I thought it was a far superior UI to facebook when it launched. I tried to use it but the gravity of the network effect was too strong on facebook's side.

In the end I'd rather if both had failed. Although one can argue that they actually did. But that's another story.

I very much wanted Google Plus to succeed. Circles was a great idea in my opinion. Google Plus profiles could be the personal home page for the rest of us but of course, Google being Google...

That being said, tying bonuses for the whole company on the success of Google+ was too much even for me.

I very much wanted Google Wave to succeed. It seemed like a really cool way to communicate.

I guess we sort of got it with Slack though

I used and liked both wave and + and much prefered if we had them today instead of facebook, twitter, etc

i was obsessed with google wave... so cool

If self driving cars replace humans, I can safely bike on the road again, not having to worry about some exhausted soccer-parent scrolling tiktok on their phone in their minivan as they use me as a speed bump. Also as a parent/part time family taxi driver, I wouldlove to get back the ~10 hours a week I spend staring at the road. Kids will be driven by waymo to Karate, Soccer, Violin lessons etc. I am ready for this future.

I don't even know what areas of the United States I would consider "walkable". I live in San Francisco, don't own a car, we have "pretty good" public transit, and it's still absolutely miserable getting around. It takes me 40 minutes to go from Outer Sunset to downtown by muni. There are many locations in this city that I can physically jog to faster than public transit.

I can appreciate this technology might negatively impact other countries more heavily, but, for me, it's easily the most exciting tech I interact with and I'm rooting for it whole-heartedly. I'm at around 1000 miles logged on Waymo and am part of their beta tester program for freeway usage.

I also think that post-Covid remote work has probably damaged incentives for increasing the density of cities more so than anything autonomous vehicles will do. San Francisco is actively cutting bus routes, bus density, and threatening to significantly cut BART stops due to budget constraints and reduction in ridership.

It's odd because I do get where you're coming from, and I feel like I should be your target audience, but, for me, the ship sailed so long ago that I struggle to relate to your position.

I think this thread conflating between walkable and having good transit. A walkable city means almost everything you need is within walking distance. That doesn’t mean there are buses or trains to take you out of this area. I live in a walkable part of the city. Within a 15-minute walk, there are three supermarkets, perhaps twenty restaurants with different cuisines, four pharmacies, one each of USPS/UPS/FedEx for shipping, four different banks, three dry cleaners… you get the idea. The only transportation tool I need is my two legs.

Now of course sometimes I’m not content staying within this 15-minute circle. Then I simply choose the fastest method of transport to get there. Is BART or Muni faster than the Waymo trip? Then yes I’ll take pubic transportation. That’s what good transit is for.

You exemplify the defeatism that the auto makers are counting on.

I literally have never owned a vehicle in my life. If you feel I exemplify defeatism then I think you need to look inward.

NotJustBikes doesn't have a particularly great reputation among transit enthusiasts. A lot of his videos have become repetitive and focused on complaints rather than specific ways of making things better. Understandably, few people are willing to spend an hour listening to someone complain on the Internet.

> "Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities..."

Congestion charges. Limited licensing for TNCs. Dedicated public or private holding areas rather than "milling about". All of these have solutions.

> Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks.

It is already best practice in urban design to separate cars that need to quickly transit an area without interacting with it into completely independent routes where there are no bikes or pedestrians, and combine transit/bikes/walking into livable mixed mode streets where cars are not allowed. NotJustBikes has many examples of this, most commonly around Europe.

> To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity.

This is what already happens in places that don't have usable, safe, or car-competitive transit, modulo autonomous, including currently most of North America. The solution to needing fewer cars -- self driving or not -- is investment in transit and in ground-up overhaul of existing cities to optimize for transit and deprioritization of cars.

This is my complaint about many types of YouTube pundits.

I had tuned in to some channels for analysis and insightful commentary, for example, film and TV series.

But every one devolved into “Worst episode ever!” and “<studio> has RUINED <franchise>!”

So to sum up, the YouTube recommendations algorithm has ruined independent criticism and there is nothing on anymore. Join my Patreon, “UnJustLikes” for the deep dive!

Are you implying that stopping Waymo will make auto companies more likely to endorse walkable areas?

No, it's orthogonal. But cars that can drive everywhere will show up everywhere, all of the time. Watch the video in its entirety. It makes very strong arguments for why this is a dystopia in the making.

