I've been making games with JS in the browser with my kids, ages 7-13. Very simple games, the sort where we can just use emojis instead of real game assets. Even just building a game inside a Claude Artifact is pretty fun.
The nice thing about JS is that there is not very much overhead in setting things up, debugging weird things, restarting.
This part of the essay makes me feel moved by the author's situation.
> I am sitting down after a long walk outdoors. It should have been relaxing, but I was processing - processing another interview pipeline that has fallen through. I'm in my 6th month of unemployment, despite job hunting 40 - 60 hours a week, starting literally the day I was laid off - because the company needed to make cuts and remote workers were top of the list.
That sounds really tough, and I'm sorry the author finds themselves in this situation. Six months sounds grueling.
I think the interview process is likely to be completely overhauled in the age of AI. I don't really know what will happen. I used to be in favor of the standard code-at-a-whiteboard approach, but nowadays the actual work is even further from that. But I haven't seen an AI-aware interview process yet that seems like an improvement.
At any rate, these systematic changes are likely to come too late for the author. Hang in there. Maybe it's time to consider a bigger change, like moving cities and looking for in-person work. I like working remotely but it's harder to get a remote job, and the in-person stuff does have upsides. Good luck out there.
If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making.
So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work.
It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.
Using tesla valuation is not useful. It's a meme stock, has AI bs overvaluation over it. It's value is completely unconnected from reality. The car business is declining steadily. It's a good day when the famous CEO doesn't do something incredibly destructive to the brand name. It's just going down.
At the same time, if Musk went away, the stock would crash back to reality but a non-idiot leader could just do impossible, crazy, hard stuff, like ... working on obvious new models and basic steady improvements.
Tesla PE is 398 today (after a drop). Toyota's PE is 13. Toyota at the least is not hemoraging market share, sales, revenue, profits. Tesla is losing on all thoes things. Tesla would need a 30x price reduction to get down to much much more stable and profitable toyota. It's gets worse because Tesla's sales and profit keep going down each quarter.
There's no doubt value in self driving but the overall value is questionable. If there are many companies providing it, and at least waymo is doing great, plus there are many many other companies in China in good shape, the value multiple won't be there.
What's the market value of all taxi compannies combined in the us? It was about $230 billion in 2024 (https://www.skyquestt.com/report/taxi-market). Will tesla get 100% of the us self driving business in the future? No, waymo at least will be a serious market competitor, tesla's service doesn't really work.
Because there are going to be muiltiple competitors with working products (we'll see if/when tesla ever gets there), Tesla's huge valuation will never make sense. Robots are much farther behind than robotaxis (there's no brain, no prototype of a learning system, maybe one day).
This got way too long, I think GM just saw it as a money sink. I think that was a big mistake, though.
It's funny to use "the market value of all taxi companies combined" as a proxy for how valuable the self-driving market will be, because that's exactly the reasoning that led people to underestimate Uber. The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.
That said, you could be right! Maybe self-driving will never be worth more than that. It's really hard to tell what business models will be like in the future. But this is the cultural mismatch, it seemed like GM leadership did not want to be in a risky business where they were betting billions of dollars on the success of self-driving. Clearly, to some people, that seemed like a really good bet to make. Time will tell.
Of course a new genre defining company can do what existing companies did and vastly increase the market if they make it better, more efficient, easier whatever. All taxi companies are not all transportation needs, not even on the road. Busses, planes, etc. There will be really new market niches, how about if your RV lets you sleep comfortably and drives all night, you never need to pay or stop (if you can sleep in a moving vehicle), gas or charge itself up.
I was thinking it won't be just one company with this tech, so they'll compete and reduce the value of driverless cars down, by attacking the profit of each other. That would be healthier than having pseudo monopoly power because there are only 2 of them - like say ios and android are basically the world of cell phones, with a few very tiny other companies.
Cosign, there's a reason it took forever and a day for Waymo to actually scale. It's great stuff, changed the way I live, but they gotta wince at the economics.
I feel like the bigger issue is that Cruise evidently had an unsafe company culture (like Uber): It wasn't just that they had an incident, it's that they lied about the incident and tried to cover things up.
