I completely agree. My father was a truck mechanic and I spent plenty of time under cars turning wrenches. I'm very happy that part of my life is behind me as an BEV owner. My wife still drives an old Accord and I dread the times when it needs an oil/transmission fluid change, muffler replacement, water pump, etc. All of that simply disappears when you switch to a BEV and it really is refreshing not having to think about it at all.
I think the AI angle for this is that it is a force multiplier. You don't have to write specific commands, you just have to prompt generic things and it will helpfully fill in all the details. This also allows you to avoid having certain keywords in the PR (ie. `rm -rf`) and possibly evade detection.
His comments about Apple ring true to my ears. Apple is definitely lagging behind in the "AI" world, but that is really what they tend to do. They aren't the first company but they are usually the best. Historically, they wait until everyone else makes the mistakes and then introduce something better. I guess they felt like they couldn't wait for the "AI" trend to blow over; probably because Siri is just not very good.
I think that Apple will hold on to their "AI" stuff for a while longer and wait until it really dies down. Then they will introduce a much better Siri and get rid of the "summarize your email" and "re-write this sentence" bullshit.
I completely agree, though with a twist. Google knows everything about me and yet I get ADs for things that I would never purchase. Just because I'm a middle aged male I see trucks, and beer, and football advertisements all day long. Those are irrelevant to me. If Google would only use their immense knowledge of me and what I like, I might be more amenable to watching their ADs. Where are the ADs for geeky movies that I might enjoy (is there a new Superman movie coming out)? Or books by my favorite authors? Or video games or computer equipment or electric cars? Hell, I have grandkids so stuff for them might work on me.
To be clear, it's not only Google, all the big providers have so much information on all of us, but they don't seem to take advantage of it at all. I've turned the AD "customization" on/off for all kinds of things and it doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. Nearly everything I see is irrelevant to me.
Their incentive is to make money, not serve you relevant ads.
If a geeky movie studio pays X to show an ad to people of your profile, while a car manufacturer pays X*2, Google is better off showing you the car, even if they are internally 100% sure you'd buy the movie instead.
Even if they pay per impression, pricing is ultimately driven by clicks.
Even if you pay-per-view of an ad, a company selling tampons will not pay as much for 1 thousand views of their ads on a youtube channel for construction workers, as on a youtube channel for girl's fashion. Because the former drives no clicks/revenue, and the latter does.
So yes relevance is extremely relevant to make money.
> Just because I'm a middle aged male I see trucks, and beer, and football advertisements all day long
Well, yeah. Those companies will pay to send their ad to all middle aged men. Those companies could slice and dice more to get better demographics, but they don't think it's worth it.
Google's business isn't to slice and dice the demographics to show you better ads. It's to slice and dice the demographics in any way that the advertisers will pay for.
Because the people who are willing to pay money are, ultimately, the customers.
The ads probably get to you subconsciously anyway, IIRC there are studies done by psychology experts (some of them also work for the ad industry) that explains the presence of random ads.
For one thing, if you're suddenly in the market for a truck, you'll see the brand that was in an ad a long time ago and you think "Oh yeah I've heard of Ford, never heard of Isuzu, let's look at the Ford much closer.". Even a tiny nudge that the ad did helps, when selling to millions. Obviously a truck is a big purchase, and you individually probably would do more research, but the nudge applied to millions might move the needle in the heads of a few dozen people.
It's an established strategy to serve you irrelevant ads. When the targeting gets too specific, the people start to notice and panic.
Target is a fun example - they had cases where they revealed pregnancies through targeted ads. Now, they'll put an ad of a lawnmower (untargeted) next to the bassinet (targeted) and customers are less creeped out
Idk of it is a strategy, would be interested for any background reading.
My XP at an ad-tech is that there is only so many targeted ads, and the advertisers cap how many times they want to show you an ad. When it comes time to bid to show you an ad, all of the targeted ads might have exhausted their campaigns (shown you the ad X times already, or the campaign ran out of spend). In this case, all the advertisers that would bid a _lot_ in auction are sitting out. There are still other bidders, but these are less targeted and are bidding less money. Because the highly targetted ads are exhausted, these lower targeted ads might look random. Their targeting might be instead of based on gender, city, income, the targeting might be based on just geography. The fewer targeting parameters, the lower the bid.
In effect, once all the highpy targeted campaigns are done with you, they stop bidding, and the ads with less targeting which have cheaper bids are now the auction winners. If those are exhausted too, then there is a very large pool of low rent ads which have even less targetting.
Here's a skeptical write-up about the mailers I was referencing. I like this view because it acknowledges human fallacies. For example, that an untargeted ad could feel targeted or that we may exaggerate the amount of ads that feel targeted.
