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well this will probably cause an exit of businesses

There's always that threath when we talk about fairer taxation, but let's not forget that the netherland (or any country for that matter) is a market that capital makes money from. If they leave, they won't be able to continue making money there, it would be a waste down the line. And I won't believe that fairer taxation will make it unprofitable, ot will be less interesting for the big ones but they'll stay because they're still making big bucks nonetheless.

Businessmen - it's for personal income taxes. I don't think it affects corporate taxes. Yet.

as worded is this tax not levied on any entity holding assets that can appreciate in value (businesses can hold stock too)?

Don't IKEA have a tax-free "design foundation" over there?

No. actually no company on earth has solved the voice assistant thing yet

Exactly. Looks like everybody's complaining that Siri isn't a better Ask Jeeves, when that's not the design goal. What people expect is an LLM that has full access to the phone. Nobody's even remotely close to shipping that.

I just want "set timer for 5 minutes" and "what time is it" to work reliably, 100% of the time.

Works on Siri! You can even set – get this – multiple timers ;)

I seem to get about 90%; wife gets closer to 80%. I just want it to be better.

Activate Siri and then say the amount of time you'd like on the timer. For me, that's holding the side button then only saying, "20 minutes."

The one caveat is that once the timer you want is two and a half hours or longer, then Siri replies by asking what you would like to convert to.


That may be it - we’re always asking a HomePod to do it - “hey siri set timer for five minutes”

My Siri-initiated timers are always done with my phone, probably 50 or more each week (work stuff). The only time I get a failure is when I release the side button too quickly. I've made certain the spoken feedback is enabled to reduce the risk of me making that mistake. (Settings > Siri > Siri Responses > Prefer Spoken Responses)

As for, "What time is it?"... Try activating Siri and only saying, "Time."


I suspect that's the main difference; if you're trying to use hands-free voice activation via "hey Siri" you get a much different experience than if you can touch the watch/phone to trigger Siri first.

And thinking back over it, more than half the failures are complete - e.g., it likely never activated at all. Very few are "it set a timer, but for the wrong time".


Good chance that's what captures our different Siri experiences. The few times I've done it spoken was always with AirPods and I always waited for the Siri reply (been a while; is it, "Uh-huh"?) after I said, "Hey, Siri." But my experience activating Siri with speech is so minimal as to be untrustworthy of anything broader.

I guess it depends on what you mean by voice assistant.

But Android has been 100% accurate for simple commands for over a decade for me. Things like:

- "weather." tells me forecast of where I am.

- "alarm at 8am" and "alarm in 30 minutes" works as expected.

- calendar commands also work

My favourite is "go home" which opens Google map with a route to home.

These things just work. I don't recall last time I had to repeat myself.


I wonder if we are getting different versions based on geolocation (I'm in Europe) because my experience is the absolute opposite of this. I actually had the thought "maybe I should switch to apple to stop having to deal with this" just this week (although reading this thread siri is as bad).

My experience is only through android auto and it honestly makes me furious how bad it is. There is absolutely no other tech product in my life that gets even close to how bad voice commands are handled in Android.

In my experience, literally everything sucks:

- single language voice recognition (me speaking in English with an accent)

- multi language voice recognition (english commands that include localised names from the country I'm in)

- action in context (understand what I'm actually asking it to do)

- supported actions (what it can actually do)

Some practical examples from just this week:

- I had to repeat 3 times that "no I don't want to reply" because I made the mistake of getting google to read a whatsapp message while driving, and it got stuck into the "would you like to reply" (it almost always gets stuck - it's my goto example to show people how bad it is)

- I asked it to queue a very specific playlist on Spotify, and it just couldn't get it right (no matter how specific my command was, I couldn't get it to play a playlist from MY. account instead of playing an unrelated public playlist)

- I asked to add a song to a playlist, and it said it couldn't do that (at least it understood what I was asking? maybe)

And in general I gave up trying to use google maps through voice commands, because it's just not capable of understanding an English command if it contains a street/location name pronounced in the local language/accent.


How is that even possible with modern transcribing and natural language capabilities?

Don't they distill directly off OpenAI/Google outputs?

Woah, metr results look impressive. Still looking exponential


all i care about is performance on metr benchmark


Waymo is overly conservative last time I checked. Driving the speed limit basically means getting to your destination twice as slow.


"Twice as slow" is not even slightly accurate.

If you're driving 45 in a 40, that may sound like 12% faster, but once you add traffic, lights, stop signs, turns, etc - you'll find that the 12% all but evaporates. Even if you're really pushing it and going 15 over, at most speeds and for most typical commutes, it saves very little.

Most of the time speeding ends up saving on the order of seconds on ~30 minutes or shorter trips.

