I guess they’re just saying “you’re holding it wrong”
Last time I chose to vibe code, I did it in a language I didn’t know so that I wasn’t tempted to try and comprehend the choices the robot made. I ended up with the application I wanted.
Caveat: it was code I would never have to touch again, I ran a script to generate the 140,000 static html pages that the rails app provided and then just uploaded them all to R2 buckets (million reads per month on free tier)
Yes it used to be said, the code is not the asset, the people who know what the code does and how to change it are the asset.
Now we’re just going to outsource our capacity to design and review because it’s faster that way, as if the thing that was wrong with the software industry was that releases weren’t being pushed out often enough.
100%, although if people are getting 90% of their interaction from a robot, one may start to pick up some vocal tics and colloquialisms from machine world. a kind of robo-pidgin.
Being responsible for knowing what to do when autopilot fails has pretty good job security actually. The job might be babysitting, but no one wants to be in a flying tube without a captain that can at least let us know when we’re all going to die
If there is limited supply of memory production, and an 16GB student laptop is $800 instead of $500, then I would say the poor folk are justified with naysaying the new 128GB top shelf exotics.
Back to the K shaped economy, it’s not just annoying that some people have more money than everyone else, but given the gap in economic power, the goods that are produced are made for the people with money. With limited resources to produce material, are you going to sell to the bottom or the top? So the people not buying flying cars are left behind in more ways than one.
What, USA never subsidizes her essential industries?
American labor is expensive but BYD owes its success to vertical integration more than cheap labor. They are moving into Europe to build there before long. Americans have an uninformed notion that China simply couldn’t have superior technology, they’re just cutting corners, dumping chemicals in the river etc (as if American companies would never)
It might just be that china is better at building cars.
Well we live in the real world. We're not going to be rebuilding cities anytime soon. And most people like being able to drive, it allows you to live your life and not be confined to a couple of square miles or the limits of a transit system.
Driving cars is not good for the environment whether your fuel is electric or diesel. The billions acres of concrete and asphalt to support car commuting, the electricity that charges the cars, the rubber microplastic tire dust made 100x worse under hard acceleration of heavy vehicles .
Best I can say about EVs is they’re quiet and don’t wear out their brake pads, and the lack of other service is economically efficient, so in that sense they are progress towards a vehicle less likely to fail on you (software updates not withstanding!)
If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil. A thousand pound lithium battery per household is not a tenable way out of destroying ecosystems.
> If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil.
This is not realistic nor scalable. The reality is that the US and Canada were built around cars, and even if we had huge transit projects there would still be a need for roads and vehicles due to the size and rural/industrial areas.
Lithium batteries can be recycled. All the studies have shown that electric cars are a huge net win for the environment, and the cries about the environmental cost of building the cars in the first place don't actually match the reality. Especially when you consider that future ev ecosystems should and hopefully will have a strong battery recycling operation.
I appreciate that the question deserves a more pragmatic response than “buy used”
So I will speculate, there could be a more adequate supply of used cars if we found ways to keep old cars running longer. back in the 90s, a 200,000mi car was a real beater, doomed to transmission failure at least, uneconomical to repair. cars made in the 2010s are lasting into half a million miles just from improvements in engineering (Toyota hybrid planetary drivetrain eliminates many points of failure: no clutch, no alternator, 0 belts. Brake pads are only engaged below 5 mph and may not need replacing in the useful lifetime of the vehicle)
I don’t even know why I’m such a hater on EV, it is better in the same ways, it’s just also a luxury vehicle that is heavy and fast af. I would love to see more ev hype for efficiency, like this car is so lightweight it goes twice as far for the same kWh. Maybe Aptera will pull it off.
Unfortunately, lithium is abundant enough that it will always be cheaper to manufacture from virgin material, battery recycling will probably just look like power grid load balancers. When batteries age they don’t fail, they just lose the ability to deliver hundreds of amps when you floor it.
Last time I chose to vibe code, I did it in a language I didn’t know so that I wasn’t tempted to try and comprehend the choices the robot made. I ended up with the application I wanted.
Caveat: it was code I would never have to touch again, I ran a script to generate the 140,000 static html pages that the rails app provided and then just uploaded them all to R2 buckets (million reads per month on free tier)
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