox beforehand. (e.g. "the user asked me to do this, but the sandbox prevents it - I'll write a python script works around the sandbox, because they asked me to..." etc)

There definitely is risk when using this tech.

I won't argue but I'll share my experience. I was already better than most of my peers in my industry (software development), depressingly and frustratingly so most of the time. It sucks to feel obligated to carry team after team out of the piles of garbage that they wrote so that we can deliver quality products on time. Take my assertion for what you will. After switching to using LLMs for most of my work, the same gap remains - indeed it has widened.

Recently my co workers have been using them more... and they are amazed at the silliest and most basic of things... sometimes they produce lots of weird garbage _and they think it's acceptable_, at least until you explain reality to them. Part of the problem is that they are being encouraged to use these tools and be vocal about it ("I used AI for X!"... cool story bro). Whereas I've been using them much more covertly and pervasively. I'm not saying what I'm producing is perfect, but it's much better and much more useful and maintainable than what I'm seeing them produce. This is across multiple disciplines (embedded, backend web, planning, design, etc).

My output has changed, it is true. Quality is a little lower sometimes. But I get to choose when and where the quality is acceptable. Being able to judge quality is also a skill. Also, being able to iterate on designs and discard bad ideas quickly - LLMs open new doors here.

If you don't know what to ask for, you're likely to get poor results. LLMs can't think for you. If you don't know what quality is, then you can't judge how good the output is. Being impressed by parlor tricks is worthless.

Tools, techniques, and mindset really matter. ToasterMonkey's "delegating" comment is accurate IMO. I could do any one single part of the work better, but I'm not a team and I also don't have anything near enough energy to compete with the output from these tools. Plus, the improvement over time from these tools is yes gamed but also it is real too.

Ok so here I will argue a bit. The _user_ is the one that learns from experience here - not the LLMs. The user learns what works and what doesn't... how to set up the tools to be useful and productive and keep them the hell away from situations where they fail.

What I've learned is that those who doubt that LLMs have good reason to. And those who sing their praises often have good reason to also.

I switched camps about a year ago and have found that they are like any tool, you have to know how to use it right without cutting yourself or shooting your feet off.

Another critical factor is that they can be both garbage and amazing at the same time. Sadly most of us are using hosted online services for these and the quality can vary by the day. You have to be able to recognize when it goes to shit and change tactics (use a different provider or take a break). Also, the best tools are vastly superior to the commonly used ones. The common ones still suck.

But when they are working... there is no amount of pharmaceuticals that would allow me to work at the pace they do, not even for a short period of time.

I'm glad, because they are allowing me to make so many of my lifelong development dreams come true. I'm a skilled developer, and things I could only imagine building, I can now build. It still takes a lot of time (months or even years of my free time), but it's possible and practical.

And also sad, sure, because why? I'm not sure why. Is it because something has been lost? Yes, it's because an era of humanity is coming to an end and something else is taking it's place. Maybe more humanity, but I'm not sure.

Whatever happened to the old kreimer (or whatever) spam?

I reinstalled DOS several times when I was 12 and just learning to use a computer, after screwing things up badly enough that I needed to set things up fresh. My parents had no idea that anything had changed (their work was on floppy, so they never lost anything).

Not everyone is technical enough to outsmart their kids.

As a parent of two young adults - I took the path of developing trust and tolerance with my kids, rather than being a helicopter parent. Yes, they have done stupid things, this is part of growing up. But we have mutual trust, and they have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes while I'm still around to help them. And they have developed the ability to manage themselves without me. So they don't need me around anymore - but I get to enjoy being in their lives because they want me there.

I don't think you're supposed to read the AC chatbot replies to rsilvergun's posts.

I really enjoy commuting in my sports cars (yes ICE). BUT!!! critical detail. I can't handle driving in rush hour traffic so I have a blast commuting at weird hours.

If most of my time was spent sitting in gridlock, then sure, let the car drive itself.

I am into autox, so I like extremely nimble and fast cars. I love shifting. But IMO:

Stick shifts are about two things:
1. being able to control how hard the engine brakes
2. being able to store energy in the rotating motor temporarily while braking/turning. (e.g. heel/toe)

I suspect EVs could be designed to provide a similar level of control over engine braking; there is not so much need to store rotational energy in an EV, since they produce torque so quickly. People will make EVs that do this eventually. (I am still driving boosted 4 bangers, but I'll switch eventually.)