The whole point of self-driving cars (to me) is I don't have to own or insure it, someone else deals with that and I just make it show up with my phone when I need it.
Imagine this for a whole neighborhood! Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though. And while we're at it, let's pick up other people along the way, you'll need a bigger vehicle though, perhaps bus-sized...
Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS services so far.
This only works in neighborhoods that are veritable city blocks, with buildings several stories tall standing close by. Not something like northern Houston, TX; it barely works for places like Palo Alto, CA. You cannot run buses on every lane, at a reasonable distance from every house.
The point of a car is takes you door to door. There's no expectation to walk three blocks from a stop; many US places are not intended for waking anyway. Consider heavy bags from grocery shopping, or similar.
Public transit works in proper cities, those that became cities before the advent of the car, and were not kept in the shape of large suburban sprawls by zoning. Most US cities only qualify in their downtowns.
Elsewhere, rented / hailed self-driving cars would be best. First of all, fewer of them would be needed.
> if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car
Maybe for you, I already don't own it and have not found that to be true. I pretty much order an uber whenever I don't feel like riding my bike or the bus, and that costs <$300 most months. Less than the average used car payment in the US before you even consider insurance, fuel, storage, maintenance, etc.
I also rent a car now and then for weekend trips, that also is a few hundred bucks at most.
I would be surprised if robotaxis were more expensive long term.
Also, a real nightmare for the municipal trade unions. (Do you know why every NYC subway train needs to have not one but two operators, even though it could run automatically just fine?)
Huh. I wonder if that makes any sense. It doesn't seem to make sense to keep employing people if you no longer need them. It sucks to be layed off, but that's just how it works.
It also shows a lack of imagination. If you have to provide a union with a job bank, why not re-deploy employees to other roles? With one person per train, re-deploy people to run more trains therefore decreasing the interval between trains. Stations used to have medics but this was cut. How about re-train people to be those medics? The subway could use a signaling upgrade and positive train control. Installing platform screen doors to greatly reduce the incidence of people falling onto the tracks is going to need a lot of labor.
Mass transit is a capacity multiplier. If 35 people are headed in the same direction compare that with the infrastructure needed to handle 35 cars. Road capacity, parking capacity, car dealerships, gas stations, repair shops, insurance, car loans.
First, these cities should be fixed by removing the traffic magnets. It's far past the point where we used the old obsolete ideology of trying to supply as much traffic capacity as possible.
But anyway, your statement is actually not true anywhere in the US except NYC. Even in Chicago, removing ALL the local transit and switching to 6-seater minivans will eliminate all the traffic issues.
Car traffic magnets like highways inside urban cores? Or people traffic magnets like office buildings, colleges, sports stadiums, performing arts venues, shopping malls?
Large stadium arenas are a special case, but they don't create sustained traffic, and their usage periods typically do not overlap with the regular rush hour.
Focusing only on price, renting a beafy shared "cloud" computer is cheaper than buying one and changing every 5 years. It's not always an issue for idle hardware.
Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?
Cars and personal computers have advantages over shared resources that often make them worth the cost. If you want your transport/compute in busy times you may find limitations. (ever got on the train and had to stand because there are no seats? Every had to wait for your compute job to start because they are all busy? Both of these have happened to me).
Yep. And it's indeed a good model for this mode of transportation. And they ARE cheap.
For example, in Seattle I can get a shared airport shuttle for $40 with the pick-up/drop-off at my front door. And this is a fully private ADA-compliant commercial service, with a healthy profit margin, not a rideshare that offloads vehicle costs onto the driver. And a self-driving van can be even cheaper than that, since it doesn't need a driver.
Meanwhile, transit also costs around $40 per trip and takes at least 1 hour more. And before you tell me: "no way, the transit ticket is only $2.5", the TRUE cost of a transit ride in Seattle is more than $20. It's just that we're subsidizing most of it.
So you can see why transit unions are worrying about self-driving. It'll kill transit completely.
you made too many false assumptions if you came up with those routes. Experts have run real numbers including looking at what happens in the real world. https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit - (as I write this you need to scroll to the second article to find the useful rebuttal of your idea)
Yeah, yeah: "Major US Public Transit Union Questions “Microtransit”" Read it. Go on. It's pure bullshit.
