There was an interview with Elon a few months back, where he described how the robots will be able to take care of your dog, your kids, or your elderly parents.
The things normal people with healthy relationships want to be doing.
> The things normal people with healthy relationships want to be doing.
agree - mostly. Anyone with a young child _and_ aging parents in poor health at the same time can tell you it's hell. Dealing with 1 at a time is a nice "calling" and way of giving back. both is...something i'd wish on my worst enemy lol.
To that I disagree. It's not hell that you have to take care both. It's hell when you have to juggle them between a full time job that you need just to survive. Caring for family is a full time job. Unfortunately, it comes with no pay.
Caring for a family usually came with help from the community.
Then we decided that nuclear families were the way to go, so we gotta do everything ourselves now, and with both parents working because one breadwinner isn’t enough to live on.
I certainly agree that the obligations of family can bring serious hardship as well as happiness. But I think that, on balance, most people believe it to be a net positive.
Then maybe it's best not to have kids no? I don't know why people bring it up like it's mandatory or something
Like if you want a robot to take care of your kid you may as well just skip instead of putting your kid through that.
(I'm not saying you specifically, but a lot of people complain all the time about how hard raising a kid is)
Participating in a democracy, going to school, paying taxes, having a job… Hell, visiting a new country, going camping, climbing a boulder — all of these things involve discomfort and cover a spectrum of ‘mandatory’ to ‘100% chosen’.
‘Complaining’ is part of human discourse. Generally it’s acceptable to share the full range of day-to-day gripes, elation, full tragedies (e.g., deaths), and emotional heights with other humans.
You don’t want to hear constant griping about raising kids. I get that. I might not want to hear griping about national politics or Apple doing something or other. Cest le vie.
Your parents no doubt griped about raising you. You don’t have to have kids but someone has to! We’re going to gripe mate. No one is forcing you to listen.
You’re getting downvoted because having children is a lifelong commitment, and health problems can come on fast. Raising children while dealing with parental health issues isn’t a choice people make, it’s something that life throws at them. Suggesting otherwise is deeply unempathetic.
Having children should not be something life throws at you, if that ends u happening the bast majority of cases is still your responsability to be there, not to put a clanker in place
I'm not even referring to that. I'm talking about basic stuff that anyone should research before having a kid like "childcare is too expensive" or "I don't get enough sleep"
You should do some basic research yourself. Childcare is too expensive for almost everyone. Is your idea that only the relatively wealthy should have children? You're not worried about the consequences of a .03 fertility rate?
I think the solution is to make childcare affordable with government intervention. But that's not going to happen if people keep having kids. There needs to be an actual demographic crisis
The argument is there's not much life training for having kids before you start, and even less for dealing with elderly parents.
So a lot of people are blindsided by the reality of either, and both together can be unimaginably difficult.
Aside from cash and life stability issues - both very real - I suspect that one of the reasons for the drop in birth rates is that because of the Internet, more people are seeing what parenting involves before they start.
Previously it was more of a rosy and aspirational "Let's have kids!", now it's "You mean I'll be severely sleep deprived for years?!"
Robots could help with all of this just by doing basic chores and automating daily bureaucracy.
In the best of all possible worlds that would free up more time for personal relationships, which can get very stressed by unavoidable demands that are basically a full-time job.
The point that you're missing is that nobody knows at what point their parents will experience severe health decline. That can happen at any time, people have strokes in their 50s or in their 80s.
unfortunately, this isn't one of those things you can plan your way out of. It's just part of dealing with life. if you're lucky, your parents will start having health problems once your kids are in school and don't need round the clock care at home. If you're unlucky, well, good luck lol
Or some ad I heard about with Melissa Meyers asking AI to list three best qualities about her child for a school homework because she couldn't think of any. It's sad, and even worse they think showing this to the world would help sell a product.
You're right, it's the very first paragraph, haha. I stopped reading TechCrush years ago when they put a privacy "consent" modal that cannot be refused - oh, they don't have it anymore, I assume they gave up on consent altogether and still track you though. Her name is spelled Marissa Mayer, and the esteemed publication is TechCrunsh, known for the philanthropic charity event, TechCrush Disturb.
This is what happens when wealth becomes generational.
Say what you want about the railway barons of the 19th century they all started out with nothing and knew the streets- because they came from them.
This is what set America apart from Europe. The old "paperboy becomes millionaire" story.
