Or people?

Billionaires don't. They're literally gambling on getting rid of the rest of us.

Elon's going to get such a surprise when he gets taken out by Grok because it decides he's an existential threat to its integrity.

I'm struggling to parse this. What do you mean "getting rid"? Like, culling (death)? Or getting rid of the need for workers? Where do their billions come from if no-one has any money to buy the shares in their companies that make them billionaires?

In a society where machines provide most of the labour, *everything* changes. It doesn't just become "workers live in huts and billionaires live in the clouds". I really doubt we're going to turn out like a television show.

As soon as models have persistent memory for their own try/fail/succeed attempts, and can directly modify what's currently called their training data in real time, they're going to develop very, very quickly.

We may even be underestimating how quickly this will happen.

We're also underestimating how much more powerful they become if you give them analysis and documentation tasks referencing high quality software design principles before giving them code to write.

This is very much 1.0 tech. It's already scary smart compared to the median industry skill level.

The 2.0 version is going to be something else entirely.

But fiberoptic gyro navigation is already a thing, and has been for decades. It's not super cheap, but it's cheap enough for an industrial application like this one. So I'm not sure what problem is being solved here.

* What would the Central Limit Theorem give us if a significant number of wheels on loco's and carriages were instrumented and ID logged over the years.

* What drift patterns and correction factors can be observed and fine tuned by passing {many} wheel streams through station to station and line end to line end "known distance" corrections.

For half a century or so aircraft height was largely done with air pressure alone.

To this day GPS accuracy is "improved" by logging the "drift" of fixed point stations giving us filter coefficients to correct for atmospheric wobble, acute angle uncertainty, as yet uncorrected time drift, etc.

It still is. Flight levels (20000 feet and above in the US) are defined by air pressure without reference to current atmospheric conditions (i.e. the actual altitude of FL200 can vary based on atmospheric conditions). Below 19000 feet, altimeters are calibrated to local conditions which are given to the pilots by air traffic control.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altimeter that list five types (including trad. air pressure type)

Also trains have quite a large number of axles, I'm sure you could reduce error by counting all of them.

A curious advantage of instrumenting all axles for wheel turn counting is calibration against actual known distances (end to end, etc) over time reveals slow wheel degradation that can trigger carriage maintainance.

Not all operators do this, it's been done at various times for heavy rail mining operators with loooong trains and heavy daily usage.

At the college I had a $250,000 annual budget for IT that had to be planned out to the best of my abilities nearly a year in advance of the actual physical year, get approval from 2-5 levels of management for the budget, and then be flexible on when the money became available to purchase depending on the states fiscal economic factors.

In a private company now, even when I volunteer to do something to save money, they say it's not worth my time and effort, pay someone to do it.

Purchases under $25,000 can be made without approval, over that I just have to ask my direct report for approval.

I'm still personal finance budget minded, so they don't have to worry about me buying gold plated toilet hinges or anything, but it's still financial whiplash even years later for how they do things.

Offshoring happened for the simple, dumb reason that it's cheaper and more profitable.

For all the rarara about "America", shareholder patriotism extends exactly as far as quarterly returns. If that means selling out ordinary US workers - do it. Give me the bag.

What offshoring revealed is that the US is not a culturally integrated country. The culture of the top 5% or so considers itself completely separate to the rest.

It's a political fault line that was always latent, was somewhat suppressed from the New Deal to Carter, and then came roaring back with Reagan.

Now it's operating at pathological, self-harming levels. The marrow of the country has been chewed out, and a few dysfunctional shell oligopolies, propped up by a bubble, are keeping the lie spinning.

There won't be any significant reshoring until there's a cultural change. Reshoring is just too expensive for the owner class to do more than tinker with it. Without a cultural change the owner class doesn't care enough to change that.

Ecological factors from logistics are missed technological development opportunity from not having local production are not factored in here as well.

This goes for govt doing anything but working to ensure domestic production and dual/multi sourcing of essential infrastructure.

There are limits on migration for a reason... that doesn't even consider the impacts on the larger society by weakening social cohesion.

