I think if OEMs prioritized phevs more as a gateway drug, the transition to EVs would have been a lot less painful in NA. Even just driving a PHEV with 50km electric range makes you appreciate how great an EV can be.
Sadly, there's few good PHEV options. And even Toyota underserves this market.
Frankly, I think a PHEV is flat out better than a full EV. The electric range is good enough for day to day driving, and you have the combustion engine for long trips (which EVs still suck at, taking 30-40 minutes to fully charge even at a very fast charger). It's more complex which is a downside, but I think having the best of both types of vehicle is worth it.
The complexity of PHEVs is overblown in my opinion. My Toyota PHEV uses the exact same engine and electric motors as the equivalent HEV model. The only difference is the bigger battery and charging port. And Toyota HEVs have proven to be extremely reliable.
And yeah I've got to bring it in for oil changes, but that's no big deal for me. They also take care of other things like inspecting the car, changing wiper blades, air filters, putting on/taking off winter tires, and maintaining my coating. It's usually pretty quick (and they give me a loaner when it's not going to be quick), they are friendly, and they have snacks and wifi. It's also a relatively inexpensive compared to the total cost of owning a car.
There is some complexity for the driver in terms of deciding whether you want to drive in EV or Hybrid mode if you want to get the most out of it - so not something I would recommend for everyone - but no problem at all for me.
The bigger issue I would say it cost. They cost significantly more than HEV equivalents, and it's not something most people are likely to recoup in fuel savings. But still worth it IMO for additional (and instantaneous) power and quieter ride.
PHEV was definitely the no brainer option for me (vs EV) when I looked at the MPV options available in my country, and the state of charging infrastructure. But I look forward to the day when battery tech and charging infrastructure improve the the point where I can comfortably ditch the ICE.
> The reality is that, despite their public statements and posture, every leader in the EU secretly hopes USA can broker a peace deal and this all just kinda goes away.
This might've been the reality three years ago. A lot has changed in the US in the last three years.
Nobody wants to invoke article 5, I do agree. But I think they might understand that it's more likely that A5 is invoked than the US brokers a peace to with anybody. They're the department of war now.
You're saying this as if it is some kind of gotcha?
Don't you hope, not so secretly, that a peace deal can be brokered and we don't have to send our young men to war? I know I do, and I hope most people do. It would be weird if you don't.
The reality is, despite Trump being a gigantic arsehole, the US is still, by a huge margin, the worlds premier military. Realistically, they have the best chance of exerting pressure for a peace deal. I just wish Trump would live up to his promises for once.
> This feels like one of those USA problems that would be better addressed by funding decent social services (free healthcare, cheap housing, addiction treatment programs, etc).
What are you going to suggest next? Hot lunches for kids and a justice system focused on reform?
> From what I see is it's mainly managers and higher brass who doesn't care about code quality and sustainability, and aims to drive time to market metrics down aggressively with AI.
Trends over time will drive more observable changes. If a whole generation of programmers picks up bad habits that their managers don't care about (think very junior), that will take some time to play out. It's like children's literacy. You don't notice overnight, but a decade of neglect and you have a reading problem in kids.
Yes, this is why it's good that we're having these debates. We should keep having them. Personally, I am not yet convinced that this is a real problem. But I also haven't yet worked on a team with people who have entered the field in the last few years.
99%. Humans break into three categories: originators, amplifiers, mimics. The 99% are mimics, they won't use LLMs for anything other than direct applications to existing life tasks.
See: what they did with personal computers and smartphones. They have access to Fable and Astra right now, and they're not interested what-so-ever despite what these systems can now do. Instead they'll promptly go vaporize $50k on a giant pile of metal garbage (autos) that will rapidly depreciate. They have no practical use for Fable as is.
For the same reason people didn't rush off to their local public library to teach themselves JavaScript to acquire a better life for the cost of renting library books. They can't easily go against their restraints, their biological potential. To do so is extraordinarily taxing.
Originators generate most of the extreme wealth, and extreme outcomes. Mimics can be exceptionally successful however, most doctors are mimics for example, they won't ever originate anything.
