If you COULD do this, you WOULD...Someone WOULD happily spend 10x what McDonald's needs it to cost to build a robot chef...think Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or some expensive hotel doing late night room service. There are a billion uses for this technology. Ask any person and they can think 100 surefire ways to make money. I am sure there are many dangerous industrial and oil rig jobs that pay top dollar and cause a lot of workspace injuries that will pay a lot more than McDonald's. Amazon would LOVE an army of these in their warehouses and has been trying for a long time. It turns out manipulating a robot hand in unpredictable space is difficult to do. Even if you make the space predictable, it's still difficult to do...then there's the lifespan issue. You spend several million dollars to build a robot and it breaks down in a few weeks...or food bits get in joints, etc. Who cleans the robot? If it was just a sensor cost or AI issue, we'd see these being successfully deployed in limited scenarios now....maybe not McDonald's but definitely SOMEWHERE.

Indeed. People participating in the arts tend to be higher-income, with healthier diets and better access to healthcare.

Also, the causation may go the other way. Healthier people are more likely to get out and go to museums or galleries.

Yeah, right.

That's what OpenCL is.

OpenCL

There's a small performance hit because OpenCL runs on any GPU, whereas CUDA is tuned only for Nvidia GPUs.

I'm not sure why this is modded Funny. It should be modded Insightful.

Modern AI is pretty good at rewriting CUDA as OpenCL.

It's not just one click (yet), but AI can do 90% of the work with some human guidance.

AI can also create a test suite to verify that the translation is correct.

I don't need 1000 miles. 600 (unencumbered) is definitely sufficient, and 500 might be okay. The thing is that I'll lose half to 2/3 of that range when towing my camp trailer, and that's not even considering that I'm typically towing it up into the mountains, gaining ~5000 vertical feet. I also need minimum 12k pounds of towing capacity and I'd like a little headroom, so call it 16k, and the bed payload has to be able to take at least 2000 pounds, because that's how much the trailer puts on the fifth-wheel hitch.

I'm anxiously awaiting an EV pickup that can do this. I'd love to have essentially unllimited electricity to buffer cloudy days (I have 1 kW of solar panels on the trailer and on sunny days they generate way more than enough, but consecutive cloudy days can leave be difficult).

3/4 ton and 1-ton gas and diesel pickups typically have oversized fuel tanks that provide about 600 miles of range, because that's what you actually need when you start hauling or towing significant loads. I don't think an EV pickup needs to have more range, but it needs to be comparable, and to be able to tow and haul comparable loads.

I'm not anti-EV by any means. I bought my first EV in 2011, and have had electric cars ever since. Trucks are a different sort of problem, though.

That's getting there, though I'd like to see some driving tests with a good-sized fifth wheel at highway speeds. The towing capacity is probably okay, though it provides very little headroom for when I'm towing both my camp trailer (~8k) and my boat (~3.5k), which I actually do several times each summer. But I think the payload capacity is too small to tow the trailer, which puts about 2000 points on the truck.

I have been saying it to anyone who will listen: Mythos won't end cybersecurity. It's not a tool too powerful to get into anyone's hands. it's an incremental upgrade to existing models. I am sure it's nice...it just won't change the world or set it on fire. I also have an insider connection that confirmed...it's no revolution, just a marketing stunt. I thought Anthropic was above the Sam-Altman-grade bullshit, but I was wrong. It's inspired many emotions, but that was based on our imagination, not reality.

That's the pick and shovel vendors. Selling AI is profitable, gambling on AI is profitable, but are AI investments profitable? If you use LLMs in your business, how much are you saving? Yes, nVidia shareholders are making a fuckton. AI can help professionals be more productive. It may pay for itself, but providing enough productivity to tangibly reduce headcount?...that's science fiction...I can imagine MANY ways of doing so with science fiction AI...just not with real world LLMs.

You could automate ditch digging with 80s technology. Take a (digital) picture, draw the ditch, let the robot do it's work...or simply drill some beacons in the soil at the 4 corners. It's not the AI stopping automated ditch digging..it's ALL the other stuff. A robotic excavator would be very expensive. It doesn't take a lot of labor to dig a ditch...one skilled operator and maybe a day's worth of labor, tops. So that tops out around $400 today. Even if you're charging consulting company rates, that's $2000 per ditch...There's no way to automate that excavator to recoup costs. And in your example the human being is there to deal with emergencies or contingencies, such as ground shift.

Using your imagination, any job can be automated...but as a thought exercise, do it....create the robot to replace a McDonald's worker...there's no way you can ever do it cheaper. I can imagine many ways to automate away my job. I can't imagine Claude doing that in the next 5 years. It makes too many mistakes for tasks a tiny fraction of what I do. With AI, errors multiply exponentially based on complexity.

IF your job could be automated....it would be. Someone would have automated your job somewhere. For example, truck driver...IF...it could be automated, it would be....maybe not for commercial, but for combat. The US Army would pay top dollar to transport a tanker truck of fuel through a warzone...risk not having your soldiers killed. They may not do it for all payloads, but they would be trying it out right now and making the news doing so.

