I'm no Musk fanboy but I think this kind of maximally cynical take is tiresome. They thought it would work, they expended significant engineering effort and money making it real and producing it and selling it to customers.
The simplest explanation is that they did all that and the market didn't want it. The economics of traditional panels outweighed the aesthetic advantages of tiles and they're pivoting. No conspiracy or fraud need be invoked.
Financially it was part of SolarCity bailout (Musk's cousin). It heavily heavily penalized Tesla shareholders and smelled of a family bailout. Solar Roof was announced so hastily in October 2016 justify the merger and stave off massive shareholder lawsuits. There was little effort in the roof development after bailout was a success, minus the bait-and-switch lawsuits.
There was genuine concept level development at some point, but it was developed into product after they knew it did not work to keep lawyers happy.
What evidence do you have that little effort was put in development? As far as I can tell that not at all the case. The early version was bad and it took multiple generations for it to become a real product.
Of course the market wanted it. I wanted it. My friends wanted it. But we couldn’t buy it because it was vapourware !
From this to self-driving cars in 2 years to tunnels that will change public transport… maybe Musk should prototype and see what’s actually possible before telling the market. I mean come on - it’s borderline fraud in order to pump stocks - there’s got to be stockholders that are forming class actions as we speak
Both self driving craze and car tunnel madness is only possible at all because how car centric US mindset is. If you even try to suggest that people could instead use good public transport and pedestrian infrastructure they would look at you like you are some sort of crazy.
Musk just takes car centric society pipe dreams and sell it back to them.
Like OMG you transiting to work and can safely stay in your phone 99% of time. In other countries this called train or a bus. Solved in London with 1863 tech.
But transit only solves your problem in cities like London. Some people - for some reason I’m still not entirely clear on - seem to like this. But other people - so far the majority - don’t. And for those, self-driving cars solve the transit problem. That’s valuable. And you only need to beat unit economics of taxis. So there is a significant margin to capture
People use public transport in villages of 20 people where I live. The idea that you need some mega city for public transport to be viable is an American fantasy. Even if its not for everybody, it still makes sense.
Also most people live plenty urban to make public transit perfectly viable.
Self driving cars means even more cars on the road, and reduce the avg occupation even more. Even in a same rural environment this isn't great. And in an urban environment is insanely fucking stupid.
Are you claiming that the majority doesn't live in cities? 80% of the US population lives in urban areas. Self driving cars contribute to the transit problem in those areas because it's even more traffic.
For the 'don't want to live in transit-dense cities like London' crowd, beating the economics of taxis may not be enough since that's not what you're competing with out in the suburbs.
On the other hand, the suburbs don't have much that is even comparable to city taxis in price or availability today, so maybe if it existed that price point would indeed do just as well away from cities too.
I’ve traveled to a decent number of countries and the only city I’ve been to that wasn’t filled with cars was Venice. I love public transport and I wish the US would do it better, but cars are extremely common all over the place and self-driving is something that would get a lot of traction in lots of countries.
While i kinda agree with you, it doesn't fly for most US cities.
Most US cities aren't dense at all. A lot of them were built with transportation in mind. London and European cities in general are so much older that their city centers have no real way to accommodate that.
So what do you do? You provide non car options. Technically they exist in US cities too, but especially on the west coast they're just not a viable alternative. Nobody who can choose will take a 2 hour public transit trip over a 20 minute drive. Heck, in a lot of cases biking might be faster than your transit option, albeit riskier
While there is obviously no one easy solution for every city situation could easily be improved in a lot of them if there was political will. At least it would be 1000% more sane than pitching underground car tunnels.
It obviously take decades not years, but again Tesla full self driving was promissed back in 2016 and something tells me it would be a big success if it will be deployed on scale in 2036.
West coast cities like Portland and Seattle both have very good transit and in my experience is generally better than driving since traffic and parking are awful. Where I live on the west coast is a mid sized city and transit is completely viable, my family only drives on weekends for example.
> West coast cities like Portland and Seattle both have very good transit
I live in Portland. Traffic is often quite slow. And even then it is much faster than public transit unless your destination is just a few miles away and on the same line.
Most US cities centers were not built to late, instead they were bulldozed for the car, those are 2 different things. The US used to have beautiful city centers and nice urban fabric around those centers.
> A lot of them were built with transportation in mind.
Complete nonsense, the Post-1945 push for suberbia had nothing to with 'transportation in mind', the reason they wanted it was totally different.
The reality is more that they pushed suberiba and only then realized the transportation problem it caused, and then they reacted with every increasing highway and stroad building.
> Technically they exist in US cities too, but especially on the west coast they're just not a viable alternative.
Its not an alternative because its either not funded or badly organized.
Its bad because the government doesn't care that its bad, its not actually a fundamental problem.
That's the problem though. Thinking your product will get by on looks when it's clearly outcompeted on performance, price, availability and longevity. That's not just optimism, it's delusion.
