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Yes, I'm sure.

I've been studying quantum theory for about 50 years and continue to absorb current progress.

We cannot know, precisely, any characteristic of a quantum. The best we can do is a good guess.

A quantum computer (QC) can spit out good guesses rather rapidly, and that can be useful for optimization problems, but not very useful for other problems.

Classical computers either know, or they don't know.

I offer this blurb because it comes from D-Wave and correctly sums it all up:

Pakin says his team are believers in D-Wave’s potential, even though they admit its systems might not yet offer performance improvements except in very narrow cases. He also explains that D-Wave's computers don't necessarily provide the most efficient answers to an optimization problem—or even a correct one. Instead, the idea is to provide solutions that are probably good, if not perfect solutions, and to do it very quickly. That narrows the D-Wave machines' usefulness to optimization problems that need to be solved fast but don't need to be perfect. That could include many artificial intelligence applications.

Yes and no:

Pakin says his team are believers in D-Wave’s potential, even though they admit its systems might not yet offer performance improvements except in very narrow cases. He also explains that D-Wave's computers don't necessarily provide the most efficient answers to an optimization problem—or even a correct one. Instead, the idea is to provide solutions that are probably good, if not perfect solutions, and to do it very quickly. That narrows the D-Wave machines' usefulness to optimization problems that need to be solved fast but don't need to be perfect. That could include many artificial intelligence applications.

each of those disengament incidents would translate into an accident.

Sigh. A disengagement is not an accident. It's when the car can't figure out what to do and pulls over / stops / hands control to the human. Waymo cars have been in exactly one accident,

based on preliminary evidence and a video released by Waymo (above), the police say the robo-car was not at fault. “The vehicle was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” says Seth Tyler, a spokesperson for the Chandler Police Department. “Waymo and the driver of the vehicle won’t get cited for anything because she didn't do anything wrong.”

https://www.wired.com/story/wa...

Really unbelievable amount of FUD here.

In the era of 4 kilobyte PCs, you had to be efficient. I still marvel at how classic Atari games fit in such a small space.

So did they.

I read an article about the tricks that the Atari 2600 game-devs. had to pull to make things fit in those (IIRC 2 kB) game cartridges. Things like using some "unimplemented" 6502 OpCodes that did cool stuff like Clear the Accumulator and simultaneously load the X-Reg. with a value, etc.

You are right, though. Parsimonious software development is a largely-forgotten art-form...

Here's a fascinating article about game Development for the Atari 2600. Yow!

https://www.wired.com/2009/03/...

I am the only person I know who didn't get this message. I don't have emergency or amber alerts turned off, my phone wasn't off or in airplane mode. I have an iPhone 7+, on AT&T. Wired has a story that tells you what to do if you didn't receive the message: Why Didn't I Get an Emergency Presidential Alert Text?

https://www.wired.com/story/pr... for the details.

https://www.wired.com/story/ho...

She was asked for a quote, not a dissertation. There are decades of papers and studies in this area if you want to read up about it.

This is James Damore all over again. The studies cited don't say what he thinks they say. The classic example is this one, which a naive reader might conclude proves that there is a difference between men and women that could account for the imbalance in STEM... Except that the differences are far too small to draw that conclusion.

This is called the "incoherence problem", where otherwise smart people bring together a bunch of overlapping data and reach unwarranted conclusions by building it into a nonsensical framework.

AMD has this issue as well.

You're going to have to design your own CPU from the ground up if you want total security.

Hmmmm... false memories, the Wayback Machine says I'm wrong, and the cam continued to operate through mid-2004 when the domain was sold and then after for I think a couple years.

WTF war did we have around that time? Scheduling that Alzheimer's screening....

Anyway, the camera "went dead" right after we got into some major conflict... The timing was close enough, I just said to myself "maybe not a good idea to give the world a PTZ view of San Diego Bay right now..."

( But, then, I've heard rumors about a Russian spy who lived on Pt. Loma that the sailors would wave to anyway... Probably had something to do with this: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/... )

Wayback only has the static views that were served if you weren't using Netscape browser. :(

It is.

https://www.wired.com/story/th...

if founded on debt, specifically mortgages, right? And what about medical debt? Most bankruptcies are from it you know?

Class war is centuries old. It came before Marx and it continued after his death. You're strawmaning now. Throwing in the much hated SJW. Building up an enemy to direct hate at. You're either a well practiced troll or you're being manipulated by one to push their agenda. If you're just being manipulated then please, go read this. It describes the techniques being used to manipulate you. Russia's the subject of the article but they're by no means the only ones using these techniques.