Why are you trying to make people on a text-based site watch a dumb video.

Just say what you want to say ... with words!

That video is 54 minutes long. Maybe, if it's the basis for your argument, you could post a summary?

Yeah, sort of.

Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be.

Disagree. A city is walkable because it is dense: daily destinations like your grocery store is close enough to walk to. But density implies congestion for cars because if everyone is in a car the roads will be too congested. This happens regardless of whether we have a human driver driving the car alone, or a human sitting inside a Waymo as a passenger. Congestion happens either way. Waymo does not solve the congestion problem, and therefore will not have any affect on the walkability of cities.

But it makes it worse. Once Waymo cars start clogging streets, cruising around waiting for passengers it will amplify the issue. It will be cheap enough to just have them mill around to be quickly available when requested.

In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate intersections. Of course pesky pedestrians and cyclists could still be in the way. That's where lobbying comes in to restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space. But since cars require much more space than peeople the result will be more sprawl and less walkable places as it will be people who will get pushed aside.

>In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate intersections. Of course pesky pedestrians and cyclists could still be in the way. That's where lobbying comes in to restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space. But since cars require much more space than peeople the result will be more sprawl and less walkable places as it will be people who will get pushed aside.

All the incentives you described exists today. On any given road any space devoted to sidewalks or bike lanes means less space for cars, and you already need separation between car lanes and sidewalks. You also have the same incentive to "restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space", because any controlled access roadway increases speed and throughput. Finally if you restrict pedestrians to certain areas (we all live in megatowers?), that actually makes taxis (including robotaxis) less attractive relative to public transit, because their whole value proposition is that they take you exactly where you want to go. Therefore it's unclear how automated cars would make things worse.

I hate how much space in cities is devoted to cars, and I wish we had much better transit of all sorts.

But - I'm just not sure your analysis is right. Someone who drives a self-owned car will park it in a downtown area for hours. Someone who takes a taxi of any sort will use much, much less amortized parking spot space. New York is a pretty good example of this.

Good public transit beats the snot out of cars, but a dense taxi deployment seems to get more people moved per total car-dedicated-space than private car drivership does.

And if we can reduce the amount of space dedicated to parking, we can increase density, which reduces the need for driving.

So the problem will be if we have self-driving whatevers at the expense of public transit, but perhaps not if it's at the expense of private car drivership.

Okay, so the video is just random predictions? Why should we believe any of this is true?

I regularly bike, which is why I'm hugely in favor of self driving cars; they're way safer for me when biking than human driven cars.

Why would driverless cars mill around? They would just wait around in underground garages. They can even block each other, so they don't need that much space to park.

Was he entirely wrong? Have you tried to dump the stored proc into a frontier model and ask it to refactor? You'd probably have neat 20 stored procs with well laid out logic in minutes.

I wouldn't keep a ball of mud just because LLMs can usually make sense of them but to refactor such code debt is becoming increasingly trivial.

> Was he entirely wrong?

Yes. I mean... of course he was?. Firstly, I had already gone through this process with multiple LLMs, from various perspectives, including using Deep Research models to find out if any other businesses faced similar issues, and/or if products existed that could help with this. That lead me down a rabbit hole of data science products related to regulatory reporting of a completely different nature which was effectively useless. tl;dr: Virtually all LLMs - after understanding the context - recommended us doing thing we had already been urging the business to do - hire a Technical BA with experience in this field. And yes, that's what we ended up doing.

Now, give you some ideas about why his idea was obviously absurd:

- He had never seen the SP

- He didn't understand anything about regulatory reporting

- He didn't understand anything about financial derivatives

- He didn't understand the difference between Transact SQL and ANSI SQL

- No consideration given to IP

- etc etc

Those are the basics. Let's jump a little bit into the detail. Here's a rough snippet of what the SP looks like:

   SELECT
    CASE
    WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('CCS', 'CAC', 'DEBT', ..... 'ZBBR') THEN '37772BCA2221'
    WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('STCB') AND ISNULL(s.FLD5_TXT, s.FLD1_TXT) = 'X' THEN 'EUMKRT090011'
    END as [Id When CounterParty Has No Valid LEI in Region]
   -- remember, this is around 5000 lines long ....

Yes, that's a typical column name that has rotted over time, so noone even knows if it's still correct. Yes, those are typical CASE statements (170+ of them at last count, and no, they are not all equal or symmetric).