Just about the only time it can be noticeable is if you're really pushing it (going to get pulled over speeds) on a nearly empty highway for a commute of 1.5+ hours.


93% of American drivers think they're better drivers than the median driver [0].

This overconfidence causes humans to take unnecessary risks that not only endanger themselves, but everyone else on the road.

After taking several dozen Waymo rides and watching them negotiate complex and ambiguous driving scenarios, including many situations where overconfident drivers are driving dangerously, I realize that Waymo is a far better driver than I am.

Waymos don't just prevent a large percentage of accidents by making fewer mistakes than a human driver, but Waymos also avoid a lot of accidents caused by other distracted and careless human drivers.

Now when I have to drive a car myself, my goal is to try to drive as much like a Waymo as I can.

[0] https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1981-svenson.pdf


It's not just overconfidence, it's selfishness.

Speeding feels like "I'm more important than everyone else and the safety of others and rules don't apply to me" personally. It's one thing to match the speed of traffic and avoid being a nuisance (that I'm fine with) - a lot of people just think they're the main character and everyone else is just in their way.

It's a problem that goes way beyond driving, sadly.


Eh this doesn't mean much. The quality of drivers is pretty bimodal.

You have the group that's really bad and does things like drive drunk, weave in and out of traffic, do their makeup and so on.

The other group generally pays attention and tries to drive safely. This is larger than the first group and realistically there's not all that much difference within the group.

If you're in group two you will think you're above average because the comparison is to the crap drivers in group one.


Yeah, I chuckle a bit when the person who blew by me on the freeway at 80mph is just 2 cars ahead of me at the offramp stop light.


Yeah, speed shouldn't be about time-to-destination except for emergency vehicles. It's about fahrfegnuggen.


I'll add on that speeding is the biggest contributing factor in accidents. And accident outcomes get exponentially worse above 30mph. For every 10 mph of increased speed, the risk of dying in a crash doubles.


There's a great paper which I can't find any more that said "going faster makes you take longer to get to the destination"; they showed the expected value for arrival time was longer at speed due to higher accident rates.


Twice as slow was probably accurate when comparing Uber with freeways vs Waymo (which wasn't using freeways yet).

But now that Waymo is gonna use freeways, that major speed difference is gonna evaporate.


In the real world 45 in a 40 will often enough get through lights just before they turn to red often enough that your real speed is more than twice as fast! Unless the city has timed their lights correctly - which sounds easy but on a grid is almost impossible for all streets. It all depends on how the red lights are timed.


I've ridden in Waymos in LA, SF, and Phoenix. You're right about them being a bit conservative, but only in Phoenix did I feel like that really slowed my ride. In LA and SF there was so much traffic that even if cars pulled away from us, we'd catch them at the next red light.


My understanding was waymo in LA does not yet take freeways (maybe this announcement will change that) which makes it a strictly worse experience in LA specifically.


I check Google maps ETA estimates when I get in a car in SF; they are accurate for Uber or Lyfts, but Waymos are absolutely slower there. This is especially, but not exclusively, true for routes where a human would take the 101 or 280, for obvious reasons.


At this point, any accident or rule violation can whip up a luddite storm threatening the whole industry, so self driving taxis will be extremely cautious until the general public have lost their fear.


Waymo may be currently safer than human drivers, but this right here is why I don't believe for a second they'll stay that way. People will complain it took to long to get somewhere because "stupid car was following all the rules!" and they'll be programmed to become more aggressive and dangerous (and due to regulatory capture they'll get away with this of course). I've already noticed this in San Francisco.


You realize it's technically illegal to drive faster than the speed limit, right? In the eyes of the law, it's doesn't matter whether everyone else is doing it or not.


It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic. It can technically be illegal to drive at (or below) the speed limit because it creates an unsafe environment for all the other cars on the road that are driving faster, even if they’re all breaking the legal speed limit.

It’s not a viable defense if you get a ticket for speeding but in practice the speed limit is really the prevailing speed of traffic plus X mph, where X adjusted for the state. I.e. in my experience Texas is more strict about the speed limit even on their desolate highways, LA is about 10 mph faster than San Francisco, in Seattle it depends on the weather, you’ll never hit the speed limit in New York anyway, and in Florida you just say the gator ate the officer who pulled you over.


It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic.

No they don’t, you’ve misinterpreted what was written. “Not impeding traffic” is not codified as “exceed the speed limit if everyone else is, or get a ticket”.

Or perhaps you have a documented counter-example.


The rule in Indiana is that on a multilane highway you must move to the right to allow overtaking traffic to pass. You are not there to enforce the speed limit; the fact that another car that is passing you might be speeding does not give you the right or duty to block them.

