If your acceptance criteria state something like “produces output f(x) for any inout x, where f(x) is defined as follows: […]”, then you can’t possibly test that, because you can’t test all possible values of x. And if the criteria don’t state that, then they don’t cover the full specification of how the software is expected to behave, hence you have to go beyond those criteria to ensure that the software always behaves as expected.
You can’t prove that something is correct by example. Examples can only disprove correctness. And tests are always only examples.
Developers who aren't yet using AI would benefit from specs as well. They're good to have whether it's you or an LLM that's writing code. As a general rule, the clearer and less ambiguous the criteria you have, the better.
Because of inflation, a normal savings account is a depreciating asset. It used to be different, but in the land of near zero prime interest, and phony inflation numbers, that's the way it sits.
Also, the risk isn't zero, just way closer to zero than that of Bitcoin or other crypto, in my opinion.
Through some coincidence I started with 80€, now it’s 20k. Maybe someday it’ll buy my kid a house. Then I’ll take it out. If I loose it all, I don’t care.
What risk are you taking on with a normal savings account?
If you are saying the global collapse of the financial system, crypto will be the first to fall in that case. Crypto like BTC is pretty much a more volatile market tracker.
Ofc a savings account has risk in real terms. But I assume GP was referring to risk in terms of losing principle in dollars.
There’s still some risk short of a global financial collapse where the FDIC rules are weakened, perhaps by making the $250k limit per individual for example, and then there being some bank failures. Or changing to only covering a certain % of deposits etc.
I believe there was an implication of the commenter I responded to that the risk of a savings account is somewhat similar to the risk of crypto. So, I asked said commenter to quantify or describe the risk. A comment simply with the text "A normal savings account does not have zero risk." is useless to a productive conversation.
ICE grabbed a US citizen friend of mine and threw her on a bus and drove her hundreds of miles away and was about to toss her over the wall to Mexico last week.
Civil asset forfeiture is another.
Tax warrants, which have zero burden of proof to be issued, are another.
I don’t keep money in banks, personally, after the third one bit me some years ago and I realized that storing money in banks makes it more likely to be stolen, not less.
That makes absolutely zero sense, and you know it. I understand you are here to essentially shill bitcoin given you have a company that exists because of it but at least argue in good faith.
you probably dont live in Boston, because there is no one on the planet that drives into boston rather than taking the T because its too expensive. people drive downtown and pay $40 for parking instead of taking the T.
That's assuming there is nothing else on the ledger.
Suppose you have to choose between a suburban house without any convenient access to mass transit (i.e. you're going to have to drive everywhere) or a more expensive unit which is closer to the city and is near a transit stop. Paying $40 for parking is going to offset the cost advantage of the less expensive housing and leave a lot of people near the breakeven point, and then a $100/mo difference in transit fares could be the deciding factor.
theres plenty of essentially free park and ride stations. theres commuter rail access in basically a 1 hour drive radius of the city. nothing about what you said is relevant.
rich people (of which boston has plenty even in the burbs where average house prices are 800k+) pay to avoid existing near poor people. they think they are going to get stabbed on the subway.
if the subway was faster, safer, cleaner, but more expensive, more people would use it.
> theres plenty of essentially free park and ride stations.
Which is a huge pain, because now you need to have a car, and already be in it to drive to the park and ride. A drive on which there could be traffic. Which means you could miss your train unless you leave early, but then you're standing around the train station doing nothing (and not getting paid) even when there isn't traffic, instead of spending that time either at home or at work. Whereas if you lived near the train stop you wouldn't have to leave early to not miss your train.
Meanwhile if you already need to have a car, and you're already in it and driving it, most people aren't going to drive northeast to the park and ride and then take a train southeast to their destination instead of saving time by just driving directly east all the way to the destination. So the thing that gets them on the train is not having to drive to get to it.
> theres commuter rail access in basically a 1 hour drive radius of the city.
There's commuter rail lines that go an hour from the center of the city. That's not at all the same thing as there being a stop within walking distance of every suburban home.
> they think they are going to get stabbed on the subway.
The people who think they're going to get stabbed on the subway are not going to use the subway. We're talking about the people who might actually use it.
> if the subway was faster, safer, cleaner, but more expensive, more people would use it.
The way you make it faster is to get more people to use it so you can justify more frequent service, which eliminating fares facilitates. The way to make it safer and cleaner is to get more people to use it, so there are more people who care if it's safer and cleaner because they're using it. Which is again facilitated by eliminating fares.
