The robots are coming

[Khaldun]

The NYT has a piece today on how every single consumer products manufacturer and retailer is abandoning the mass market as a source of profitability--everybody is chasing "premiumization" as the main way to improve the profit margin, e.g., making the main product as shitty as possible and making anything even slightly resembling quality only on an upmarket basis.

It's an insane strategy in that wealth inequality is even starting to erode the upper middle-class; a billionaire's family can only consume so much caviar or caviar-priced goods. But yeah, this is the world that America is charging towards. So even though in a better timeline, there could be trillions to be made on building a better public transport system with autonomous piloting/driving, that would take valuing the greatest good for the greatest number and clawing back wealth from the .01%.

[Samwise]

My wife was telling me recently about a vendor sales pitch that was talking about a feature that they didn't have yet but it's "on their roadmap for next quarter," and how she couldn't believe that some of the suits in the room were falling for that, because obviously "on the roadmap" doesn't guarantee it'll be there in any particular timeframe.

"Not only that," I said, "but if they finally add the feature, who says they won't put it in a more expensive SKU than whatever they initially sold you?" and she was like "holy shit you're right, that's exactly what they'll do."  I hate that I've worked in tech long enough to be able to see these things coming a mile away, but the entire economy is built around that kind of bullshit now.

[Sky]

Let's not forget how terrible people are about owning cars. Treat them like shit, drive them like shit, maintain them like...I don't want to insult shit here...And then get a new one as soon as they've paid off the old one, or earlier.

I'm trying to baby my poor old truck into her senior years, avoiding salty slush, regular maintenance (I wish I had a good classic car garage in the area to work on her, though). And when I look at folks who make almost double what I do (not difficult tbf), but have dropped well north of a hundred grand on vehicles with no end in sight to the treadmill. And then complain they are broke all the time (and in layers of debt). Ironically many of the folks I'm referring to also drive domestics that need a ton of repairs over their life (I finally got new brakes a couple years ago...truck's 15 now).

The car economy is crazy toxic and nobody seems to give a shit. Or at least not enough to change their behavior, whether it's driving better, maintaining the vehicle, or owning it until it actually needs replacement.

All that said, in my area, taking public transportation is a truly shitty experience. The drivers are terrible, the routes make no sense, and the past few years have made dealing with the average person such an ordeal that I'm happy most of my public transportation experience were in the sublime metros of Central LA and South Oakland. Not kidding, 'the poors' on those buses and trains were way more well-behaved.

I'd still do public transportation over a robot car, though. I don't even like the level of electronics in my truck, and it's completely without screens.

[01101010]

I do all my own car maintenance that I can handle without investing $$$ in specialty tools. Even then, vehicles these days are way more complicated than the stuff I grew up tinkering with in terms of standard tune-up oil change type stuff. I take care of the filters and oil changes and other minor items that might go haywire, but some of this stuff you are forced to take to a dealer/mechanic. Of course there is youtube for damn near everything, but that means investing time.

So I can excuse folks for not keeping up with maintenance if they have to take it somewhere that just end up being an argument about the upcharges.

[Sky]

So I can excuse folks for not keeping up with maintenance if they have to take it somewhere that just end up being an argument about the upcharges.

Shit, I have to argue for them to complete the maintenance I ask for, every time. In all my years of faithfully maintaining the truck, I've had one instance of a place upcharging on wipers, which NYS law kinda sets up for them with a 6-month replacement requirement. It must be the new thing, same happened to the old lady (this was just last year). But that was for the NYS inspection, not a maintenance visit. I go by the maintenance schedule in the book, which gives both time (every 6 months) and mileage. My main issue after getting a place to actually perform all the maintenance listed, necessary or not, is getting them to obey the time of ownership metric vs the mileage metric.

The burden of the low mileage vehicle owner  (I should be rolling over 64k on the '08 soon, though)

[Count Nerfedalot]

it's not just cars though.  Everything is disposable these days.  Clothing, furniture, houses, appliances, food.  Built cheap from the cheapest possible materials.  And there are very very few alternatives available for most things because they just don't sell. At least 9 out of 10 people will pick the item on the shelf with the lowest price without even looking at how well it is made or of what materials.  It is an odd paradox. Our culture practically defines itself by what we own, yet we buy junk.

[Khaldun]

People buy junk because that's all there is now. You could have a million dollars to drop on a toaster but the only way you're going to find a well-functioning durable toaster is if you use that million to get an engineer to build you a great one from scratch.

