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weweersdfsd

142 karma · joined September 25, 2023

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weweersdfsd··on Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
The solution is simple. Just build big parking lots outside the city where land is cheap, and a bus service from these parking lots to the inner city. That way commuters can get to their workplace and back fast enough.

Making commuting viable that way is beneficial to inner-city folk too. When people who want to live further away from city can do it effectively, housing will become cheaper for those who actually want to live in the city.

weweersdfsd··on US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
Social media AND smartphones became popular around that time. I think it's the toxic combination that's the worst - easy, low effort dopamine hits that are available everywhere via your phone, whenever you are bored.
weweersdfsd··on Volkswagen to make EVs more affordable, starting with the ID.Polo and a new SUV
Yes, what Western world really needs is more people moving to already unaffordable big cities, because they can't afford a commute from cheaper areas.

Landlords would really love that.

weweersdfsd··on Le Chat: Custom MCP Connectors, Memories
It's a good argument if you care about privacy and geopolitical risk, like a dictator suddenly deciding that citizens of your country should no longer have access, or should be monitored when using the service.
weweersdfsd··on Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
If that is the case, where are the LLM-controlled robots where LLM is simply given access to bunch of sensors and servos, and learns to control them on its own? And why are jailbreaks a thing?
weweersdfsd··on Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
The problem with current GenAI is the same as in outsourcing to lowest bidder in India or whatever. For any non-trivial project you'll get something that may appear to work out of it, but for anything production-ready you'll most likely you'll spend lots of time testing, verifying, cleaning up the code and making changes to things AI didn't catch. Then there's requirement gathering, discussing with stakeholders, gathering more feedback and so on, debugging when things fail in production...

I believe it's a productivity boost, but only to a small part of my job. The boost would be larger if only had to build proof-of-concepts or hobby projects that don't need to be reliable in prod, and don't require feedback and requirements from many other people.

weweersdfsd··on German contest to live in depopulated Soviet-era city proves global hit
>> Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy.

I don't think legitimate Syrian refugees were the biggest problem. Rather, the open-door policy was abused by lots of young men from other MENA-countries, with no eligibility for asylum. Deporting them proved pretty hard, and crime stats prove that some of them had a very bad attitude towards their new host.

weweersdfsd··on How to grow almost anything
If you're into home automation, you could probably get pretty far with some light & moisture sensors (I recommend Xiaomi Flora bluetooth sensors for the latter purpose) and smart plugs connected to Home Assistant. I did something like that on a small scale, it worked fairly well.
weweersdfsd··on The Who Cares Era
This is it. It's rational not to give a damn in this environment, at least for anyone who isn't an entrepreneur or very well paid.
weweersdfsd··on The Who Cares Era
Perhaps you can't pay people enough to make them care, but you sure can make them not care by paying too little.
weweersdfsd··on Trial by Fire: The crash of Aeroflot flight 1492
They do get parts through various third party countries.

Sanctions really don't work in aviation either. Iran has faced harsh sanctions through the 2000's, yet they've kept flying Western made planes, lately even newer models. Similar story with Cuba, somehow they operated ATR turboprops for decades, and those certainly do have American made parts.

If you have the money, somebody will supply you the parts.

weweersdfsd··on A number of electric vehicle, battery factories are being canceled
I think the switch will happen sooner rather than later, considering the progress BYD is making in China (and many of their export markets).

It's true that electric vehicles remain a bit too expensive for many, but most of those people aren't buying brand new ICE vehicles either. Why spend lots of money to buy a brand new car of obsolete technology, when the alternative is to buy used and wait for electric ones to get cheaper? I know literally nobody in my age group (adults in their 30's) who has bought a brand new car in past few years. I live in rich EU country.

weweersdfsd··on A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress
The key here is "under your guidance". LLM's are a major productivity boost for many kinds of jobs, but can LLM-based agents be trusted to act fully autonomously for tasks with real world consequence? I think the answer is still no, and will be for a long time. I wouldn't trust LLM to even order my groceries without review, let alone push code into production.

To reach anything close to definition of AGI, LLM agents should be able to independently talk to customers, iteratively develop requirements, produce and test solutions, and push them to production once customers are happy. After that, they should be able to fix any issues arising in production. All this without babysitting / review / guidance from human devs, reliably

weweersdfsd··on AI Is Stifling Tech Adoption
I agree. Most frontend rewrites are totally unnecessary, caused by resume-driven development, desire for the latest fancy thing and most JS frameworks having a short lifespan. If LLM's reduce that behavior by steering devs towards most popular solutons, then it's only a good thing.
weweersdfsd··on Why was there a wall near runway at S Korea plane crash airport?
Even if the runway was only used from one direction (not true), it would be dumb to build a big concrete structure near its beginning. It's not unheard of for planes to come in too low and touch down before start of the runway due to pilot error (or even double engine failure on rare occasions).
weweersdfsd··on Morgan Stanley Follows Citi, BofA in Quitting Climate Group
Build and create what? More cheap plastic junk for consumers? Big SUV cars for middle class that could very well drive a Corolla? Cloud services delivering social media that negatively impacts people's mental health, but makes billionaires a lot of money?