Now, if you're just a troll, or worse one of the ones working for the ruling class as foot soldiers in their army, well, all I can say is that they will not treat you well after the war is won.

Bugger all happened in 2016, that is the actual evidence. Trolling advertisements, click bait got quite corruptly called political, when it fact it most definitely is not. It simply targets politics to get you to click it, to take you to the actual ad.

This is actually far from true. Here's some of what is known to have happened, the political ads themselves are a minor part of the whole thing:

The Mueller indictment permanently demolishes the idea that the scale of the Russian campaign was not significant enough to have any impact on the American public. We are no longer talking about approximately $100,000 (paid in rubles, no less) of advertising grudgingly disclosed by Facebook, but tens of millions of dollars spent over several years to build a broad, sophisticated system that can influence American opinion.

The Russian efforts described in the indictment focused on establishing deep, authenticated, long-term identities for individuals and groups within specific communities. This was underlaid by the establishment of servers and VPNs based in the US to mask the location of the individuals involved. US-based email accounts linked to fake or stolen US identity documents (driver licenses, social security numbers, and more) were used to back the online identities. These identities were also used to launder payments through PayPal and cryptocurrency accounts. All of this deception was designed to make it appear that these activities were being carried out by Americans.

Additionally, the indictment mentions that the IRA* had a department whose job was gaming algorithms. This is important because information warfare—the term used in the indictment itself—is not about "fake news" and “bots." It is about creating an information environment and a narrative—specific storytelling vehicles used to achieve goals of subversion and activation, amplified and promoted through a variety of means.

2. What kind of content did it rely on?

As the indictment lays out in thorough detail, the content pumped out by the Russians was not paid or promoted ads; it was so-called native content—including video, visual, memetic, and text elements designed to push narrative themes, conspiracies, and character attacks. All of it was designed to look like it was coming from authentic American voices and interest groups. And the IRA wasn’t just guessing about what worked. They used data-driven targeting and analysis to assess how the content was received, and they used that information to refine their messages and make them more effective.

3. Who or what was the operation targeting, and what did it aim to achieve?

The indictment mentions that the Russian accounts were meant to embed with and emulate “radical” groups. The content was not designed to persuade people to change their views, but to harden those views. Confirmation bias is powerful and commonly employed in these kinds of psychological operations (a related Soviet concept is “reflexive control”—applying pressure in ways to elicit a specific, known response). The intention of these campaigns was to activate—or suppress—target groups. Not to change their views, but to change their behavior.

4. What impact did it have?

We’re only at the beginning of having an answer to this question because we’ve only just begun to ask some of the right questions. But Mueller’s indictment shows that Russian accounts and agents accomplished more than just stoking divisions and tensions with sloppy propaganda memes. The messaging was more sophisticated, and some Americans took action. For example, the indictment recounts a number of instances where events and demonstrations were organized by Russians posing as Americans on social media. These accounts aimed to get people to do specific thing

It wasn't undiscovered. It was an open secret [duckduckgo.com].

It's not an open secret if only his own company and some Hollywood insiders know about it. If it's not widely known, it's just a regular secret.

Why do you strawman instead of tackling the issue? You ignored the initial pushback. You ignored the context in which he was finally pushed out. It wasn't about morals, it was about what was politically expedient.

Consider their record, compared to the record of the Republicans on Roy Moore and Trump himself. This is the beginning of a trend where you've begun to move the goalposts from the core issue of a vast difference in moral/principled behavior and tribalism among the left and right in the US, to making the false equivalence argument that the left isn't perfect on these issues and is therefore just as terrible as the party where Donald Trump and Roy Moore operate freely.

But they are liberals.

Biased sample fallacy. Most liberals would not support Polanski.

No, I'm talking about this [twitter.com].

A ridiculous description of well-documented events?

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/...

You know Good Ole' Bubba has been accused of rape, as well as being a serial sexual harasser of women, right?

Fair point. So is he still in good standing? Hard to tell. He's no more involved in politics than any celebrity with political opinions these days. If the allegations from the '90s happened today and he was in office, it would likely be a different story.

As for Sarah Jeong, like it or not parodying racism isn't racist, and there is a difference between punching up and punching down in comedy. Pretending otherwise harms your credibility.

