This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.
Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.
Okay now they are here.
Where? I see driver-assist cars, but no self-driving cars. Even Tesla (and many of slashdot regulars) point out that "autopilot" doesn't mean that the car can drive itself.
We've had the hardware to do self-driving cars for about 20 years now, and for the same amount of time very little progress was made on the software. We still don't have software that can drive a car in anything but perfect conditions, and even in perfect conditions they aren't able to do better than humans in perfect conditions.
This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.
Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.
Once again. Tesla is full of shit. They compare 'autopilot' accident rates to all human driving. They should compare autopilot rates to human driving on divided highways. They don't because that would make them look bad.
So, have you done that? Has anyone? And if so, where's that comparison? I've looked up some related statistics but none of them speak directly to this point. Over one-third of collisions are on divided highways, for example; that suggests that in fact the comparison would not make them look bad, but I honestly don't know.
No need to go that far - they are comparing "autopilot in perfect driving conditions with a human ready to take over when the software gets it wrong" with "All human drivers, in every road condition imaginable".
You shouldn't need a book on statistics to know that the comparison of "autopilot+human+perfect conditions" with "humans+all conditions" is not a statistical comparison but a marketing one.
In short, you shouldn't need to be told that the comparison is not legitimate; it's obvious after a moment's thought.
In fact on average a computer will have much better visibility to the full surroundings than a human driver could, so even if "dumber" the computer is better informed and so statistically will probably make better choices.
Why would you assume that? The electronic visibility of an airplane is much better than any pilot, and yet 40 years after the invention of the "autopilot" we still do not have software that matches the pilot.
"Self-piloting" is a much much easier problem to solve than "self-driving", and yet we haven't solved that yet. I expect that 5 years after we've gotten passenger aircraft fully autonomous, we'll have self-driving cars.
But lets first see if anyone can solve the easy problem first, okay?
Says that self driving cars will put an end to car ownership.
It could put a dent in it but unless this makes people so broke that they can't own their own car I think personal space will still win out.
I refer to you (as I've done many times in other threads) to Tokyo. You can party, go to work and take your kids anywhere in the whole Kanto region without a car.
That only works in very high-density areas. Those of us who don't live in battery-hen conditions won't be getting good access to public transport anytime soon. You may enjoy living in such a manner that four or five of the six sides that make up your home are shared with someone else. I do not.
I won't be moving to a high-density area anytime soon as I'm used to my 700sqm house on 4000sqm land with a 80000l pool in the yard. and (literally) park-like front garden. You probably paid the same as I did, except you got tiny cube in the city. But, hey, at least you don't need to own a car!
In other words the litigious nature of US society will prevent it taking a lead in robotics and self driving vehicles.
Self-driving vehicles aren't going to happen in your lifetime. You need strong general AI for that. If we had that we'd have reached the singularity and probably won't even need cars.
The reason it hasn't been forked is because there simply isn't enough interest in it from people with the technical ability to fork it.
Or, just maybe, everyone else would wait for ABI stability before trying a port?
You are going to look SO silly when Android adopts Swift (or forks it)...
Why would I look silly? I hardly ever develop for Android either
Personally I'm not in competition with you - I do (and have done) s/ware development on more than a single manufacturers products. I'm flexible
I can't help but laugh at a curmudgeon who ignores a widely used programming language
Whoa there cowboy - you're getting a little ahead of yourself. Swift is "widely used"? Maybe in mobile development (and even that is probably debatable), but in the Aerospace, Military, Healthcare, Finance, Agriculture, Automotive, Manufacturing, Retail, Mathematic, Web, Modeling, Design, Embedded and Desktop industries/environments the usage is too small to even be accurately counted.
and operating system describe themselves as "flexible".
I guess then I'm even MORE flexible than you are, since I have worked with scads of non-Apple systems and platforms also...
Sure you have. And I'm the King of England (tip: the actual experts and experienced folk almost are rarely blind yes-men for big corps).
While C remains backward compatible, C99 and C10 have added quite a lot of stuff to C. But due to Microsoft's refusal to support newer C standards in Visual Studio and the problems that mixing new C with new C++ brings, they aren't in widespread use.
It appears to me that the standards committee is actively sabotaging C. The latest standard made some things "optional", which in effect means that a vendor can advertise their C compiler as C10 conformant even though they don't support VLAs (for example).
