Assuming there is any reality to this (big assumption), I assume you are looking at the distance to the nearest distribution center (so Tesla “Not a dealership for legal reasons”). So a lot closer to hundred than not.

Mostly because Factory->House requires a lot of automated charging technology. Whereas Factory->Truck->Dealership->House still lets them take advantage of scale (a truck truck) and can go on a single battery charge.

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Sensationalism/puritanical stupidity will always color this as “depressed and lonely” in the same sense that anyone who masturbates is a freak who can’t get a real partner (and those crowds are ALWAYS implying a cishet partner…).

“Sex robots” are more or less a middle ground between a masturbatory aide and a prostitute. People who use them aren’t looking for (simplifying) a girlfriend anymore than someone who has casual sex is looking for one. They may be looking for a way to blow off some steam. Sex releases a LOT of really nice chemicals into our brains and, if you do it right, is almost meditative when it comes to clearing thoughts.

Some are looking for a way to “get practice” for a “real girlfriend” because media makes them think they need to make their partner orgasm with just a single look. When the reality is… if you even give half a shit about how your partner feels you are well above the vast majority of people out there. And, if you actually ask for feedback and follow it, it is gonna be god damned niagara falls down there. The good Canadian side.

And, with the rise in long term long distance relationships as well as the acknowledgement of asexual folk, it can be a way for one or more partners to get what they need out of a relationship without burdening the person(s) they love.

I dunno. I generally hate most coverage of these topics because it invariably involves folk showing their crusty poorly wiped asses. Sex positivity! But only if you have sex the way the good book says you should (… with your daughter and against her will?). Same with when sex work comes up. It INSTANTLY becomes the assumption that anyone who has ever considered sex work is involved in human trafficking and blah blah blah. And some of that does happen (it is almost like legalization means victims have somewhere to go for help…). But it ignores the idea that someone might just realize they can trade their body for money in the same way that athletes and “the trades” do.

People clean sleeves (fleshlights) on the regular. And an adult sized (please, dear Eothas, let it be adult sized…) android is not something you can hide in a sock drawer. So a cleaning station is very reasonable.

I definitely lean toward this being genuine manufacturing error (or user error).

That said? Never underestimate the power of market research. I was just chatting with a friend about how neither of us understand cars beyond the most basic of emergency maintenance and I could 100% see a predatory system target us (moreso than the ones we know target us).

Similarly, I would assume most former grad students are used to actually monitoring mileage because we are trying to push our crap for as long as we can. Whereas someone who has been a tech bro for a decade probably expects to buy a new car every time they get a bonus and wouldn’t care.

That said? Assuming this IS fraud on tesla’s part (and that is generally a safe assumption), my money is on something like:

The odometer nudging is designed to make sure everyone hits their mileage based warranty after N years. Every M months it will estimate your average use and “nudge” you based on heuristics. Hinton had a particularly low mileage the period before so it scaled them much higher for the next period while they were monitoring it.

The “Fuck Cars” crowd basically just regurgitate what they hear a ridiculously rich youtuber who lives in one of the higher cost of living cities on the planet say. So take anything they say with a grain of salt.

What they ACTUALLY are saying is that the average person did not need a personal vehicle (whether it is a horse or a car) until (guesstimating) the 1950s/60s. Not because public transit was so much better but instead because people basically never left the couple mile radius of where they were born. Catching a bus To The City was a big deal and people who actually moved long distances away from family were 'strange".

Then, for whatever reason, people learned there was a big wide world and the cost of cars dropped drastically. So it became much more common to want to make that dream trip to The City a monthly or even weekly trip and people increasingly would move tens or even hundreds of miles away from where they grew up… in part to be able to buy a house and have their own family.

But it isn’t that infrastructure was “changed” so much as use cases were. And people stopped being willing to spend an entire day traveling to go visit their sibling one state over.

The aspect which HAS changed in “living memory” is the decline in “walkable cities”. The idea that you would have a corner grocery store every couple miles and would never even need a car. And… anyone who is even slightly aware of logistics and shipping can understand why that is also not really feasible. Because having pantry staples and “the basics” at Fred’s Grocery down the street? That is… depending on where you live that is feasible.