And, breaking news, soon we'll get to see how this turns out. I predict plenty of mulligans and conspiracy theories on the right:

https://www.wired.com/story/co...

During a discussion of methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.

"No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer," replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to deliberately download pirated material very slowly so other users can't.

"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."

(source)

On Facebook: “So, how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” (April 2018)

This guy is another dinosaur that his constituents keep putting in because they have no idea how to vote for anyone else and doing so would require thought or energy which are scarce resources for the average American. At least this guy has the decency to retire! Just a few months ago, McCain was incapacitated and refused to step down unless the governor agreed to appoint his wife to take his place.

Putting the CON in Congress! :)

One ad seeking a roofer, from a company called Enhanced Roofing and Remodeling, was targeted to men 23 to 50 in Silver Spring, Maryland, according to information from Facebook accompanying the ad. Another, from JK Moving, seeking drivers, targeted men age 21 to 55 who live or were recently in Maryland.

In both cases, they very specifically targeted not just gender (men) but age (21-55, 23-50). Doesn't seem like much nuance around it.

Apple's removal of the 1/8" headphone jack

...is because they bought a headphone company (Beats) and want to sell wireless headphones. That's it.

The music Apple sells hasn't had DRM for years, and nobody bothers "ripping" ("dubbing" would be the proper term) anything via analog, except for vinyl records. Back in ye olden days when iTunes music did have DRM, people removed the DRM using their computer (remember those things?) - not their phone.

That being said, Apple is no saint when it comes to DRM. I've had paid apps disappear from my purchase history because Apple pulled 'em, paid apps that died in the 32-bit purge, and I've read of people who've lost movies they'd purchased (I only buy Blu-Rays, so I haven't experienced that one).

does not convince me of a proof of concept as much as a FUD campaign to attract attention to its ancillary claims of assisting film direction and self-driving cars and the latest battleground of chip makers.

You may consider them naive for believing the tech companies are telling the truth about what it does and does not listen for. If so, I consider you naive for believing that the tech companies could get away with such a lie.

I don't believe my Android phone was designed to randomly pocket dial 911 but it does so anyway. What's the stats on Android pocket dialing nuisance calls to 911? How many MILLIONS per year?

Turns out there is no rational input filtering from the digitizer allowing absurdly stupid superhuman rates of button presses to register. Couple that with crummy unlock dance and you have low probability events happening thousands of times per day that don't need to due to lack of attention to detail.

It's not that they are secretly recording you for no reason it's that wake word detection is not fit for purpose. To be blunt it sucks ass. It's incapable of effectively mitigating against uncommanded activation. They simply don't care enough to take the issue seriously. Anyone whose around a smart speaker will see it activating for no reason now and again. Anyone wanting to collect data or collect cheap points will shout a command on the radio or TV and it will be picked up and processed.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/...

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/...

https://www.businessinsider.co...

It's pretty easy to monitor network traffic

No way. It's all encrypted. Google speaker has half a gig of RAM. Low bitrate codecs with silence detection can store weeks of conversations easily and batch it out under cover of an actual activation or updates or any such shit.

I'm not asserting this is happening but the claim it's easy to monitor especially when you don't trust the vendor to act underhandedly is totally bogus.

This is a step on the path the announced recently - https://www.wired.com/story/go...

"I'm a Bernie Bro who's butthurt that not enough primary voters voted for *MY* favorite candidate for him to win the nomination. I'm going to support trump now. And I'm happy to see the whole country burn, because I didn't get my way."

Fixed that for you.

This is what the Russians were going for with their information warfare campaign, although they were not necessarily interested in getting Bernie voters to flip for Trump (that's hard to achieve) as they were to get those voters to stay home and not vote at all (easier to achieve). Quoting the link:

The indictment mentions that the Russian accounts were meant to embed with and emulate “radical” groups. The content was not designed to persuade people to change their views, but to harden those views. Confirmation bias is powerful and commonly employed in these kinds of psychological operations (a related Soviet concept is “reflexive control”—applying pressure in ways to elicit a specific, known response). The intention of these campaigns was to activate—or suppress—target groups. Not to change their views, but to change their behavior

By the radical groups there they mean both the Trump and Bernie camps, both because those groups had the largest existing online reach (and thus, were they easiest to target) but also because you could pretty effectively use the same kind of anti-Clinton messaging to target both. So they wanted at the same time to get people who don't usually vote but are pissed at the status quo ('Drain the swamp', 'Lock her up', etc.) to go out and vote for Trump and to get people who usually vote for the democrats to stay home ('Bernie or bust', 'Walk away', etc,).

