I agree that LIDAR or radar are better solutions than image recognition. I mean, that’s literally what those technologies are for.

But even then, that’s not enough. LIDAR/radar can’t help it identify its lane in inclement weather, drive well on gravel, and so on. These are the kinds of problems where automakers severely downplay the difficulty of the problem and just how much a human driver does.

You are making it far simpler than it actually is. Recognizing what a thing is is the essential first problem. Is that a child, a ball, a goose, a pothole, or a shadow that the cameras see? It would be absurd and an absolute show stopper if the car stopped for dark shadows.

We take for granted the vast amount that the human brain does in this problem space. The system has to identify and categorize what it’s seeing, otherwise it’s useless.

That leads to my actual opinion on the technology, which is that it’s going to be nearly impossible to have fully autonomous cars on roads as we know them. It’s fine if everything is normal, which is most of the time. But software can’t recognize and correctly react to the thousands of novel situations that can happen.

They should be automating trains instead. (Oh wait, we pretty much did that already.)

That may be part of it, but Saudi Arabia also has a long track record of being incredibly abusive and generally just not giving a shit about worker’s rights.

Yeah, 100%. This is the town’s fault IMO - not maintaining the markings in the first place (it’s not the contractor’s fault that the old marking is non-existent), and then probably refusing to pay the contractor “extra” to repaint the whole thing.

I grew up in a small town in Canada. We never had any kind of lock down drills.

Even talking about it this way is misleading. An LLM doesn’t “guess” or “catch” anything, because it is not capable of comprehending the meaning of words. It’s a statistical sentence generator; no more, no less.

Nobody going to mention a Cask of Amontillado? Maybe not the most mind-bending example, but the tale of leading a supposed friend to their own horrific murder was not a thing I expected to be reading in school.

I had blocked that one from my memory; I remember now. Thanks. ಠ_ಠ

He can give himself whatever titles he likes, that doesn’t mean he makes any positive technical contribution.

Did you tell him you guess you have to stop doing non-web development then? Clearly you’re not qualified if you can’t have the corresponding title.

Machine learning has many valid applications, and there are some fields genuinely utilizing ML tools to make leaps and bounds in advancements.

LLMs, aka bullshit generators, which is where a huge majority of corporate AI investment has gone in this latest craze, is one of the poorest. Not to mention the steaming pile of ethical issues with training data.

Very nice writeup. My only critique is the need to “lay off workers to stop inflation.” I have no doubt that some (many?) managers etc… believed that to be the case, but there’s rampant evidence that the spike of inflation we’ve seen over this period was largely due to corporate greed hiking prices, not due to increased costs from hiring too many workers.

You can very safely remove the “probably” from your first sentence.

I mean, there is a hard limit on how much info your brain can take in. It’s time. Every hour spent learning one thing is an hour not spent learning everything else.

Came here to effectively say this. If we were people in 1820’s Germany, 99% of us wouldn’t have nearly enough spare time to even think about cataloging those beetles.

Libre Office

Others have pointed out the degradation issue, but you’re also assuming that all plastics are thermoplastics. They are not. There’s huge variation in chemical composition and material properties between different plastics, and most of them can’t be melted and reformed.

Biblically accurate appetizers

There is no way that arming Taiwan results in Taiwan starting a war of aggression against China.

What arming Taiwan does is make it an increasingly bad idea for China to invade Taiwan. It’s a deterrent to make sure the nuclear power who constantly threatens Taiwan (read: China) doesn’t think they can just go and take what they want without consequence, and probably commit a little genocide on the side.

You know, like Ukraine.

*Thinnest and yet roughest. Not thick enough to be a barrier, and it can rub you raw to provide an entry point at the same time!