Gloria lives in a bubble, and made the mistake of thinking her extremely comfortable, highly secure bubble was the whole world. That's not surprising. Gloria only moves among other bubble people, from one gated bubble pad to the next, in her bubble transport system, where they don't talk about the turbo-fans and ICE V8's that power it all, or the staggering quantity of power it takes to climate control everything in her bubble world.

That's not new. We're ruled by such bubble folk, indulging their bubble concerns, pursing their moral panics, signaling their virtues, and carefully ignoring all else beyond the bubble.

What's new here is this: the consequences of this have reached the privileged students of our prestigious academic system. Suddenly it's not just the hoi polloi on the shit end of the stick. Johnny Winston-Blake IV is also having his future deleted by the bubble people. And he's mad about it.

I question that the wealthy ARE receiving benefits, beyond the pick and shovel vendors. I don't think the modern LLM AIs are useful enough to really make a tangible dent in your labor needs. Most talk about actual benefits are based on theoretical science fiction AI...not today's version of Claude/OpenAI/Gemini. IF AI worked as promised, absolutely...but first, it has to work as promised. It falls short in real-world usage. If ChatGPT can do your job, it was probably automated a few years ago by simpler technology.

So we're all in this uneasy transition. Today's AI doesn't work very well and shows no sign of working as promised in the short term. However, it's equally foolish to assume it never will work.

The wealthy WILL absolutely benefit from science fiction AI. However Claude/Gemini/OpenAI/CoPilot all fail on the basics today. They provide SOME value, but not enough to tangibly cut headcount.

Agreed. My sedan has been electric for nearly a decade now, but I'm still driving a diesel pickup (1-ton, though a 3/4 ton would be sufficient) because EV pickup range is inadequate -- and I think it may be inadequate for a while. I need 250 miles of range when towing a trailer, which means I need ~500 -- maybe 600 -- miles of range without.

I'm not generally a fan of hybrids, but I think plug-in hybrids with large-ish batteries may be the sweet spot for a while with pickups. The Dodge Ramcharger is looking really good to me, though I'd like to see them make a 2500.

Modern AI has greatly oversold it's capabilities. However, every tech leader has significant AI investments and is selling picks and shovels. So....you're NIKE...who do you trust?...a guy like me who uses Claude daily?...or fucking Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Marc Beinhoff, etc. If you're the CEO of Nike you have to decide if you're going to believe the most famous leaders in tech saying that AI is going to revolutionize IT and your best staff will all become 10x developers and professionals...or believe actual professionals, like me, who aren't famous who will tell you...yeah, it helps some...not sure how much...but definitely a percentage improvement and not a 2x or greater improvement....you are highly unlikely to be able to reduce headcount. Jensen Huang has publicly stated that the notion of programming languages will very soon be obsolete...so why more programmers than you ABSOLUTELY need to?

I know they know the pick/shovel vendors are exaggerating, but by how much? It gives them hestiation to hire someone new if Claude 5.0 comes out next year and you can lay them off.

This is all a huge fraud. It's safe to say every AI layoff of programmer positions was a routine layoff, AI washed. However, it's far sexier to say "AI Baby!!!!...ride the wave" about your layoff than "interest rates make hoarding surplus talent dangerously unprofitable" or "we overhired" or even worse...."our business is in decline". It shocks me shareholders haven't filed lawsuits about this...I still think that day is coming.

However, every headwind faced by Meta, Google, etc is also faced by Nike and every B-tier and C-tier business that hires large IT staffs. So yeah, we have routine layoffs, CEOs committing fraud by lying that it's due to AI...and everyone else watching, unsure of what is going on....when in doubt, it's safer to close open reqs and downsize. They can always increase headcount once they know what is going on...once they have more clarity as to who is telling the truth...people like me...or AI vendors and the psycho evangelists who are so exited for science fiction AI that they pretend Claude can actually reliably write code that works...or that OpenAI can actually do much of anything of moderate complexity. I understand their perspective...

It just saddens me that this is just another externality of the AI hype bubble, like how EVERYTHING related to computing is now in scarce supply and many factors more expensive than it should be...that technology is actually going up in price and the $1000 will buy you a SLOWER device today than it bought 1.5 years ago...Moore's Law is now going in the opposite direction!...and that's assuming you still have a job to buy a new device...and you weren't laid off.

I'd like to just continue on with my life and ignore this AI bullshit, but I can't...it impacts my job. It emboldens employers to mistreat employees, thinking they have a lot more leverage than they did 5 years ago (which may very well be true). It makes it difficult and painful for me to buy devices or upgrade my personal technology like normal to distract myself from the stupidity of the news.

It's really simpler than Boomer Bucks. Interest rates are more expensive...doesn't matter the cause. There are definitely other factors, but as you said, that's the most obvious.