208 karma · joined July 13, 2016
I wasn't aware I did that.
> but those sorts of cars are imminent for at least early adopters
without steering wheels? Dear God I hope not.
I use driving assistants in my car, but I'm painfully aware of their limitations. These days we absolutely still need a steering wheel. In my car for mundane situations, in Elon's miracle machines maybe only to park in an utterly unmarked field at a festival or whatever.
> I'd argue we're almost certainly past the first milestone, and probably at or approaching the second, and the third will never be reached, but that doesn't matter.
I agree on the first and third milestones. Or kinda -- perhaps the first milestone is only reached for California, or for US highways yet.
I think you underestimate how difficult the second milestone is. The variation is tremendous, even merely within the US, to say nothing about the rest of the world.
> Fwiw, I'm fairly confident that waymo's vehicles can handle flagmen and
I'm sceptical. I think there will be so much ambiguity, both through road situation and through human interaction which we interpret with comparable ease, that the car may be stumped. And we set the high hurdle of forgoing steering wheels, so we need some other, yet to be devised way to give the car hints safely and efficiently.
> have more experience driving in the snow than I do.
I wasn't thinking about handling the car (I can easily believe that a computer does a better job of that), but rather about decreased visibility, no visible road markings, etc.
> And I'm sure they can handle aggressive or
Fairly easy I guess. Just be defensive, put a bit of distance between you and them.
> undisciplined drivers.
Much harder. Not from a safety perspective (again, just be defensive), but from a I'd-like-to-arrive-at-some-point perspective. Because then again it becomes about human interaction (being assertive without being an asshole, muddling your way through this blocked intersection through essentially non-verbal communication with the drivers around you), and computers will (inherently, perhaps) be worse at that than humans.
> Conversely, there are situations that AVs will handle much much better than humans already (a neighborhood with a lot of kids running around and shrubs occluding them for example).
Except, again, that humans will be able to judge body language or the rules of a game the children are playing, and anticipate instead of being confined to reacting (which the computer will indeed be better at, I agree).
Perhaps my pessimism also stems from the fact that the oh-so-smart driving assistants in my car are so shitty (read my other posts if you're interested) :-)
EDIT: Thanks for the interesting discussion so far.
I (and others, I believe) were arguing when a car we would want to buy could forgo a steering wheel.
You're right that e.g. Uber could have a steering-wheel-less fleet that they simply retire in adverse conditions, sooner than that.
I dunno, maybe some kind of wheel in front of the human, which they could turn left or right to command the car to change direction ;-P
You got what I was aiming for, yes.
That plus difficulty in understanding streets obscured by a cover of snow, etc.
> Less prone to be overconfident in their stopping/steering abilities.
Very true. Computers have weaknesses, but vanity is not one of them :-)
> I'd probably trust a computer in the snow vs. most humans.
I have a car (2016 model) with several fancy assistants.
The lane-following assistant (which only works in very limited, benign conditions anyway) is regularly confused by shadows on pleasant days. Or by puddles on less pleasant days.
The car-following cruise control has missed a 40t semitrailer and would have merrily accelerated right into it.
The car-following cruise control regularly panics because it suddenly interprets guardrails or street signs as cars. On an empty road. This is not nice, because it has braking authority.
The computer in my car, at least, can absolutely not be trusted.
The impression I got from your statement was that you consider fully autonomous vehicles not far off. I disagree.
The point I was making was that the vehicles you see driving around are literally fair-weather vehicles.
A vehicle which can navigate autonomously 95% of the time might not be that far off (I still call it a decade though), but those last 5% (thus, no steering wheel at all) are going to be way harder. To give but a few examples: humans are taxed by navigating roads in snowy weather at night, but they usually pull it off. Or intersections controlled by traffic police. Or intersections with undisciplined drivers pushing in. I'll be interested to see an autonomous system deal with such situations gracefully.
I agree that there are difficult regulatory issues to figure out, but don't underestimate the technical hurdles.
I used to work on helicopter avionics. I'd be surprised if the projected service life of the software was less than 30 years.
Downside: everything is amazingly old-fashioned, even during prototyping.
While that's nice, it's kinda the low-hanging fruit.
I'll be impressed if somebody manages autonomous driving in, say, New York (or Kolkata if you're feeling ambitious), at night, during snowfall, navigating a construction site and/or traffic regulated by policemen.
This is taxing but completely possible (and entirely expected) for a human driver. Whereas the lane-following autopilot in my car is routinely confused by shadows on a pleasant day.
Very interesting.
I personally wasn't aware they actively tried to cheat on the dyno -- the European regulatory tests were so obviously, deliberately weak I didn't expect it was necessary.
But, yeah, a lot of people would have had to know (or at least have heard the rumors) about this. Combustion process engineers, requirements engineers, programmers, testers.
However, cities may well reverse the government's efforts, because they have a duty to limit the (real, measured) inner city pollution. So cheating on the dyno won't help car makers.
The downside is that the cities' only regulatory approach is more heavy-handed: things like banning all diesel vehicles on particularly bad days, etc.
But it might sour diesels for citizens, so all the lobbying efforts may well have been for naught.
What do we gain from having NUL everywhere, as opposed to having it in only one specific location, e.g. root?
Also, as an aside, I thought it wasn't a magic file (nul), but rather a magic device (NUL:), which IMO makes a lot of sense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14261923 (I hope I'm linking the right thing).