This has been a pretty consistent pattern -- Cruise was always less transparent about its safety data than Waymo, and its claims tended to be opaque and non-measurable, whereas Waymo was partnering with insurance companies to get hard data.
Waymo is going to have incidents, too, but I think they have made the (correct) decision that being open and transparent about safety stuff is the way they move past those; Cruise made a decision in the opposite direction, and it killed them.
In general electronics aren't recycled because people don't care about recycling them.
The easiest piece of electronics equipment to recycle is probably an iPhone. You can give an old iPhone to Apple and they will recycle it for free. But still most end-of-life iPhones are not recycled.
It doesn't surprise me that Siri continues to be bad - Apple's current plan is to use a low-quality LLM to build a top-quality product, which turned out to be impossible.
What does surprise me is that Google Home is still so bad. They rolled out the new Gemini-based version, but if anything it's even worse than the old one. Same capabilities but more long-winded talking about them. It is still unable to answer basic questions like "what timer did you just cancel".
From several engineer answers over a few years from inside Google, the consistent answer was that they created a highly fragmented ecosystem of devices over the years, almost none of which were capable of running the same software stack/versions, which led to an enormous mountain of technical debt and spaghetti code. There was a big effort a couple years ago to resolve this by creating a single new software version that would work on all modern devices and be supportable across future generations, but it also required (hah!) they essentially abandon (not brick, but just not really actively maintain or support) a plethora of older devices. So you have lots of consumers with either a mixed device environment where there's no consistency between their devices, or consumers who only have older devices that won't run the newer software and will be complaining about performance and reliability until they eventually give up and either abandon Google Home or buy a new device.
Indeed especially compared to chatGPT running so much better on my same iPhone where siri shits the bed. Voice transcription sucks in every aspects on my iPhone except surprise chatGPT gets what I am saying 90% of the time.
I can't even get gemini on my phone, configured as my assistant, to schedule a timer. It just googles the answer now or tells me "Gemini can't do that". 16 years ago it was doing that perfectly.
It would be great if home assistants actually started to understand me personally. Not even in the sense of "what am I like", more like in the sense of, "when I ask what the weather is today, do I want a long lecture, or do I just want you to say high of 60 degrees, wear long sleeves".
The problem with AI art is that it mostly sucks right now. Well, for "high art" - it can't write a novel, it doesn't create interesting artistic images. It's great for mocking up product UIs. And there are exceptions when an individual human puts a lot of work into it, for graphic art at least. Novels, it doesn't seem that close.
Yet.
I don't know if it will always stay this way, though. If one day I read a novel and I think, this is a great novel. I appreciated it, I felt myself growing from it. And then later I learn it was written by an AI. That's it, that will prove that great AI novels are possible. I will know it when I see it. I haven't seen it yet, but if it happens, I'll know.
So it's really just a technical question. Not a philosophical one.
>I don't know if it will always stay this way, though. If one day I read a novel and I think, this is a great novel. I appreciated it, I felt myself growing from it. And then later I learn it was written by an AI. That's it, that will prove that great AI novels are possible. I will know it when I see it. I haven't seen it yet, but if it happens, I'll know.
That's not what the essay is about. Sanderson spends the first half of the essay examining reasons for his strong feelings against AI. He also touches on the fact that he already struggles to discern generative AI from human art.
Eventually, he concludes that his real objection to generative AI has nothing to do with the quality, and everything to do with the process by which it was created. He believes (as do I) that focusing solely on the end product of generating a painting or a novel, robs would be artists of the valuable learning experience of failing repeatedly to create art, and then eventually rising past that failure to finish something. In this way, he thinks one of the real hallmarks of art is that it's transformative for the human who creates it, going so far to state that __humans are the art__ itself.
Can AI kludge together a ripping story? Sure. But there is a reason people still write new books and buy new books - we crave the human connection and reflection of our current times and mores.
This isn't just a high art thing. My kids read completely different YA novels than I did, with just a few older canon titles persisting. I can hand them a book I loved as a kid and it just doesn't connect with them anymore.
