But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.

What a formidable moat against newcomers, definitely worth the price!

it depends what's most beneficial: having a few percents of very mathematically experts people in maths-heavy professions? Or having everyone somewhat decent at maths, even when it doesn't affect their productivity in their jobs?

I don't have any hard data about this, but instinctively I'd bet on the former: I'd rather have a few hundreds more Sutskevers, than most of the country's bakers know their way around PDE.

* be completely autonomous from day 1, and progressively increase the number of situations you can drive through;

* or drive through every legal situation from day 1, and increase the % of them handled autonomously.

I believe the 2nd approach, Tesla's, has one key advantage: it collects data about freak situations much faster and more exhaustively. Given how data has become the key resource in AI, that's probably a very strategic asset they've accumulated here.

Also, Waymo's joker (remote operation by humans when the software bails out) is totally replicable by Tesla robotaxis.

you have only one data structure (the 2D table), data types are super-weak, there are no variable names... all of this guarantee a maintenance nightmare, and rightfully scares developers. But it's also a very low barrier to entry. You've got data, you paste them into the grid, and you start toying with them, before having figured anything about them.

That's an amazing superpower, when targeting non-developers, and that's why Excel is the most used programming language over the world, by far: it's probably got an order of magnitude more users than there are trained developers in the world.

Remote has been fantastic, to extend our pool of potential customers/employers. Not working in an open space, not being disturbed by pointless red-tapers and middle managers is a productivity boost. Not losing time and energy in commutes as well.

I can see one serious drawback with pure remote: it's a cumbersome way to mentor junior developpers. In big companies which maintain a balance of junior/senior staff, and try to make the former grow, it's a legitimate issue. In start-ups, which expect you to hit the ground running, and don't have an army of managers to keep busy, remote should be the norm.

* Getting out of sleep (deep RAM sleep, not hibernate)

* Handling password/fingerprint authentication once out of sleep

* Wifi rescan frequency

* Occasionally, plugging/unplugging external screens

And I've got no idea why. Once woken up and plugged to whatever I need to use, it's a really good laptop.

However, I'd be thoroughly unsurprised if Bob happened to be on the autism spectrum. And autistic people are counter-intuitive but very easy to handle: force yourself to be extremely explicit, and to stick to first-degree in your exchanges to a point that seems ridiculous (to you). That's it, really.

They were a niche gadget before electrification went mainstream, but today, I really urge you to give it a try by renting one for a couple of days, it makes life more enjoyable in my experience, beyond the money saved.

As opposed to companies which consider them as glorified factory workers, who are insufferably hard to manage and monitor.

I'm currently working with RoR, which I'd never used before, and what matters is that I know algorithms, SQL beyond ORM, how to write code which won't be a nightmare to maintain in a couple of years, etc. All those skills are the same in Rails, in Django, in C++.

it's in order to avoid renegotiation with current employees, who may have negotiated a less favorable deal, under different circumstances or because they can't haggle.

Google employees are in a more-than-fair position when it comes to negotiate compensation. If the deal sucks, then Google will revise it and/or lose part of its talents, but the issue will fix itself.

Then again, maybe the issue was they were compensating people so that they accept SV commutes and house prices, and everyone is realizing that most people don't need to live in SV. So the ludicrous compensations aren't needed either.

It is a share of the nation's wealth, which you receive as a legitimate co-owner of that nation. The only difference with a company stock is that you cannot sell it, citizenship is unalterable. This safeguard prevents a lot of extortion schemes.

And when discussing the amount of dividend to grant (a political discussion which must be repeated regularly), the tradeoffs are the same as for a company: you want as much dividend as possible, as long as it's not detrimental to the nation's future wealth.

Many opponents to such schemes wrongly perceive it as communist, it's important to present it in a way that debunks that misconception.

Automating out a taxi/Über driver saves 50× to 1000× more money per traveler. And the infrastructure for a car ride cost way less than train + track + catenary lines + stations + antiquated ticketing system etc., so salaries represent a higher percentage of total costs.