This may actually be the time where it becomes feasible to create high quality software with reasonable (human) effort.

What we are seeing with AI generated incident reports causing issues is maybe mostly an impedance mismatch between people who have fully adopted AI and people /projects who haven't.

Traditional light bulbs have taught us that lights naturally have to be "consumables". That has been far less true for energy saving lamps (of which I have maybe 2 or 3 still left which I planned to replace by LEDs once they die, but they just won't). As far as I can tell, this isn't at all the case for LEDs.

It's much more likely that lamps and ceiling fans made out of plastic break from accidental physical impact or turn ugly due to natural UV discolorization or similar. And probably most will live on until replaced due to changing tastes.

Having said that, seeing the incredible progress of models throughout this year, I also strongly believe that the planned buildout is overeager. Even I with my gaming hardware often run out of instructions to give. And the smarter the models get that I can run, the less I will be able to saturate my hardware. Is it because of my lack of creativity of which kinds of tasks I can give to AI? Maybe a bit, but currently I can't believe that I am that far away.

So the best solution for nowadays is to use just char, short, int and long long (and make strong assumptions that these are exactly 8, 16, 32 and 64 bits wide respectively), never use long or long double. Never use (u)intNN_t. Then you are good.

Those caveats of the past (but int might be 16 or 36 bits), are exactly that. An artifact of the past. A historical curiosity. Not relevant for today or the future. No, I don't believe for a second that any future platform will change their size.

Platforms also still disagree on the signedness of char, so when an 8 bit numeric type (as opposed to an ascii character type) is needed, one should always explicitly specify signed char or unsigned char, both of which are separate types from char.

Further things of note: platforms also have agreed on little endian (so called "network byte order" is dead and should never be used in new protocols, because it forces everyone to convert) and on IEEE memory representation of float and double. Contrary to popular belief the main floating point operations (+,-,*,/,==,<,>,<=,>=) are also precisely defined and always behave exactly the same (leaving out strange edge cases such as denormals). And yes, of course platforms have very long agreed on twos-complement for negative integers. This even made it into the standard at some point, I believe. Same happened with the memory layout of a vector<>, which in the past wasn't standardized, but because everyone of course did the obvious (and made it the same as a normal C array), it was added to the standard later.

What I am saying, what the C++ standard guarantees isn't everything. There are much more guarantees modern C++ code can (and should) rely on.

So 200% smaller is 3*2=6 smaller than 3, which is 3-6=-3

Which is why these kinds of statements usually don't make any sense at all. Usually something can't be more than 100% smaller, at which point it is completely gone.

But still, it seems that billionaires are lying left and right. It isn't just Elon.

- Autonomous cars will improve traffic because stopped cars can start going at the same time at an intersection -> Then you have no safety distance. And while theoretical improved reaction times mean you might need a bit less distance, the quadratic term comes from the needed breaking deceleration, not the reaction time.

- Autonomous cars will reduce congestion: they can't if they are supposed to drive around empty either to park somewhere else or to get to the next person to transport. On the contrary, they will increase congestion.

Note also that I don't buy the "work" inside "very small cars". It's not just that having to drive prevents you from working. Also the overall comfort while traveling isn't good enough outside of trains or planes for anything but some tiny amount of work.

I am on board with the benefits for old, disabled, tired and drunk people though. Also, I do accept that they will prevent a lot of accidents and deaths.

To answer GPs point, I think Fairphone doesn't primarily target either of the two audiences. I think they primarily target the people that care about the ethics of the creation of the hardware. Basically people who would like to minimize the invisible human cost that their phone creates.