It's a completely different story. For cars, it happened because of relentless pressure from the auto lobby. It took years of propaganda from oil companies, car makers etc. to make us think the road is for cars [1]. We demolished and rebuilt entire cities to accommodate cars, partly because they gutted the public transport sector [2]. This made our infrastructure so hostile to our own bodies that we have no choice but to use cars now. We bought their products because they forced them down our throats. There is nowhere near that kind of pressure behind the adoption of... oh dear lord.
I don't think the pressure of the auto lobby is really the reason.
People feel cars are more convenient and more prestigious than riding on a bus. Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force.
The auto lobby invented the word jaywalking to shift the liability for dead pedestrians from the people doing the killing to the people doing the walking.
Even in Amsterdam the original "stop the child murder" protests only barely succeeded, and it took a massive oil crisis and a population that could still (if only just) remember what life was like before cars took over their city to get there.
Uses change and laws need to keep up. Lobby or not, jaywalking is a reasonable thing to be illegal because when cars became common enough, walkers in their way caused an overall loss for everyone. People also used to be allowed to walk on the train tracks freely when trains were slower and more obvious - did the train lobby invent the word "foamer"? Should we make rail corridors train-free? Computer hacking became illegal during my lifetime to shift liability for faulty software and incompetence from the operators to the users. Before that, it didn't really matter because nobody was using the internet for anything important. Friends used to hack each other for fun. Bitcoin used to be a wild west where people would openly steal from or fool each other for sport - I don't think people really saw it as money or property when you could just generate it with your computer.
And in a Cost/Risk/Benefit computation, cars remain incommensurately invaluable. Because one's Quality of Life without them would simply be destroyed, comparatively. The moving "castle" (legal term in the USA) can be more important than the house in crucial regards.
The point attempted at post 48501189 remains unintelligible. That cars imply risks and externalities does not clarify it.
Cars were quite desirable in Soviet Union, where industry was not allowed to advertise. You had to get into a queue to buy a car, the state was not interested to make them in a quantity to satisfy the demand.
Very few people actually _needed_ cars as soviets built adequate public transport system. But there are many situations where car can really help a lot. Perhaps that's more obvious in a society which has rather few cars.
E.g. back in Soviet days and around that only one member of my extended family had a car. The rest of the family were really happy about opportunities it provides. E.g. with a car you can buy fresh produce directly from farmers with just few hours of driving. Doing the same without a car is so much hassle and effort people just won't do it, and then you're confined to what's available in a local grocery story (which was usually much worse than direct-from-farmer option). Do you think it has something to do with "car industry"?
No its much more straightforward, but I get it - there is no warm fuzzy feeling of discovering yet another global evil conspiracy out there set to get all of us.
We are family of 4 with 2 small kids. Whenever we travel, its a series of backpacks, other bags, other stuff, and then some more. Heck, even if I travel alone its almost never just me - there are heaps of garbage to dispose, big shopping bags to bring back, big backpack with camping or climbing or skiing gear etc.
It would have been absolute, utter nightmare to do this over public transport. This comes from European who has generally very good public transport (given rural area) and world's best train network specifically (Switzerland). Yet roads are choke full of cars and every year there is more.
Public transport simply ain't cutting it for anything but the simplest use cases, ie just me and nothing or small backpack. Some routes I take would take 3-5x longer with public transport, or are just not possible at all. No industry massage required here, ever. Not everybody lives in some dense city and never leaves outside for evenings or weekends.
Switzerland does have roads choked full of cars. It also has pretty mediocre bike infrastructure.
But this is kind of besides the point - even in the Netherlands I also would use a car if I were taking camping and skiing gear with the kids, and that's fine. But I can also take them in the bakfiets to the grocery store when I want, and that's also fine. Cars have their purpose, but you shouldn't _have_ to use one for basic trips.
Well, here is where we differ - what is basic trip for you may not be basic trip for me or next Joe. Maybe they don't even have walking path to their house. Maybe closest grocery store is 5km away on roads which are incompatible with safe cycling (many parents don't give a fck and just ride, throwing a tiny little dice with every truck passing centimeters from them and their young kids at high speed). Maybe XYZ.
Don't judge others in some complex situation just because in your case there is some simple straightforward solution. Yes Netherland has top notch cycling infra but thats nowhere else to be seen and won't be seen for quite some time. And don't force your solution unto everybody regardless on fit, that doesn't work long term (aka EU approach to things or why much of eastern part hates it).