The _only_ issue with the old "microtransit" is the _driver_. Each van ends up needing on average MORE drivers than it moves passengers. It does solve the problem of throughput, though.
But once the driver is removed, this problem flips on its head. Each regular bus needs around 4 drivers for decent coverage. It's OK-ish only when the average bus load is at least 15-20 people. It's still much more expensive and polluting than cars, but not crazily so.
This article is just a bunch of propaganda. You can tell that by the picture with people in the shape of a bus next to the line of cars. Every time you see it, you can immediately blacklist the author and ignore whatever they are saying about cars.
Can you guess why?
Hint: think about the intervals between buses and how you should represent them to stay truthful. And that buses necessarily move slower than cars. And that passengers will waste some time due to non-optimal routes and transfers. And that passengers will waste some time because they need to walk to the station.
So back to my point, can you tell me EXACTLY what I should read in that article? Point out the paragraph, please.
That's how some people feel about airplanes. Presumably you're not one of them. For some people, the inconvenience of being responsible for a car would outweigh the benefit of setting up their stuff inside of one.
It's not even an inconvenience. I like my cars. Dealing with ride hailing services (autonomous or not) is certainly far more inconvenient than owning a car (unless maybe you're stuck living somewhere without convenient parking).
For the vast majority of people who own a car, continuing to own the car will remain the better deal. Most people need their car during "rush hour", so there isn't any savings from sharing, and worse some people have "high standards" and so will demand the rental be a clean car nicer than you would accept - thus raising the costs (particularly if you drive used cars) Any remaining argument for a shared car dies when you realize that you can leave your things in the car, and you never have to wait.
For the rest - many of them live in a place where not enough others will follow the same system and so they will be forced to own a car just like today. If you live in a not dense area but still manage to walk/bike almost everywhere (as I do), renting a car is on paper cheaper the few times when you need a car - but in practice you don't know about that need several weeks in advance and so they don't have one they can rent to you. Even if you know you will need the car weeks in advance, sometimes they don't have one when you arrive.
If you live in a very dense area such that you almost regularly use transit (but sometimes walk, bike), but need a car for something a few times per year, then not owning a car makes sense. In this case the density means shared cars can be a viable business model despite not being used very much.
In short what you say sound insightful, but reality of how cars are used means it won't happen for most car owners.
Or, if they are Hertz, they might have one but refuse to give it to you. This happened to my wife. In spite of payment already being made to Hertz corporate online, the local agent wouldn't give up a car for a one-way rental. Hertz corporate was less than useless, telling us their system said was a car available, and suggesting we pay them hundreds of dollars again and go pick it up. When I asked the woman from corporate whether she could actually guarantee we would be given a car, she said she couldn't. When I suggested she call the local agent, she said she had no way to call the local office. Unbelievable.
Since it was last minute, there were... as you said, no cars available at any of the other rental companies. So we had to drive 8 hours to pick her up. Then 8 hours back, which was the drive she was going to make in the rental car in the first place.
This is the nightmare scenario for me. A forever subscription for the usage of a car.
Subscription for self driving will almost be a given with so many bad actors in tech nowadays, but never even being allowed to own the car is even worse.
I think this is purely psychological. The notion of paying for usage of some resource that you don't own is really rather mundane when you get down to it.
Subscription for changes to maps and the law makes sense. I'd also pay for the latest safety improvements (but they better be real improvements). However they are likely to add a number of unrelated things and I object to those.
If OSM is up to date - many places it is very outdated. (others it is very good).
Law - when a government changes the driving laws. Government can be federal (I have driven to both Canada and Mexico. Getting to Argentina is possible though I don't think it has ever been safe. Likewise it is possible to drive over the North Pole to Europe), state (or whatever the country calls their equivalent). When a city changes the law they put up signs, but if a state passes a law I'm expected to know even if I have never driven in that state before. Right turn on red laws are the only ones I can think of where states are different - but they are likely others.
Laws also cover new traffic control systems that may not have been in the original program. If the self driving system can't figure out the next one (think roundabout) then it needs to be updated.