The only thing fares get you is an amount of money that represents less than 1% of the state budget, and then you lose a significant proportion of that to the cost of collecting the fares. It's taking a privacy-invasive deadweight loss to create a deterrent to something you're trying to encourage people to do.
There is nothing convenient about doing park and ride. It's something you do because whatever your other options are suck worse. Commuter rail inevitably dumps you somewhere you don't need to be so then you have to take the T from there. There is no way not to make it a slog of a commute with that many transitions.
brother the MBTA arleady bleeds money at an astounding rate despite a large budget and fairs.
Why would your solution to be to make the rest of the state pay more for services they cant even use rather than make the people that use it pay the true cost it take to run it?
People that drive cars actually pay most of the cost to upkeep car infrastructure. people that ride the T dont.
Call me crazy, but maybe mass transit doesn't need to make money to be useful. Maybe the entire point of government is to provide services to its citizens. I mean, I don't pay $2.40 every time we drone strike some Yemeni wedding, right? Why should I have to pay to take a train in a city, which is about a thousand times more useful to me?
>People that drive cars actually pay most of the cost to upkeep car infrastructure. people that ride the T dont.
This is... so ridiculously untrue. Most car-dependent infrastructure is funded with federal dollars, the vast majority of which are conjured up out of thin air and vibes.
You can say the same thing about most federal spending.
Car and truck owners pay fuel tax and registration tax (hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, especially heavy trucks) which all ostensibly goes to road upkeep and related infrastructure. It may not cover all the costs but neither do transit fares.
I don't know anything about Boston's system but most transit agencies would need to have fares in the tens of dollars per ride, at least, to come anywhere close to covering their costs. This is much closer to the costs of using a car, probably not coincidentally. Getting from point A to point B has a value that is independent of the transport mechanism.
> Call me crazy, but maybe mass transit doesn't need to make money to be useful.
This is such a heinous non-sequiter i dont even know where to begin. Government services take money to operate. Government services are paid by taxes. In a democracy, you need to make people agree that they want to pay taxes for particular services.
The 60% of massachusetts residents who dont live in teh greater boston metro area do not want to pay for a service they dont use, so it is nearly politically impossible to raise the budget of the MBTA.
So if you are a massachusetts state legistlator you have a couple options. you can allow the MBTA to continue to deteriorate while also going over budget every year (current state) or you could increase the fare to compensate for the actual cost it takes to run the service, or your third option, which is to decrease the amount of money that goes to an already deteriorating public service.
edit: 50-55% of car related infrastructure costs are paid by gas taxes, tolls, excise taxes etc. currently <30% of the mbtas budget is covered by fares.
Services have costs. They don't lose money. No one says the US military "loses hundreds of billions of dollars a year" or expects them to cover it back.
the MBTA already absolutely bleeds an incredible amount of money. No businesses in Boston are even open late, theres no night life. 90% of the young people in the city are nerds doing Phds.
I loved living right on the red line, but its just not worth it unless we figure out how to make it not cost a fortune.
almost every single AI doomer i listen to hasnt updated any of their priors in the last 2 years. these people are completely unaware of what is actually happening at the frontier or how much progress has been made.
wrong. OpenAI is literally the only AI company with horrific financials. You think google is actually bleeding money on AI? they are funding it all with cash flow and still have monster margins.
OpenAI may be the worst, but I am pretty sure Anthropic is still bleeding money on AI, and I would expect a bunch of smaller dedicated AI firms are too; Google is the main firm with competitive commercial models at the high end across multiple domains that is funding AI efforts largely from its own operations (and even there, AI isn’t self sufficient, its just an internal rather than an external subsidy.)
Dario has said many times over that each model is profitable if viewed as a product that had development costs and operational costs just like any other product from any other business ever.
What that means, and whether it means much of anything at all depends on the assumed “useful life” of the model used to set the amortization period assumed for the development costs.
> You think google is actually bleeding money on AI? they are funding it all with cash flow and still have monster margins.
They can still be "bleeding money on AI" if they're making enough in other areas to make up for the loss.
The question is: "Are LLMs profitable to train and host?" OpenAI, being a pure LLM company, will go bankrupt if the answer is no. The equivalent for Google is to cut its losses and discontinue the product. Maybe Gemini will have the same fate as Google+.
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