I do not understand why the committee would encourage breakages between compilers - a fully conformant C program was (until now) gauranteed to work on all conformant implementations. This is no longer the case.
I have no doubt that you could still get a job writing in COBOL if you wanted to.
I ignore COBOL for the same reason I ignored iOS-dev: there is no lack of opportunity without them. Lacking iOS (or COBOL) doesn't change my employability enough for me to even notice.
Since Swift is open source, it's already been ported to many platforms. It's on Linux (which Apple officially supported) and Windows and even Android now...
So is DOSBox. Doesn't mean much. The reason it hasn't been forked is because there simply isn't enough interest in it from people with the technical ability to fork it.
If you are ignoring Swift because of your irrational hatred of Apple, you are only hurting yourself and your future employability.
I dunno hey - I soundly ignored iOS, Obj-C and all Apple development and it hasn't done anything to my employability at all. I expect similar by soundly ignoring Swift.
But I do thank you for making it even easier for me to find work.
Personally I'm not in competition with you - I do (and have done) s/ware development on more than a single manufacturers products. I'm flexible. The amount of non-Apple development work out there dwarfs the Apple-only development work. Hell, the Apple-only work being offered is so tiny I doubt it even makes a margin-of-error difference? Maybe four orders of magnitude difference? Less?
"Look at 3d TV for example; despite all the hype, people just didn't buy into it, and now you have to look petty hard for the 3d models."
When we bought a new TV last fall, pretty much all the mid-range models we looked at came with 3D built-in. It just seems to be a tickbox feature now, rather than a selling point... and is pretty much zero cost for the manufacturer (a bit of software, and a Bluetooth chip if they don't already have one).
What's the bluetooth for? Our 3D TV doesn't have bluetooth (I don't think so; never seen it as a menu option, but then again I wasn't really looking for it).
They simply compute, albeit using ever more complex algorithms.
Whereas brains do what exactly? In order for them to do something that can't be run on a computer, they would have to be super-turing somehow.
While I broadly agree with you, I was under the impression that there is absolutely no research whatsoever indicating that a turing machine can model a human brain. It's never been done and only been speculated in fiction.
IOW, what makes you think brains are not a product of a model better than the turing machine (super-turing?). 'Cos claiming that a brain can be modeled with nothing more than a turing machine is inaccurate at best: we don't know what model the brain uses. We barely know which areas light up when given particular stimulation, but that's all we know about computation in the human brain.
What a tiresome argument. Human drivers aren't capable of quickly and ethically trolley problems while controlling a vehicle, and we don't expect them to be. Sure, you may think to yourself "Well I know what one *I'd* pick," but in an emergency you're not gonna react the way you imagine your super-rational brain to.
The car is programmed "Go the speed limit," "maintain a safe following distance," "obey laws," and "Avoid hitting people," and that's about as far as it goes.
You don't need to rank human life to have a car that avoids collisions.
The problem with SDCs isn't going to be the hardware, it's the software. The problem is, software advances are very deceptive. People who don't write software don't get this. Most of the Musk/Tesla/SDC hopers don't get this either. Either their experience is with electrical/electronic engineering or something similar. Most people who've read Horrowitz and Hill don't get this. Most people who've read things like Abelson and Sussman *do* get this. Software progress is deceptive, hardware progress is visible and clear.
The ability to drive a car in perfect traffic conditions with a human hand on the wheel is easily done with software. The ability to drive the car in unknown, unexpected or never-before-seen traffic conditions, without a human hand on the wheel requires strong general-purpose AI. To be honest, if we have that, then we have reached the singularity and have better things to do and probably better methods of transportation.
Wait, you're not trying to suggest that we didn't know all that there was to know in 1960, are you? We were using chemical propellant for rockets then,
I'm curious - what are we using now as rocket propellant?
As far as the AI argument goes: The processing power in the world the last 3 decades has increased by a factor of a few hundreds of thousands. The "AI" has improved by a factor of 2. Maybe less. The progress we've seen in AI software has been incremental; a rounding error compared to progress in other software or in hardware, and we've yet to approach the cognitive abilities of a smart cockroach, even though we're consuming orders of magnitude more processing power than the cockroach.
Luckily, we can continue brute-forcing our way through a problem-space, pruning the space here and there, and get pretty good results because of all the transistors devoted to the task. The singularity isn't coming along in my lifetime (nor yours, in case you're a young man).
