I think self-driving cars are inevitable: I agree with that statement. And once they are here and cheap and safer than humans, they'll become universal. I don't know when that is, but it's less than 100 years from now.

However I don't think Tesla's SFD is inevitable, or any other carmakers; for all I know, they're so bad they shouldn't be sold. It's early days. This or that brand might go out of business. But within 100 years, self-driving will conquer the world.

Something I don't understand:

Why don't you buy used books?

Plenty of supply for a book like the one he mentions, Knut Hamsun's "Growth of the Soil." No question that it was made to the quality level of the time when it was published; early 2000's is probably peak.

I understand some books are so new they won't have any used copies. But for everything else, there's an endless buffet to choose from.

I can't speak for jn6118, but for me the reason I tend to avoid used books unless there is no other option is the lack of reliable quality standards. Used book listings rarely come with pictures of the actual item being sold, and the same used book listed as "very good" may be nearly brand-new from one seller with minor wear to the dust jacket, and from another have a broken spine, writing inside, discolored pages and an unpleasant odor.

I can't recommend ThriftBooks highly enough. I'm a "very good" or "good" but not "acceptable" customer and I've felt the quality was consistent across the probably 30 books I've ordered from them.

Shop at abebooks and limit purchases to those which have photos of the SKU in question.

> Something I don't understand: Why don't you buy used books?

To me this is like asking what's wrong with buying used underwear. You don't know anything about the paws that have thumbed those pages. I had a flatmate in my early twenties who would kick off every reading session by scratching his bottom - and then as he read, he'd sniff his fingertips as a focus aid. I am not kidding. But even if the previous owners haven't had repulsive habits, people still sweat, cough and sneeze, rummage obliviously, read naked with their books in their laps, or in their partners laps, put their books down to please their partners then pick them back up - do I need to go on? We have intimate relationships with books, and a second hand book has all the detritus of an intimate relationship with its previous owner. Then there's the yeasts, molds, mildews, weird stains - anything humidity, cooking smells, damp, rotten trash, dense flatulence, halitosis, disease etc has impregnated the pages with. There's nothing noble or romantic about that aggregate odor they all develop.

A better way of thinking about them is that they're like semi-digested bites covered in the dried belly juices of whoever hawked them back up. How hungry do you need to be? It's no different really to dogs tucking into vomit in the street. Each to his own, though.

OK I love used books but this diatribe is a thing of beauty.

Geez, I have issues with bent bindings and people who lick their fingers to turn pages, but you take it to a whole other level of grossness. You did forgot the common practice of reading on the toilet.

Tech companies are less receptive to alcohol than they used to be. There was a post (can't find it now) from a VC firm saying something like, "We encourage our companies to throw no alcohol parties; there's less risk of all kinds, and overall it's less messy."

After MeToo it was all gone. A lot of the incidents that were problematic from that era almost all had some alcohol involved.

I hear people say this, but I also see announcements from Chinese carmakers like this:

"NEW: Latest EV model boasts full charge (200 miles) in only ~5 minutes"

To me, that seems like a leaps & bounds improvement.

I was using cruise control on the highway yesterday and thinking: this is like very cheap very crude self-driving. And you know what? In its limited UNIX-like way, it's great: the car does a much better job of gradually injecting fuel than I, with my brick-like human foot, can do. Robot 1, human 0.

And from there it's easy to think: couldn't the car also detect white lines and stay within them? It doesn't have to be perfect; it can be cruise control++. If it errs a little, I can save it. But otherwise, this is a function I'd love to use if it was available, for a sub $1000 price point.

I think of Tesla autopilot as sophisticated cruise control. Can perform most driving tasks better than I can, saves a lot of cognitive work, still needs close of my 100% attention.

Is this comment from 2010? Maybe I'm missing your point, but it seems you would be shocked by what modern cars are capable of.

The intention of my comment (possibly unclear) was to say: I know we can do self-driving very well very expensively. But what can we do extremely cheaply?

Like the difference between "what can do we with an LLM on my maxxed-out laptop with an RTX 5090 card" vs. "what can we do with a mac mini." Self-driving car version.

This post has convinced me to give Mastodon another try.

This is me w Google Gemini. And you're right: it does change your outlook on micropayments, which in my case, are API calls. My costs for the last few days: 3 cents, 2 cents, 46 cents. Believe it or not, every one of those calls was scrutinized and justified.

This is my take.

First: the audience is NOT software devs. Because as you've surely noticed if you are a software dev, you can do most of the things that OpenClaw can do; if it offers improvements, they seem very marginal. You know, "it makes web apps" I can do that; "it posts to Discord programmatically" I can code that; etc. Maybe an AI code buddy shaves a few minutes off but so what. It's hard to understand the hoopla if this is you.

However, if you're a small business owner of some kind, where "small business" is defined by headcount (not valuation - this can include VC's), it's been transformative.

For a person like that, adding a 10k/mo expense is a natural move. And, at that price point, an AI service for 2k/mo is more than competitive: it's a savings.

The other part is that I think a lot of people have gotten used to human-in-the-loop workflows, but there's a big step up if you can omit the person.

Combining this w/the observation above, there were a lot of small business owners who were probably stymied by this problem: they had a bunch of tasks across departments that were worth like $2k/mo to do but couldn't fill (not enough in salary, couldn't be local). AI fits naturally for that use case. For them, it's valuable.

I see your point but these business owners are going to wait until a big player offers this as an online service. As of now installing *Claw requires running scripts, mucking about with Docker etc, no business owner is going to do that unless software dev happens to be their hobby.

I think in a hand-wavey sense people understand that $PROFIT means $INCOME here.

We should be friends. I got 47. In my defense, I was tired.

I was the first to post my score and I thought I did pretty well. Pure hubris! Looking forward to brunch (/j, I'm pretty far away).