Most durable goods are now assemblies of the same cheap parts and components with some kind of outside shell that gives them some degree of brand distinction, but is otherwise the same as any other version. They're all made to break fairly quickly. No brand is made from high-quality parts that the brand-name company assesses for quality under its own control except maybe cars, in fact. I was talking with a guy who maintains a bunch of rental properties for relatively demanding higher-end clients and he said that they literally can't find a dishwasher model for the properties that is well-made and durable, so they've just settled for a basic cheap model and they throw them away the first time they break because fixing or maintaining them isn't worth it.

[Count Nerfedalot]

That's true now, but that's because for the last 40 years Americans have been buying the cheapest thing on the shelf even though it was only going to last 5 years rather than paying 15-20% more for the well-built one next to it that would last the rest of their lives.  Since well-built stuff doesn't sell, nobody makes it anymore.  There are a few brands out there that are still relatively well-made - Bosch appliances for example.  But now the price differential is 200-300% instead of 15-20%.

[Khaldun]

It's not Americans, this is the world.

For Bosch, you have to buy the high end of their product line to get an appliance that's mostly assembled in Germany with higher quality parts. (You also have to avoid their power tools line, which sucks.) You buy lower end Bosch at Home Depot or whatever, you're getting the same as all the other brands. Miele is still pretty much "this is really well built" and that too you pay through the nose for. But that's big durables. You cannot get well-built smaller appliances any longer for love or money. Nobody makes them, period.

[HaemishM]

It's almost as if the amount of people who can afford the priciest shit isn't enough to sustain a business on, especially when you are building products that aren't designed to be re-bought in a few years' time.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Well, shareholder dividends can't keep going upupUpUPUP if the consumer isn't buying new stuff every few years.  It's almost as if consumer capitalism is dedicated to eating itself.

[Khaldun]

Global capitalism isn't even shareholder capitalism any more. The financial world is effectively run by three hedge funds now, who no longer remotely think about their investments in terms of company performance or fundamentals or anything of the sort. Mostly they're just the financialized upper tier of the global economy with private equity being the middle tier, and private equity is mostly about looking for companies to buy and liquidate.

[Samwise]

I got full access to Waymo a couple of weeks ago, and took my first ride in one today (fully unmanned; it pulled up in front of my house and dropped me off at a restaurant).  Observations in no particular order:

• Its route avoided not only freeways but also major streets, I'm guessing to minimize the odds of encountering something unpredictable, since any accident is a major liability right now regardless of fault.
• As far as navigating the route it chose, it was flawless.  Smoothly avoided double-parked cars, slowed down perfectly as it came to speedbumps, and very gracefully handled a two-way stop crossing a busy multi-lane street that would have stressed me out as a driver.  The only time it did something that felt "off" to me was lurching slightly while stopped at a red light, and I realized it did that to try to dodge a motorcycle that was coming too close for comfort, moving out of the way of the reckless human as far as it could without leaving the lane or crossing the limit line.  Asimov's First Law in effect.
• My prior hands-on experience with an AV was a Tesla with autopilot, which was a white-knuckle ride the entire time that it was on.  The difference isn't day and night, it's day and the deadly vacuum of space.
• The display inside the car shows you everything the car is "seeing," including pedestrians (which show up as dots) and their dogs (which show up as smaller dots) as well as static obstacles like curbs and medians.  A fun detail is that anything which it identifies as an obstacle that requires extra attention (like a pedestrian that's hovering too close to the curb as if they might dash out into traffic) is highlighted in green.
• I was riding with my visiting mother-in-law, who to give you an idea of her demographic has never used Uber, and she couldn't stop talking about how cool it was.

I doubt I'll be using it regularly, for all the same reasons I don't use Uber regularly, but as a tech demo it was absolutely wild.

[Trippy]

The display inside the car shows you everything the car is "seeing," including pedestrians (which show up as dots) and their dogs (which show up as smaller dots) as well as static obstacles like curbs and medians.  A fun detail is that anything which it identifies as an obstacle that requires extra attention (like a pedestrian that's hovering too close to the curb as if they might dash out into traffic) is highlighted in green.[/li][/list]

That's cool.

[Khaldun]

I am still thinking the short-to-medium term scenario is going to be all the money that's deep into autonomous driving is going to insist on (and pay for, grudgingly) the installation of guide technology for autonomous vehicles along major routes that will especially include HOV lanes on major highways; step 2 in about 15 years will be to argue that manual vehicles should have to get out of autonomous-access lanes for safety; step 3 will be making highways autonomous only except in low-density areas, at which time trucking is going to be shifted to autonomous only for highway transport to big depots where human drivers might do pick up for local delivery. (Might).

There's persistent evidence that Tesla in particular is concealing a lot of data about accidents and erratic behavior; I think the other players are avoiding some of that by grooming the routes they're testing with undisclosed guided trials. E.g., the routes they perform on well are a kind of "Clever Hans" thing where they've been trained quietly a zillion times on about the aberrations and unusual features of the route, they're not genuinely adaptive AI except when it comes to handling unexpected behavior by other vehicles/pedestrians, etc. I think the fix is going to be to exert control over the conditions of the test, so to speak.