Many of them are very aware of how LLMs work, they regularly interact with context limits and there have been threads about thoughtfully pruning context vs letting the LLM compact, making backups, etc.
> LLM output is expressly prohibited for any direct communication
I would like to see this more. As a heavy user of LLMs I still write 100% of my own communication. Do not send me something an LLM wrote, if I wanted to read LLM outputs, I would ask an LLM.
I’m glad they have a carve out for using LLMs to translate to, or fix up English communications. LLMs are a great accessibility tool that is making open source development truly global. Translation and grammar fix up is something LLMs are very, very good at!
But that is translation, not “please generate a pull request message for these changes.”
"I just used it to clean up my writing" seems to be the usual excuse when someone has generated the entire thing and copy pasted it in. No one believes it and it's blatantly obvious every time someone does this.
Not sure what you're talking about. Quite often I've written out a block of information and have found chunks of repeats or what would be hard to interpret by other stuck here or there. I'll stick it in an llm and have it suggest changes.
Simply put you seem to live in a different world where everyone around you has elegant diction. I have people I work with that if I could I would demand they take what they write and ask "would this make sense to any other human on this planet".
There are no shortages of people being lazy with LLMs, but at the same time it is a tool with valid and useful purpose.
Sometimes I ramble for a long time and ask an LLM to clean it up. It almost always slopifies it to shreds. Can't extract the core ideas, matches everything to the closest popular (i.e. boring to read) concept, etc.
Better to use Google Translate for this than ChatGPT. Either ChatGPT massively changes the text and slopifies it, or people are lying about using it for translation only because the outputs are horrendous. Google Translate won't fluff out the output with garbage or reformat everything with emoji.
"Translate this from X to X, don't change any meaning or anything else, only translate the text with idiomatic usage in target language: X"
Using Google Translate probably means you're using a language model in the end anyways behind the scenes. Initially, the Transformer was researched and published as an improvement for machine translation, which eventually led to LLMs. Using them for translation is pretty much exactly what they excel at :)
Yep. If you don't know the language, it's best not to pretend you do.
I've done this kind of thing, even if I think it's likely they speak English. (I speak zero Japanese here.) It's just polite and you never know who's going to be reading it first.
I didn’t say GPTs in general. ChatGPT specifically should be avoided. So many people are posting the most blatant ChatGPT slop full of em dashes and emoji and then claiming they just used it to translate.
Using software for translation is fine as long as the original source is also present for native speakers to check and any important information that is machine translated should be read by humans to test
Why would you want to use a chat bot to translate? Either you know the source and destination language, in which case you'll almost certainly do a better job (certainly a more trustworthy job), or you don't, in which case you shouldn't be handling translations for that language anyway.
Same with grammar fixes. If you don't know the language, why are you submitting grammar changes??
No, I think GP means grammar fixes to your own communication. For example if I don't speak Japanese very well and I want to write to you in Japanese, I might write you a message in Japanese, then ask an LLM to fix up my grammar and check my writing to make sure I'm not sounding like a complete idiot.
I have read a lot of bad grammar from people who aren't very good at the language but are trying their best. It's fine. Just try to express yourself clearly and we figure it out.
I have read text where people who aren't very good at the language try to "fix it up" by feeding it through a chat bot. It's horrible. It's incredibly obvious that they didn't write the text, the tone is totally off, it's full of obnoxious ChatGPT-isms, etc.
Just do your best. It's fine. Don't subject your collaborators to shitty chat bot output.
Agreed. Humans are insanely good at figuring out intent and context, and running stuff through an LLM breaks that.
The times I've had to communicate IRL in a language I don't speak well, I do my best to speak slowly and enunciate and trust they'll try their best to figure it out. It's usually pretty obvious what you're asking lol. (Also a lot of people just reply with "Can I help you?" in English lol)
I've occasionally had to email sites in languages I don't speak (to tell them about malware or whatever) and I write up a message in the simplest, most basic English I can. I run that through machine translation that starts out with "This was generated by Google Translate" and include both in the email.
