I work at Google as a SWE SRE. That means a lot of the code I touch is on tangly complicated projects doing bug fixes and improving things. Not so much greenfield development unless it's a smaller tool change.
AI coding is definitely speeding me up, but not quite in the magic way people at smaller companies might be used to.
As a good code complete it's awesome. As a brain storm buddy, very good. AI code reviews are awesome and very low risk - if it makes a mistake it's usually just being too cautious.
As an end to end agentic coder -pretty bad track record. Giving it smaller tasks? Pretty good, saving me many hours of boilerplate/cruft a week at least.
I mean, I can meet you in an ally, transfer some satoshis from my wallet to yours, you hand me a wad of cash/jewels/MtG/collector funkos and you might not even know my name.
Hmm, doesn't this work equally well with a wad of $10 and $20 notes? I mean, yes, notes could be clandestinely marked. But aren't bitcoins also traceable after the first transaction?
There’s a large industry for cleaning cash which then makes moving a clean 10M or even 10B in clean cash nearly trivial.
10M might not be as noticeable but crypto being nominally in a country on its own isn’t that useful as you still want to be able to spend it at the end of the day.
The same way you avoid it doing anything else illegal that involves cash.
Crime is risky, but not pure anarchy. It is still based on trust and rules, just not those written in the law.
There are plenty of regular people who interact with criminals, for example drug dealers, without getting murdered or robbed of all the cash they are carrying.
In Argentina, years ago, you could exchange dollars/euros for pesos on the street and get a far better exchange rate than in a bank. It was obviously aimed at tourists, who didn't get robbed, or the whole enterprise would stop.
Except that there is a huge trusted network for this. The world does not revolve around americas and europe. Not everyone has issues cashing out millions of crypto from a bank. This has been especially prevelant with countries that host a lot of Russian immigrants ever since the SWIFT ban, the regulation is extremely lax and there is minimal data shared to western institutions.
I have heard from friends who are in these countries observing transactions that go into the millions of dollars that are being cashed out (not even laundered) like it's just another day. Nobody asks questions, nobody cares either and if you bring it up you will likely lose your job in few months or so.
The moment that crypto is cashed out at a bank, no matter how sketchy, a record is created in a ledger. This completely destroys the so-called anonymity of cryptocurrencies.
No it doesn't. If I go to an escrow company, transfer my ten million in bitcoin to their wallet and they put money into the bank, the only paper trail is the escrow company.
Escrow companies open and close all the time for this very reason. People wash money alllll day long with US real estate for this reason.
Because they open and close all the time. I've dealt with escrow companies where the owners had opened and closed multiple other escrow companies in a ten year span.
My (2019) Tesla has been the most reliable car I've ever owned, but it sure seems like they're not interested in being a car company anymore.
Not having turn stalks and the drive selector, making me either pay for internet access or use bluetooth if I want to play spotify or youtube music (which I get for 'free' in cars with CarPlay or Android Auto), making the cybertruck way too big for a garage, discontinuing the model S and X...like are they even trying?
They used to have a third row option for the model Y, good for small kids or something, but then they got rid of that.
They were going to do the roadster, but didn't bother. They only have 6 paint colors, not even options for PTS. It's like they don't want to be a successful car company.
Take the reports with a grain of salt. Tesla does not mandate maintenance. The cars in the reports are the ones who left factory and get checked after 3 years of intensive use without any maintenance. Check the light alignment, check rust in the brakes and check the suspension and the inspection will be fine. Still cheaper than 400-600€ bi-yearly coolant refill from other manufacturers. Plus Tesla has published repair manual which is very strong advantage for me. I am poor and maintain my cars by myself. Maybe I like it too.
Teslas have too much play in bearings and steering column (from new) and unlike every other manufacture out there they refuse to follow the standards and says it is how it is supposed to be. This forces owners to pay to get a factory problem fixed with zero help from Tesla, otherwise their car will not pass inspections.
Also, it isn't normal for a 3-year-old car to risk dropping a wheel. You should read some more about this before you defend them.
EDIT: Here is a reddit thread about the problem (and an article in Norwegian):
>"Almost half of all Tesla Y fail mandatory tech inspection in Denmark and make headlines for it; similar numbers in Tesla-country Norway."
>"The most common issue remains slack in the wheel alignment and suspension, found in 22% of TMY's, as opposed to .1% of ID4's."
Mercedes does this yearly. It’s running gag from all the car influencers when they show the 800-1000€ service invoice of the EQS after first year. Imho it’s definitely a scam.
A big part Part of the reason tesla is considered less reliable is the number of recalls it gets, most of which are software related and fixed over the air.
In terms of maintenance, it is by far the lowest cost of ownership vehicle I've had, I'm in my 40s, not exactly new to owning cars.
The very first thing that Tesla was criticised for was terrible QA process. The quality was random and there were huge differences between factories. So I can totally believe there are plenty of Tesla made cars that made their owners happy. Of course few people can afford such gamble.
They don’t. Their market cap is higher than all the successful car companies combined. Becoming a successful car company would cost Elon half of his unrealized capital gains. It’s far better to be the company who is going to make us $30,000 robot slaves because that’s a bigger market and one he’ll own entirely.
The only question is what will be the next hype cycle when that succeeds about as well as the Cyber Truck.
Oh I was in no way saying I agree with any of that, just explaining how his mind seems (to me) to work.
He hyped electric cars to the point where someone in here in 2017 told me I was nuts to buy an ICE car because there wouldn’t be any gas stations left in five years. That’s why his share prices are out of proportion to reality.
Now that it turns out the EV market isn’t growing as fast as it seemed when it was all early adopters, and autonomous delivery isn’t ready and won’t be for at best a few years, he’s gotta hype the next thing.
Anthropic has one of the best moats of any business that's been created in the last 50 years.
Numerous companies have tried and failed competing with SoTA foundational models. If Anthropic had no moat, Apple and Meta wouldn't be paying them billions for coding asistance.
Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Nvidia would all have SoTA competitors to Claude. They all tried and have not produced a competitor.
Instead you have three companies that stand alone making billions from foundational models.
The open models are not far behind. Is it really a "moat" when it's so short lived and you need a brand new moat after six months? That's just ordinary competition.
> would assume (hope) that code review practices haven't changed inside of Microsoft or Google.
Google engineer perspective:
I'm actually thinking code reviews are one of the lowest hanging fruits for AI here. We have AI reviewers now in addition to the required human reviews, but it can do anything from be overly defensive at times to finding out variables are inconsistently named (helpful) to sometimes finding a pretty big footgun that might have otherwise been missed.
Even if it's not better than a huamn reviwer, the faster turnaround time for some small % of potential bugs is a big productivity boost.
I don't think Uber goes out of business. There is probably a sweet spot for Waymo's steady state cars, and you STILL might want 'surge' capabilities for part time workers who can repurpose their cars to make a little extra money here and there.
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