Note that every time a company comes up with a choice between a smaller phone and a larger phone (up to some limit when you get into phablet territory), the larger phone sells in much, much higher numbers. Apple themselves tried the Mini, it sold at best a few percent of how well the regular phones sell.
While you, personally, might prefer smaller phones, and that's a perfectly valid preference, you are very much in the minority.
The point is that good public transport makes cars unnecessary for the vast majority of everyday life in an urban setting. And, in particular, it means that taking away someone's license, even for a long period of time, doesn't have to be as crippling as it is in cities that don't have good infrastructure - hopefully leading to society being way more willing to apply drastic driving penalties to repeat offenders.
The point is this: if you live in a city with bad/no public transport, then a car is necessary for going about everyday life. If you live in a city with good public transport, it's really not.
Given the fact that car infrastructure competes for resources with public transport infrastructure, and is vastly more expensive per person-km, and vastly more dangerous as well, prioritizing efficient use of public resources trumps personal comfort when looking at this. The same can't be said for housing, so the comparison is not relevant. Plus, there are very objective reasons for which privacy is an absolute requirement at home (mostly to do with vulnerability and sexual behaviors), which also don't apply to cars; especially since the kind of privacy you get in your own car is actually quite limited anyway - it would be both illegal and quite unsafe to drive around naked, at least in a bad neighborhood, for example.
Unnecessary is the perfect word. If a car is unnecessary then can simply choose to not have one. Right now a car is required to live in most places in the US.
No one is saying people must give up their cars. I just want more options.
Your housing analogy is also perfect. Nearly 80% of the land in my city is single-family zoning so it’s necessary to buy an expensive detached home to live in my city. I would like more choice in housing, transit, etc.
Unnecessary is the perfect word and it’s not strong at all
You can argue all day whether cars are good or bad. That's not my point. My point is that pretending public transport is equivalent to cars if you have good enough infrastructure is silly. They are different experiences, each with their own tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs matter differently to different people.
> So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
No, the point was that instead of cities waiting until self-driving cars become an option to help get rid of terrible drivers, the cities could invest in public transportation today, and get better road safety that way.
> the cities could invest in public transportation today
Again, with what money? My city is insolvent and every extra money it gets goes to cover the massive financial hole of social programs like elderly care and handicapped people, which is growing in need.
Would you sacrifice the elderly and disabled, so people give up on needing cars to get to work?
Again, just saying "invest in public transportation" is like telling homeless people to invest in real estate.
Car infrastructure is typically a huge part of the costs of any city. Roads and parking spots and so on don't maintain themselves. If most people used public transport, you'd need far less road infra to maintain every year.
Anyway, my point was about how we allocate existing money, not about increasing spending.
>Car infrastructure is typically a huge part of the costs of any city.
Car drivers, at least in EU where I live, are net cash cows to the local economy with all the taxes they pay on everything car related and second order business they support: fuel tax, car tax, insurance, parking , service stations, gas stations, shops, dealerships, finance leasing and banking, towing services, emissions tax, etc
All of these businesses profit from car drivers. If you remove cars you'll have a massive hole in the economy. That's why no government has banned cars, but just made driving expensive to increase the money they get from drivers and add it to the city/government budget that then gets spent on public transport infrastructure..
> Roads and parking spots and so on don't maintain themselves.
Roads and parking spots are not free for car drivers(where I live), they pay for them directly in taxes, and it's a net profit for the local economy. That's where the maintenance money comes from.
>If most people used public transport, you'd need far less road infra to maintain every year.
Buses drive on the same car infrastructure as cars and cause more road damage due to their massive weight so you still need roads and maintenance costs. If you replace cars with more busses then the roads will see even more wear needing more money except now you have less money.
>Anyway, my point was about how we allocate existing money,
That's an economically illiterate and purely ideology driven take that makes no sense. You can't allocate existing funding away from roads towards more public transport because exiting public transport also depends on roads existing and being maintained, with money from car drivers chipping in to share those roads.
If you want to improve or add new public transport(like build rail or buy more busses) then you need to get more money from somewhere. There's no free lunch where if you get drivers off the road then suddenly you have more money. No, now you have less money.
