The "cooperative task" they're engaged in is just, broadly, meeting your needs, whatever they are.

The isolation is a desirable property, and I agree this is much preferable to a highly inter-coupled bunch of machines, and also that thia stretches the typical sense in which we refer to a "compute cluster", but I don't think it's an entirely invalid framing of the term.

You may be able to make it more expensive than your information is worth, but of course that affects users too.

It's intuitively obvious to a lot of people that the era of personal, wholly owned transportation is waning. A lot of people seem to miss the second clause of that old "you'll own nothing" phase, the part where most people are happy about it!

When vehicles drive themselves, and there's a large enough pool that one can show up pretty reliably within a few minutes of your needing one, how many people are going to choose to own when renting is cheaper and easier?

Believe me or don't, but, if you operate a vehicle with these assistive systems, I encourage you to carefully familiarize yourself with the ways in which they may unexpectedly affect its behaviour.

All of these half measures are pretty concerning to me. I think they let drivers feel more comfortable, despite paying less attention, and I think their failure modes may often be much worse than the (human-driven) crashes they purport to prevent.

Anecdote: I once had a rental car with alane-keeping assistance system that would nudge the wheel slightly. On the interstate, upon cresting a hill, I saw that there was a vehicle stopped in the shoulder, and I was concerned someone might step out into the travel lane. I already knew that there were no vehicles behind me in either lane, so I steered gently into the passing lane to give ample space to anybody who might step into the road.

However, in my haste, I had not used the blinker, so the lane-keeping system intervened. Imagine my surprise when the car decided to nudge me back towards exactly the dangerous situation I had been avoiding!

Luckily, nobody stepped out into the road. But if they had, this lane-keeping system could have killed them.

In comparison, even if the left lane hadn't been clear, the hypothetical accident there would have been a comparatively minor fender bender.

My car has a little screen in the dash where it usually shows my range, or the current temperature - information that I check when safe to do so, but never very urgently. This is the perfect place for a warning about low wiper fluid.

As for forward collision warnings, ehhhh. Maybe that should beep loudly, but it should almost never be wrong! (A false alarm could easily mean I slam on the brakes and get rear-ended, so that has to be balanced with the safety advantage of the true alarm.)

Stability and performance at scale sound like implementation specific properties though. If you've tried this, I'd be curious to known about the specific issues you encountered.

That said, I understand people are paying for basically not having to think about infrastructure, and agree that that's theoretically worth money, if they could do it well.

We always wish that our doctors would stay up to date on all of the current medical literature as they practice, and some of them do. In theory, AI systems could greatly accelerate a person's ability to retrieve and extract insights from the current body of knowledge.

Of course, that is highly fraught, but, in theory, I think I see what they're going for.

Also, FLOPs per watt hasn't changed as much lately, so thinking in terms of watts over a few-year time horizon does at least give you a ballpark of how many FLOPs.

If you're talking about a chip, you obviously want to know about FLOPs moreso, but, even down to the level of individual rack-units, wattage is a serious concern. Not every facility is built for these crazy 200kW racks.

A TOS/CSA should in no way ever attempt to prohibit automation, and if it does, it (generally) deserves to be disrespected.

There is a legitimate concern however about customer resource use escalating beyond what was expected when the price was set. Luckily this can be written as a simple black and white determination without any complicated gray areas, and is therefore easily enforced both in the code and in the contract.

https://forge.taf.codes/taf/snippets/src/branch/main/backups...

Have you ever considered using a foot-pedal for PTT?

Apple incidentally already has native STT, but for some reason they just don't use a decent model yet.

It's possible to drive results and create a culture of accountability without dragging people into the room with you just so you can interrupt their work in-person.