I just setup a large refactor with Astra and was feeling super lazy and let it mostly do it without my usual extreme micro managing.
The refactor ended up adding 22,000 loc.
I went in there and quickly read through it, laughed my ass off. Reverted the work tree. Micromanaged a new refactor. Net lines of code for something really elegant and easy to reason about was -3k loc in the project.
In case you are wondering why vibe coders are doing 30k loc a day, this is why.
Interesting, as someone who started making sites on geocities I don't find this anything the same. I remember learning tons about weird little niche hobbies and making little learning sites and stuff with my own brand of weird Photoshop graphics.
An llm making the exact same layouts for everyone with obviously zero input from anyone who cares seems absolutely nothing like the old geocities days.
Yeah, there's a woman who is quite old and has a severe disability who drives regularly through our neighborhood who's car every few weeks has a new giant dent, missing fender, broken windshield, etc.
It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving.
It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise? My mother-in-law is in a wheelchair and zooms by on the bike paths faster than I do thanks to her handbike (it's seriously insane how fast people can move with handbikes), and if she needs to travel large distances she hops onto a train instead.
The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!
>You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise
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?
I dislike this type of patronizing superficial handweaving advice that is disconnected from the harsh challenges of building more great public transport infra (lack of funds, geography and land ownership issues, nimbyism, public safety concerns, labor/material shortages, government bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence etc).
People use cars because they have no better choice. I'd also want my city to build me Swiss levels of public transport so I wouldn't have to drive, but guess what, the infra sucks and the city is insolvent, so that leaves me with little choice for the next decades as 100% nothing will change for the better in this regard, so then car driving it is. I didn't make it this way, it's the way the city management has botched it over the last decades, but it's still on me now to adapt to it, and cars are one of the ways.
I agree with you in spirit, that everyone should have great public transport ideally, but when cities are broke and that infra doesn't exist, then that externality is burdened on the individuals because they have no other choice but still need to get to work and other places. Telling them they can "just build more infra" is like telling homeless person they can just buy a house. OK cool, but with what money?
> 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.
Huge amounts of insolvency is due to supporting this failed urban planning experiment. Urban centers are significantly more economically productive and significantly less expensive. Carism leads people into this trap when they should be advocating for significant expansion of dense cities and transit.
This is just learned helplessness. The US already spends unfathomable amounts of money and resources on car infra, and there's always some nonsensical defense like "it's just impossible to do it any other way!", as if cars are simply a law of nature. That lack of money can be solved by diverting some of the money going into roads into instead improving public transport infra.
The solution should NOT be investing in driverless cars, which are all owned by megacorps and leave people shackled to Google and Elon Musk.
You even mentioned another cliche, Geography, but then right below mention Switzerland. Same goes for NIMBYism and everything else you mentioned, how come these aren't issues when building massive 12 lane highways, but adding some dedicated bike paths suddenly turns into a quagmire that rivals the Manhattan Project in scale and difficulty?
Utrecht in the Netherlands is a perfect example of reversing course on car-centric designs. They had a canal, emptied it out to build a massive highway, then realized "hey, that's idiotic!" And turned it back into a canal and banned cars from the area completely. It's now a gorgeous city center free of cars, plentiful public transport options, accessible to wheelchair users and kids and literally everyone.
Americans do not care about biklanes or modifying their cities in that way, they want driverless cars and more large multilane highways/roads so that's what we will get.
Americans don't like walking/biking and love cars.
It's not really learned helplessness it's just what the vast majority of our country wants.
Remember the majority voters voted someone in who specifically campaigned on getting out of any climate change agreements and to bring back coal mining.
Roads cost $200b a year and that doesn’t include the individual cost of owning a vehicle, fuel, insurance and maintenance. It also ignores the opportunity cost in having parking lots and land taken up by highways instead of being more economically productive in even small cities.
Yes, I was never against that. I initially argued/asked where do you get the money to implement it if the city is broke? And until that is solved decades from now maybe, how should people get to work without their cars?
Colorado is shipping a regional rail project in the front range. Service will start in ‘29 and the district is voting on new sales tax to fund the expansions.
It’s a very solvable problem. We’re also not talking about removing car infrastructure just funding a small amount of reasonable local transit. You can get quite far with Bus Rapid Transit, bike facilities, etc. The goal is to reduce the vehicle miles traveled in cars in general. Right now it’s very hard for any individual to make that choice because the transit infrastructure sucks.
The point is that society's priorities are messed up. Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
>The point is that society's priorities are messed up.
People's priorities are putting a roof over their heads and food on the table for the family. Everything else is secondary.
> Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
NO, but you and him are yet to provide a better solution that leads to an actual immediate change for the better. People aren't gonna sacrifice their lives and become martyrs for a moral cause that does nothing in the end except make them poor while other people and countries get rich while fucking the planet even harder.
Europe(EU) sacrificed it's manufacturing industry and a lot of its middle class jobs along with it, in order to "save the planet", and then India and China's politicians and billionaires said "lol, thanks for your sacrifice and outsourcing to us, now we have even more headroom for pollution and growing our manufacturing industries, making you dependent on ours and giving us leverage over you on the international stage; thanks suckers".
>The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
People care more about themselves and their family than the planet. Especially when China and India are lighting the planet on fire and billionaires and politicians are taking private jets and yachts to moralize the poor on saving the planet. Again, you need to have them lead by example first.
Public transport is not the same as cars. It's silly when people pretend like they are interchangeable and it's just a matter of having "better infrastructure".
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.
No one said it is, and I even clarified at the end that better public transport infra makes life for drivers easier as well. More public transport means less people on the road since they're concentrated in buses and trains and trams, meaning for people who do need cars, they have to compete for less space on the road.
For example the Netherlands simulatenously has world class public transport infra and the happiest and most satisfied drivers. 60% of the country still drives, it's just that it's not the only option and the drivers also take public transport and bike when it's more convenient than driving.
I believe Tesla’s FSD is already better than such unassisted drivers. Particularly with the current FSD limitations which require monitoring driver attentiveness. If every drunk who attempted to drive was using FSD, deaths due to drunk driving would be virtually eliminated. Heck, even advanced lane keeping and smart cruise control from other manufacturers, while much more crude, would still help tremendously.
I wonder how much of drunk driving crashes are because driver turns into speeding asshole vs dozing off. You wouldn't be able to force them to use FSD, especially in a fun car like Tesla. Maybe if it derated itself if it detects erratic driving. They already released a feature where it avoids crashes even when FSD is disabled (but does require subscription).
I think people are just incredibly bad drivers when drunk, but they do it because they don’t want to hire a cab or leave their car at the bar overnight, etc. Having FSD handle driving would be way safer.
It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
We likely do. First and foremost, services already exist to have people driven to places, like uber, taxis and public transport. Other possibilities to help them do what they need to do include: neighbors, family, door dash, the mail, nurses, moving to assisted living, etc.
That really depends on where you live. Where I live there are no taxis, no public transport, no shops or services in the village - you want anything, it’s a minimum 30 minute drive to town - which includes collecting your mail, as they no longer deliver here.
And yeah, it falls on neighbours. Pretty much every day I give one old lady or another a ride to town and back. It’s a pain in the ass, I am not a fucking taxi driver, and I end up sitting around with my thumb up my ass waiting for whoever to finish whatever their errand is.
Where you live there are also no autonomous cars either though. Car services can pop up much more quickly/easily. This is capitalism. If there's money to be made, people will make it! OK, if you live in an area where they don't deliver mail, first, please understand that this is already an outlier of a situation for an outlier of a situation. In the context of elderly people living on their own, if my mother lived on her own in such a place, thinking about her driving would not even be close to the top of my concerns.
There are four Teslas in the village; FSD is likely to be available in six weeks or less, as it’s about to be homologated across the EU - I’m half considering running an informal robotaxi service with ours.
And yeah, it ain’t easy for them which is why I put up with being chauffeur - many of them still have dirt floors at home, heating via an open hearth, which is insane in the 21st century in Western Europe.
Disagree completely. I started using Astra from Sol the day it was released, and was a virtually imperceptable difference and made lots of mistakes and shit architecture decisions from day 1 of release.
I still think this is because, on a new release, it works on some prompts the previous ones did badly at, because new weights do well on a different set of prompts.
Then after a few days you notice the prompts that it does badly on that the old ones did fine with and everyone is convinced there's a regression when it's just a different part of prompt space
I find Astra to be weirdly stupid in the sense you have to force it to spend time on something (fix this architectural issue and refactor), then it’s stupidly smart.
It prioritises getting something working over making something good during the 1-shot phase and outputs maximum slop.
They had a very successful economic mechanism design for many years. It's one that thousands of businesses have relied on for decades.
Create great free product, create rich tutorials and docs, people look them up and you can sell variety of services from there.
Then ai companies stole the data, put a $20 pricetag on it and wiped out all those businesses essentially overnight.
If those "variety of services" are worth anything they should remain popular. There are countless ways to advertise them to people. I'm guessing many devs who were regularly browsing their documentation had ad blockers anyway.
Company creates a free core product, possibly open source, etc.
Company creates rich help docs and other useful resources.
Customers who use their core free product are frequently engaged with the company and it's helpful resources.
