OpenPilot and comma.ai are very close to a bolt-on after-market solution; not FSD 14 quality but you can get a lot of autonomy and intelligence with a $1000 Android device and thirty minutes for installation.
53 karma · joined March 21, 2022
[0] the ultimate, of course, being profit.
Why do you have to make that assumption? An expert arborist likely won’t know much about tuning GC parameters for the JVM but that won’t make them “worse than useless” or “actively misleading” when discussing other topics, and especially not when it comes to the stuff that’s relatively tangential to their domain.
I think the difference we have is that I don’t expect the models to be experts in any domain nor do I expect them to always provide factual content; the library can provide factual content—if you know how to use it right.
I would tend to agree with that assertion…
> it requires you to understand the specific model's training and happy paths
But I strongly disagree with that assertion; I know nothing of commercial models’ training corpus, methodology, or even their system prompts; I only know how to use them as a tool for various use-cases.
> it requires more time to make it output the thing you want than just doing it yourself.
And I strongly disagree with that one too. As long as the thing you want it to output is rooted in relatively mainstream or well-known concepts, it’s objectively much faster than you/we are; maybe it’s more expensive but it’s also crazy fast—which is the point of all tools—and the precision/accuracy of most speedy tools can be often deferred until a later step in the process.
> If you don't know enough about the subject or the model, you will get confident garbage
Once you step outside their comfort zone (their training), well, yah… they do all tend to be unduly confident in their responses—I’d argue however that it is a trait they learned from us; we really like to be confident even when we’re wrong and that trait is borne out dramatically across the internet sources on which a lot of these models were trained.
But I think my point still holds—it’s not the tool that should be blamed; the engineer just needs to better understand the tool and how/when to use it appropriately.
Of course, our toolboxes just keep filling up with new tools which makes it difficult to remember how to use ‘em all.
I get it; I’m not an AI evangelist and I get frustrated with the slop too; Gen-AI (and many of the tools we’ve enjoyed over the past few millennia) was/is lauded as “The” singular tool that makes everything better; no tool can fulfill that role yet we always try to shoehorn our problems into a shape that fits the tool. We just need to use the correct tools for the job; in my mind, the only problem right now is that we have a really capable tool and have identified some really valuable use-cases for that tool yet we also keep trying to use it for (what I believe are, given current capabilities) use-cases that don’t fit the tool.
We’ll figure it out but, in the meantime, while I don’t like to generalize that a tech or its use-cases are objectively good/bad, I do tend to have an optimistic outlook for most tech—Gen-AI included.
How is this sentiment not different from my grandfather’s sentiment that calculators and computers (and probably his grandfather’s view of industrialization) are a shortcut to avoid work? From my perspective most tools are used as a shortcut to avoid work; that’s kinda the while point—to give us room to think about/work on other stuff.
I didn’t get entitlement vibes from the comment; I think the author believes the PR could have wide benefit, and believes that others support his position, thus the post to HN.
I don’t mean to be preach-y; I’m learning to interpret others by using a kinder mental model of society. Wish me luck!
I think this is the crux of our confusion; you may not desire the expanded functionality but others certainly do. You can suggest that manufacturers force unwanted functionality onto consumers but I have trouble accepting that premise unless admit our own complicity; maybe I’m part of that problem though.
> Owning a TV is something one should be able to do for over 10 years.
Again, that’s your preference and the choice you’ve already made; I choose to not set arbitrary time limits but instead make decisions on purchasing new TVs (and other non-essential products) depending on the available technologies and toys—and, of course, the girth (if any) of my wallet . We have different preferences, we make decisions based on those preferences, yet—as far as I can tell—we are both satisfied with our choices; why complain about a system capable of implementing a bug that doesn’t affect us?
> Can you guarantee that most of the nice features on your TV will work more than 10 years from now?
Almost certainly I can. There are both massive and minuscule communities, aftermarket solutions, and DIY makers/hackers/activists that focus on all kinds of technologies and products dating back over a hundred years. The original iPod is 25 years old and yet there are still folks making firmware updates for it. The Commodore 64 has a multitude of projects, products, communities, and marketplaces to keep the product alive — nearly fifty years after it was released! There are literally thousands of examples. Interestingly, and calling back to my original point, these kinds of secondary markets are only possible because of those products’ use of a combination of quality underlying hardware and user-updatable/modifiable software—well, and that nerds like us dig breaking things.