Most energy out there already goes to causes that do nothing whatsoever to advance humanity's future or to improve people's lives. Burning fossil fuels to produce that waste of energy is absolute madness.

If we are to waste energy, it should at least be produced in a manner that doesn't doom future generations.

weweersdfsd··on OpenAI hits pause on video model Sora after artists leak access in protest
There's nothing wrong with resisting bad working conditions, unfair pay, or getting replaced by a machine without adequate social safety nets in place.

If businesses decide to replace workers with AI, then it's also their collective responsibility to pay for their retraining, or if that isn't possible their social security.

weweersdfsd··on Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke
If it comes to a war I'm going to be on the front lines anyway, because I happen to live in a country next to Russia. Capturing a cargo ship guilty of sabotage wouldn't make much of a difference in whether a war comes or not.
weweersdfsd··on Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke
The truth is that Russia has been making war preparations for a long time, also within the EU. In Finland even during the "good years" (between fall of the Soviet Union and Georgian war) Russian businessmen kept buying property that made zero financial sense, but was located close to strategic infrastructure or military bases.
weweersdfsd··on Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke
I think it's time for a special navy operation which captures a Russian or Chinese cargo ship every time a cable gets damaged. The ships and their cargo could be then sold to the highest bidder.
weweersdfsd··on OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI
I think buttons should not be replaced, but rather augmented with voice control. I certainly want to be able to adjust air conditioning or use my washing machine while listening music or having otherwise noisy environemnt.
weweersdfsd··on Hetzner introduces GPU server for AI training
If you don't need a big model and are fine with hosting locally, an RTX3060 with 12GB VRAM is going to do just fine. Can be bought for about 200-300 USD.

I've been pleasantly surprised by what such a mediocre GPU and Llama3 8B can do for certain (simple) use cases. Ollama makes it all pretty easy.

weweersdfsd··on NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's salty ocean
The money does exist, and manpower isn't a problem considering how many people this planet has. The problem is the small monority that has most of the money, and doesn't like to pay their fair share of taxes.

"As of late 2022, according to Snopes, 735 billionaires collectively possessed more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households ($4.5 trillion and $4.1 trillion respectively). The top 1% held a total of $43.45 trillion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

weweersdfsd··on NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's salty ocean
If we survive climate change, I would argue that conquering space should be the top priority to ensure long-term human survival. Projects like this ultimately gather knowledge that can help that goal.

But sure, we also need to tax the ultra-rich more, so that we can have money for all the things that need to be done. Tax evasion is a problem, not NASA's spending.

weweersdfsd··on Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC
Of course they are humans like everybody else. But I do not support mass migration as a tool for bringing the wages further down and exploiting workers. I think the rich should be taxed much more, and that money used to reduce poverty & improve education globally. It's not migration itself that is the problem, but the fact many migrants are in a position where they can be exploited more easily than native workers.

In ideal world businesses would have to pay a fair livable wage, no matter where they build factories, or receive migrants from.

weweersdfsd··on Iran successfully launches indigenous Chamran 1 satellite into space
In my experience, the people who that hate the Iranian government the most are actual Iranian citizen. That's not surprising really, because the vile theocratic government doesn't represent the values of an average Iranian, and stays in power only through violence.

It's a nation with lots of awesome people and culture, but a horrible government.

weweersdfsd··on Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
To me the content archived consulting page looks very much like something a large language model would generate. Impressive, but doesn't make any sense considering the size of this company. Probably good enough to fool Hezbollah anyway.
weweersdfsd··on Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC
They will keep crying that, no matter the actual labor market situation. My country has low wages, high unemployment, and yet businesses similarly cry for more immigration, as they always want to find the most desperate worker who accepts the lowest wage possible. That's the reality of modern capitalism.
weweersdfsd··on New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike
In case of a recession, fresh grads are usually affected the worst. Really it makes sense, because work experience tends to be valued more than a degree.

https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recessi...

weweersdfsd··on How immigration remade the U.S. labor force
The rich have never cared about things you mentioned. They have always exploited the working class, all this talk of "shared blood, culture and history" has largely been just a tool of control, not something they actually cared about. Before that, it was God which they used to keep the peasants in control.

Fair distribution of wealth, that is ultimately the only real question that matters. The ultra-rich are the threat to our nations, not the poor masses of immigrants, who are simply brought in to make them even more money.

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