Insurance companies are also run state by state. My blue state plan covered my vaccine completely. As they say, follow the money. It's in my insurance company's best interest for me to stay healthy. They don't have the luxury of treating it like a culture war.
The comment explicitly mentioned "cities". Of course rural and suburban areas don't make it practical to be without a car, but many people in cities could use public transportation but handwave it as beneath them or dangerous or unreliable. When in reality it works just fine. Car travel has its own tradeoffs that can be just as easily exaggerated.
The population has been handed a shortcut machine and will give in to taking the path of least resistance in their tasks. It may be ironic but it's not surprising to see it used here.
A big task my team did had measured accuracy in the mid 80% FWIW.
I think the line of thought in this thread is broadly correct. The most value I’ve seen in AI is problems where the cost of being wrong is low and it’s easy to verify the output.
I wonder if anyone is taking good measurements on how frequently an LLM is able to do things like route calls in a call center. My personal experience is not good and I would be surprised if they had 90% accuracy.
That's what we had before LLMs. Without the financially imposed contrivance of it needing to be used everywhere, it was free to be used where it made sense.
If remote work actually resulted in higher productivity, the first attempt to ship the labor base offshore would have worked. (Not that remote is the only variable there, but you brought it up.) With LLMs they see an opening to try again, now that they view labor as commodity babysitters of LLM output.
Fortunately, a good number of people in the 3 of 5 population have the imagination to see that they or people they love will someday be in the 2 of 5 population.
> Folks say handwavy things like “oh they’ll just sell ads” but even a cursory analysis shows that math doesn’t ad up relative to the sums of money being invested at the moment.
We should factor in that messaging that's seamless and undisclosed in conversational LLM output will be a lot more valuable that what we think of as advertising today.
I don't see that happening. People have stuck with streaming and social networking as they've trended user-hostile. And with LLMs an even greater type of dependence is being cultivated.
The screen doesn't have to be obnoxious like this, though. A Chevy van has a small screen embedded in the rear view mirror, which is impossible to see when not in reverse.
Oh really? My current car is over 20 years old so I'm way out of the loop. I guess I'll hope for options with smaller screens that control fewer of the functions.
My next daily will likely be something with approximately the same level of technology.
There are about ten buttons on the dashboard, of which the only ones I care about is the rotary knob that turns on the headlights and the button that switches the heater from "normal" to "EVERYTHING UP FULL ALL ON RIGHT NOW FULL BORE MAXIMUM EVERYTHING WE ARE GOING TO AIR FRY A POLAR BEAR ON THE BACK SEAT".
There's an LCD screen. It's the size of my thumb, and tells me how many miles it's done (only 190,000 - it's my low mileage one, my other has done 270 and there's a guy on my forum who's rapidly closing in on 600,000 miles in his), what gear it thinks it's probably in, and occasionally it uses this LCD to lie about the gearbox overheating because water got into the plug for the sensor when I drove through a river and it came over the bonnet.
It's not very fast or very efficient, but it does everything I need a car to do, and I have a full factory service manual for it and easy access to spares.
You could still buy some rad cars into the '10s but you generally had to go looking.
The fiesta st is a decent example. An economy car, so very simple, but with a sports package. The only "smart" features, like traction control, can be turned off.
100% manuals are the way to go if you want to feel like a driver, not a passenger. I love my manual Jetta
Thing is, people are lazy. US market is automatics only. Can't make people understand what the clutch is or why slushbox is bad for fuel efficiency. No one cares. Gas guzzlers are the national idea
My kid learned to drive a manual in 15 minutes. Too much effort for US drivers!
Automatics have been more efficient than manuals for decades. And the computer can shift a DCT faster than you can. These days a manual tranny is right up there with hand-crank starting your car: if you enjoy it, great, but don’t get smug because people don’t want to manually adjust the spark advance.
>Automatics have been more efficient than manuals for decades.
No, they haven't. At least, not ones the average consumer could actually buy.
While it's true that modern 8 or 10 speed automatic transmissions do now compete favorably with 6 speed manuals, the former didn't meaningfully exist in passenger cars or trucks until around 2017. Neither did DCTs outside of high-end brands- sure, they're starting to do that now that "torque converter loss" means they don't pass emissions, but that was an option that commanded a premium back in the mid-00s when they were introduced (and still not actually more efficient than a manual outside of shift speed).
An automatic with 4 gears is less efficient than a manual with 5, much less 6 (this was the standard until about 2010 or so); one with 6 gears is likely on par with the 5-speed manual (and loses to a 6-speed, obviously).
So no, "decades" is bullshit. It's a very recent advancement.
Only because they cheap out and don't put in manual with optimal gear ratios. Otherwise the manual is better because you can use high throttle with low rpms - try that in an auto and you get high rpms which is bad for efficiency - but great for acceleration.
When you have a small fuel efficient engine, you can tell and feel the difference. With a V6 under your hood, you probably don't care. US is mostly big engines
You will still care that you're wasting a bunch of your engine's potential, even with a V8.
Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).
> You will still care that you're wasting a bunch of your engine's potential, even with a V8.
You're not really, especially on a long run. If you're doing motorway speeds there is no difference in economy and performance. An auto will be a bit worse in slow driving, when it's using the torque converter which is quite lossy.
> Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).
They will let you rev the engine as high as you like and will engine-brake just fine if you select a lower gear. They might not shift into a lower gear if you've got a gearbox that's smart enough to stop you money-shifting the engine.
Not really, although I guess the least powerful automatic I've ever driven was a 1.7 litre naturally-aspirated diesel Citroën Xantia. It was very economical on long runs but acceleration was really something for very patient people.
Most Xantias had a 1.9 petrol making roughly 50% more power, although with appreciably less torque.
To be fair, I have a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was the first year of their then new model rollout for the GC. It was (as I understand it) the last of the Mercedes JGCs.
I love this thing, it's a "cold dead hands" kind of car for me. Only has 120k-ish miles on it.
I won't say it's my last car ever, I just have a hard time visualizing swapping it out for anything.
It starts, all the buttons work, it's cosmetically 95%. The single biggest issue is that last year it was down for a couple of months simply because of parts availability. It's not unreliable, but it's swapped a few things (water pump, radiator, A/C has had work twice, guess it's a bit notorious in the community). Purchased in 2013, it's a 12 year old car.
But waiting months for suspension components (air suspension, which I adore) was a real drag. Even with a dealer supplied rental.
That would be the thing that sends me over the edge long term, I think.
It'll be a shame when it happens, I love the car.
The dealer wants to buy it every time I take it in for routine maintenance.
You don’t know much about cars. All the work they had done on their vehicle was typical for that model generation. Air suspensions are generally problematic because of constant wear mixed with parts issues, and A/C problems are common in that model generation. This is all normal stuff to fix over twelve years.
I do most of the maintenance of cars in our garage, and I would never accept double AC repair, suspension and radiator replacement to be "normal" around 120k.
The thing is, modern jeeps are a joke even compared to this "reliable" example.
There was a post recently about over-the-air update bricking Jeeps WHILE DRIVING ON THE FUCKING HIGHWAY. And no one cares. People keep buying this trash and defend double AC repairs. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
They sell luxury goods, which people know to avoid when they care about reliability
The thing is, jeeps are even beating the BMWs when it comes to unreliability.
Yes Mercedes built that garbage for the US market because US market eats that crap. Then stellantis took it a step up and removed reliability from their vocabulary entirely - more profitable that way. I'd pick a modern VW over American garbage all day any day.
But sure, keep yourself convinced about exceptionalism of American SUVs.
My 2016 Corolla seems to be the last year without a SIM (it does have a screen but whatever it just shows me what's playing on the stereo), but despite a Corolla being bulletproof and me rarely driving anymore, i do still wonder whether i can get away with this car forever or if I'll have to buy some spyware carriage someday
What if, instead of just attempting to retreat into a shrinking world that will eventually disappear, we all collectively worked together to fix things?
