Yes, all of us who are not wealthy must have an upper limit to what we can support, and maybe 25% is over your limit, but please don't ignorantly accuse them of ripping you off when you clearly know nothing of the costs of vastly different scales of business.

Plus, depending on the battery chemistry, that material could also create a serious fire; it is a lot of stored energy either way.

So, I would not wait for it

>>Ask a civil engineer the degree to which they can fight their leadership on these grounds. Both civil engineers and doctors both can and absolutely do refuse to sign off on unsafe situations.

That does not mean they detect them 100% of the time, or never cave to pressure, but they absolutely do. We just never hear about the incidents that didn't happen because a doctor or engineer forced the right solution or no action — precisely because nothing newsworthy happened. We DO hear about the ones that did happen, Therac-25, Mars Climate Orbiter loss, Cloudflare outage, it is endless

>>I think it actually selects against those who are bad at avoiding responsibility and not legally savvy.

You might think that, but clearly you have never read even the summaries of cases where doctors lost their licenses. Hint: it was not some mistake that could have been covered up by better schmoozing. If anything, the system is too lenient.

The rest isn't even worth the bytes to respond; just handwaving an attitude. There are very good arguments to not have licensing on software engineering but you are not making them

You glibly say "More schooling does not mean more trustworthy or careful doctors.". Yet the schooling and credentialing clearly cuts off huge numbers of would-be doctors who never pass the exams, never graduate med school, or never even get into med school, or decide it is too difficult in the first place. In the software realm, those people just go to some boot camp and they're off to the races...

Another huge aspect of credentialing is required ongoing education, which REQUIRES physicians and engineers to take updated continuing education just to maintain their license. This again continuously improves the talent pool.

And, if your main concern is that they be "more trustworthy or careful", credentialing also helps that by finding the worst, least trustworthy and careful and cancelling their license, so they are NOT doctors anymore. The untrustworthy or careless SWE just gets a new job to ruin stuff elsewhere, probably taking one from the actual good engineer because their talent is not engineering, but bullshitting.

Yes, but they make a lot FEWER such mistakes than would people who could not pass the exams and maintain a license.

The standard is not perfection; the standard is as good as practical and better than if nothing were done. Medical licensing definitely meets both of those criteria. Unless you are arguing that anyone who takes a ten-week "Medical Bootcamp" is ready to be a surgeon you would trust to operate on you or your children?

Would you also be happy to commute to work over a bridge designed by someone with a 10-wk bootcamp in civil engineering?

You have it exactly backwards — Credentialing RAISES the skill floor. It does not raise it to perfection, and "Certificates" in the computing industry are a joke, but real medical or engineering credentials certainly raise the floor higher than the software floor

No.

Automating the system is ABSOLUTELY a difference in kind. The argument "it is the same thing" is reductionist beyond absurdity.

"Quantity has a quality all its own."

Scaling and automation is a difference in kind in every field, and especially in surveillance of a population. To deny it is to assert the Industrial Revolution, the Computer Revolution, and the Internet had no effect on anything.

A cop sitting by the road operating a speed trap time or radar/laser gun can trap enough speeders to moderate the traffic, and individual speeders get few tickets. Implementing the "same" thing with cameras everywhere and timing toll-booth arrival/departure times and issuing tickets automatically would result in the majority of drivers getting multiple speeding tickets every trip (just based on measured average speeds on most roads exceeding the posted limit).

Your example proves the opposite of what you say.

Having a cop personally observing and writing down license plates requires resources - a decision to prioritize those specific resources for that specific investigation on that day. It is a real decision to surveil people in that way. It means people will ONLY be surveilled in that way when it is important.

In contrast, constant, ubiquitous, and near-cost-free surveillance means people will be surveilled all day, every day.

What was once applied only to exceptionally serious crimes is now available to target any citizen for any petty crime. It enables exactly the kind of silent targeting for which every authoritarian government lusts — the appearance of law and order with the ability to target any specific "troublemaker" at will.

With such surveillance, there is no need for an authoritarian to make false charges or highlight a protest. Jack protests, they don't like it, just say "go after Jack". They go to the cameras, find a bunch of petty crimes, and prosecute. Jack now has endless trouble if not jail, and the regime carries on like nothing happened.