Architecturally, it's better for the amp to be closer to the load so that they can be matched and equalization can be applied. Having the external battery preserves battery life in the phone itself and it IS "theoretically" possible for Bluetooth headphones to "make better sound". Apparently you made quite a living talking about things in which you are poorly informed, Bruce Perens.
You're wrong on every point.
It's not better for the amp to be in your ear (or close to it) because amps generate heat. Even a fraction of a degree celsius for one hour is going to have a negative effect.
At the loads you are talking about, the headphone cable is not going to have any loss you can hear.
It's not possible for audio to sound better simply by going over bluetooth. Best case scenario is that it sounds the same.
And the most impressive part is how completely, utterly terrible Beats headphones actually are!
Really, go and try some reasonable Sennheiser, Koss, AKG, Pioneer, hell even Sony...
What do you mean "even Sony"? The set of Sony headphones I purchased in 2005 are the third-best I've ever owned (The best were a set of Phillips purchased in 1991, with second-prize going to a Sennheiser from 2012).
"The tire is almost 200 years old. It had its last big innovation about 70 years ago (radial tires)."
I guess you forgot about run-flat tires and the countless innovations in compound and tread design. Whereas it's not a NASCAR type thing, watch F1 to see how tires are constantly bring improved.
Stupid argument - all those innovations you list don't prevent compatibility between 70 year old cars and new cars. The Apple "innovation" (and I use that word very loosely when talking about Apple products) does remove compatibility.
An electric car is no more expensive than an ICE car in the long term - an ICE car's fuel and maintenance costs are vastly more expensive while an electric car is more expensive up front (and has the long-term occasional concentrated maintenance cost of a new battery pack).
I doubt it. The EV may be missing an engine, but it's hardly ever the engine that gives problems. Engines typically outlast most of the other crap that falls off cars. As an EV owner you'll still have the gearbox, the suspension, the brakes, the hydrualics, the electrical system, the aircon, the heater and most of the other mechanicals present in a non-EV car. With a single exception, my repairs for the last 25 years of driving have been electrical or non-engine mechanical problems.
hmm, vim doesn't complain, but it doesn't seem to work either -.-
Very odd - it works in both vim and gvim (although in my vimrc I leave out the colon at the beginning of the line). Might be a good idea to do:set noet once vim has opened (to turn tabs on).
a rule is all you need for indentation and/or alignment once you have the language in a generalized form.
Lisp s-expressions *are* the generalised form for all programming languages. XML, for example, is syntactically a limited and crippled but more verbose representation of s-expressions. All XML can be run through a regex that will spit out conforming s-expressions, but not all s-expressions can be regexed to XML.
doesn't work in my vim... are you sure its correct that way?
/. ate the unicode characters. Replace A and B below with the unicode chars you want to represent tabs and spaces. I use right->arrow for tabs and a dashed bendy line for trailing spaces.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.
Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.
Okay now they are here.
Where? I see driver-assist cars, but no self-driving cars. Even Tesla (and many of slashdot regulars) point out that "autopilot" doesn't mean that the car can drive itself.
We've had the hardware to do self-driving cars for about 20 years now, and for the same amount of time very little progress was made on the software. We still don't have software that can drive a car in anything but perfect conditions, and even in perfect conditions they aren't able to do better than humans in perfect conditions.
This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.
Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.
Once again. Tesla is full of shit. They compare 'autopilot' accident rates to all human driving. They should compare autopilot rates to human driving on divided highways. They don't because that would make them look bad.
So, have you done that? Has anyone? And if so, where's that comparison? I've looked up some related statistics but none of them speak directly to this point. Over one-third of collisions are on divided highways, for example; that suggests that in fact the comparison would not make them look bad, but I honestly don't know.
No need to go that far - they are comparing "autopilot in perfect driving conditions with a human ready to take over when the software gets it wrong" with "All human drivers, in every road condition imaginable".
You shouldn't need a book on statistics to know that the comparison of "autopilot+human+perfect conditions" with "humans+all conditions" is not a statistical comparison but a marketing one.
In short, you shouldn't need to be told that the comparison is not legitimate; it's obvious after a moment's thought.
In fact on average a computer will have much better visibility to the full surroundings than a human driver could, so even if "dumber" the computer is better informed and so statistically will probably make better choices.
Why would you assume that? The electronic visibility of an airplane is much better than any pilot, and yet 40 years after the invention of the "autopilot" we still do not have software that matches the pilot.
