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.
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.
As an educator in university I have found the project proposals of students have become longer, to some degree more well written and quite certainly have LLMs involved.
This becomes problematic when it turns out people haven't even read what they sent me.
To clarify: this is about voluntary projects that do not win them extra points.
How dependent you are and how much value you get out of it are not linked as a metric. You can be smart and get a ton of value out of it, yet still be entirely dependent on it. Just like a sporty person can be dependent on a car since running a marathon to work each day is illusionary.
I believe all people will become dependent on it. And then the rent will be jacked up. Everything else wouldn't fit with the dominant capitalist incentive to always maximize extraction and suffering.
Any society should aim to have the most educated population it can afford to have. Them getting a better earning through it can be a nice side effect of that, but it is a side effect. The main price is that living among educated people beats living among the dumb and uneducated, especially in a democracy.
The US would have no problem affording that education, if it just considered taxing the richest members of its society a reasonable amount, as it did in the past.
>...The US would have no problem affording that education, if it just considered taxing the richest members of its society a reasonable amount, as it did in the past.
The USA has about the most progressive taxes of all the OECD countries. In the United States high earners pay high taxes and pay a heavy share of the federal tax burden, while lower- and middle-income households pay comparatively little in direct federal income tax and there is no national consumption tax. In other OECD countries the high earners pay high taxes, but the poor and middle classes also pay high taxes including a 15%–25% national sales taxes (VAT). The US would have no problem affording that education if its tax policy was similar to all the other OECD countries, but that is not a choice voters have made.
Has to do mostly with the historic environment of the country. Berlin was a split city, so after the 90s it abstained mostly from what it perceived as dangerous political experiments. Also die Linke was basically seen as a continuation party of the GDRs SED, and as such didn't have the greatest of reputations in that city (shooting/jailing people that want to move out will do that miraculously).
Die Linke today is a completely different generation of people and drawing any direct line to the SED is mostly wishful thinking by polemic conservatives.
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