So... you're not just dealing with incredibly unwieldy and non-standard SQL (omitted), noone really understands the business rules either.

So again... yes he was entirely wrong. There is nothing "trivial" about refactoring things that noone understands.

The issue is that AI will be creating software at whatever abstraction layer it is asked to produce. Right down to ASM maybe even machine code if someone actually wanted or needed that. Perhaps not the AI of today but given a few years I'll be quite surprised if it still can't.

If we can take a computer as powerful as today’s laptops and make it crawl because of the amount of inefficiencies in software like Teams, I’m not holding breath for embedded. If you apply the same kind of engineering principle as Anthropic, you’ll be laughed out of the room.

> For example wood carvers, blacksmiths, butchers, bakers, candlestickmakers etc etc.

Very, very few of those professions are thriving. Especially if we are talking true craftsmanship and not stuffing the oven with frozen pastries to create the smell and the corresponding illusion of artisinal work.

They are thriving where I live. There is a huge artisinal market for hand crafted things. There are many markets, craft centers, art fairs, regular classes from professionals teaching amateurs etc. In most rural communities I have visited it is similar.

They're existing, not really thriving. Artisanal things have become more popular as a hobby, but even people who get into them commercially rarely make real money off of it. The demand exists, but purely as a novelty for people who appreciate those types of things, or perhaps in really niche sub-markets that aren't adequately covered by big businesses. But the artisans aren't directly competing with companies that provide similar goods to them at scale, because it's simply impossible. They've just carved out a niche and sell the experience or the tailoring of what they're making to the small slice of the population who's willing to pay for that.

You can't do this with software. Non-devs don't understand nor appreciate any qualities of software beyond the simplest comprehension of UX. There's no such thing as "hand-made" software. 99% of people don't care about what runs on their computer at all, they only care about the ends, not the means. As long as it appears to do what you want, it's good enough, and good enough is all that's needed by everyone.

If you have a bespoke busines that needs some very custom software to run it, you will want a team to build it for you and provide extensive support for it.

I work in manufacturing industries where software for a single factory is completely custom written to their workflow and custom built machines, and they have dedicated teams of engineers on site 24 hours a day to monitor and maintain it. When it comes to large manufacturing factories, minutes of downtime equals millions in lost sales.

I guarantee you these types of companies will not be running software created by ai anytime soon, if ever at all.

The problem for software artisans is that unlike other handmade craftwork, nobody else ever sees your code. There's no way to differentiate your work from that which is factory-made or LLM-generated.

That is a valid concern.

Therefore I think artisan coders will need to rely on a combination of customisation and customer service. Their specialty will need to be very specific features which are not catered for by the usual mass code creation market, and provide swift and helpful support along with it.

What do you do for living now (if anything)?

I stopped working as a programmer and I'm teaching CS+math and homeschooling my kid.

I'm the exact age as the author and this post could have been written by me (if I could write). It echoes my story and sentiment exactly right down to cutting my literal baby teeth on a rubber key ZX Spectrum.

The anxiety I have that the author might not be explicitly stating is that as we look for places we add genuine value in the crevices of frontier models' shortcomings those crevices are getting more narrow by the day and a bit harder to find.

Just last night I worked with Claude and at the end of the evening I had it explain to me what we actually did. It was a "Her" (as in the movie) moment for me where the AI was now handholding me and not the other way around.

> The anxiety I have that the author might not be explicitly stating is that as we look for places we add genuine value in the crevices of frontier models' shortcomings those crevices are getting more narrow by the day and a bit harder to find.

That's exactly it. And then people say "pivot to planning / overall logic / high-level design," but how long do we have before upper management decides that AI is good enough at that stuff, too, and shows us all the door?

If they believe they can get a product that's 95% of what an experienced engineer would give them for 5% of the cost, why bother keeping the engineer around?

English is my second language so I'm not well tuned to picking up on the phrases that expose writing as AI generated. Even so it doesn't really change the sentiment being conveyed nor the fact that it's better writing than I could muster.

I really don't understand the demise of usenet as a way to have a public message board. It worked perfectly well for decades and then died off all at once when the bigtechs did everything in their power to squelch it and instead replace with their walled gardens.

I see what you did there.

You must be the only one who got my joke!

This guy has completely lost the plot. Too bad he holds the entire regime in Washington by the short hairs so they're all too happy to comply with his delusions.