If, as you say, you don't understand why it is not different, stop being reductive, look at the larger system.

Inspiration to us all

I've seen AI used well in a few support situations, and it is great - faster to get to the answer vs a human (usually faster than even getting to a human, which is another issue)

When my case can be handled by the automated system, it is great, when it is not, it is usually misery, leading to anger at the customer and whatever company sold them that automated isht.

Especially for intelligent knowledgeable users of anything, by the time we call, it is an issue likely to need escalation.

So, the one absolutely critical factor for me and everyone I know is: how fast and easy is it to get to a human when we find the automated assistance does not work for our particular issue? It should be "I need to speak to a human now", and the immediate response should be "OK, let me get you one... Hello, this is [person], how can I help?" with the prior transcript already on the human's screen.

If this works, it is good because the humans are operating a level up, not having to deal with endless monotonous minutiae, and dealing with interesting issues all day, which means they get good at it and have a better attitude — a win for all.

How, and how well do you handle that situation — how close are you to the proper response I described?

Maybe you could pay someone else who is less desperate to part with some, but that does not increase supply.

Nine women cannot produce a baby in a month, even though you could average about one per month if you wait about nine months.

They should say more clearly up front what is the definition of efficiency.

If they want people to think of a particular metaphor, but there are critical differences, those differences must be clarified up front. It seems the person designing the game/test has never really mowed actual lawns (at least lawns s/he actually cared about).

I took the approach of efficiency meaning minimizing turns to save time.

Instead their definition of efficiency is fewest moves. Their "optimum" has many more turns than many other paths, so would be far more inefficient use of time (and apparently nevermind that path also lacks the necessary overlap to do a good job of actually mowing a lawn).

It was also unclear up front that the squares with rocks/features could not be mowed into, but this is unrealistic, as you need to mow around the feature edges not merely the square nearest them.

Overall, it is a less-than-good choice of metaphor for the test, and with the poor explanation of what "efficient" means by his measure, it is not the slightest bit surprising many got different results, "sub-optimal" by the page's standard.

It seems the test itself is so sub-optimal so the results are meaningless — ench test-taker's goals were likely significantly different from the goals the test-maker assumed.

Sure, ubiquitous charging will be enormously helpful to adoption, and universal rapid charging also. But the reality is it doesn't yet exist.

Until then, just because long trips are lower frequency does not mean they are less important or can be ignored as a requirement, particularly if a person/family has only one vehicle.

The long trips may be the most important trips, maybe to see family only a few times a year...

Plus, even though you might be able to rationalized away the long range requirement, generations of people are accustomed to cars yielding 4-600 miles between fill-ups. It is not only the ability to drive on a long trip, but also the need to only fill up your car every 1-3 weeks instead of every day or two.

Desirable Range between fill-ups is also a human-factors issue. You want the range of the car to be at least, indeed around, the distance people can drive in a single stint. If you can drive 350 miles in 4.5 hours, and your car gets that distance, you're probably OK resting and filling up. If it goes 1000 miles between fill-ups, that isn't a big advantage. But if the car makes you stop before you feel you need to stop, that will feel like the car is not good enough for your needs.

So, sure, if we suddenly got 2500 Wh/kg batteries and could easily make cars with a 1000-mile range, and manufacturers offered 1000, 500, and 100-mile ranges, I'd expect the most sales to be in the 500-mile units.

We could go for performance, trading off some battery for four inboard motors (fully sprung weight) with half-shafts and CV joints, steel space-frame chassis and carbon fiber body — it could put many supercars to shame.

Going for range, same light-weighting, but less powerful motors and adding more battery, the range could get silly long at something like 1000 miles for 100kg of battery.

For the kind of long range options another poster mentioned, with 100 kg for 1000 miles, a few 10-kilo swappable battery packs could make it easy to trade luggage space for range, or bring them to a charge station only occasionally, but not lug them around for most in-town trips.

No question, we could go wild!

The Watt-hours per kilogram of good Lithium Ion batteries is around 250-280 Wh/Kg; for Lithium Iron Phosphate it's about 180 Wh/kg, and for Sodium-Ion about 170 Wh/Kg.