"Self-piloting" is a much much easier problem to solve than "self-driving", and yet we haven't solved that yet. I expect that 5 years after we've gotten passenger aircraft fully autonomous, we'll have self-driving cars.
But lets first see if anyone can solve the easy problem first, okay?
Says that self driving cars will put an end to car ownership.
It could put a dent in it but unless this makes people so broke that they can't own their own car I think personal space will still win out.
I refer to you (as I've done many times in other threads) to Tokyo. You can party, go to work and take your kids anywhere in the whole Kanto region without a car.
That only works in very high-density areas. Those of us who don't live in battery-hen conditions won't be getting good access to public transport anytime soon. You may enjoy living in such a manner that four or five of the six sides that make up your home are shared with someone else. I do not.
I won't be moving to a high-density area anytime soon as I'm used to my 700sqm house on 4000sqm land with a 80000l pool in the yard. and (literally) park-like front garden. You probably paid the same as I did, except you got tiny cube in the city. But, hey, at least you don't need to own a car!
In other words the litigious nature of US society will prevent it taking a lead in robotics and self driving vehicles.
Self-driving vehicles aren't going to happen in your lifetime. You need strong general AI for that. If we had that we'd have reached the singularity and probably won't even need cars.
"If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse". - Henry Ford
Either the experiment works and everyone ditches the headphone jack or it fails and everyone gets a laugh.
Given the number of other things Apple's done like this I'll side on this becoming a trend.
They've had an equal amount of failures. It's 50:50 that the jack removal will take off.
The reason it hasn't been forked is because there simply isn't enough interest in it from people with the technical ability to fork it.
Or, just maybe, everyone else would wait for ABI stability before trying a port?
You are going to look SO silly when Android adopts Swift (or forks it)...
Why would I look silly? I hardly ever develop for Android either
Personally I'm not in competition with you - I do (and have done) s/ware development on more than a single manufacturers products. I'm flexible
I can't help but laugh at a curmudgeon who ignores a widely used programming language
Whoa there cowboy - you're getting a little ahead of yourself. Swift is "widely used"? Maybe in mobile development (and even that is probably debatable), but in the Aerospace, Military, Healthcare, Finance, Agriculture, Automotive, Manufacturing, Retail, Mathematic, Web, Modeling, Design, Embedded and Desktop industries/environments the usage is too small to even be accurately counted.
and operating system describe themselves as "flexible".
I guess then I'm even MORE flexible than you are, since I have worked with scads of non-Apple systems and platforms also...
Sure you have. And I'm the King of England (tip: the actual experts and experienced folk almost are rarely blind yes-men for big corps).
While C remains backward compatible, C99 and C10 have added quite a lot of stuff to C. But due to Microsoft's refusal to support newer C standards in Visual Studio and the problems that mixing new C with new C++ brings, they aren't in widespread use.
It appears to me that the standards committee is actively sabotaging C. The latest standard made some things "optional", which in effect means that a vendor can advertise their C compiler as C10 conformant even though they don't support VLAs (for example).
I do not understand why the committee would encourage breakages between compilers - a fully conformant C program was (until now) gauranteed to work on all conformant implementations. This is no longer the case.
I have no doubt that you could still get a job writing in COBOL if you wanted to.
I ignore COBOL for the same reason I ignored iOS-dev: there is no lack of opportunity without them. Lacking iOS (or COBOL) doesn't change my employability enough for me to even notice.
Since Swift is open source, it's already been ported to many platforms. It's on Linux (which Apple officially supported) and Windows and even Android now...
So is DOSBox. Doesn't mean much. The reason it hasn't been forked is because there simply isn't enough interest in it from people with the technical ability to fork it.
If you are ignoring Swift because of your irrational hatred of Apple, you are only hurting yourself and your future employability.
I dunno hey - I soundly ignored iOS, Obj-C and all Apple development and it hasn't done anything to my employability at all. I expect similar by soundly ignoring Swift.
But I do thank you for making it even easier for me to find work.
Personally I'm not in competition with you - I do (and have done) s/ware development on more than a single manufacturers products. I'm flexible. The amount of non-Apple development work out there dwarfs the Apple-only development work. Hell, the Apple-only work being offered is so tiny I doubt it even makes a margin-of-error difference? Maybe four orders of magnitude difference? Less?
(Not trolling... I'm a Macbook Pro user myself and in the same boat as you)
The Titanic?