Amplifiers are the teachers, they - ideally - shuttle what works to the mimics for reproduction across society. The mimics are largely just trying to keep up with the Joneses. They go out of their way to not risk anything most of the time. They're ideally following pre-set paths to biological success. It's why mass, rapid de-industrialization for one example is such a wipeout, the mimics don't adapt very quickly, they followed the path they were told would work and then they feel betrayed, they become like abandoned programs and don't know what to do next.
As a system you don't want too much of your population in the originator category: it's very expensive and highly prone to spectacular failure. You want the extreme majority of your biological entities following successful paths that have already been proven to work.
Humans aren't special, we're animals. Apply the patterns accordingly.
You are not wrong, but I was just saying that the possibility is there. And especially for people who are despairing over bad math education I see this as a game changer. Seeing equations used to make me angry and powerless for over a decade because I felt absolutely hopeless during my studies.
> and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?
Yes, probably. The benefits of dissemination already existed. The internet was free. Libraries are free. You deny people basic reading and comprehension growth by giving a distilled, without thought, answer.
You say "some time in the future this might be available on our phones for free" and "what's 10 years in the grand scheme of things?"
We'll, I'll argue that in 10 years from now we may see the full damage of what doing this has done to us and I'd rather not wait for "the what's 10 years in the grand scheme of things" to playout and irreversibly damage an entire generation the way we let the unmitigated and unregulated rollout of social media do the same to the most recent generation.
The risk/reward of this technology is unproven regarding the long-term effects on developing minds. We are beta testing the bullshit dreams of a couple billionaire techbros on an entire cohort of kids and young adults.
The main risk you have presented is a supposed negative effect on children's development. I am not convinced that there will be a negative effect at all.
On the reward side we have potentially curing most major disease, automating labor and freeing humanity from having to work for a living, as well as perhaps generally advancing science at an unprecedented pace. And of course improving education.
Wiki already democratized it just fine and was legitimately free for people who know how to read.
It's asinine that you think the sell it back to us argument falls short.
Not only does it distill our history to try to sound like some average version of us, it sounds like the blandest versions of us... And then sells this back to us.
From a coding standpoint, the tech is good and gets the job done. The pillaging of all other aspects of human history is just sad. With the only solace I'm seeing is that future training has to train on the dogshit versions of the internet that are now infected with LLM content.
> Making it accessible, understandable, and usable is another matter.
I see no evidence that this is what the use of LLMs is accomplishing for most users. Rather, they see to get distilled answers without the depth required to fully understand the response. Partially because that's what they like, and that's what the LLMs serve. Deeper understanding is not being given by LLMs. Instead, it's the SEMBLANCE of depth and laypeople don't know the difference. It's effectively eroding comprehension for some cool knowledge dopamine hit.
I'm more worried about the collapse of humanity a la idocracy. The model collapse might just be secondary. Even just conversing on HN, that's the vibe I feel we're headed towards. Or, perhaps, I'm just running into more and more posters that have financial ties to the success of LLMs.
Model collapse is an induced phenomenon, not something you'll ever see in practice. Of course naive predictions of an impending 'collapse' go back to at least GPT-3 (that's over 6 years ago), yet models continue to get smarter. And speaking of predictions, I assume you've been saying that AI is "fake" for just as long?
How do you see a possibility of avoiding model collapse? It seems to me to be an unavoidable consequence of two facts I consider pretty much irrefutable:
1) LLM content can at best be as good as the source material it was trained on. That's the upper bound. "Out of distribution" output of LLMs is mostly unusable.
2) LLM-generated content increasingly drowns out original content, online and elsewhere.
This spells "monotonically decreasing content quality" to me.
I use AI for coding regularly. It's not fake. Just most aspects outside of the coding are looking to be a net negative on humanity if we think comprehensive and critical thinking are positive aspects of the human condition.
I'm waiting for a messenger from the future coming back to tell people that passkeys are stupid, and having passwords on post-it notes attached to the monitor was never a real problem, it's just the security industry that got threat modeling backwards for couple decades...
Sadly, there's few good PHEV options. And even Toyota underserves this market.
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