And I'm on your side in spirit, I want a car-free society. But for that I want to see Swiss levels of public transport first. Life is too short to waste it commuting on bad infrequent and slow public transit that doesn't take me where I need to get. Hence driving cars FTW.
My pithy response is the same as people who have told me what to do when I try and advocate for transit. “Move somewhere else.”
I don’t find these problems unsolvable. We spend over $200 billion on roads a year. That’s almost $75bn more than the CA high speed rail. That’s project has its own problems but local buses and street cars and road diets would cost minuscule fractions of that number and improve conditions and options for nearly everyone.
Cars are clearly not a perfect solution. They are expensive and unsafe. But for some reason transit and buses have to be the perfect solution for everyone upon immediate delivery just to get the tiniest fraction of funding.
It’s actually quite easy. RTD in the front range in Colorado has drastically reduced issues on buses and the light rail the past couple of years. It wasn’t that hard.
I take various forms of transit regularly and I’ve never had an issue more noteworthy than any interaction I’ve had in a car.
It's pretty easy to solve once the political problem is solved. Colorado has solved the political problem, but many jurisdictions haven't. Mustering the political capital to defy the coalition of groups that oppose strict enforcement of city ordinances on public transport is something many major cities have not managed to do.
> any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as well have been made by Von der Leyen herself.
This is simply wrong. Plenty of security-sensitive companies and agencies disallow the use of any Chinese model out of hand. Given the black box nature of LLMs, the fact that it's "open weight" is irrelevant to the trust calculus, and the fact that it's self hosted barely adds anything.
How do you confirm that you did enough pre-train and post-train to remove the relevant bias/backdoor?
Note that I'm not singling out Chinese models here. The same question and concern should apply to any model you use - in security critical scenarios, you need to ask yourself if you can trust the provider, since the artifact, the model itself, is far too complex to audit and trust.
Given most AI companies' ties to the weapons industry and spying apparatus of their host countries, it would be absurd to think that burying some kind of malicious payload in the models has not at least been contemplated, and I would bet it has been at least attempted. We know retrospectively this was the case with many previous technologies (remember the backdoored encryption that the NSA tried for so long to push), so it would be naive to think it's not at least plausible with AI.
The company owners have one set of standards for those that work for them, and a completely different set of standards for themselves and for the company itself.
If you are using AI and it causes some damage to them, then it's your fault and you'll get reprimanded/fired. If they deploy AI and it causes damage to someone else, then that's proof that AI has extraordinary capabilities that no one could predict and that merit way more investment in this tech.
We still have a good few thousand years until we make the Earth anywhere close to as inhospitable as the second best planet in the Solar System - and probably much more than that before we run out of space on Earth.
It makes far more sense to colonize the Arctic, the Gobi desert, the peaks of the tallest mountains, and similar places here on Earth before even contemplating the colonization of Mars. Let's first have a 10M-strong self-sustaining megacity at the South Pole before contemplating absurd projects like a Mars colony.
I have different take on this. We already shown significant decline in Fertility rate of whole world. Its right now 2.2 against nearly 5 in 1950s till 1970. 2.1 is replacement only. So, we are sorted there from occupying Glaciers,Mountains, etc.
Moreover, Average age of many countries are increasing. That might need support in near future. Migration is filling up that gap in Western world.
As per current prediction world population will peak around 2080s and then decline.
Problem is that decline. Since, Governments are working on selling futures (e.g. Bonds). We need new frontier to make things exciting for new generations up ahead.
People aren't making more children because they largely can't afford to, either in actual resources, or in time spent. And, unlike in a rural community, children don't have any "return on investment" - plus, you generally have to raise them alone even when they're no longer toddlers, rather than relying on an entire community to do it together.
There's no great mystery, and a colony on Mars will not change this even one iota.
> because they largely can't afford to, either in actual resources, or in time spent
But that's absolutely not true. People are so wealthy right now that they can afford practically an unlimited amount of children. The avoidance of having children is almost entirely shaped by the cultural environment and not economic environment.
> relying on an entire community to do it together
I am not sure that it ever was a case. "Relying on an entire community" to raise children generally meant that children were raised mostly by themselves.
> The avoidance of having children is almost entirely shaped by the cultural environment and not economic environment.
