Isn’t the girl from Québec in the movie? They go get her from a university in Montreal, if I remember correctly…

I’ve been a programmer for the last 15+ years, and the only constant over that time has been change. Every few years, there’s a new technology that “radically simplifies” programming, such that"business people will finally be able to write the code themselves". Without fail, what ends up happening is that we build more complex systems on top of it and we still need programmers to deal with it. AI is a radical shift, yes, but it still doesn’t liberate “business people” from the burden of clarifying their ideas. That is what I do, and the technology I’m using to achieve that doesn’t fundamentally change that fact.

That, and leaky abstractions. They always end up leaking, and you need someone who can understand what’s going on.

18 months is an eternity in terms of AI performance. Local models now are better than the frontiers models were at that moment.

In my experience, AI automates the boring part of programming (which is actually writing the code). It leaves me able to focus on user experience, architecture, the fun stuff. Am I more productive? Maybe a little, yeah. Is it magically going to replace my whole team? Only a fool would think so.

These figures are also heavily dependent on where and how the car was manufactured, too. If the factory is powered by clean energy, doesn’t that reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emitted during manufacturing? If EV tech advances enough that the mining rigs are electric-powered, does that not also reduce the amount of GHG emitted mining lithium? Eventually we’ll also have enough batteries to recycle that too (batteries are basically a very rich lithium ore), can’t we do that in clean-powered factories?

Basically, I think the conversation on “how much manufacturing a given product pollutes” is entirely focused on the wrong thing…

Also, a lot of these studies compare an EV’s complete lifecycle with just the tailpipe emissions of an ICEV. Mining, refining and transporting gasoline has a huge carbon impact before you even put it in the car.

2% is probably near the theoretical maximum, too. Actual output considering weather, efficiency losses, etc is probably less than half that. Solidly in “not-worth-it” territory for most use-cases. Heck, my car won’t even properly charge on a 120V outlet when it’s too cold, because it needs to heat up the battery to a safe temperature first and at -20°C that takes more than the ~1kW available from the outlet.

“rich people” in your mind is who, exactly? Here in Canada only cars below a certain MSRP qualify for subsidies, so “luxury barges” are not subsidized. Also, a $50K car is not luxury anymore, have you seen car prices recently? New ICE cars are expensive as hell too!

Pretty sure the conditions on the planet when oil/coal formed were substantially different from today. In particular, there are now various organisms which feed on the decaying matter that’s at the start of that process. These organisms eat that matter and emit CO2 as they live and breathe, returning the carbon to the air instead of burying underground.

It’s been clear for a few years that Israel hold USA’s balls in a vise or something, on both sides of the political aisle. The main question is why? What do they have on the USA?

You vastly overestimate that. It’s not a fixed number of cycles, it’s a number before significant degradation. In other words, after you’ve spent ~8000 hours driving, you’ll have to recharge about 40 minutes earlier.

If you think your ICE car is still top shape after that long, go ahead man… But in all likelihood, it’s burning a little oil, it’s not as quick as it used to be, the transmission has a weird clunk in third, etc… nothing mechanical works forever, and yes that includes hydrogen.

Hydrogen, by the way, is the worst of both worlds… It solves a very minor issue (charging on road trips) while introducing a whole lot of new ones. The infrastructure for it is non-existent, it’s still a lot of mechanical parts (if you’re talking about the ICE version) or pretty niche technology (if you’re talking about fuel cells), it’s a nightmare to store, and it’s probably still produced from fossil fuels.

There’s a reason BEVs have caught on, and hydrogen hasn’t.

You know that fast chargers exist, right? In my car it usually takes less than 15 minutes before I’m good for another 4 hours. Charging for hours is only when I’m at home, but then I’m sleeping or something… By the time I need it again it’s full.

Batteries already last about 4 hours at highway speeds, what do you want more than that? Are you not stopping for a coffee/bite/wee/gas at some point? People say they only stop for 2 minutes to fill a gas tank, but they only count the time spent pumping gas… If you count the time spent paying, getting snacks, waiting for the bathroom to be available, etc you’re at much more than that. All that takes the same amount of time in an EV, but the car charges while you do that.

Most of these things are issues with all modern cars, not necessarily specific to EVs…

In short, Ukraine allowed itself to be instrumentalized by the west as a weapon against Russia.

Pretty sure Ukrainians just want better living conditions just like anyone else. And “the west” happens to have arguably the best living conditions; I’m not surprised anyone would want to be at this table. Are you really arguing that people are looking at Russia as a nice place to go live? I’ve never actually set foot there, but from the other side of the world it doesn’t look good. Even I know it’s not actually “liberalized”.

Also, invading Ukraine as a preventative measure against NATO expansion turned out to be spectacularly stupid, because it directly led to NATO expansion to a direct neighbour (Finland).

But yeah, in general I’m not on the side of countries invading other ones. What Russia is doing in Ukraine is wrong, what Israel is doing in Palestine is wrong, and what the US is doing in Venezuela/Iran/Greenland/Cuba is also wrong.

I think you’re right about there being entirely too much hype, and we’re definitely in a bubble right now, but I think this technology is here to stay. It definitely won’t have the current economic shape forever, but it’ll follow a similar trajectory to the “web 2.0”/social media tech. Is that a good thing? Probably not, but we may end up being surprised. I personally think running the models locally will end up being the best way to use AI.

Technically it’s more with their descendants that they’re in touch, no?

The AI fad is a lot more like the Internet fad than the crypto fad. I think once the bubble pops (like the .com bubble 25 years ago) some use-cases will definitely remain. But yeah, we definitely are in a bubble.

There’s a broader context here:

• Air Canada used to be part of the government of Canada (which has 2 official languages).
• It was privatized, but part of the agreement was that it continues being subject to the law on official languages (legally, it has to offer ALL its services in both official languages)
• That dude bragged about never learning French while living in Montreal for many years (this was the original scandal I alluded to)

This is the specific context around Air Canada, but within Canada as a whole, languages is a touchy subject. I won’t make you a history lesson, but us French Canadians take this VERY seriously.

And I’m pretty sure if one of your hispanophones colleagues died ON THE JOB, somebody would at least say one sentence to their family in their native language, even if badly-pronounced. That’s just basic decency. This guy couldn’t even be bothered.

It’s such an issue because that same guy was at the heart of a similar scandal a few years ago and vowed to do better and learn French. Evidently, he not only didn’t learn French, he didn’t learn how important it was to his job. Putting out an English-only message when one of the killed pilots was a francophone is very insensitive.

Funny, LLMs actually gave me the time and energy to move forward with a lot of my personal projects. It’s a lot more fun when I don’t have to lose time investigating why some component doesn’t work, or build oauth for the gazillionth time

For sure, we need to get landlords to install EV chargers in all parkings too. We’ll probably need legislation for this.