Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01 • Hacker News Board

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#121

Post by mortehu » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 12:31 PM UTC

Denzel wrote: post #73

jsnell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the economic proof of impossibility? As far as I know Waymo has not published any official numbers, and any third party unit profitability analysis is going to be so sensitive to assumptions about e.g. exact depreciation schedules and utilization percentages that the error bars would inevitably be straddling both sides of the break-even line. > with no evidence that the system can generalize, profitably, outs…

Analyzing Alphabet’s capital allocation decisions gives you all the evidence necessary. It’s safe to assume that a company’s ownership takes the decisions that they believe will maximize the value of their company. Therefore, we can look at Alphabet’s capital allocation decisions, with respect to Waymo, to see what they think about Waymo’s opportunity. In the past five years, Alphabet has spent >$100B to buyback thei…

To be clear, buying back stock is one of the ways they can invest in Waymo (and other business units).

Since Alphabet buybacks mostly just offset employee stock compensation, the main thing they are getting for this money is employees.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#122

Post by harvodex » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:02 PM UTC

zetalyrae wrote: post #56

> LLMs have proved amazing facile with language. If you took a transcript of a conversation with Claude 3.6 Sonnet, and sent it back in time even five years ago (just before the GPT-3 paper was published), nobody would believe it was real. They would say that it was fake, or that it was witchcraft. And whoever believed it was real would instantly acknowledge that the Turing test had been passed. This refusal to updat…

The whole point of the post is that many have updated their beliefs too much.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#123

Post by guappa » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:08 PM UTC

Mistletoe wrote: post #58

lolinder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe some devs were probably replaced by AI, but not a large amount. I'm not even sold on the idea that there were any . The media likes to blame AI for the developer layoffs because it makes a much more exciting story than interest rates and arcane tax code changes. But the fact is that we don't need more than the Section 174 changes and the end of ZIRP to explain what's happened in tech. Federal economic pol…

But I see so many devs typing here saying how vital AI is to their writing code efficiently and quickly now. If that is true then you need way less devs. Are people just sitting idle at their desks? I do see quite a bit of tech layoffs for sure. Are you saying devs aren't part of the workers being laid off? >In 2024: At least 95,667 workers at U.S.-based tech companies have lost their jobs so far in the year, accordi…

A lot of devs are hacks. If an AI can do your job you had no value as a software developer.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#124

Post by cudgy » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:11 PM UTC

ynniv wrote: post #33

anon7000 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is not optimistic on flying cars. The prediction is that an expensive flying car could be purchased no earlier than 2036, and notes a strong possibility that it won’t even happen by 2050. Plus states that minor success (aka 0.1% of car sales are flying cars) isn’t going to happen in his lifetime. The author also expands on this: > Don’t hold your breath. They are not here. They are not coming soon. > Noth…

Engineering is about focusing on what matters. There's no point in talking about flying cars: they will exist when portable fusion exists, so just talk about that.

So you are saying that a true engineer doesn’t read articles and criticizes a successful engineer that wrote said article with hand-wavy arguments?

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#125

Post by harvodex » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:22 PM UTC

RamblingCTO wrote: post #101

rcpt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty much impossible to get work as a copywriter now

I was thinking about this. I think we have an overcorrection right now. People get laid off because of expected performance of AI, not real performance. With copywriting and software development we have three options: 1. leaders notice they were wrong, start to increase human headcount again 2. human work is seen as boutique and premium, used for marketing and market placement 3. we just accept the sub-par quality of…

90% might even be too low.

If you look up business analyst type jobs on JP Morgan website they are still hiring a ton right now.

What you actually notice is how many are being outsourced to other countries outside the US.

I think the main process at work is 1% actual AI automation and a huge amount of return to the office in the US while offshoring the remote work under the cover of "AI".

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#126

Post by HenryBemis » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:26 PM UTC

Denzel wrote: post #62

AlotOfReading wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's covering significant areas of 3 major metros, and the core of one minor, with testing deployments in several other major metros. Considering the top 10 metros are >70% of the US ridehail market, that seems like a long way beyond "non-existent" coverage nationally.

You’re narrowing the market for self-driving to the ridehail market in the top 10 US metros. That’s kinda moving the goal posts, my friend, and completely ignoring the promises made by self-driving companies. The promise has been that self-driving would replace driving in general because it’d be safer, more economical, etc. The promise has been that you’d be able to send your autonomous car from city to city without…

> ..is a tiny part of a tiny market in a single nation in the world.

