We use wheels on Mars rovers that are pretty capable for traversing rough terrain. I think that when you combine wheels with the ability to "put the brakes on" and attach those to the end of articulated appendages you get a pretty robust solution. When going downhill, the robot can actually use regenerative braking to slow themselves down (and in that case actually recharge the battery a bit). An organism that had wheels and the ability to adjust the braking force would be pretty nimble.

I think you're correct. If it was possible for evolution to have created wheeled actuators, then the organisms with those appendages would have dominated long ago.

That would depend on the exact wording, of course, and a lot of those contracts get written so that the agreement is only with the original owner, and I assume most of those vehicles would be on their second owner by now. Interesting though.

I'm a little surprised that someone buying a Tesla 10 years ago would believe the pie-in-the-sky promises about self-drive, or using it as a robo-taxi. I certainly thought self-drive was a long way away, but I have experience with computer vision. I just wouldn't buy a product with the promise that some software update sometime in the future would deliver the rest of the features. Either way it doesn't matter to me because I've never owned an electric car, and I want to see real people in my area (rural Canada) using them for a few winters driving 40 km each way to work, on unplowed snowy roads. But if I lived and worked in a city, I'd probably have bought one by now, and would still be very hesitant to use self-drive. But I know of a guy who has a Tesla and has it self-drive him from his driveway to his destination about 2 hours away pretty regularly. So I guess they finally delivered on the promise.

I understand the "we're all supposed to take every opportunity to hate Elon" thing, but your premise doesn't hold up when checked against the facts. The whole genius of Tesla was that it was the first company that made electric cars that *looked* like regular cars, and that people wanted to actually buy, and he's proven to be quite good at business decisions so I have a hard time believing he didn't have a hand in that. The cybertruck was an anomaly. But if you look at the problem of electric pickups, they're a significantly harder problem to solve than an electric car because transporting a couple relatively light humans vs. transporting heavy cargo doesn't scale well with our battery technology. You can try super-sizing the battery, which just cranks up the cost and makes the whole thing even less efficient, or you can do what Tesla did and re-think the frame and body from the ground up to get rid of as much weight as possible. It just so happens that the material they picked to solve this problem can't be formed like regular door panels, so they decided to lean-in to this angular weird look and see if people would accept it. I certainly disliked the look of it from the start, but I've also been wrong about which products would succeed, and you don't know until you try. It turns out that people buy trucks on looks more than they buy them on specs, so it didn't pan out. But this hardly means the people at Tesla are constantly shooting down Elon's crazy ideas. This was a one-off.

Look, I mean... yeah, it doesn't work exactly the same way human intelligence works, but I use Claude Code as a coding assistant every day, and within the domain of writing code, if this doesn't qualify as AI... then I just don't know what the difference would be. No, it hasn't really solved code review, and it hasn't solved big software architecture yet, but as far as day-to-day coding of small to medium tasks, I would argue that it's already surpassed the intelligence of the average programmer.

If you're on the Ultra plan with Claude Code, it's $200 per *month* and honestly, running about 4 separate sessions constantly working through to-do items, I don't even hit 25% of my weekly usage anymore. I was hitting the limit with Fable 5, but Opus 5.5 is much more efficient token-wise. I was thinking of dropping to the $100/month plan. Though I have suspected that the Claude Code plans are being sold at a loss, and they're much, much cheaper than pay-as-you-go pricing where you pay by the token.

As soon as everyone switched to using Claude Code to write all their software, it became affordable to rewrite in Rust, and people are seeing significant speed-ups and a reduction in memory usage, which is amazing. Using Claude to migrate an existing app to another language is a pretty good task for it because it has the existing one as a target, and AI agents work really well if they have a goal to iterate towards. The fact that human programmers find Rust to be pretty ugly doesn't seem to bother anyone, once the agents do most of the interaction. For the line-of-business app that I work on, I'm leaving it in C# for now because that's what I know, and I still review all (or most of) the code it writes. But if I were vibe-coding a weekend project, then telling it to use Rust is kind of a no-brainer.

Yes, it really is getting good. But I've still been reviewing almost all of the code it writes (I'm using Opus 5.5 mostly). Just yesterday I caught it writing the same logical rule (something like "only show this button if such-and-such condition is true) a second time about 10 lines away from where it was written the first time. Sure, it fixed it when I pointed it out, but that seemed like low-hanging fruit that it should have picked up immediately. At the same time, it can investigate pretty fast, so it does a pretty deep dive when writing a design document, and will pickup on things I probably would have missed in the first pass. Plain coders who just write what they're told are now a thing of the past. This has happened in some industries before, but I don't think it's ever happened this fast. Opus 4.x that could actually write mergeable code was released last November, and by this summer we had Fable 5 and since August I've hardly written any code. I'm a solo dev working at a small company and I have a lot of autonomy, so this technology just tripled my output over the span of a month, even with me still reviewing every spec, design doc, and almost all the code it outputs.

