• 0 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 24th, 2023

help-circle

  • Good thing they aren’t on your roads then, being that you’re not American, and therefore not in either of the metropolitan areas they operate. They are on my roads however, I see them all the time. I see constant terrible driving from all kinds of people, but these things are patient and I don’t think I’ve personally seen one make a mistake.

    By referring to their current stage of deployment as a public beta like it’s a bad thing you show a ton of ignorance on how testing cycles work as well. No amount of alpha testing would make these safe for broad deployment into real world scenarios that test designers can’t dream up. This is exactly the type of slow roll out that is required to get as much real experiences as possible to be programmed for.

    I have no doubt these things aren’t perfect, but they are a lot better than an overworked and tired human being the wheel.


  • I’ve been in software for more than 20 years now. I’ve done some pretty innovative things from time to time. There is nothing I have ever done or seen in any proprietary code base at any company I’ve ever worked at that isn’t at every other company. The only unique thing at any company is how all the puzzle pieces get connected. It’s pure ego to think that any idea you have in that now open source project is unique or what’s giving you any competitive advantage in your other projects.




  • I think 200ms is an expectation of big tech. I know people have very little patience these days, but if you provided better quality searches in 5 seconds people would probably prefer that over a .2 second response of the crap we’re currently getting from the big guys. Even better if you can make the wait a little fun with some animations, public domain art, or quotes to read while waiting.


  • Addressing consent first, it was given by the elected officials of the given cities, which is why they only operate in certain cities and only in certain areas of those cities. Anyone that objects to that act should petition for change, or vote for officials that will change it.

    Airplanes are a pretty poor comparison. They’re not fully autonomous, nor are they trying to be. But even if they were trying, autonomous airplanes would be operating in so many jurisdiction’s airspace that even getting a short route, say LA to SF, would be almost impossible. Every city and country they fly over would have to approve. Also, every new version of auto pilot in planes is at some point going to release and no one is going to roll their updates out to the entire fleet at once. They’re going to install it in a few, and try it out for a while, then a few more, almost exactly like a beta test, it’s just not called that.

    The thing with Waymo is that no matter how much they test, no matter if they prove to be safer than humans by orders of magnitude, it will never be enough for some people. So do we wait for 100% of drivers to consent to them? 90%? Where do we draw the line? If we put it to a vote, it’s 50%+1 of voters, not even drivers. At least with city councils and mayors involved, it can be a much greater majority.

    I get that people don’t like them, but I see them as the beginning of a carless future. Autonomous cars will cover situations where mass transit doesn’t work for whatever reason.





  • It was very experimental, that’s really the reason Sony went with it and it was at the genesis of multi threaded processing, so the jury was still out on which way things would go.

    Your description of it is a little wrong though, it wasn’t multiple CPUs, at least not gore would be traditionally thought. It was a single dual core CPU, with 6 “supporting cores” so not full on CPUs. Kind of like an early stab at octocore processors when dual core was becoming popular and quad core was still being developed.

    I remember that the ability to boot Linux was a big deal too and a university racked 8 PS3s together into basically a 64 core super computer. I’m actually sad that didn’t go further, the raw computing power was there, we just didn’t really know what to do with it besides experiment.

    Honestly I think someone had a major breakthrough in multi-core single-unit processors shortly after the PS3 launch that killed this. Cell was just a more expensive way to get true multi threaded processing and a couple years later it was cheaper to buy a 32 core processor.

    Maybe in a different timeline we’re all running Cell processors in our daily lives.






  • A train sends 100 cargo boxes from town A to B in an hour. It takes 4 hours to put all the boxes in, and 5 hours to pull the boxes off the train and stack them in the yard

    Conveyer sends 1 box every 6 minutes for 10 hours.

    Same throughput, but one is easier to schedule workers around at both ends. I’ve never worked in a train yard or anything, don’t know how accurate my time frames are or anything, just trying to imagine what’s better about this.





  • You call no one. You buy a safe of your own. You start buying your groceries in two transactions, one with your card like always, the other in cash. Every other time you fill your gas tank you use a little of the cash. Clothes are all cash till that safe is empty. Buy all your gifts from the farmer’s markets or other “street walk” events. Who cares if it’s more than you normally spend, the point is that officially, you bought no gifts. Cash anytime you go out to eat.

    Get what you can from Facebook marketplace or Craigslist, but never anything that would mean title or registration. Those all need to come with deductions from bank accounts you can point to. The point is that by “cutting” a bunch of explainable expenses, you can eventually save up for the big spend item and buy that officially.