Yes, people who live in the countryside need cars. But just because that's the case doesn't mean that the auto industry has nothing to do with the development of transit and cycling infrastructure in cities. I too am from Switzerland, but I lived near a train station (I now live in the US). When I'm there, I would much rather take the train than the car for most trips. It was an eight-minute walk to the station and the train is usually faster or the same duration as driving and I don't need to drive (which sucks; I'd rather read a book or look out the window than stare at the car in front of me). In the past, I owned an Urban arrow bakfiets which would fit my child and wife and me all at the same time with our groceries.
So yeah, you live in the countryside; you're in the minority, but you're trying to make global claims about the car industry based on your experience. For most humans, getting in the car involves bumper to bumper traffic to get somewhere, then 10-30 minutes of searching for a parking spot, and not having the infrastructure to make that a choice rather than a requirement in densely populated places is unacceptable.
And it's well documented in the US that the oil industry knee-capped public transit and train systems.
Yeah, when you travel. But wouldn't it be cool if school was just down the block and a grocery store was the same distance the other way? In big city Europe, it's like this.
Oh man what a perfect example to be had here. So historically exactly what you're said is 100% what happened. By the time Ford really mastered manufacturing, he managed to get the price of the Model T down to $260 around 1925, about $4,600 in current terms for a premium car!
Needless to say everybody was buying one and he was rocking it. Then came along General Motors and they were desperate to find any way to compete. They couldn't compete on price or quality, so their CEO is credited with inventing planned obsolescence, and turning cars into a fashion. They'd release a new style each year alongside plentiful marketing implying that the old styles were outdated, and it was wildly successful.
So yeah, needless to say people have always genuinely wanted their own cars. But it's also true that companies have managed through advertising to create artificial demand for vehicles that don't objectively make sense. To some degree reality is catching up at least though. Aston Martin is on the verge of bankruptcy and BYD is the largest electric car company in the world, by a wide margin.
Comfort, utility, fun, status. Every person has their own mixed requirement of those that then gets applied to their budget. Expensive for me is probably cheap for our CEO and cheap for me is probably expensive for our interns :)
> Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force.
Not really. We know it’s not as much of a natural force as some would like it to be because there are places where the lobbies lost, and while cars are common and widespread they’re nowhere near as dominant as they are in, say, the USA.
NJB’s next video (currently available on nebula) is about exactly that, Amsterdam’s (/ De Pijp’s) resistance to cars and car lobbying.
Subsidies played a huge role, including the eminent domain bulldozing of cities for free-at-use highways. If people had to pay upfront for those costs, the urban landscape would look much different (probably closer to Japanese cities, which do have massive suburbs, but centred around train stations).
Yet Japan does still have cars (and a car culture even), they're just not necessarily the default or dominant mode of transport.
Sure, nobody is saying cars are useless or unfun, I'm just pushing back against the idea that everything car everywhere is a natural and intrinsic outcome from cars existing. As I noted, even in the netherlands cars are common, the dutch have a very dense road network, and a fair amount of cars.
For me, cars are a perfectly fine mode of transport, but the way so many places prioritize it over alternatives (whatever the reason) isn't necessarily better.
My "wtf" moment was 20 years ago when I was visiting my cousin in an exurb and we sat in a line of cars for over 40 minutes waiting for our turn to pick up her kid. The messed up part was that while there were school busses, everything was so spread out that the bus ride for them would have been over an hour and then another 20 minute walk from the arterial road drop-off point to their house. Everything was far away, including local public parks.
My view on this is based on situation in Ukraine: Ukraine definitely didn't have any car lobby at least until 1990 as Soviet Union was heavily investing into public transportation and did not profit from car sales.
Still, general opinion on cars was that you should buy one if you can, even if you're not going to use it for commute.
I doubt there was any car lobby in independent Ukraine as national car makers were just bad, and foreign were competitors. But general opinion on cars got to a point where not having a car when you can afford it (and can learn to drive, etc.) is considered weird.
So I'm afraid car dominance is just what happens naturally in a capitalist environment, and countering it requires an effort - e.g. eco-conscious population, urban planning and public transport optimization, etc. And Netherlands is such a country, as far as I know, but it just doesn't happen by default.
> Isn't Not Just Bikes some US expat/biking maximalist?