Said company offers additional services such as coursework, cloud services, analytics, etc.
Since customer knows and trusts the core free product, and knows the company is trustworthy, they may be inclined to purchase something.
Now, few coders use these learning resources (ai fetches it for them), they do not know anything about the company and they never engage with the company to see their additional offerings.
Therefore the company now has to advertise by spending heavily on Google/meta/etc. to a cold audience that doesn't even know who they are, because everyone using their system/sdk/library/etc. doesn't know anything about them because ai just steals all their resources and regurgitates it to the coder.
I feel like the number is higher for software work where I'm at, and lower for every other profession. Scary when you think that your doctor is in it for the money
You can be a software developer without any formal training and without any licensure. Not so for an MD.
It's going to attract more people who have the mentality of artists or musicians, i.e. people who do it for the love of the craft and as a creative outlet.
They tend to be higher risk though. If you've got the capacity for memorizing all the stuff you need to become a doctor, there's not much risk involved in attaining your doctor salary.
True. I like math and CS theory, but despise coding (pays well though). AI is finally taking over this soul-sucking occupation and all I can say - good riddance.
It's an awesome profession for those of us who love it.
Tbf coding with ai is still super fun though. I am hoping that engs who hate it like you will finally get kicked out as productivity increases from ai and it will finally go back to just us nerds.
It's kinda soul-sucking being around all you guys that just hate this work, please get out and go do farming or something lol.
"The only thing it lacks is weight."
You must be being a bit hyperbolic no? Have you ever looked at artisanal/quality goods in comparison to IKEA? You can't see any quality difference?
I varies widely on piece, but even some (not all) of the cheapest wood stuff they have are pretty remarkable quality (or maybe I should say durability, the design side is still super simple for flat-packing optimizations). The non-entry-level stuff is quite good in my opinion.
But on some other stuff I tend to agree, their sofas are pretty bad in my opinion. The beds are okay, but even the non-cheap ones aren't "great".
I'd actually be curious to read an award winning ai book, all the ai books/interactive story generators I've tried have been... Ok at best... Do you know what novels have been written by ai and award winning?
Japanese isekai might not be your cup of tea, but one example is [1] which was way back in Jan, and models have improved a lot since then.
My sneaking suspicion is that there are a lot more cases than get reported, because authors are disincentivized to disclose AI usage, and readers by and large feel icky about reading AI work for reasons unrelated to quality.
I can totally see a weird future where a lot of what people like is AI generated, and everyone lies to each other about it. So it's hard to do research on this phenomenon.
Not completely surprising that AI could do well generating manga. It's very formulaic in general and by nature devoid of a lot of the relatable character development from most other writing. I have no problem reading an AI story if it's done well, but it typically just isn't. What I find annoying though is AI generated content that is only interesting if it's actually real. Like a historic photo or a video of some shocking event.
I’d be ok reading AI-written stories if it’s only “AI assisted” (I.e. there’s a skilled human driving it). If it’s just a prompt and then the AI does all the writing, I know there’s just no intention behind it as LLMs don’t actually “think”- they just (in a very sophisticated way) pattern-match against an existing corpus.
I’ve experimented using AI to prototype game ideas and inevitably once I succumb to the temptation of handing the AI the game design reigns it starts devolving to meaningless slop with a silhouette of a meaningful design. The only way to get something meaningful (that ive found) is for the human to stay in the driver’s seat.
So a website AlphoPolis, awarded a cheap online romance manga some sort of award because it got a lot of likes on social media?
My Unassuming Skill, 'Tidying Up,' is the Strongest! ~A Corporate Slave Office Lady Accidentally Reforms a Country in Another World, and Now She's Doted on by the Knight Commander and His Majesty the Emperor!?~"
I guess I thought you were talking about real awards for great literature not webtoon style romance manga slop.
Whenever people compare ai to a one real world tool always surprises me tbh.
The only equivalent tool in wood working would be a robot that can build an entire table from scratch and you just sit there and tell it what to do and what kinda table you want and watch it autonomously build everything.
1 saw type is not really even remotely equivalent to what ai is to software.
My comment wasn't about the tool, it was how people are treating the new tool. Much as they would when they learn other new tools. They tend to have a preference and apply it where they maybe shouldn't. Do people really need to ask AI everything like simple math problems or what goes best with this dress? Is that really a good use for early generation, water hungry, huge datacenter AI?
The refactor ended up adding 22,000 loc.
I went in there and quickly read through it, laughed my ass off. Reverted the work tree. Micromanaged a new refactor. Net lines of code for something really elegant and easy to reason about was -3k loc in the project.
In case you are wondering why vibe coders are doing 30k loc a day, this is why.
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