Just do your best to communicate intent and meaning, and don't worry about sounding like an idiot.
Not my experience in human discourse. Most people have a very, very hard time seeing beyond their own assumptions and biases and reading the actual context and intent.
You seem to be judging business communications by weird middle-class aesthetics while the people writing the emails are just trying to be clear.
If you think that every language level is always sufficient for every task (a fluency truther?), then you should agree that somebody who writes an email in a language that they are not confident in, puts it through an LLM, and decides the results better explain the idea they were trying to convey than they had managed to do is always correct in that assessment. Why are you second guessing them and indirectly criticizing their language skills?
Running your words through ChatGPT isn't making you clear. If your own words are clear enough to be understood by ChatGPT, they're clear enough to be understood by your peers. Adding ChatGPT into the mix only ensures opportunity for meaning to be mangled. And text that's bad enough as to be ambiguous may be translated to perfectly clear text that reflects the wrong interpretation of your words, risking misunderstandings that wouldn't happen if the ambiguity was preserved instead of eliminated.
I have no idea what you're talking about with regard to being a "fluency truther", I think you're putting words into my mouth.
Eh, na dawg, I'll have to reject a lot of what you've typed here.
LLMs can do a lot of proof checking on what you've written. Asking it to check for logical contradictions in what I've stated and such. It will catch were I've forgot things like a 'not' in one statement so one sentence is giving a negative response and another gives a positive response unintentionally. This kind of error is quite often hard for me to pick up on, yet the LLM seems to do well.
I completely agree. I let LLMs write a ton of my code, but I do my own writing.
It's actually kind of a weird "of two minds" thing. Why should I care that my writing is my own, but not my code?
The only explanation I have is that, on some level, the code is not the thing that matters. Users don't care how the code looks, they just care that the product works. Writing, on the other hand, is meant to communicate something directly from me, so it feels like there's something lost if I hand that job over to AI.
I often think of this quote from Ted Chiang's excellent story The Truth Of Fact, The Truth of Feeling:
> As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.”
But there is obviously some kind of tension in letting an LLM write code for me but not prose - because can't the same quote apply to my code?
I can't decide if there really is a difference in kind between prose and code that justifies letting the LLM write my code, or if I'm just ignoring unresolved cognitive dissonance because automating the coding part of my job is convenient.
To me, you are describing a fluency problem. I don't know you or how fluent you are in code, but what you have described is the case where I have no problem with LLMs: translating from a native language to some other language.
If you are using LLMs to precisely translate a set of requirements into code, I don't really see a problem with that. If you are using LLMs to generate code that "does something" and you don't really understand what you were asking for nor how to evaluate whether the code produced matched what you wanted, then I have a very big problem with that for the same reasons you outline around prose: did you actually mean to say what you eventually said?
Of course something will get lost in any translation, but that's also true of translating your intent from brain to language in the first place, so I think affordances can be made.
What do you recommend if I've been regularly producing blog-length posts in Slack for years, no LLM present? It's where I write man...should I quit that out? I try to be information dense...
Yeah I use LLMs to show me how to shorten my emails because I can type for days. It helps a lot for when I feel like I just need a short concise email but I still write it all myself.
I see this on Reddit a lot. Someone will vibe code something then spam a bunch of subreddits with LLM marketing text. It’s all low effort low quality sooo.
I have many colleagues that use copilot for it and it's so dumb. This hyper-excited corporate drone style, the emoji dragged into everything, the bullet points.
In my opinion it really devalues the message they're sending. I immediately get this dismissive rolleyes feeling when I see it.
Meltybrains are still wheeled robots even if they use the wheels in a novel way.
If you could develop a self-starting top capable of remote controlled translational movement you would get non-wheeled weight bonuses up to 2x in most competitions.
Long term stability is less important for gaming computers than having the most cutting edge (and theoretically highest performance) drivers. That's why the community leans so heavily towards arch.
Many in my regular cycling group are getting them. I find the camera creepy and do not trust meta enough to put anything they make on my face, but they do provide a lot of value to wearers (gps navigation, comms, etc).
I know there are alternatives from more trustworthy companies but haven't looked into them in depth.
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