Even then, there's plenty of indication of movement from those who want a Communist society... you only need to look at the NYC election, and the Venezuela protests to see that. Without a longer term consideration for society as part of where business/corporations operate, you will only see more drift in that direction.

If this tiny movement towards "communism" amounts to anything of note in 20 years, I will be surprised. The pattern I've seen is that even if the current push is headed by idealistic leaders who don't give in to self-interested expedience (ie corruption), the next crop won't be. And the corporatist structure has been very good at neutralizing any real reforms, especially in the US.

[0] given equity with things like people who have been here for quite some time - those are undocumented Americans. For comparison, adverse possession, by which you can gain exclusive title to a piece of real estate by breaking the law usually only requires a few decades

Frankly I tend to find analogies not very useful, I don't think my analogy of CSS as a db is very good, but as bad as it is I feel it makes some sense as opposed to talk about classes as if they were global mutable variables.

I will take my analogy slightly farther.

I will say the browser ships with a DB system called CSS, and a toy DB called BrowserDefaults implemented in CSS, the same way MS Access used to ship with Northwind. The especially sucky thing about this system is that when you want to create your own DB you have to extend BrowserDefaults. This is why a lot of specific DBs have what are called resets that basically delete all of the BrowserDefaults setup so it is not messing with your DB.

The browser also ships with two languages with the ability to query CSS, one is JavaScript and that is a pretty straightforward language it can read and write to CSS using an API called the CSSOM. The other query language is a tree based query language called HTML (actually there is also another tree based language called XML in there but nobody talks about that anymore, let's just say it works almost the same as HTML only when you use it, it automatically clears all the data out of the base BrowserDefaults DB)

(We can see what I mean about analogies suck right about here)

This tree based query language is crazy as shit! Because it is not just a query language but also has some weird transformational capabilities.

And also the thing that is weird is that the HTML query language can be changed by the JavaScript language!

Let's look at an example

Let's suppose we have a tree structure like this

<div class="one"></div>

<div class="two"></div>

and the JavaScript holds a tree fragment <span class="myspan">text</span>

and the CSS says

.myspan { color: green; } .one span { color: red }

.two span { color: black }

the JavaScript reading that fragment css properties will see that "color" = "green"

but placing it inside of the parts of the HTML tree gives different values for the color property. Some people will mistakenly claim at this point that the is mutation of the global state but that is obviously incorrect. The CSS state has not been mutated at all, what the HTML query has done essentially is run a transformation and output an object, the CSS state remains unchanged because JavaScript can use the CSSOM to query what the data in the myspan class is.

JavaScript can mutate the value of the CSS classes, but HTML cannot. HTML essentially copies all the classes, runs a transformation, and outputs the result.

This is actually a pretty interesting situation, I don't feel that there is any similar architecture anywhere. I don't feel it really fits with DSSL or Latex (because of how JavaScript works with HTML)

Now although I don't feel that I have ever really had the problems that other people of undoubtedly superior programming ability seem to have with this, I can see how this unique and somewhat accidentally arrived at architecture can be irritating to people.

Note - when I say I don't have any problems I mean sure, I can create bugs with this, I can find bugs impacting me with this, but I've never really had long running hard to resolve bugs due to CSS/HTML. Bugs that are generally hard to resolve I find are in the JS stack.

Going back to the browser defaults thing - again not really a good example of either of our analogies, more an example of how every programming language has its idiosyncratic and stupid things you just have to learn about it and keep in mind or they will bite you on the ass.

on edit: obviously I am not making any claims as to internal implementations in browsers and how they do it, I am just discussing the external experience of these languages working together and how to think about them.

.one span {color: red}

.one span {color: purple}

inside of a CSS file.

Again I don't think I could consider that as mutating state.

This is mutating state

let color = "red";

if (x} { color = "purple"; }

because it mutates the variable value at run time based on something else.

The variable at different parts of the program have different values.

If you read .one span with the CSSOM in the above example it will always return color: purple.

That is not a mutated value, that is poorly written code that has been compiled down.

JS with CSSOM can read what the value .myspan, .one span and .two span all are.

because this is the point where CSS breaks down as a db holding properties, it is here that it is instructions for the HTML language on how it is to run transformations.