There’s already a fledgling industry of third-party repair shops for BEVs—which you can attest to first hand. BEVs are not “disposable” like you claim—as evidenced, again, by your own experience of repairing BEVs.
You’ve suggested, in other threads, that BEVs are not designed for repair; every professional and shade-tree mechanic I’ve ever known (myself included) has used that same complaint (“engineers are idiots; they don’t think about repairs”) against ICE vehicles for decades yet the ICE repair industry is still massive and, importantly, constantly evolving—new tools, new aftermarket parts that are better/more reliable than OE, the sharing of knowledge so others can learn how to be safe, etc. This is how industries grow. The notion that all the support infrastructure must be in place before a product can be considered useful or reliable is absurd; we live in a world that iterates and evolves quickly.
Is the Fiat “totaled” or will you be able to repair it? What about the Bolt?
You’ve complained that working on the Fiat is difficult and poorly documented; have you seen what it takes to replace the oil-pan gasket on modern trucks? You have to remove the entire cab! I know well the frustration of working on products that have poor service documentation or seem to be engineered only for production with no consideration for service but that doesn’t mean a product has no viability or is unreliable; in fact, the opposite often seems to be the case—difficult to repair products seem to have better longevity and are therefore more likely to be viable.
I’m willing to admit I might be wrong about BEVs while it feels like you’ve already decided they’re utterly useless; why take such a hard-line stance?
The same was true for the ICE vehicle third-party repair industry 100 years ago.
It seems like your objection to BEVs (i.e. they can’t be repaired) is directly refuted by the fact that you yourself repair BEVs. Maybe I’ve misunderstood your argument though.
Really? Is that what’s wrong with me? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Um, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Yahoo, YouTube, Skype, and AOL are/were PRISM Service Providers and I’d argue that they all receive(d) equal (+/- 5%) concern and scrutiny from those world governments.
> They can afford to resist legal demands from countries they don't respect because they have nothing to lose from denying them access.
Are you talking about the cloud providers I listed above? From my perspective, those guys all tend to honor the demands of any state that offers a statistically significant percentage of current/potential consumers, regardless of the demand. Perhaps they have some bright spots where they “did the right thing” (like refusing to unlock a device, or refusing to provide access to private data) but by and large they all—including Apple—are subject to the rules of the states within which they operate.
> Apple has not demonstrated that they have the willingness to resist this unlawful coercion, even recently.
Ten years ago, Apple refused demands by the FBI to unlock the iPhones of various suspects. Four years ago they did the same during the Pensacola Naval Base shooting investigation. I would guess there’s plenty of other examples but I’ve not been watching that stuff much over the past couple years. Were those instances just cherry-picked for marketing purposes? Maybe, but until someone shows me compelling evidence that Apple is /not/ acting in good faith towards both their consumers and the governments under which they operate, I see no reason to believe that they’re “lying about this one too”.
I do keep a salt-encrusted spoon nearby when reading about these things but that doesn’t mean I refuse to trust someone who has demonstrated what appears to me a good-faith effort to keep my privacy intact. Maybe what Apple is doing with PCC is just security theater; I doubt it but I also recognize that marketing and technology are often in conflict so we must always be cautious. But the important thing, both to me and GP, is that none of the other cloud providers have offered (whether it be sane and intelligent privacy controls or just snake oil-like scams) any solution beyond “encrypt your data before you upload it to the cloud”.
Seriously? So,what, mutes can’t incriminate themselves?
Even if you wanna stick to that shaky narrative, consider that text messages are speech. Notes to myself are speech. Pictures in my phone are a form of my self-expression—which is speech. Emails? Speech. Voice recordings? Speech. My ChatGPT history? Speech. My Siri interactions? Speech.
The concept of protection against self-incrimination is deeply rooted in protecting our privacy; I don’t see how they can be separated like you seem to have suggesting here.