It’s better they don’t. Hyper-targeting of ads to achieve political aims has been happening for the past decade with Meta leading the way.
There is zero situation where this technology doesn’t get co-opted by adverse interests to make your life measurably worse.
Better to keep them dumb and then grow a regulatory spine to put a stop to the endless proliferation of ads. It was done for advertising on other media.
No it doesn't. Google is highly restrained when it comes to using what it knows about you to serve you ads. Way more restrained than for example Meta or the newer Chinese apps like TikTok.
I agree with your point, but you're also making a different argument than the point you're replying to. Google knows way more about you than they're legally able to apply to advertising. Just because they can't use it for that specific purpose doesn't mean they lack the information.
I would like to see a advertisement for “The C Programming Language - ANSI edition”. Yes I have a copy but would like to see it advertised on YouTube. Wish my copy was signed :/
I'm the same. I loved my 2020 Model Y when I bought it new and I love my 2020 Model X that I bought used. Both are the best cars I've ever owned. I know that everyone likes to complain about fit and finish but honestly I never noticed a single thing wrong with either of them. They are performant, silent, efficient, and the MX doors make my grandkids giggle (that's worth quite a bit :).
I keep looking for the next EV to buy but every one that I test drive seems lacking, mostly in the software area. Tesla has the software nailed and nobody else can seem to figure it out. I recently drove a Rivian R1S and really liked it, but the software was not great (for a $100K car) and it really disappointing me.
I really feel like Tesla does great work but their leader needs to go. He's smeared the name so badly that I fear it might never recover.
Yeah I’m hoping the R2 is an option but FSD has become very critical.
I don’t see how Tesla could even dissociate with him, he owns the board and would have to divest also. I think the only path back is if people forget, conservatives suddenly like EVs, or they strike gold with the robots or something.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it was a "scam" but there were definitely reasons that other automakers didn't take them up on the offer. IMHO if someone like Ford or Toyota had taken them up on the offer they could be miles ahead of the competition today and not lagging behind the Chinese competitors. While there were strings attached there were also a lot of good ideas in those patents that would have boosted development and deployment timelines.
I just finished watching Daredevil: Born Again[0] and this incident looks shockingly familiar to what happened in the show. I don't know how the show runners knew this was going to happen but it feels like they've been spying on the future. Do they have a time machine or are they really that good (and the current administration that bad)?
That makes me wonder ... what could you do with a cheap Cybertruck? Take all the panels off and remake them in something else? Maybe put a 3D printer to work and create something really unique. Sure, you'd still be stuck with a CT but a lot of the tech in that vehicle is pretty good. Could you turn it into a sand buggy? What about a flatbed truck? Maybe a repair truck with welders and other electrical equipment?
> a lot of the tech in that vehicle is pretty good
For all the insistence that "Tesla is a software company" and "Tesla's advantage is software", the Cybertruck has entirely software defined anti-slip and skid prevention loops that are utterly broken.
Which is funny, because ICE cars have solved this, again, fully electronically and with significantly less control over the drivetrain (the primary control is holding the brakes on whichever wheel is slipping and letting the diff sort it out) for decades.
My VW GTI can crawl its way across sheer ice by just holding down the gas pedal and letting the computer sort it out. A VW Passat from 2008 could do the exact same thing. Every other ICE vehicle manufacturer had this as standard functionality by like mid-2010s.
Meanwhile, you can find videos of Cybertrucks struggling to deal with an inch of slush, which is an trivial situation for electronic stability controls to handle.
There is no excuse for a fully electronic drivetrain which has perfect ability to modulate not just the speed but also the force with which it turns the wheels to be this bad. It's pathetic.
The UK government wants the ability to decrypt ANY UK users data no matter where they might be located. What do they think, that no other country would follow suit and ask that ITS citizens be "protected" by the same ruling? How short sighted can you be?
And props to Apple for refusing. Time and again Apple has refused to compromise their security in the face of government pressure. I know, I know, they are part of PRISM (and other Snowden leaks) but they are the company most willing to publicly resist. At this point, I wouldn't trust Google to host my dumpcake recipe, and it's terrible.
This tracks. My sister had her car keyed (scratching the paint) in a Honda dealer parking lot while waiting for a tire repair. The dealer has cameras but when they reviewed the footage they couldn't find any evidence of the vandalization. They wouldn't let anyone else review the footage so we're not really sure what happened. However, I do know that finding evidence of a crime that happened on their property would just cause the dealer trouble and likely force them to pay for damages.
She filed a police report but that didn't really help at all. Not that we really expected it to, but she was just trying to be complete. In the end she had to pay to fix the damage and the dealer (and the criminal) had no repercussions at all.