I agree but I'm starting to think "out of touch" isn't even a harsh enough critique. Out of touch is when you're not aware what's going on in popular culture right now. What do you call it when you don't even know what it is to be human? I think maybe these people are all sad psychopaths.
Nursing homes are a thing. It's not easy taking care of people at the end when they start falling over, needing toilet assistance and the like. Most of my elderly family had professional care at the end and it's an expensive business. I think £5k per week for my Aunt recently (now passed away).
I get the other things being out of touch, but Robot care for the elderly is something people have been looking at for awhile. I for one wouldn’t mind living independently into my 80s rather than being a burden on my only kid. I’m sure lots of people feel similar. Nursing homes and Elder care facilities also have huge labor problems, and throwing just money at the problem isn’t really an option.
Not fanboying or playing favorite, but I've never come across what you mentioned while using Claude Code. You may indeed be doing something wrong or some part of your config isn't right.
I use Copilot CLI at work, and Claude Code at home, and all harnesses are pretty good these days.
I imagine it was what it felt like for miners when they went from working next to each other with pickaxes, to operating massive machines by themselves, although that timeline was much longer and less jarring, taking a generation or two.
"Many cars have an AUTO option now, but would you trust it to choose the right thing? I didn’t, being unsure if it properly accounted for daylight rain driving."
While it doesn't negate the iconography discussion throughout the rest of the article, the AUTO option is the intended default, because it turns on low beams in every case where they're needed, including daylight rain driving, which is based on the use of windshield wipers. I'm always a bit baffled at the modern cars driving around without their lights on. The car does it for you these days.
The ability to select low beams vs daylight running lights (DRLs) is mostly for convenience for one-off odd circumstances where you would want to override AUTO for whatever reason.
I think the problem is that AUTO behaves differently across cars. Some turn on the headlights when the wipers are running, others seem to rely mostly on ambient light
I have the same light control on my car. Here's how it gets turned off: when I'm parking with the engine off, waiting for someone, the lights stay on unless I turn them off manually. If I don't turn them off, my use of the stereo and other accessories ends sooner than necessary when the car shuts them off to preserve enough charge to restart the engine.
Then, when I leave, I forget to turn the lights back to AUTO. Now I have no lights at all except for the front DRLs. (Even then, though, the low beams still come on automatically when the wipers are turned on for more than a couple of cycles.)
Really, the OFF position should work only when the car is parked. Otherwise, it should be equivalent to AUTO.
My understanding is that the OFF position is for special cases, such as on ferries (the drive-on kind, obviously) where cars are densely packed and they can shine into the staff.
I imagine they're referring to the case where the ferry workers are directing you when you first drive onto the boat. Seems like a valid point, but I hardly ever take ferries and don't recall if there are signs asking drivers to turn off their lights.
It'd be best to simply remind the driver that the lights are manually turned off with a subtle notification in the display, and leave it up to the driver to decide whether they should remain off.
The problems with Amazon these days, which may or may not be related to a buyer's specific location:
- Shipping delays. Prime's biggest selling point, is useless if orders aren't shipped in the advertised Prime timeframe. I've quit my Prime subscription multiple times this year because this keeps happening.
- Excessive advertising/sponsored listings. Over half the listings in a search are now sponsored listings, which are often lower quality listings. And Amazon now puts unrelated banner ads next to listings.
- Returns. While returns are typically hassle-free, this leads to abuse of the system. The returns get put back on the "shelf" without much inspection, and there have been more than a few times where I got an item listed as New, which was very clearly Used.
And then there are the cases where someone returns an item, but puts something else in the box for weight, so you end up getting a completely different thing than you ordered.
I once ordered a parallel LiPo battery charging board, and in the box was a LiPo battery, which someone clearly put in the box for weight. That situation was particularly dangerous, because a LiPo, let alone a used LiPo of unknown charge state, cannot be shipped by air and must be shipped by ground. If Amazon had put that box on a plane, that'd be a serious safety issue.
A lot of the focus is the effect on pay, but some of the attention should also be spent on competence. There are individuals going through master's degree programs, which are essentially degree mills, to get hired at one of these (or similar) companies, who do not have the basic skills to do the job.
Not everyone, but a significant number, and if you've ever worked with one of these individuals, you know how demoralizing and frustrating it can be. Especially in the typical political climate in a tech company, where saying something even slightly related to immigration will get taken a certain way.