But… there is a reason fricking kei cars exist. Because you are not going to have a butcher or a giant produce stand or whatever on every street corner. You can’t. There will be MASSIVE food waste if you did. So people still tend to have to travel a bit even just a few times a month. Some people do that by public transit and are the people with five bags of groceries on the subway. Many people rapidly get that car for the weekend grocery trips and so forth.

At which point… if people are already going to drive to get groceries… why would they go to the corner store anyway?

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE a walkable city and I was probably the happiest for the five or so years I lived in The City and would hit up a medium sized grocery store while walking back to my apartment from the subway station. And getting GOOD meat was 30 minutes away by train. But I am also not privileged enough to ignore the existence of small towns or the tendency for the people who WORK in those grocery stores to live in said small town where it is an hour commute and having to stay late for 30 minutes adds another two hours to their day.

Which is why I REALLY dislike the “Fuck Cars” “movement”. Because, at best, it is a bunch of privileged people saying “fuck the poors”. And… the idea of never needing to travel more than 5 miles from where you live feels like some backdoor rightwing bullshit to isolate people and Make Xenophobia Great Again.

Trust me. You do NOT want to go on a long distance road trip in a kei car. Even if you are super short.

Kei cars are amazing for commuting and grocery store trips. They are horrible for basically anything beyond that so you are still getting that chair delivered and so forth. Once you start cramming it full of luggage or camping supplies you will rapidly feel the claustrophobia.

112 miles is perfect for driving around a city or going to the park on the weekend or whatever. 40 minutes for 10->80% is a bit… ouch. But if you can charge it over night (with even an L1 charger) that doesn’t matter for day trips and… trust me when I say you want to take a long lunch and stretch your legs if you are taking a kei car on a road trip.

Which… also speaks to how consumer vehicles “should” be treated. Get something with great efficiency for your commute and every day driving. Rent a car for long range driving. First off… if you actually take wear and tear into account it isn’t THAT much more expensive to drive a beater for your 500 mile road trip. Second it means that you are saving a LOT of money on your commutes and normal shopping trips and can drive something optimized for that which reduces pollution considerably.

I mean… even in Japan (basically the mecca of public transit), you need a car for a lot of “last mile” transit to smaller towns. And you want a car for many (most?) towns because there might only be two or three buses per day.

Makoto Shinkai’s movies LOVE to focus on this as a way to build tension. Have one of the characters spend two or three days taking a long chain of trains and buses to reach the one that they love only to have to spend the night at a motel in a nowhere town where they can then have a heartfelt talk about what they are actually looking for.

And if you actually go there (or to “Western Europe”) and want to go somewhere other than the most touristy of places? You rapidly realize how true that is. Less so the “talk to the friend who is taking off work to help you check in on the girl you used to body swap with” part and more the idea of needing to transfer to three different trains and run to catch a bus because the alternative is you are waiting for 3 hours at a tiny 7-11 and then spending the night at the bus station when you arrive.

And I am sure that has absolutely nothing to do with tariff hell, financial insecurity, and repeal of the de minimis exemption that temu and the like required to function.

Oh incels are a massive problem. But younger millenials and genz and the like got radicalized by reddit and twitter and the like, not 4chan. And then they just went straight to 8chan if they left their festering grounds at all.

Just remember that the vast majority of those users are in their mid-late 30s or even early 40s. Zoomers and even younger millennials never gave a shit about 4chan.

A bunch of chuds got angry that they were banned because they went brigading against LGBTQ+ folk.

This was the end result

Not to mention companies like apple that actively lock down their replacement parts to prevent people from having a spare whatever.

The thing to understand is that it is not about improving developer efficiency. It is about improving corporate profits.

Because that engineer using “AI”? If they are doing work that can be reliably generated by an AI then they aren’t a particularly “valuable” coder and, most likely, have some severe title inflation. The person optimizing the DB queries? They are awesome. The person writing out utility functions or integrating a library? And, regardless, you are going to need code review that invariably boils down to a select few who actually can be trusted to think through the implications of an implementation and check that the test coverage was useful.

