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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2025

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  • Public transport systems are just part of a mobility solution, but it isn’t viable to have that everywhere. Heck, even here in The Netherlands, a country the size of a post stamp, public transport doesn’t work outside of the major cities. So basically, outside of the cities, we are also relying on cars.

    Therefore, I do believe there will be a place for autonomous driving in the future of mobility and that it has the potential to reduce number of accidents, traffic jams and parking problems while increasing the average speed we drive around with.

    The only thing that has me a bit worried is Tesla’s approach to autonomous driving, fully relying on the camera system. Somehow, Musk believes a camera system is superior to human vision, while it’s not. I drive a Tesla (yeah, I know) and if the conditions aren’t perfect, the car disables "safety’ features, like lane assist. For instance when it’s raining heavily or when the sun is shining directly into the camera lenses. This must be a key reason in choosing Austin for the demo/rollout.

    Meanwhile, we see what other manufacturers use and how they are progressing. For instance, BMW and Mercedes are doing well with their systems, which are a blend of cameras and sensors. To me, that does seem like the way to go to introduce autonomous driving safely.








  • As a Dutchman, I agree we have great infrastructure and “walking” cities. But you’ve only seen Amsterdam. Outside of the cities, The Netherlands is more dependent on cars than you might think. I live on the border of the country and public transport is basically non existent and cycling is not viable due to travel distances, every adult has a car in my area. A family of 4 adults (children over 18 living at home) have 4 cars parked in front of their house here. We’re not as car dependent as the US, but we don’t live in a fairytale either.



  • The way I see it, there are two types of developers we should take into consideration for this discussion:

    • Software Engineers
    • Code editors

    Most “programmers” these days are really just code editors, they know how to search stack overflow for some useful pointers, copy that code and edit it to what they need. That is absolutely fine, this advances programming in so many ways. But the software engineers are the people that actually answer the stack overflow questions with detailed answers. These engineers have a more advanced skillset in problem solving for specific coding frameworks and languages.

    When people say: programmers are cooked, I keep thinking that they mean code editors, not software engineers. Which is a similar trend in basically all industries in relation with AI. Yes, AI has the potential to make some jobs in health care obsolete (e.g. radiologist), but that doesn’t mean we no longer need surgeons or domain expert doctors. Same thing applies to programming.

    So if you are a developer today, ask yourself the following: Do actually know my stuff well, am I an expert? If the answer is no, and you’re basically a code editor (which again, is fine), then you should seriously consider what AI means for your job.



  • This isn’t as much about the social media platforms, competing with those is relatively feasible. This is more about the professional infrastructure market. Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. There isn’t really a European competitor there, the US dominates this market. We have a huge trade deficit on these services, which Trump “conveniently” didn’t include in his trade war analysis.