Calculator was a small device that was made in one tiny market in one nation in the world. Now we all got a couple of hardware ones in our desk drawers, and a couple software ones on each smartphone.

If a driving car can perform 'well' (Your Definition May Vary - YDMV) in NY/Chicago/etc. then it can perform equally 'well' in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, etc. It's just that EU has stricter rules/regulations while US is more relaxed (thus innovation happens 'there' and not 'here' in the EU).

When 'you guys' (US) nail self-driving, it will only be a matter of time til we (EU) allow it to cross the pond. I see this as a hockey-stick graph. We are still on the eraser/blade phase.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#127

Post by tontonius » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:26 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #95

LOL about the last paragraphs: > Let’s Continue a Noble Tradition! > The billionaire founders of both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin had faith in the systems they had created. They both personally flew on the first operational flights of their sub-orbital launch systems. They went way beyond simply talking about how great their technology was, they believed in it, and flew in it. > Let’s hope this tradition continue…

How am I supposed to read this ? a thinly veiled hatred for Mr. Musk?

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#128

Post by lukeschlather » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:32 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #97

khafra wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So he think humans are intervening once every 1-2 miles to train the Waymo Just to make sure we're applying our rubric fairly and universally: Has anyone else been in an Uber where you wished you were able to intervene in the driving a few times, or at least apply RLHF to the driver? (In other words: Waymo may be imperfect to the point where corrections are sometimes warranted; that doesn't mean they're not already…

To apply this benchmark, you'd have to believe that Waymo is paying operators to improve the quality of the ride, not to make the ride possible at all. That is, you'd have to believe that the fully autonomous car works and gets you to your destination safely and in a timely manner (at the level of a median professional human driver), but Waymo decided that's not good enough and hired operators to improve beyond that.…

Let's suppose Waymo's fully automated stuff has tenfold-fewer fatal collisions than a human. There's no way to avoid the fatal accidents a human causes, and the solution to Waymos getting stuck sometimes is simple. The point is that the Waymo can actually be described as superior to a human driver, and the fact that its errors can be corrected with review is a feature and not a bug - they optimize for those kinds of errors rather than unrecoverable ones.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#129

Post by skywhopper » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #94

sashank_1509 wrote: post #6

Feels too self-congratulatory when he claims to be correct about self driving in the Waymo case. The bar he set is so broad and ambiguous, that probably anything Waymo did, would not qualify as self driving to him. So he think humans are intervening once every 1-2 miles to train the Waymo, we’re not even sure if that is true, I heard from friends that it was 100+ miles but let us say Waymo comes out and says it is 10…

I think that, if it were true that Waymo cars require human intervention every 1-2 miles (thus requiring 1 operator for every, say, 1-2 cars, probably constantly paying attention while the car is in motion), then it would be fair to say that the cars are not really self driving. However, if the real number is something like an intervention every 20 or 100 miles, and so an operator is likely passively monitoring dozen…

I disagree that regular interventions every two trips where you have no control over pickup or dropoff points counts as full self driving.

But that definition doesn’t even matter. The key factor is whether the additional overhead, whatever percentage it is, makes economic sense for the operator or the customer. And it seems pretty clear the economics aren’t there yet.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#130

Post by lukeschlather » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:41 PM UTC

Mistletoe wrote: post #58

lolinder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe some devs were probably replaced by AI, but not a large amount. I'm not even sold on the idea that there were any . The media likes to blame AI for the developer layoffs because it makes a much more exciting story than interest rates and arcane tax code changes. But the fact is that we don't need more than the Section 174 changes and the end of ZIRP to explain what's happened in tech. Federal economic pol…

But I see so many devs typing here saying how vital AI is to their writing code efficiently and quickly now. If that is true then you need way less devs. Are people just sitting idle at their desks? I do see quite a bit of tech layoffs for sure. Are you saying devs aren't part of the workers being laid off? >In 2024: At least 95,667 workers at U.S.-based tech companies have lost their jobs so far in the year, accordi…

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

BLS reports ~1.9 million software developer jobs and predicts 17% growth through 2033. Crunchbase is talking about "tech workers" not developers. And they don't even say that tech employment is down. I predict that when BLS publishes their preliminary job numbers for 2024 it will be at least 1.85 million, not 1.9 million as suggested by your Crunchbase News. I would lay 2:1 odds that it will be higher than 2023's number.