According to their videos, they prefer trams within cities; generally take trains between cities; and acknowledge that cars are very useful for places which aren't so well connected (e.g. places that are far apart which aren't on a train line). They think encouraging the use of cars within cities is a bad idea (dangerous, scales poorly, makes those areas less pleasant to be, etc.).
Not what I'd think of as a "biking maximalist".
They do show themselves cycling to places that are nearby. Does that make Youtubers who record videos in their car "driving maximalists"?
Are there real acknowledgments cases of multiple companies coming together to bribe some state level people to increase their profit and splitting the bribe across the companies?
Like GM, BNW and Honda coming together bribing and splitting the bill. Seems unlikely thou there was a RAM price fixing agreement caught but then again they were caught cause of the number of people aware
Whether public or individual transportation makes more sense really depends on a country’s geography and people’s housing preferences. Public transportation is not always the best option.
Typical comment that probably comes from a healthy, childless, young person with no disabilities that can’t understand why people not in that situation might have different requirements from transportation.
This might be a very naive take on my part, but I don't think of vibecoding as a competitor to actual coding the same way I don't think of doing amphetamines (even if they make you more productive in the short term) as a competitor to being clean. I think it's a self-destructive behavior that is ultimately going to degrade your critical thinking skills, especially if you're a beginner. As with everything, the smarter your tools, the dumber you get. People often claim to acquire "higher level thinking" skills from it (as do meth users), but even if that's true, they are also currently teaching those skills to the very tools that try to replace them.
The question is why would you fare any better if you don't use it. I don't know how it will play out, but this much I know: I will never pay for AI music, because I can replicate it for free. I'm still buying music from real musicians (in fact tons more than ever before), because I can't. Similarly, I have contributed to many FOSS projects (both financially and in PRs), but will not (knowingly) do the same for the ones that are vibecoded. Whether that will amount to anything or is just a fart in the wind, we'll see.
I take amphetamines prescribed by a doctor for ADHD, and without them I am considerably less effective. And the same way your amphetamine analogy doesn't work, I think it similarly doesn't work for LLMs either. At the end of the day if you are more effective with something than without it, it would be silly to avoid it out of some sense of "purity".
I definitely did not mean using it as a prescription drug for a known condition. I meant using it without any medical indication, like many of us do. We know that amphetamines can lead to cognitive impairment [1] [2]. We know much less about reliance (over-reliance?) on AI, but what we know doesn't look good either [3] [4]. Of course, if you already live with a condition that makes it hard to concentrate, the benefits can outweigh the risks. But for most people they don't.
(Aside wrt being more effective with something than without: this is anecdotal, but my paragliding instructor once said that modern wings are often designed to correct for various pilot errors. He advised against buying those because he had seen people make worse mistakes after getting accustomed to them. In his own words: "you become dumber under a smart wing". Sharing because I think this applies to many things in life.)
<In his own words: "you become dumber under a smart wing". Sharing because I think this applies to many things in life.>
Applies a lot in life, eh. The old expression re muscles "if you don't use it, you lose it" applies a lot to coding or even in just normal day to day systems maintenance. Asking an AI agent, do to simple task just because "an agent is quicker or more effective" will quite often end up costing more in the long run do to one not remembering "how" to do something
I take (prescribed) amphetamines and use LLMs, and I think "I wrote this while on amphetamines" will leave you with way better understanding of the code than "I vibecoded this?" Like, to an absurd degree?
Vibecoding $x gives you pretty much the understanding of "someone else did $x," which seems unsurprising to me. There's a lot of usecases for code where "someone else did $x" is a perfectly fine way to accomplish $x! There are also many cases where "someone else did $x" is not a substitute for "I did $x."
"I want a tmux theme that fits with my existing zsh and neovim themes." Is it useful to me to learn how tmux themes work? Eh, marginally maybe? I'm personally kinda hoping I'm not using tmux in 10 years, so probably not.
"I'm writing code for work, where a bad correctness bug would be very expensive." If I'm pulling in someone else's code, I /better/ be auditing that code.
Like, this seems like the obvious framing and a useful heuristic? Maybe the problem is the subject of "vibecoded" is usually "I vibecoded this with Claude," not "Claude vibecoded this with me?" IDK
A commit is a measure of nothing. Severity weighted bugs per unit of nothing? What does that even mean? In any repo it's trivial to achieve a sev/10c that's arbitrarily close to zero while completely ruining everything.