They're never going to get human-controlled vehicles off of small rural routes or highways in severely underpopulated states within the next 50 years, but highly trafficked highways? Human drivers are going to be moved off whether the tech works as planned or not.

[Samwise]

It's hard to imagine "unusual features" of a route that would be harder to figure out adaptively than what people and vehicles can do, and it's equally hard to imagine that people are out there manually coding in the locations of each pothole and speedbump when LIDAR is able to detect things like that, but with enough VC money and stupidity anything is possible.

Tesla is in a class of its own because Elon decided LIDAR would detract from the clean aesthetic lines of the Cybertruck and so everything has to be done with cameras -- the results speak for themselves, I think.

[Chimpy]

Or, we could just lay down these nice pieces of metal, maybe make them parallel to each other. String some wires about 20 feet above them and then put a series of wheeled tubes between said wires and metal.

[Samwise]

Shared infrastructure?  Sounds like socialism.

(edit) tbh even in a car-free utopian future with ubiquitous rail, I can see municipal robotaxis being a very solid last-mile solution for those who aren't physically able to ride jerk scooters and the like.

[Khaldun]

Buses and trains will never work, no. Only hyperlooped AI tunneling machines.

[Samwise]

I can see municipal robotaxis being a very solid last-mile solution

I'm glad I'm not the only one smart enough to think of things like this.

https://abc7news.com/amp/contra-costa-county-micro-transit-system-glydcars-autonomous-vehicles/14125023/

"Right now, first and last mile is one of our biggest challenges here in Contra Costa County. We don't want people to have to drive to the BART station," says Tim Haile, executive director of Contra Costa Transportation Authority.

For the past few years, it's been working on the Dynamic Personal Micro Transit (DPMT) system. It is 28 miles that will connect Pittsburg, Antioch, Brentwood and Oakley with autonomous vehicles, known as Glydcars.

I've thankfully never lived as far out as any of those places, but am familiar with the commute situation from talking to coworkers and it's grim -- if you want to take BART, you get up early to secure a parking space at the station before they all fill up.  Eliminating parking as the bottleneck in getting people off the freeways and onto the rails is pretty huge.

[Samwise]

Hands on with Gemini

I'm very skeptical of the claims about Gemini's "reasoning" abilities until the general public gets to poke at it, but the visual recognition stuff alone is pretty impressive.

[Khaldun]

Like you say, I want to see what happens when people are fucking with it. Or just doing stuff that isn't planned. "Our favorite interactions" is kind of like "selected game footage"--until you see the rest, you can't be sure how much it resembles the typical experience.

[Trippy]

Hands on with Gemini

I'm very skeptical of the claims about Gemini's "reasoning" abilities until the general public gets to poke at it, but the visual recognition stuff alone is pretty impressive.

This is faked. And not just in the disclaimer that's not in the video itself but only in the description "For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity." faked.

According to Bloomberg https://archive.ph/ABhZi

Google also admits that the video is edited. “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity,” it states in its YouTube description. This means the time it took for each response was actually longer than in the video.

In reality, the demo also wasn’t carried out in real time or in voice. When asked about the video by Bloomberg Opinion, a Google spokesperson said it was made by “using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text,” and they pointed to a site showing how others could interact with Gemini with photos of their hands, or of drawings or other objects. In other words, the voice in the demo was reading out human-made prompts they’d made to Gemini, and showing them still images. That’s quite different from what Google seemed to be suggesting: that a person could have a smooth voice conversation with Gemini as it watched and responded in real time to the world around it.

[Samwise]

I mean, that's... whatever.  If the only gap between what's in the video and reality is speech recognition (which, you know, exists) and throwing more CPUs at it to make it faster, then it's effectively there.  I'm more talking about whether these prompts they're giving it are scenarios that it's been specifically trained on.  A general purpose AI that can play the shell game based on reading about it on Wikipedia is one thing; an "expert" that has been specifically taught to play that game is impressive (object tracking is hard!) but it's in an entirely different ballpark.

[Samwise]

Company loses millions after employee duped by video call deepfakes.

Somebody tell this guy that this whole AI fad is going to blow over any day now.   

[Tale]

Wow. I noted the deepfake Biden robocalls the other day. A full video meeting scripted setup is next level... but totally doable.

[Johny Cee]

How about a Let's Play series that fakes that last four presidents?  https://www.youtube.com/@GamerPresidentsUSA

[Tale]

Pod Save America uses deepfake Biden for comic relief, but uncomfortably https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyqtXPkM364