alexawarrior3

"Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded."

Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was.

The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.

And what's going to happen long term with exploding Berlin rents? The only affordable rents will be out in the suburbs of Berlin, where you'll either have to drive in or spend 2-3x the time on a probably crowded train possibly standing room only. As in the example of Switzerland above, mass transit is a luxury for those able to pay high rents. Previously in Berlin this was subsidized by the rest of Germany and by price controls but the right-wing courts have pretty much gutted Berlin's price protections in favor of billion-euro property developers.

I lived in Germany for years without driving as well, because I could afford to live by the city center. But over half my colleagues drove because that's all they could afford to do, and you should try stepping out of your bubble and understand the pressures that force Germans to drive. They're not all just wanting to spend more time in their Audis.

They're just trying to save your from the fire ants.

We solved that problem for you by closing everything at 9pm now, or earlier.

ITT: if you're rich enough you don't have to see the billboards saturating the landscape of the customers feeding the investments you own.

Let's be real: you've never been poor. I have. When you're poor you don't "choose a job that's nearer". You get whatever you can take. If that's 2 hours commute each way, so be it. You need to eat and pay rent (at least in the US where there's not much in the way of welfare). The rich and poor alike drive, but the rich can live close to work and the poor often can't. The very poor take the bus if it's available and just eat the extra time commuting, which in my city is usually 3x the time driving. The bus is also a safety issue, my friends have been robbed waiting for the bus and after getting off the bus, driving is safer in this regard.

The Katy Freeway seems idiotic, unless you actually need to drive in Houston, and then it's great. It's great that I have space between me and my neighbors. It's great that I can stay cool in my car and avoid the heat and rain from my garage to my destination (often, an HEB with a parking garage). It's great that I can get anywhere in the city outside of rush hour in 30 min or less. It's great that I can fill up my battery from the comfort of my home at off-peak hours. It's great that Tesla FSD takes me the whole way and only tries to kill me once or twice.

I've lived in a tiny apartment in a super-dense European city with Japanese levels of extent and service, and yet now for less money I live in my house like the European upper class, in a house bigger than theirs and with the same car they drive. I could never have afforded this in Western Europe (or Europe-like SF, NYC, etc). But freeway-loving America makes it possible.

Reposted with editable accessible link above.

None of these I've seen actually works in practice. Having used LLMs for software development the past year or so, even the latest GPT-4/Gemini doesn't produce anything I can drop in and have it work. I've got to go back and forth with the LLM to get anything useful and even then have to substantially modify it. I really hope there are some big advancements soon and this doesn't just collapse into another AI winter, but I can easily see this happening.

Some recent actual uses cases for me where an agent would NOT be able to help me although I really wish it would:

1. An agent to automate generating web pages from design images - Given an image, produce the HTML and CSS. LLMs couldn't do this for my simple page from a web designer. Not even close, even mixing up vertical/horizontal flex arrangement. When I cropped the image to just a small section, it still couldn't do it. Tried a couple LLMs, none even came close. And these are pretty simple basic designs! I had to do it all manually.

2. Story Generator Agent - Write a story from a given outline (for educational purposes). Even at a very detailed outline level, and with a large context window, kept forgetting key points, repetitive language, no plot development. I just have to write the story myself.

3. Illustrator Agent - Image generation for above story. Images end up very "LLM" looking, often miss key elements in the story, but one thing is worst of all: no persistent characters. This is already a big problem with text, but an even bigger problems with images. Every image for the same story has a character who looks different, but I want them to be the same.

4. Publisher Agent - Package things together above so I can get a complete package of illustrated stories on topics available on web/mobile for viewing, tracking progress, at varying levels.

Just some examples of where LLMs are currently not moving the needle much if at all.

I was cycling on such a "beautiful" cobblestone path with a tram line through it, and got my tire stuck in the tram rail, I instantly fell over, and only luck saved me from getting run over by a car.

Where I've seen cobblestone replaced generally everyone was much happier with the new pavement.

The only wearable headset so far has been Google Glass. It was great for wearing around 24x7 with only pauses to recharge. I even had mine in prescription glasses so I could wear them as my primary.

Then, as Google does, they dropped it, and no one took it up again. I'd have to imagine that in 10+ years of display and battery improvements an even better Glass is waiting to hit the market. It seems more a social issue rather than a technological one: we as a society are not ready for universal AR.