Whether or not it made a definitive difference to the election results is not really knowable at this point, because the effectiveness of such campaigns is hard to measure, but keeping in mind that the amount of votes in the key states that flipped the result to Trump was what, around 30 000 it's definitely a possibility.

this does not invalidate the report by the CIA, FBI, NSA and Director of National Intelligence, nor their "high confidence" in their judgment that Russia engaged in an influence campaign directed at the election.

I get it....this whole post is just another fascist right conspiracy theorists bullshit that shouldn't even show up on /. BUT we have a cadre of worthless fucking fascists on here who's whole goal is to undermine this country. We can see them in all these up voted posts that are basically people too fucking stupid to even understand what was written in the article, all the way to up voting posts like yours which downplays serious issues because you're little partisan brain is nothing more than a rat turd.

I long for the good old days when there were some conservatives who actually used their brain, and had a little integrity. They certainly don't seem to exist anymore.

We can dump iron in the oceans as a fertilizer which produces bigger fish harvests and sinks co2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

We could use calcium too.
https://www.technologyreview.c...
https://www.wired.com/2008/07/...

We could farm Kelp.
https://www.scienceforums.net/...

But unless we stop emitting co2 this will not be enough. We should really consider Thorium reactors especially if they are as safe as scientists are claiming.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

Sorry about the quality of the links but it should be a good starting point for some research. None of these by themselves will be enough but we have many options even terrible ones like reflective aerosols.

~matthekc

Great list! I would also add:

* Humming music was the biggest piracy threat because artists weren't getting their "fair share"

* Used CD sales was the biggest piracy threat because according to clueless, greedy asshats artists aren't paid royalties on these transactions,

* Guitar Hero was the biggest piracy threat since it allowed gamers to play music over and over again onlyh having to pay once,

Aerosmith has reportedly earned more from Guitar Hero : Aerosmith than from any single album in the band's history.

* iTunes was the biggest piracy threat since it allowed music and movies to be distributed without needing physical media.

This is different from .mp3 since Apple's .aac used to be DRM protected but did these wankers complain about that when Apple removed DRM from their music?

Furthermore, why did it take a computer company to sell music???

The only thing the music industry knows how to is whine, constantly. It's not fucking rocket science. People just want:

* Access to music, regardless of device, and
* The ability to pay for it.

Piracy shows you have a distribution opportunity not a price problem.

Ok, tell me how you plan to use your plastic gun to take down the tyrannical government that has tanks,fighter jets, and nuclear weapons.

You've completely missed and should spend a few minutes on this excellent read: https://www.wired.com/story/de...

The AK-47 is way ahead of these on the open-source fire arm bandwagon. The Trump administration is sticking with what the constitution says, this activist judge and all the me-too's from elsewhere are virtue-signaling their left wing stances.

This is a combined 1st and 2nd amendment issue - shutting it down is violating both, I don't care what the laws of non-U.S. countries are. It's not our job to enforce the laws of other countries, if they don't want their people getting what's on U.S. servers it's their job to block their users, not ours.

... in terms of making a decent firearm that is better that what anybody could put together at Home Depot.

In terms of real make-at-home untraceable firearms, you need a CNC mill and an 80% lower. And you can order both, online, at a very reasonable price:

https://www.wired.com/2015/06/...

they also have an incentive for Android not to be viewed as a less secure mobile operating system

This cannot be taken seriously, considering how few Android phones get updates and security patches. Is their argument that as long as the play store is updating its applications then the device is fine and all is secure? Newsflash, Android IS less secure.

"We're proud of the fact that half of devices received an update in 2016, but that's not sufficient," says Adrian Ludwig, Google's director of Android Security.

That link is old but its not too hard to find more recent articles to shame Android.

I can fix this problem with just 1.21 gigawatts and my flux capacitor.

Dude, if you have a time machine then you don't need to mine cryptocurrency. Just check the stock market one year from now. Or maybe that's what you meant when you said "fix this problem?"

But the more important thing is that there isn't an obvious systemic problem here. If there was you know I'd be first to point it out. This year is exceptional.

No white men have won a Hugo in anything, save for the "dramatic presentation" category, in years.

So I guess 2017 was an exceptional year too.
http://www.thehugoawards.org/h...