I think people lose sight of the fact that there are quite a few people who move their votes back and forth, particularly in those swing states. He won in 2024 because a lot of people put cost-of-living, immigration, housing, and staying out of foreign wars as their highest priorities, and those were his main talking points. He's utterly failed to deliver on those promises (you could argue he did what he promised on immigration, but even the supporters disliked how he went about it). So, this vote is a rebuke. It's a vote against Trump's execution of the plan, not the plan itself. Importantly, those people still want those things, and prioritize those issues, and it doesn't look like the democrats have a believable plan to deliver on them, and they actually tend to talk around those issues. That means two years from now there's going to be an opportunity for someone else to come out of the woodwork and campaign on the same issues and re-invigorate those swing voters. A Trump 2.0. Most of these voters are working class people who are traditionally supportive of democrats, so I'd love to see the dems get their heads out of their asses and offer this group something real and tangible, particularly on housing affordability, but it seems like they openly despise the working class, and it's hard to shake that off. Fingers crossed.

Nobody supports everything their candidate stands for. That's completely unreasonable, and you know it. There are many people who voted democrat who don't stand for all the things their democrat candidate stands for. A good example would be the highly unpopular "defund the police" policies that were all the rage a few years ago. It's quite reasonable to vote for a democrat who pushes the defund the police movement even if you don't agree because on the balance of issues you'd prefer the democrat policies over the republican. Hypothetically if you had two Trumps running, are you culpable for their actions no matter which one you voted for? Are you saying that unless you agree with every single policy that your democrat candidate supports, you should just not vote? That seems absurd, and it would be hard to find anyone who agrees with your argument. Both parties are a coalition of groups, many of whom don't agree on fundamental ideas (e.g. Muslim groups and women's groups) and yet they agree to hold their noses and work together to push a certain set of policies. Traditionally the democrats actually have the much broader and less cohesive coalition, so the idea that someone voting democrat would actually support all the policies of their candidate is highly unlikely. The republicans (before Trump) were mostly a coalition of business interests and Christian groups. The business owners dutifully showed up at church despite not being very religious, and agreed to vote against access to abortion while knowing abortions were always going to be available for their daughters if they had enough money, and Christian groups agreed to promote a very un-Jesus pro-free-market de-regulation agenda in exchange. It was a smaller but tighter coalition, and was actually pretty successful.

No, that's incorrect. The guy who just thinks everything costs too much isn't "voting for violence". He sees two parties, only one of which is putting forward policies that address his concerns, and he votes for that one. You majorly over-estimate the amount of effort that the average person puts into politics.

There are people who don't know most of the things that you think are important. They have other things they think are important. They get to vote. Unless you want to take away some people's votes or you want to force everyone else to agree with you at gunpoint, then you're going to have to do the hard work of politics, which involves listening, persuasion, and ultimately compromise. It's harder but it's better for everyone than the other outcome, which is just violence.

That's interesting. It works for me. I'm located in Canada and it's a CBC documentary, and also I have a premium account. Maybe one of those details affects it.

I agree, but I also have to point out that depending on what priorities you have while voting, there aren't always any good options. Let's say you identify as a "worker" (unskilled) and you don't get too involved in the social politics and your biggest concern is that everything costs more and you don't feel like you'll ever afford a house. That's your biggest priority - a good paying job and cost of living. Historically, that's a pretty common priority issue. It's pretty easy to sell you on the idea that two reasons for this problem are that all the good paying jobs were shipped overseas during the globalization push (which is true) and that whatever basic labor jobs are left, that immigration tends to push down wages for those jobs (which is true to a first approximation, anyway). Traditionally this person would vote Democrat, the party that's supposed to stick up for the little guy, like him. But it's pretty easy to convince this guy that the ("neo-Liberal") Democrats are pro-immigration, and of course the Republicans have traditionally been pro-immigration. And on globalization, both parties are pro-free-trade. Mostly this just pisses him off and he sits home on voting day, not feeling like either one represents his interest. Now when the Republicans surprise-elect a guy who starts talking about tariffs and building a wall, and at the same time the Democrats are spending a lot of time talking about things that aren't his priority, I don't think it's surprising when that guy goes and votes Republican. You and I see Trump for the danger he is to the systems of the country, but that guy isn't even aware of what those systems are or how they work, and if he is aware, he thinks those systems are rigged against him. We're all coming at this with our own lived experience, and from that guy's point of view, Trump looks like the only candidate representing his priority interests after literally decades of feeling those interests were ignored. It's not enough that Trump is bad for ideological reasons. The Democrats need to offer this group something tangible that they really want. They want to own a house, and be able to afford to have BBQs and see ballgames and save up for a boat they can take down to the lake. And they know their grandparents lived that dream.