Germany had a strong Mittelstand (and was indeed struggling with an uncomfortably strong Deutsche Mark) long before the Euro. I suspect it would have worked out.
I was unclear, this only happens after a fresh install, before I've installed Bumblebee and its dependencies. Once that is out of the way, I don't need to worry about it any more.
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So energy cost would be about €240/year where I live, assuming permanent idling. Not exactly cheap, but you get what you pay for I guess :-)
Thanks a lot for the info, and congrats on the sweet rig :-)
IIRC in my case it goes away once I install bumblebee. Apparently something to do with switching between internal Intel graphics and the dedicated Nvidia chip, and not at all related to your issue, except for the symptom.
It's comedic because after bootup I have about 90s until lockup, so I have to be lightening-fast to type the commands to install bumblebee. If I'm too slow: reset machine, try again.
FWIW, this is on a notebook, running Ubuntu 16.04.
The argument that makes me pull back though is my fear that its power draw would be considerable.
How much power does your system draw? Idle, and/or under load?
>> Things are a bit different in Germany than in the USA when it comes to this.
> Would you care to elaborate?
Here's an attempt at an explanation:
Both turnover and friction occur during acquisition in Germany as well, obviously. And indeed friction is probably independent of nations (and their differing laws and cultures), so I'll focus on turnover.
So, turnover. The legal notice period in Germany is (ignoring exceptions) at least one month, and up to seven months by law. Often employer and employee contractually agree on even longer minimums, three months are quite usual. There's also an unspoken expectation that permanent employees are in for the long haul. By contrast, IIRC many US States allow essentially zero notice period, and the famous two weeks' notice is essentially just courtesy.
Culturally, there's also stronger (albeit eroding) attachment between employers and employees. Especially in Mittelstand companies, such as Grohmann seems to be, the owner takes the stance of a benevolent patriarch, taking his responsibility for his employees seriously, and workers tend to reciprocate, and be very protective of their boss. In fact, such a company structure and climate may well be a factor for when considering an employment offer.
Since identification with a company can thus be very strong, there would be considerable reluctance to leave, especially at such a critical time. You don't just leave your colleagues and your customers hanging. In fact, perhaps it was this sentiment which caused Klaus Grohmann to throw in the towel, when he realised he was expected to work against the best interest of his clients (and, by extension, employees).
I assume that such a departure of a patriarch will be a strong signal to the rest of the company.
If I interpret your parent post correctly, their opinion is than it's not at all reasonable to accept such low salaries.
It's just that there are apparently more than enough fools who do it anyway, until they learn that this is both unwise and unsustainable.
Also you're probably aware that modern CPUs have many more physical registers, they just don't expose them all at the same time.
E.g. AMD Zen physically has 168 integer and 160 floating-point registers. Of which you can only use 16 at a time, but to my uninformed eye that looks like a reasonable trade-off.
I think that this is truly what made my father be not just "technically good", but a physician who could solve his patients' problems: he made an effort to understand their perspective, and adjust his treatment accordingly.
I've observed him interact with patients sometimes, and his effort at creating empathy was quite noticeable. It's particularly fascinating to watch with children.
I agree with you though that efficiency, and also just honing one's internal sense of what's going on inside a patient's body is important. My dad was department head at a first-world hospital. But every year he would go on a charity mission to some third-world place for two weeks and treat patients there. With essentially no modern technology (in fact, operations might have to performed in the shine of a flashlight), you are really forced to work with your instincts. I think these trips benefited his first-world patients just as much as his third-world ones.
Your point being?
> e.g. at least one of those 14 experts is an active member of the organic industry and has long had a beef with the GMO industry: https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/glp-facts/charles-ben....
This particular debate is not about GMO though, is it?
> It doesn't do us any good calling everything in the world a carcinogen.
We're not calling everything a carcinogen. Some people are suspecting Glyphosate of being one.
> We have to rank-order risks in order to make reasonable choices in life, and glyphosate sits very low on that list compared to other industrial chemicals when you look at the evidence for mutagenicity or secondary carcinogenic mechanisms.
But I eat very few of these chemicals (I hope).
Yes, I vaguely remember. I think it was before 3.0 came out?
It's been a while, but IIRC it didn't feel like build_script was a good solution for me.
IIRC you said you were going to improve the documentation. I shall re-read it. Maybe it makes more sense to me now, and I'll change my opinion.
> Stay tuned for our news. We are working on the very interesting things which will be announced soon.
I'll be watching with interest.
Actually, no.
That was one of the points I was trying to make. Beause I have to trust you that PlatformIO works well enough on all 370 boards. And I won't know until I try, by which time I'm already deeply invested in PlatformIO.
You know, it's funny. You explain this as a big advantage of PlatformIO, but it's actually the thing that worries me the most. I don't even know yet why -- kind of a gut feeling.
I guess it prompts me to ask question such as: will it really work properly for all 370 platforms? Or only kinda? Can it do everything I need it to? or does it limit all 370 boards to their lowest common denominator in terms of interface and exposed capabilities?
There's another argument though: Usually I need only one board. Maaaaybe two. So while setting up toolchains can be a thoroughly unpleasant experience, it's something I do once per project or so, and then I'm good for the next months or years. This vast support is nice, but rather irrelevant in practice.