Why would you think that? Cameras a cheap, and LiDAR prices are coming down, too. As companies build them in larger and larger quantities, economies of scale and competition will drive the price down rather quickly. Best guess is that in five years, self-driving hardware will add about $15k to the price of the vehicle if they use LiDAR, or $6k if they don't. And that's including the cost of stuff that a lot of cars come with already, like the electric steering rack. I'd be shocked if it were significantly more than $20k.

So as drivers replace their cabs or semi tractors, they'll spend the extra $20k or whatever to buy versions that are self-driving. For that matter, once the tech is reliable enough, you'll likely see retrofit kits come on the market. There's no good reason you'd replace a working tractor unit when you can just swap out the steering rack, bolt on cameras, and add some electronics, and that's true whether you're an owner-operator or the manager of FedEx's fleet.

Production equals consumption in an ideal economy. Both are bound by finite time. If production increases, consumption must increase, too. Ergo, time spent on production must fall, which is what happened during the last two depressionary eras. 1873-1897 and 1930-1940

https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/2...

This phenomenon can be modeled with two linear equations.
Conditions
Assume we want Production = Consumption. (P = C)

Linear Equations

P Hours + C Hours = Konstant (16 hours if we measure by day).
(P Hours) X (Rate of P) = (C Hours) X (Rate of C)

Example by week: (40 hours) x (Rp) = (72 hours) x (Rc)

As Rp increases, P Hours must decline to maintain equilibrium.

https://www.scry.llc/2025/01/2...

Oh, absolutely. Most local delivery uses people who already work at the business, and delivery is just a small part of that person's job. So that impact is likely to be close to zero. But that still leaves probably probably around 5 to 10 million taxi drivers and probably three or four million truck drivers.

But taxi and truck drivers won't be replaced overnight. Most taxi drivers and many truck drivers own their own rigs, and although they may eventually replace themselves with robot rigs, they would continue to earn the revenue after doing so. They certainly have no incentive to fire themselves.

Ultimately, somebody has to own the rigs. There's nothing that necessarily requires that robotaxis be fleet vehicles owned by some big company like Uber, no matter how much companies like Uber might prefer it to be that way. Replacing all of those taxis with robot cars costs money, and Uber isn't capitalized that well. Uber's cash on hand wouldn't even be enough to replace all of the taxis in the United States. So while this may shift things around some, I wouldn't expect a taxipocalypse.

Sorry, was thinking orders of magnitude, not orders of complexity. :-)

I'm not sure why he thinks it will be a problem for drivers. A study a few years ago showed that something like 96% of all Uber drivers quit within the first year. So worldwide, we're talking about only O(350,000) people who will have to find something else to do. The world economy can easily absorb such a tiny number.

That's no moon. It's a space station. :-D

Having control is very different from allowing a third-party company to send down arbitrary definitions at any time that suddenly render arbitrary software nonfunctional. The whole concept of Crowdstrike can be summarized as "McAfee Antivirus on steroids". I mean, this sums it up.

This. The "someone says 'Hey Siri/Okay Google' on TV/radio/loudspeaker" problem is a well-known failure mode, and if they don't have reasonable mitigation in place by now, they don't know what they're doing, and their product shouldn't be taken seriously. Whether that mitigation is blocking it during meetings, doing handshaking to limit commands to the nearest device when multiple nearby devices detect the hot word at exactly the same time, making it recognize your voice and not other random people's voices, or any of dozens of other strategies for coping, having some mechanism in place to handle this should be considered a base requirement for any voice-based assistant.

A USB-C connector is the same physically as a Thunderbolt 3/4 connector. That does not mean you can always run Thunderbolt over the connector. This is the a problem with a universal connector that has wildly different capabilities. However in this context, I know of no mobile phone that has a Thunderbolt connector unlike what the OP and the people who replied have said.

It is possible for Microsoft to do both, you know.

• OEM version: Requires a higher minimum level of hardware support for a premium experience
• Retail version (more expensive): Supports a wider range of hardware to the extent that it can

Then they just have to make sure the price difference is high enough to destroy any profit benefit from cutting corners on the hardware.

Yeah, as if we needed any more reason to consider this bloated "security" software to be malware. I really don't understand why anyone in their right minds would install it or allow it to be installed on their systems. Giving some third-party company complete control over what software can run on your machines basically screams "I don't understand anything about security" better any almost anything else you could possibly do as a system administrator, IMO, short of posting the shared-across-all-machines root password on USENET.

https://www.scry.llc/2025/09/1...

"Technology revolutions create "virtuous cycles" where growth in a primary industry drives growth in other industries. During the Steel revolution, the falling cost of steel led to more railroads, which led to cheaper commodities like wheat and coal. Cheaper coal made even cheaper steel for steel-framed buildings, which spawned elevators, penthouse apartments and fire escapes"

AI is probably in the "trough of disillusionment" phase, which is why there's so many negative articles now.
A few months ago I had ChatGPT run a semantic analysis which produced this graph -

https://www.scry.llc/2025/07/0...

Government: So I see that your H-1B jobs are all for "Computer Programmer (I)" and your U.S. hires are all for "Software Engineer (III)" or "(IV)".
Company: Yes. We haven't had much luck in hiring level one programmers here in the U.S. We put the jobs out there, but nobody is applying.

Prevailing wage for the job doesn't mean what you think it does. A bunch of sleazy outsourcing firms made sure of that.

Surprisingly little money. As soon as the extra cost exceeds the cost of hiring one person to maintain workarounds, it is cheaper to do the workarounds. Tricks like that might ostensibly work for individuals, but they fail badly every time when you're talking about big corporations.