How I think AI CAN produce art that people want is through careful human curation and guided generation. This is structurally the same as "human-in-the-loop" programming. We can connect to the artistry of the construction, in other words the human behind the LLM that influenced how the plot was structured, the characters developed and all the rest.
This is akin to a bad writer with a really good editor, or maybe the reverse. Either way, I think we will see a bunch of this and wring our hands because AI art is here, but I don't think we can ever take the human out of that equation. There needs to be a seed of "new" for us to give a shit.
Again, this article is not discussing the quality of generative AI. Sanderson clearly believes himself that AI is already able to produce things that are indiscernible to art from his eyes.
What this article is trying to get across is that art is a transformative process for the human who creates it, and by using LLMs to quickly generate results, robs the would be artist of the ability for that transformation to take place. Here's a quote from Sanderson:
"Why did I write White Sand Prime? It wasn’t to produce a book to sell. I knew at the time that I couldn’t write a book that was going to sell. It was for the satisfaction of having written a novel, feeling the accomplishment, and learning how to do it. I tell you right now, if you’ve never finished a project on this level, it’s one of the most sweet, beautiful, and transcendent moments. I was holding that manuscript, thinking to myself, “I did it. I did it."
It's pretty common in California for cities to abuse the permitting process to extract money from homeowners. But on the other hand, these homeowners are getting subsidized by Prop 13. For a typical house in the Palisades bought 34 years ago ChatGPT estimates the subsidy is about $15,000/year. So, I have a little bit of sympathy but they're really on the benefitting end of California's various forms of tax craziness.
If they actually worked right now, the demand would be high. Demand is certainly high for Waymos. Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high. But it's hard to tell if (or when) it will work well enough to actually be a real product.
The question is what 'high' means in context of revenue.
Uber, the globally available taxi company, is valued 8 times less than tesla. If you are now able to kill all the costs for the taxi driving and reduce the cost for the car also, how much revenue is left?
Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis. The margin of that company can't be that much more than a company like uber.
And uber itself will also invest in this, as every other car company. XPeng and co everyone who is building or working on this, will not just idly looking and waiting for tesla to just take 'whatever this cake' will look like.
For me it becomes a complet game changer if it becomes so reliable so extrem reliable, that i can order a car at night, a fresh bed / couch is then in the car and i can lie down while it drives me a few hundred kilometers away.
>Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis. The margin of that company can't be that much more than a company like uber.
This just isn't true. If you're a woman, choosing a slightly more expensive robotaxi over a ride share where you might meet your end is a valid choice.
At the end of the day, you're still trusting a misogynistic man to get you from point A to point B. One drives the car and works as a gig worker and wears a flannel shirt, and the other sits in an office at Waymo HQ, wears a patagonia vest. Both are still part of the patriarchy and have very little interest in making sure you're safe, unless there's money to be made.
As much as I want to assume this is a trolling response, I'll pretend it is in good faith. The person you replied to is not speaking about nebulous dangers of "the patriarchy". They are talking about the risk of being verbally harassed, or physically/sexually assaulted by the driver during or directly after the ride.
> Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis.
I'm not sure that's true. Self serve checkouts are killing the checkout. Washing machines killed the washing board. Something can be the same price or dearer if it's more convenient.
That comparison has the problem that it is not comparable. A robo taxi is not much different from human taxi. I can not see much of an improvement for the rider. Whereas washing machines are an incredible time saver and self checkouts can be faster (especially if you use these little hand scanners).
Are you sure? They are great for reducing personnel cost for the shop operator, but a cashier scans so much faster than you do. If you want to optimize for speed, the human cashier would still be better.
> Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high.
They may already work better than a Waymo. It's hard to tell. It's certainly there using the public version of FSD. There's awkwardness, but the same can be said of Waymo. What I don't know is how many mandatory edge cases remain to be handled before they can set it free.
In my experience, whenever you mandate open source software, you get software so unusable that it might as well be closed-source. Like, it doesn't compile, and they ignore all bug reports.
The nice thing about JS is that there is not very much overhead in setting things up, debugging weird things, restarting.
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