Depends. A professor told me AI is really good at writing bad pandas code because it's seen a lot of bad pandas code, so starting from scratch isn't necessarily the worst thing.
The 90ies weren't perfect, but it felt more idealistic to me, with the rise of open source software. People thought about ethics a bit more. It felt like the ultimate tide rising to empower people locally on their own computers, and that tide has been going out for some years. A bit with cloud computing, and now a lot more with LLM's. And the company a lot of SV people keep these days is pretty gross.
I wouldn't necessarily say "idealistic," but certainly constrained. Microsoft has always been scummy in one form or another, but always-on internet connectivity has allowed them to be scummy in persistent ways long after your purchase of their product. It's a serious money-maker, but I think that explosive growth has bred a whole generation of tech "professionals" these days that think more like Wall Street bros than sober engineers: make line go up, damn the consequences.
> Can't find a Waymo article about this, but Lyft and Uber (let alone trad taxis) also do this. I'm not sure that this is a particularly autonomous-car-shaped sin.
Yeah I think it'd probably actually be easier to prevent Waymo from doing this. Once you change the programming, they all stop doing it.
What that means is that Waymo is intentionally choosing illegal behavior, at a corporate level. Uber/Lyft are merely turning a blind eye to the illegal behavior of their employees... er, "contractors".
Newberry Volcano is too good to be true in that there are few (outside of Yellowstone) equivalent sources of geothermal awesomeness at similar depths in the USA. Good for research bad for generalization of drilling costs to hit similar temperatures. There are federal protections for geothermal drilling anywhere near Yellowstone.
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