Cultural factors are certainly a part of it, but probably mostly in the sense that we are (rightfully, I believe) far less willing to let children die young or get maimed. But economic factors are a huge thing; I don't know where you live that you thing young people "can afford practically an unlimited number of children", but in most of Europe and the USA it is in fact impossible for the bottom 50+% of young couples to even support themselves, not to mention a child, on a single income. And it's also very hard to raise a child 0-4 in a city while working full time+.
> "Relying on an entire community" to raise children generally meant that children were raised mostly by themselves.
No. Children, historically, after they became capable of roaming around, were raised by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings etc. Even when they were away from adults, they'd be roaming near the village in groups with older children.
> we are (rightfully, I believe) far less willing to let children die young or get maimed.
I don't think it matters at all. Of course, we are, but there is a huge gap between "not let children die young or get maimed" and what is happening with child raising now.
> but in most of Europe and the USA
bottom 50+% of young couples would have zero problems to support even 20 children per couple. How do I know it? Because in other parts of the world other people easily support like 5+ kids on 10+ times less amount of resources than this bottom 50% of young couples in the Europe and the USA have. So it is purely cultural phenomenon.
> were raised by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings etc.
No, they (generally) weren't raised that way. Historically, "raised by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings etc" mean that they were like 5% of the time "raising by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings", and other 95% of the time raising by themselves (and maybe by neighbor's dog, best case scenario)
> Even when they were away from adults, they'd be roaming near the village in groups with older children.
I mean right now there is zero problems to raise 20 children per couple this way in the cities. Except for the cultural perception.
Apart from a gamma-ray burst, what do you imagine could happen to the Earth to make it as inhospitable as Mars?
Asteroid hits wouldn't come even close. The worse disease imaginable would not make the air as permanently dangerous to life as Mars' atmosphere is. So what exactly would motivate this move?
> P.S: the biggest success, from their leftist point of view, of french intellectuals is managing to present national-socialists as "far right" (as if they were fascists)
I wander how "national-socialist" sounds in other European languages, and whether it might have some history of referring to fascist movements. Say, what would the Germans call someone like that? Nationalsozialistische? I don't remember if there is any history about someone who called themselves that being a fascist...
Yeah, "when have national-socialists ever been fascist!" is all I read in GP's post after I got to that part. It's just a brain crash for me (I'm German)
This being 13M lines of entirely agent-generated code, we can't be certain it's written in good faith and doesn't actually exploit some weird metaprogramming trick. The agents' goal was to write a proof that Lean prints "correct" on, not to check that the proof of the FLT was valid (which they wouldn't be able to do anyway).
It's not impossible, but I also know of no instances of an AI being told to prove something in Lean and exploiting such tricks. Surely Anthropic also had some agents looking for issues with the generated proofs. Personally, I am also comfortable trusting Kevin Buzzard, who was leading the human team aiming to formalize FLT and discussed this a bit on his blog.
Finally, the good thing about Lean is that if anyone ever finds a new compiler bug (which, by the way, are being searched for extensively using AI), you can correct the bug and recompile any old proofs of which you are suspicious. Any tricks in a false proof must be exploiting a bug in the Lean compiler, so as we increase trust in the compiler over time we also increase trust in every previously compiled proof.
I agree it's not a 100% guarantee, but in this case the human proof is well-understood and written about by many experts, so I think Claude had plenty of material to work with. Even if the task was enormous, I don't think any of the individual steps are out of the scope of what we have seen from current AI tools.
> No matter what standard of care you receive, senescence will gradually kill you even with therapies or treatments to slow it.
That doesn't mean that it can't be entirely reversed. We already know that senescence is not a completely required part of life itself, or even of eukaryotic and/or multicellular organisms - as we have known examples of organisms that don't experience it. For example, jellyfish don't experience senescence (they go through a revolving cycle of polyp - jellyfish that can go on forever as far as we can tell). And even if true permanence is out of reach, we also know of animals that live for hundreds of years, and of plants and fungi that live for thousands or tens of thousands of years.
So, having a way to make something like a human (though possibly quite different from what we call a human, to be fair) live for at least a few hundred years if not much more is a very difficult but certainly solvable bioengeneering problem, not some philosophically impossible feat.
While you, personally, might prefer smaller phones, and that's a perfectly valid preference, you are very much in the minority.
reply