I don't think it was clear that it would be out compete on price or performance. If you compare roof + solor to solar roof, the idea was that eventually it would compete with doing both separately.
I'm also not sure if its actually worse on longevity.
> That's the problem though. Thinking your product will get by on looks when it's clearly outcompeted on performance, price, availability and longevity. That's not just optimism, it's delusion.
May I present to you the Apple corporation, at least until recently.
You're not entirely wrong on it being a maximally cynical take, but I think it depends on where the idea originated. Yes, they expended a lot on engineering to make it real, but you can do that with any idea. I think what matters was if it was a feasible idea put forth from a reasonable source or if it was another grand delusion from Musk that everyone just had to make as real as possible despite their own misgivings on the idea.
Imo basically this, the attempt to make it work is downstream of musk deciding it had to be attempted. Musk can decide to spend money on a project whether or not it's genuine or feasible. This seems a clear cut case of musk designing a bad product and engineers doing their best to implement it despite the nonsensical constraints
I am confused about why Gary Marcus thinks it's so obvious that Claude isn't conscious. As he points out, Dawkins is just taking a bog-standard behaviorist position: that he can't distinguish Claude from a conscious being just by the behavior here.
Marcus is saying "Well, if you knew they were trained to mimic, then you'd understand it's just mimicry and not real consciousness" The problem with this argument is that we just don't have a good idea what "real consciousness" is. What if, in order to simulate human text prediction with sufficient accuracy, the model has to assemble sub-networks internally into something equivalent to a conscious mind? We could disprove that kind of thing really quickly if we knew how to define consciousness really well, but we kinda don't!
Philosophers are genuinely split on this question, it's totally reasonable to be on either side of this based on your personal intuition. Marcus's position seems to be actually based on his own personal incredulity, despite his claims that understanding LLM training methodology gives him some special insight into the internal experience (or lack thereof) of an LLM.
Gary Marcus here is making an argument about souls and just doesn't realize it. You could rewrite this whole post replacing "consciousness" with "soul" and it would flow almost the same.
He handwaves consciousness as "internal states" as if that means anything and as if an LLM has no internal state. (This seems to be the analog for "divine touch".) He can't define consciousness rigorously, partly because we don't at all understand consciousness, but also because any attempt to do so would allow a scientific response.
And honestly pretty great, unless you are a collector. It's well done.
The book itself is beautiful and haunting. But I don't think it's for everyone... I have a copy, and I gifted one to someone in my family who really didn't understand the point.
Sometimes, in the interest of having something rather than nothing, I have to press publish. This entails getting things wrong, which is regrettable.
I will say, that I'm trying to steelman the code-as-assembly POV, and I dont think the exact historical analogy is critical to it being right or wrong. The main thing is that "we've seen the level of abstraction go up before, and people complained, but this is no different" is the crux. In that sense, a folk history is fine as long as the pattern is real
This is an interesting distinction, but it ignores the reasons software engineers do that.
First, hardware engineers are dealing with the same laws of physics every time. Materials have known properties etc.
Software: there are few laws of physics (mostly performance and asymptotic complexity). Most software isnt anywhere near those boundaries so you get to pretend they dont exist. If you get to invent your own physics each time, yeah the process is going to look very different.
For most generations of hardware, you’re correct, but not all. For example, high-k was invented to mitigate tunneling. Sometimes, as geometries shrink, the physics involved does change.
This just doesn't explain things by itself. It doesn't explain why humans would care about reasoning in the first place. It's like explaining all life as parasitic while ignoring where the hosts get their energy from.
Think about it, if all reasoning is post-hoc rationalization, reasons are useless. Imagine a mentally ill person on the street yelling at you as you pass by: you're going to ignore those noises, not try to interpret their meaning and let them influence your beliefs.
This theory is too cynical. The real answer has got to have some element of "reasoning is useful because it somehow improves our predictions about the world"
Skills wont use less context once invoked, the point is that MCP in particular frontloads a bunch of stuff into your context on the entire api surface area. So even if it doesn't invoke the mcp, it's costing you.
That's why it's common advice to turn off MCPs for tools you dont think are relevant to the task at hand.
The idea behind skills us that they're progressively unlocked: they only take up a short description in the context, relying on the agent to expand things if it feels it's relevant.
What Stripe did for payments, Pylon is doing for the mortgage industry: We're taking a sleepy industry with backward technology and re-building the stack from the ground up. We're first-principles thinkers, and our team is small, talented and ambitious.
I'm hiring generalists who love coding and want to build something beautiful in an industry where technology written in the 90s is the norm. We're Series A, well funded, and we have traction with customers. Come to Menlo Park and help us turn the $13 trillion US mortgage industry into a set of APIs.
The simplest explanation is that they did all that and the market didn't want it. The economics of traditional panels outweighed the aesthetic advantages of tiles and they're pivoting. No conspiracy or fraud need be invoked.