"a person who knows, or should reasonably know, that another vehicle is overtaking from the rear the vehicle that the person is operating may not continue to operate the vehicle in the left most lane"

With of course some reasonable exceptions.

https://law.justia.com/codes/indiana/title-9/article-21/chap...


The rule in Indiana is that on a multilane highway you must move to the right to allow overtaking traffic to pass.

That's a rule just about everywhere, but that's not what's being discussed. I'm in the right lane doing the speed limit, and OP claims that's "technically" illegal due to contradictory laws. (Where there is no real contradiction, because the Chesterton's Fence is that we don't want Farmer Jones driving his tractor to his fields down I-75 through Atlanta.)


What does happen in that situation sometimes is that if you're speeding along with everyone else, that sometimes gets allowed as a defense against a speeding ticket; basically the argument is that if driving the speed limit when all surrounding traffic is driving over the speed limit, that the relative speed difference can matter. At least that was true when I learned to drive (many, many years ago).


Right. What's (maybe) illegal (and definitely unsafe) is staying in the left lane, although driving at the posted speed limit, and impeding traffic that wants to pass.


Oh, as a Washington resident[0] I completely agree.

[0] The "joke" here being that WA drivers are notorious about parking in the left lane while driving 5mph under the limit.


I don’t know what you mean by “documented” but here is Georgia:

> No person shall drive a motor vehicle at such a slow speed as to impede the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, except when reduced speed is necessary for safe operation. [1]

Versus California:

> No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, _or in compliance with law_. [2] (underscore emphasis mine)

It’s part of the Uniform Vehicle Code but each state has its quirks in how they adopt it since theres no federal mandate.

My apologies though, this seems way less common than I thought. As far as I can tell Georgia and Oregon are the only two states left that don’t have that compliance exception.

On the other hand “in compliance with law” is it’s own barrel of monkeys because it doesn’t specify priority.

[1] https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/title-40/chapter-6/arti...

[2] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...


> I don’t know what you mean by “documented” but here is Georgia:

Georgia isn't going to punish you for going the speed limit in the right lane, they passed that law recently and called it the 'slow poke law'.

> On the other hand “in compliance with law” is it’s own barrel of monkeys because it doesn’t specify priority.

It really isn't.


> Georgia isn't going to punish you for going the speed limit in the right lane, they passed that law recently and called it the 'slow poke law'.

So you’re saying they had to pass a law clarifying a contradiction in previous laws? Those contradictions were my original point. And it still only applies to the slow poke lane.

> It really isn't.

Oh you sweet summer child.


[flagged]


Projection. Projection. Projection.

You’re literally viewing the law as a precise programming language, whereas I’m arguing that the reality is that laws are written in natural language that contains not only semantic ambiguity, but temporal ambiguity where one law is not coherent with another because they were created by different people at different times with different incentives.

You also didn’t bother responding to the meat of my argument, but hey you do you. Personally I’ve found that anyone who refers to other human beings as “NPCs” is void of any substance.


> It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic

As others have mentioned, this is dead wrong.

But the actual complication is enforcement usually requires a margin of error, and in some states (e.g. Wyoming) you can go 10 mph over when passing.


> It’s not a viable defense if you get a ticket for speeding but in practice the speed limit is really the prevailing speed of traffic plus X mph, where X adjusted for the state.

A lot of laws aren't enforced consistently in practice, sure. The implicit point is that while that may be so, it is nonetheless enforceable and nonetheless the law. So while individual people may be comfortable about being flexible in following traffic laws, having that behavior encoded or permitted by software is basically a declaration of broad intent to violate the law made by a company.


+1

and a product manager


This is such a steep price tag. I loved what Jeremy Howard put up on fast.ai and respect the heck out of his team, but I've seen too many people scammed by online courses that sell a dream. This one seems to be selling a dream as well.

I'll be purchasing the course to try it out but I think my concern is not a one-off thing.


I participated in the first batch and am not a shill, look through my comment history.

The dismissive comments here pain me as Ive seen them work hard on this over the last year as they integrated many of our feature requests and built out the platform. I’ve also had time to let the ideas sink in.

You definitely cant hang back and expect some magic ai to do all the work for you.

I also cant say „you will definitely benefit“ since everybody is difft.

But i can honestly say it‘s the real deal, no ifs and buts.


Is this an ad?


I'd say the fact that I'm unable to show purchase intention without being accused of being a shill proves my point.


I was unaware that you had a point.


Also Amodei has an assumption that a 100m model will make 200m of revenue but a 1B model will make 2B of revenue. Does that really hold up? There's no phenomenon that prevents them from only making 200m of revenue off a $1B model.


> So, there'll be a one-time, 'Oh man, we spent a lot of money and we didn't get anything for it.'


GPT-4.5 has entered the chat..


It seems like you burned out on writing this comment


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