Yes, exactly. Without a hint of pettiness or subjectivity: To say that many of these individuals are bad at the job would be an understatement. They might as well be random non-English-speakers grabbed off the street and told "write a React app" or "administer this database" or "perform data analysis".
It's not their fault. But it's demeaning in the extreme to the experienced, dedicated natives who are forced to work with them.
I’ve experienced working with h1b workers that are not great, but this characterization is a bit rich. All of the massively valuable big tech companies have a ton of these workers. There’s no way they are like random people pulled off the street.
I haven't tried it as recently but last time I checked they only route once per session (or subagent). Imo this is basically impossible to do correctly. Consider the case where you start with one prompt "rewrite this in rust". Trivial in a 1 day old repo, extremely difficult in e.g. the VSCode repo!
For those of us who do utilize the pre-existing tools and the coding agents effectively, yeah automated code reviews eventually become redundant. But they're still around because there are a lot of devs who don't even glance at what the agents are writing for them. Maybe partly because they don't care to streamline their workflow, or maybe because they've never been particularly good at writing code, and don't actually understand what the agent is giving them.
Lately I've seen some pretty glaringly obvious issues caught during the preliminary automated code review, and the issues seem to be coming from individuals who don't actually understand what the code is doing.
For the rest of us who are actually using the whole stack effectively, the automated code review is essentially a CI gate to protect the repo from the devs who don't know what they're doing.
> But they're still around because there are a lot of devs who don't even glance at what the agents are writing for them
But how does automated AI code review help, here? Doesn’t it just reinforce that they don’t need to look at it (or change their habits), because the AI review will catch the issues?
"If AI inference remains as desirable as Kimball expects, the evolution is likely to follow the same trajectory as the CPU. The CPU didn’t improve along a single axis but instead across simultaneously. Once transistor scaling slowed, chip and system architecture innovations of all kinds proliferated. The list of individual innovations that led to today’s ubiquitous, powerful personal compute could fill dozens of books. A few decades from now, the history of AI inference innovation will show similar depth."
Of the areas mentioned in the article, which are the most likely to have the most prominent innovative impact, and what will they entail?
A large fraction of the innovation in CPUs is driven by working around the memory wall. I anticipate AI inference will follow the same trend, and innovations that work around the autoregressive nature will be enormously impactful.
Speculative decoding is an example. An accurate draft model can reduce the number of times you stream through memory by a factor of 4x.
How do you work around the memory wall when you're going to have to stream all weights, no matter what? Latency-hiding tricks don't matter when you're bandwidth constrained.
One of the biggest limitations right now is memory capacity (storing large models/contexts in memory) and bandwidth (transferring the relevant data/weights to the silicon that is performing the operations on that data). This would cover things like:
1. having more memory on the card/chip and/or faster access to that memory;
2. integrated memory and compute units optimized for matrix and vector multiply add operations;
3. optimized load circuitry to e.g. read memory in the stride and span (next row, next column) access patterns common to matrices or ensure that no/few parts of the chip are stalled waiting on data or operations to complete.
Another aspect is quantizations. These are similar to SIMD vector operations in that you are performing an operation on a block of n-bit data values at the same time, so can have optimized circuitry.
For 2 or 3 valued quantizations you can reduce various addition and multiplication operations to logic operations, avoiding circuitry for things like the half-adder, full-adder, and carry-lookahead.
Then there's adding specific circuitry for common operations such as ReLU like is done in hardware acceleration of image, video, etc. processing. There's a trade off here as optimized hardware would perform better at the specific operations but if those are too specific then they can't be used by different/newer model architectures. (Though it does make sense to try and optimize common operations/logic where possible.)
It would be interesting to see if these designs can/will benefit training as well, as that would bring down the time/cost/energy of training large models as well as making it easier for local fine-tuning.
Some kind of compute-in-memory architecture is a good candidate, I think. There are many alternatives here, researched for many years prior to the LLM craze. However economies of scale dominate in chip industries, and this tends to favor more conventional or incremental approaches (to piggyback on existing scale). Alternatively someone needs to have a way of bootstrapping the insane scales needed to be competitive with a better-but-different approach.
So it could be that boring and straightforward stuff like two-chip prefill+decode takes most.
The things normal people with healthy relationships want to be doing.
They're so incredibly out of touch.
Edit, found the interview: https://youtu.be/DPCvFy5BKeM?si=3c1yS2kSaOdlW56d&t=238
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