And so was 2016.
http://www.thehugoawards.org/h...

And at last, we have ONE white guy in 2015 (for best novelette). And the only reason he won was because there was an open rebellion among the fans demanding it:
https://www.wired.com/2015/08/...
Of course, that didn't stop the Hugo committee from responding to the rebellion by refusing to issue awards for most of the other nominees:
http://www.thehugoawards.org/h...

Should I go on, or are you still going to pretend that white guys have a snowball's chance in hell of winning a Hugo anymore?

Men are just not as good at creative writing, according to some vague statistics, but they’re better at other stuff like eating contests so it’s ok.

But the more important thing is that there isn't an obvious systemic problem here. If there was you know I'd be first to point it out. This year is exceptional.

No white men have won a Hugo in anything, save for the "dramatic presentation" category, in years.

So I guess 2017 was an exceptional year too.
http://www.thehugoawards.org/h...

And so was 2016.
http://www.thehugoawards.org/h...

And at last, we have ONE white guy in 2015 (for best novelette). And the only reason he won was because there was an open rebellion among the fans demanding it:
https://www.wired.com/2015/08/...
Of course, that didn't stop the Hugo committee from responding to the rebellion by refusing to issue awards for most of the other nominees:
http://www.thehugoawards.org/h...

Should I go on, or are you still going to pretend that white guys have a snowball's chance in hell of winning a Hugo anymore?

In 2007, Wired ran a brief article about Toshiba's micro-reactor. If this technology existed eleven years ago, then how is its current "development" newsworthy?

For the few pieces of media I want to own, I get a digital version, and I'm done. No extra piece of plastic in my house, nothing had to be manufactured or transported, and I still get to enjoy it.

You get to enjoy it until something happens to the DRM server, then like that South Park meme, ...and it's gone!

I have a bunch of paid iOS games that died during the 32-bit purge. It's a bit ironic that I can fire up Windows XP under VMware and play Worms Armageddon (which I bought almost two decades ago), but my copy of UNO (yup, the card game) for iOS has gone to Apple's digital graveyard.

Don't even get me started on Netflix removing content. It was what finally motivated me to set up my own server at home, and bought Fire Sticks to run Kodi, for each TV. Content providers can shove their "kill switch" up their ass.

Not only has millions of tonnes of greenhouses gases been produced due to mining

Where did THAT come from?

There were a couple of articles about Bitcoin and emissions last year.

• Nature
• Forbes
• The Guardian/
• Wired

Back around 2000, many companies (Sun, Google) had their own shuttle services that went between the different corporate buildings and Caltrain stations. They were needed to allow employees to get between buildings for meetings and many didn't want to drive along freeways each day.
Google now runs luxury coach buses through San Francisco.

There was a big hoo-hah about how these buses were using bus-stops but not actually making any payments to the cities, so there was a deal made that involved Google making a $7 million donation for free childrens rides on public buses:

http://time.com/10315/google-b...

https://www.wired.com/2015/11/...

Today's Wired article says the details of the Foreshadow attack would be presented tomorrow. Somebody is coordinating all this.

"While it is undeniable websites are vulnerable to hackers, election night reporting websites are only used to publish preliminary, unofficial results for the public and the media. The sites are not connected to vote counting equipment and could never change actual election results." https://www.nass.org/node/1511

You're forgetting West Virginia that is allowing online voting with your smartphone. https://www.wired.com/story/sm...

Kinda explains the private jumbo jet (among other private jets...) for Google executives.

Fuel for those ain't cheap - Google really has to "monetize" the privacy of every person on the planet!

According to this:

...Magic Leap has contracted with former Apple executive Ron Johnson’s startup, Enjoy, which sends customer service people to deliver new tech gadgets and help users set them up. Enjoy representatives will deliver every Magic Leap headset, fit it, and provide a tutorial on how it works.

This is a concierge-based trial release - don't buy it unless you have $2500 you can throw out the window without major pain.

IPv6 with RAD includes privacy extensions by default and dead easy to deploy (even easier than DHCP on a home router.) While with typical IPv4 nat, someone who wants to map your home network just has to find your subnet, then has 255 or fewer addresses to ping. In contrast, using bog standard IPv6 (the privacy extensions became standard fifteen odd years ago?), you need to search 2 billion internets worth of addresses to map each home network, which will, at least, take much longer, but really, it is practically infeasible.