End result? A team of ten becomes a team of four. The workload for the team leader goes up as they have to do more code review themselves but that ain’t Management’s problem. And that team now has saved the company closer to a million a year than not. The question isn’t “Why would we use AI if it is only 0.9x as effective as a human being?” and instead “Why are we paying a human being a six figure salary when an AI is 90% as good and we pay once for the entire company?”

And if people key in on “Well how do you find the people who can be trusted to review the code or make the tickets?”: Congrats. You have thought about this more than most Managers.

My company hasn’t mandated the use of AI tools yet but it is “strongly encouraged” and we have a few evangelists who can’t stop talking about how “AI” makes them two or three times as fast and blah blah blah. And… I’ve outright side channeled some of the more early career staff that I like and explained why they need to be very careful about saying that “AI” is better at their jobs than they are.

And I personally make it very clear that these tools are pretty nice for the boiler plate code I dislike writing (mostly unit tests) but that it just isn’t at the point where it can handle the optimizations and design work that I bring to the table. Because stuff is gonna get REALLY bad REALLY fast as the recession/depression speeds up and I want to make it clear that I am more useful than a “vibe coder” who studied prompt engineering.

I’ve seen those demos and they are very much staged publicity.

The reality is that the vast majority of those roles would be baked into the initial request. And the reality of THAT is the same as managing a team of newbies and “rock star” developers with title inflation: Your SDLC is such that you totally trust your team. The reality is that you spend most of your day monitoring them and are ready to “ask a stupid question” if you figured out they broke main while you were skimming the MRs in between meetings. Or you are “just checking in to let you know this guy is the best” if your sales team have a tendency to say complete and utter nonsense for a commission.

Design gets weird. Generally speaking, you can tell a team to “give me a mock-up of a modern shopping cart interface”. That is true whether your team is one LLM or ten people under a UI/UX Engineer. And the reality is that you then need to actually look at that and possibly consult your SMEs to see if it is a good design or if it is the kind of nonsense the vast majority of UX Engineers make (some are amazing and focus on usability studies and scholarly articles. Most just rock vibes and copy Amazon…). Which, again, is not that different than an “AI”.

So, for the forseeable future: “Management” and designers are still needed. “AI” is ridiculously good at doing the entry level jobs (and reddit will never acknowledge that “just give me a bunch of jira tickets with properly defined requirements and test cases” means they have an entry level job after 20 years of software engineering…). It isn’t going to design a product or prioritize what features to work on. Over time, said prioritizing will likely be less “Okay ChatGPT. Implement smart scrolling” and more akin to labeling where people say “That is a good priority” or “That is a bad priority”. But we are a long way off from that.

But… that is why it is important to stop with the bullshit “AI can’t draw feet, ha ha ha” and focus more on the reality of what is going to happen to labor both short and long term.

Which humans can be far better than in terms of just directly following the assigned task but does not factor in how people can adapt and problem solve.

How’s that annoying meme go? Tell me that you’ve never been a middle manager without telling me that you’ve never been a middle manager?

You can keep pulling numbers out of your bum to argue that AI is worse. That just creates a simple bar to follow because… most workers REALLY are incompetent (now, how much of that has to do with being overworked and underpaid during late stage capitalism is a related discussion…). So all “AI Companies” have to do is beat ridiculously low metrics.

Or we can acknowledge the real problem. “AI” is already a “better worker” than the vast majority of entry level positions (and that includes title inflation). We can either choose not to use it (fat chance) or we can acknowledge that we are looking at a fundamental shift in what employment is. And we can also realize that not hiring and training those entry level goobers is how you never have anyone who can actually “manage” the AI workers.

Yes. No over worked human would ever lose their crap and tell someone to go kill themselves.

Currently the answer would be “Have you tried compressing the data?” and “Do we really need all that data per client?”. Both of which boil down to “ask the engineers to fix it for you and then come back to me if you are a failure”

…

What error rate do you think humans have? Because it sure as hell ain’t as low as 1%.

But yeah, it is like the other person said: This gets rid of most employees but still leaves managers. And a manager dealing with an idiot who went off script versus an AI who hallucinated something is the same problem. If it is small? Just leave it. If it is big? Cancel the order.

There is nothing more cat than hanging out, getting cuddles, and then running like hell at the first sign of danger.