A lot of that has to do with the fact that the people who decide to use it fall into two camps:
1. People who do not have to use it themselves (political decides, bosses, ..), but get lobbied to the max
2. People who have to administer it and know nothing else and endure the lasting pain over the perceived infinite hurdle of changing the system
I gladly can use Linux at work, so I have had a stable, reliable and unchanging system since the past 6 years, but others have to go through major pains for each version of enshittification of their OS update. In my case the OS just got better slowly and incrementally.
Because alternatives are bad. After decades of being great, Linux gaming community finally gave up on it working and accepted emulation of Windows as the way to go. (No need to nitpick on tech specifics of how Wine works)
You want to keep a building secure, so you have some structure of access and key managment, who has access to what and who do you let in.
Then you let access and key managment slide, your front-desktop lets in some shady people and their is a hole in your back wall.
The solution: add scaffolding around the facade and empower some security service staff to enter every room through every window and chime in on every front desk decision.
Yet, when I go through the skills and knowledge acquired during my school education there are many bits in there that I am now eternally grateful for, that I did not understand the need for as a kid.
I am not sure where I would have ended up if left to my own devices, e.g. as a kid starting first class I was bad at languages and hated it with a passion, in the last class I had the single best German and English final exams in my school district and language had grown on me.
Yet another thing that GDPR makes harder. That law people think forces websites to display cookie banners is actually a law that requires you to gain freely given informed consent by the person whose personal data you want to process.
Whether you do that on a website, app or in a grocery store is irrelevant. Every person needs to be (1) informed about what data you are recording, (2) what you plan to do with it, (3) who else sees it and then (4) they need to say yes to all of that. Oh, and the No option needs to work equally well and you are not allowed to record any data before they say either yes or no.
That would be the law. In practise even many websites don't fulfill it.
Imagine how well that would make you look as a grocery store.
In the sense that it and its ecosystem is high maintenance. When I call something names I do not do that lightly, but Wordpress is probably the single piece of software that has caused me the most problems over my 20 year IT career. You simply cannot put Wordpress into a customers hands, let it run for 5 years and expect it not to blow up in one way or another.
Just today I spent three hours to manually fix a page where a customers site was defaced after they installed and then uninstalled a translation plugin. I had to write a script that manually check every single instance of translatable text there is on the website.
They're closing in a billion users. That's Google search territory.
OpenAI is sitting on a $100+ billion ad network, incoming.
They're not going to need a government bailout, they're going to be a spigot of cash production.
Every single thread on HN keeps saying the same ridiculous thing, going on a year now. It's like they've never heard of advertising, which SV specializes in. It's like they're oblivious to the fact that every mega platform with so many users becomes an ad goldmine, and GPT's context positioning is even richer than search.
> OpenAI is sitting on a $100+ billion ad network, incoming.
How can you make this sort of claim with a straight face, knowing that a chinese model downloaded for free from ollama works as well if not better than OpenAI's models, without costing you a cent.
GPT is still 20 a month for most people, 50-100 or 200 for pros.
Meanwhile, for local LLM's - everyone is chasing hardware that is crazy expensiv eand to get around it they're leasing it or putting it on credit card. DGX Sparks are insane, and you need 2 for most people talking in this thread. Mac Ultra 5 is amazing but 6k minimum 12k for the build most want so many people lease it for 240 a month which doesn't even include electricity or time in setup so instead of talking about facts, we get into weird arguments like console wars where people give APple a 5 trillion dollar company 250 a month for 36 months and don't even own their hardware money "because they can run local models" vs just paying for output from their choice of frontier.
I say this fully loving local llms and embracing them, but the reality is, local llms have gotten so expensive and continue to get expensive while we keep talking about this "Threat" of apis - where there are a lot more than openai and anthropic available much cheaper and competitive priced.
Oh, and they don't work better than OpenAI or else we wouldn't even have these discussions.
Exactly, a road system as a whole has a certain capacity and friction in the system is used intentionally to maintain order. It is a bit like limiting electrical current using resistors in electrical circuits. Sure you could leave them out, but then you will have problems.
> You want a light to be able to clear the line built up each time
Ideally, yes, practically, no. In reality you also have to consider what comes downstream of a traffic light. It doesn't help at all if one traffic light has perfect throughput only to put everything into gridlock in the next node.
That means in most real traffic systems each intersection lane will have to have less then ideal throughput because you don't want to overwhelm the next section, as this could be even worse for the system overall.
If you have some engineering background you can also think about this as impedance matching. If you have a 4 lane road narrowing to 2 lanes you have a sudden impedance increase, leading to flow issues. If you put an intersection inbetween you now have a way to manage that impedance mismatch with signaling times, but you have to both look at the impedance before and after the intersection.
I'm sure AI can figure this out better than a human can. Obvious and empirical, we certainly haven't figured it out or optimized it, with all the engineers that CalTrans has. How often have we been in a four-way controlled intersection and the green is on for the empty side. There's no way that's impedance matching, it's more like Good to go boss, call it a day.
There's no incentive to modernize traffic light control because it's public works and there's no capital profit motive for it in the same extent as private. I would not advocate privatizing it either because that will bring different consequences. The hero will be that new young Caltrans engineer who's grown up in the AI generation and will probably be fed up with the legacy technology.
> How often have we been in a four-way controlled intersection and the green is on for the empty side. There's no way that's impedance matching
Who claimed it was tho? We were talking about throughput. If all your intersection knows is time, it can't decide based on traffic. Which is why inductive loops, camera based systems and so on exist, but (1) they are not deployed everywhere and (2) if they are deployed there may still be a time based limit for the case of defective sensors.
Our traffic systems are already pretty well optimized where we are willing to spend money on them. Note however that if you 100% optimize any system for perfect throughput, it has zero slack to deal with unexpected fluctuations in traffic patterns. That is as true for traffic as it is for networks. Throughput is important, but so is comfort, resilience, predictability and cost. All different metrics you have to keep in mind¹ and all of them can suffer when you over-optimize for one.
The view from inside the traffic that we are part of may make that seem inefficient, but seen system wide the main problems usually are not traffic lights, but harder to change structural issues.
¹: or rather you don't have to keep them in mind, since there are people who specialize on just that and are pretty good at it
Preventing a dedicated American enemy to get nukes, an enemy of which the American intelligence agencies said there is currently no sign they work to get nukes and with which you had deals to prevent them from doing so.
Sorry, but all you did was:
1. Showed them and the world that treaties with you are worth nothing
2. Showed them and the world, to gain the respect of the US, you need nukes. Decades of loyalty, treaties or good partner have been shown to be worth nothing, while being an authoritarian dictatorship and having nukes are respected.
3. Showed them and the world that having US bases on your soil is a liability and not a protection.
All in all if you were US president and your task was to destroy the US' standing in the world, there is not much more you could have done.
1. People who do not have to use it themselves (political decides, bosses, ..), but get lobbied to the max
2. People who have to administer it and know nothing else and endure the lasting pain over the perceived infinite hurdle of changing the system
I gladly can use Linux at work, so I have had a stable, reliable and unchanging system since the past 6 years, but others have to go through major pains for each version of enshittification of their OS update. In my case the OS just got better slowly and incrementally.
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