The addresses used by IPv6 privacy extensions rotate more rapidly than IPv4 DHCP4, because they run multiple addresses at once. To argue that IPv4 is more privacy oriented than IPv6 is idiocy. Don't be an idiot.

You can read microfilm using a cell phone with a microscope lens attachment. All you need is some rack mechanism to let you precisely scroll the film left/right, and move the camera up/down across the film. I'm not sure why this guy insisted on salvaging an outdated reader. Those were bulky in order to avoid the expense of a an electronic camera sensor (which could cost millions of dollars at the time) and built-in monitor. Neither of those are expensive anymore.

I think the question should be posed

The people in a position to pose the question are local bureaucrats. They have long-running "relationship" with the cable monopolies and would never do, what you wish them too. Earlier laws and regulations have kept them in power to do that, while ya'll rioted for nationalizing Internet service-providers.

Good to see Trump Administration addressing this problem too.

US antitrust law doesn't define a monopoly as being the only one to make your exact name branded product. It's about control of a specific product or business *type*.

I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on Slashdot. But I doubt that your car analogy with stop this lawsuit which alleges that Apple abuses its monopoly control of its App store. You can rage about it if you like, but the law is the law. SCOTUS will decide.

This is the sort of thing that the EU's GDPR is supposed to address. Hopefully it will provide a model for other jurisdictions, I think that California's Privacy Bill is along the same lines.

The other thing that we badly need are devices that let us lie to apps; show them the profile that we want them to know. It should also be illegal for apps to refuse to work if they detect that they are being lied to.

Autonomous vehicles have rounded the corner and already arrived. Right now they're doing, you know, autonomous driving - the kind that doesn't require a human driver.

These are merely Class 4 AVs, only capable of driving in a limited area under specific conditions, so still a long way from 100%. But those "specific conditions" include full city driving among pedestrians, buses, trucks, pets, distracted drivers, roadworks.. clearly an already-useful percentage of human capability.

Augmented reality has applications in production and is already being leveraged there [1] [2]. The commercial/industrial space is an easier sell because no one cares if you look like a dork or it's unwieldy (to a point) if it actually improves productivity. Retail sales are never going to take off until you don't look like a tool wearing one and they work in direct sunlight... at that point they'll sell like hotcakes (especially after I introduce my app that overlays everyone else on the subway with (or no one at all)).

lol

It was this article that finally made me switch from SMS verification codes for my personal email (gmail): Wired article

And I went to Google Authenticator only after I figured out how to put the same code on multiple devices and assure myself that I had enough backup hard copies of keys that I would not likely get locked out permanently should I ever lose my phone, etc.

The U2F works great for corporate, etc. where you have a support team who can help you in case you lose it or forget anything. They can make you come in person and prove that you are you.

The problem with implementing this (without enough backups) for personal is that if you ever lose all of your key info or code generator, you are absolutely fucked because there is no way to prove who you are to Google and have them reset your password / security. So you've got to have multiple backups in different places should your house ever burn down, etc.

Expedited shipping means your packages may not be as consolidated as they could be, leading to more cars and trucks required to deliver them, and an increase in packaging waste, which researchers have found is adding more congestion to our cities, pollutants to our air, and cardboard to our landfills

This is a classic misunderstanding of opportunity cost. Comparing the scenarios as if the alternative is for the packages to materialize in your house via a Star Trek-style transporter and zero pollution.

If Amazon weren't shipping the items to you, you would probably drive to a local store to buy it. Multiple stores if you're buying a variety of things. In the vast majority of cases, that will burn more fuel and cause more pollution than delivery via UPS. The average UPS driver makes about 120 deliveries a day, driving about 150 miles. So total vehicle-miles per package is only about 1.25 miles. (The longer cross-state transport would've happened anyway delivering the item you bought to your local store.)

The excess packaging part I agree with. I peeves me that when Amazon is running promotions like their "$1 digital credit for slower shipping", it's per order rather than per item, or per $x spent. It encourages me to save my items for later, and purchase them one at a time, rather than put them all in one order which can be shipped in a single box. To their credit, I've found that if I place multiple orders in rapid succession, they're smart enough to consolidate all of them into a single shipment.

What? You think that getting to 100% self-drving cars is not going to involve any accidents?
The fact is, that Tesla has far fewer accidents / mile driven, than the other APs. BUT, to get to this level, the other APs will have to allow lots of AP based driving. Waymo is finally adding some mileage on their network which is what it will take to teach theirs.