The raw energy in gasoline is about 12,300 Wh/Kg but automobile internal combustion engines get only about 20-30% efficiency yielding about 2500-3600 Wh/Kg. For aviation piston engines it is a bit better at 25-30$ so 3000-3600 Wh/kg.

So, the batteries, instead of being 10-12X the weight of the gasoline for the same net driving/flying range, could weigh about the same as the gasoline. So, a typical car with maybe a 16 gallon tank and 30 miles per gallon fills up with 128 pounds (58 kg) of gasoline to get 480 miles of range. The Li-Ion battery for that range would weigh something like 1300 Lbs (590 kg). That is a substantial additional weight for a car that could be 2800-3800 Lbs in ICE configuration, so 35-45% added weight (a bit less because of savings on the ICE engine, etc). This requires everything else to also be heavier, from the structural frame, the suspension system, and even the wheels and tires (which is also unsprung weight, further impairing performance).

With a 130Lb/60kg battery instead, and saving the weight of the ICE engine and fuel system, the overall car design could go much more lightweight, regaining a lot of performance and range, all while gaining the huge torque of electric motors.

In aviation, a battery systems of that weight would enable all-electric aviation to go from small performance niches to the default for general aviation.

So yes, it would be a HUGE benefit to achieve 10X energy density batteries, and we do have reference points for people to imagine it.

It is not a difference for each person; it is a difference for a different category or type of person or service.

It is not exploiting spying on a person's private life and seeing when they are desperate or get the DGAF discount.

The SpaceX stationary/mobile distinction actually provides a better service - for more money, you get to move around. I'm not sure if it puts any higher load on the system but my guess would be the excess profit exceeds the extra cost of tracking a mobile terminal.

They aren't great, but are at least fair. Airlines have also been doing it for decades, beyond economy/biz/first but also cheaper if your flight includes a Saturday stayover (extra $$ for typical biz travelers) and far more sophisticated schemes now.

Similar for parking lots charging more per hour during business hours vs nights/weekends.

The key is the category-type prices are not exploiting an unfair advantage by prying into individual customer's private lives.

Is it on a similar (slippery) slope of charging more without providing more value? Sort of. But they really are very different things.

https://studcosystems.com/

https://www.clarkdietrich.com/products/structural-studs

https://www.steelconsystems.com/

There are two ways to legally "earn" money. The first is to provide a product or service that is sufficiently valuable the buyer willingly parts with the money for the price.

The other is extractive — to find a way to exploit the customer with limited choices and extract the maximum value from them. Monopoly pricing is the primary example — people need electricity, housing, food, etc. and if someone corners those markets, or colludes, they can extract a far higher amount of money from people than they would willingly spend in an actually free market of multiple competitors and fully available information (wherein another competitor would offer prices closer to the cost of production and take the business from the overpriced competitor).

Production of value is the essence of the value of capitalism. Extracting value by coercion is fundamentally corrupt, and at the extreme end is nothing more than mob rule ("nice store windows you got there, it'd be a shame if something happened to them; pay us for protection").

Surveillance pricing is simply a fundamentally dishonest form of the latter, exploiting massive amounts of information on customers to extract more money from a person than they would be freely willing to pay for a product, because you found a temporary or permanent vulnerability and 'have them over a barrel'.

A society that permits surveillance pricing will inevitably become more impoverished because the few players doing surveillance pricing will extract more money from the society WITHOUT creating any more value. This impairs everyone else's ability to provide value.

Allowing it is fundamentally stupid and self-destructive.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083597

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

OFC, YMMV

I think that is the part where he talks about "do I still have economic value?", and more generally, is everyone in this ever-receding pocket where they will have no economic value.

And until this week, they would release numbers every six months. Now they are NOT releasing numbers.

If the numbers were up, they would post them.

This sudden change of Netflix' reporting shows they decided it is less bad to raise the flag of halting reporting than to expose the size of the subscriber loss. That is not good. Maybe they are just fearful of showing any loss at all, or maybe it is a really large loss. Eventually, we'll know something.