luciole

It’s March 14th! An excellent day to eat pie and do maths. I might brush up on my geometry and try the NASA Pi Day Challenge.

This report published on August 30 by Vias (Belgium) studies the relationship between the car’s characteristics (such as size, weight and power) with injury severity in case of collision. It’s available in French and Dutch only, but it includes an English summary.

Here’s an excerpt:

With the exception of vehicle age, we find that vehicle characteristics that reduce the injury severity of car occupants, such as high mass, are more likely to be detrimental for the other party. For example, when the mass of a vehicle increases by 300 kg, the probability of fatal injuries for car occupants decreases by half while the same probability for the other party increases by 77% for car occupants and 28% for vulnerable road users, respectively. A similar pattern is seen for other vehicle characteristics such as power and pickup trucks. This indicates an opposite relationship between occupant safety and opponent safety, or put another way: vehicles with a high capacity to protect their occupants (= high crashworthiness) tend to have a lower capacity to protect the opponent (= high crash aggressiveness).

Big takeaway for me: if the vehicle hitting a pedestrian or a cyclist is a pick-up, the victim is 91% more likely to be severely wounded and 196% more likely to be killed.

I’m not American, so it’s hard for me to judge how famous Eisenhower’s farewell address is in the USA. There are things I probably don’t know about it as well. I just find it fascinating since it warns against a number of threats that have basically materialized.

He warned against:

• the dominance of the arms industry
• being captive of the tech elite
• becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate

The place of religion is interesting as well, as his language is quite pious while being inclusive as well for the time, as he "prays that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied" and so on.

Anyways, to me it’s interesting to give it a listen in light of how things are today. It’s ~15 minutes and there’s a transcript too.

I’m a dev. I’ve been for a while. My boss does a lot technology watch. He brings in a lot of cool ideas and information. He’s down to earth. Cool guy. I like him, but he’s now convinced that AI LLMs are about to swallow the world and the pressure to inject this stuff everywhere in our org is driving me nuts.

I enjoy every part of making software, from discussing with the clients and the future users to coding to deployment. I am NOT excited at the prospect of transitioning from designing an architecture and coding it to ChatGPT prompting. This sort of black box magic irks me to no end. Nobody understands it! I don’t want to read yet another article about how an AI enthusiast is baffled at how good an LLM is at coding. Why are they baffled? They have "AI" twelves times in their bio! If they don’t understand it who does?!

I’ve based twenty years of career on being attentive, inquisitive, creative and thorough. By now, in-depth understanding of my tools and more importantly of my work is basically an urge.

Maybe I’m just feeling threatened, or turning into "old man yells at cloud". If you ask me I’m mostly worried about my field becoming uninteresting. Anyways, that was the rant. TGIF, tomorrow I touch grass.