I suggest you practice some humility and update your conclusion instead of updating the mental gymnastics you used to arrive at the same conclusion.
Whether commits decrease the sev/10c depends on if there are a lot of small commits increasing the demoninator. In reality, we have the opposite: the post-Claude releases have way fewer commits than the pre-Claude ones.
Thus, if anything their sev/10c is inflated. If I changed it to lines of code changed, the relative bug ratios would be much smaller, and the conclusion wouldn't change. In fact, the conclusion would look "better" for Claude; if I was using "mental gymnastics" to come to this conclusion, I would have already used a metric other than adjusting per commits!
What different metric would you suggest that would change the conclusion?
Showing "humility", as you so moralistically and condescendingly put it, would require being wrong first.
> In reality, we have the opposite: the post-Claude releases have way fewer commits than the pre-Claude ones.
No, they don't, you just made that up.
> What different metric would you suggest that would change the conclusion?
What would be a lot more useful to know is whether or not the original prompt used to generate this post instructed you to do a fair and unbiased review of these bugs, and whether or not that prompt itself was framed in a fair and unbiased way. If you take a piece of paper and write "therefore Claude is not at fault" at the bottom, then nothing you write above that line is admissible, no matter how well-reasoned.
I would advise against using it. The code it returns comes from real public repos, so including it in your work could lead to copyright issues. You'd probably be better off asking an LLM to come up with gibberish.
It's math that requires an obscene amount of compute. If it's possible to make DRM chips that don't let you play pirated movies and GPS chips that shut down when going too fast, then I reckon it's also possible to make GPUs that shut down when they encounter anything that looks like a transformer. The problem is regulatory, not technical.
It doesn't require obscene compute though. I can run a model on my macbook with 48GB of RAM that is roughly comparable to Sonnet 4.6. A year from now the same machine will be able to run much more capable models.
I would agree there are sound regulations needed, but banning certain kinds of math is not it. (Your DRM example is particularly unfriendly to your point in this regard.)
chips limiting what kind of software can be run sounds absolutely awful and would be a huge overstep in government power. once I buy a piece of hardware I should be able to run whatever I want on it.
Sure, until it gets to the point where you're no longer able to just "buy a piece of hardware". Then it'll suddenly sound like a pretty sweet deal. Like when Nvidia nerfed ETH mining back when that was still a thing. That too was done to give more people access to hardware, not to take away their freedom.
I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op.
How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.
We still have hundreds of nuclear power plants worldwide! There have been some terrible accidents but overall the consequences of nuclear power are much less than fossil fuel electricity generation. And some people wish we hadn't nerfed our ability to build nuclear power plants through over-regulation.
Now of course we shouldn't completely deregulate nuclear power either. As in all things, the middle way.
In the mid-80s the world was estimated to have some 60000+, so 12000 is somewhat of an improvement. Ideally through arms control we could reduce this further, but that's no trivial undertaking.
Wasn't it designed that way so you can pass it off as a toy in situations like that? It even comes with games and a dummy mode that hides everything except the tamagotchi screen.
We generally don’t allow cockroaches to thrive in the spaces we claim for ourselves. Question is how much space (economic or otherwise) will AI claim for itself and whether there will be any left for us.
Would you prefer if someone did the same thing and kept it to themselves (or sold it to the highest bidder)? I think knowing it exists is better than not knowing it exists.
No. I would prefer we, as a community, don’t build this. I am under no illusion that I will persuade all people but I feel clarity that it is morally and practically unwise to build a tool like this at all and especially unwise to publish it as a freely available open source project
Nothing morally wrong about finding an exploit in a system, it's what allows you to make it more secure in the future. Perhaps the most ethical course of action would have been to disclose this to Google/OAI first (which I don't know whether or not has happened), but I find that optional in this case since this isn't really a vulnerability in the conventional sense.
Finding an exploit with the intent to patch it is different that finding the exploit and using it for personal gain which, in turn, is different than finding the exploit and publishing it for open source ecosystem use.
It’s kind like if I took a picture off of your facebook with your keychain, and used it to make a copy of your house key. You’d probably prefer I reached out and told you to take down the picture instead of creating a template of the key for anyone to download and make a copy along with your home address.
[1] https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2022/06/how-lobbyis...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
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