"Look at 3d TV for example; despite all the hype, people just didn't buy into it, and now you have to look petty hard for the 3d models."
When we bought a new TV last fall, pretty much all the mid-range models we looked at came with 3D built-in. It just seems to be a tickbox feature now, rather than a selling point... and is pretty much zero cost for the manufacturer (a bit of software, and a Bluetooth chip if they don't already have one).
What's the bluetooth for? Our 3D TV doesn't have bluetooth (I don't think so; never seen it as a menu option, but then again I wasn't really looking for it).
They simply compute, albeit using ever more complex algorithms.
Whereas brains do what exactly? In order for them to do something that can't be run on a computer, they would have to be super-turing somehow.
While I broadly agree with you, I was under the impression that there is absolutely no research whatsoever indicating that a turing machine can model a human brain. It's never been done and only been speculated in fiction.
IOW, what makes you think brains are not a product of a model better than the turing machine (super-turing?). 'Cos claiming that a brain can be modeled with nothing more than a turing machine is inaccurate at best: we don't know what model the brain uses. We barely know which areas light up when given particular stimulation, but that's all we know about computation in the human brain.
What a tiresome argument. Human drivers aren't capable of quickly and ethically trolley problems while controlling a vehicle, and we don't expect them to be. Sure, you may think to yourself "Well I know what one *I'd* pick," but in an emergency you're not gonna react the way you imagine your super-rational brain to.
The car is programmed "Go the speed limit," "maintain a safe following distance," "obey laws," and "Avoid hitting people," and that's about as far as it goes.
You don't need to rank human life to have a car that avoids collisions.
The problem with SDCs isn't going to be the hardware, it's the software. The problem is, software advances are very deceptive. People who don't write software don't get this. Most of the Musk/Tesla/SDC hopers don't get this either. Either their experience is with electrical/electronic engineering or something similar. Most people who've read Horrowitz and Hill don't get this. Most people who've read things like Abelson and Sussman *do* get this. Software progress is deceptive, hardware progress is visible and clear.
The ability to drive a car in perfect traffic conditions with a human hand on the wheel is easily done with software. The ability to drive the car in unknown, unexpected or never-before-seen traffic conditions, without a human hand on the wheel requires strong general-purpose AI. To be honest, if we have that, then we have reached the singularity and have better things to do and probably better methods of transportation.
Wait, you're not trying to suggest that we didn't know all that there was to know in 1960, are you? We were using chemical propellant for rockets then,
I'm curious - what are we using now as rocket propellant?
As far as the AI argument goes: The processing power in the world the last 3 decades has increased by a factor of a few hundreds of thousands. The "AI" has improved by a factor of 2. Maybe less. The progress we've seen in AI software has been incremental; a rounding error compared to progress in other software or in hardware, and we've yet to approach the cognitive abilities of a smart cockroach, even though we're consuming orders of magnitude more processing power than the cockroach.
Luckily, we can continue brute-forcing our way through a problem-space, pruning the space here and there, and get pretty good results because of all the transistors devoted to the task. The singularity isn't coming along in my lifetime (nor yours, in case you're a young man).
"1) The world does not owe you a living"
Yet you feel the world owes cheap labor and no taxes to corporations? Why do you worship takers?
What is the purpose of science and technology if you feel like we should live like in the Middle Ages?
"2) If someone is willing to do your job as well as you for less money than you, they should have the job."
Sure, and that doesn't mean I should now starve in a world like ours. But to you and your delightful Bronze Age sensibility, it does.
Figures you're a software type.
You are arguing with a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. I highly doubt that this will end well for you - "Never wrestle with a pig..."
If Twitter will save us, then we are definitely DOOMED
Hey, how hard can it be to find the problem - it's not like it's rocket scie... Oh, wait.
This is an embarrassingly wrong perspective.
Architecturally, it's better for the amp to be closer to the load so that they can be matched and equalization can be applied. Having the external battery preserves battery life in the phone itself and it IS "theoretically" possible for Bluetooth headphones to "make better sound". Apparently you made quite a living talking about things in which you are poorly informed, Bruce Perens.
You're wrong on every point.
It's not better for the amp to be in your ear (or close to it) because amps generate heat. Even a fraction of a degree celsius for one hour is going to have a negative effect.
At the loads you are talking about, the headphone cable is not going to have any loss you can hear.
It's not possible for audio to sound better simply by going over bluetooth. Best case scenario is that it sounds the same.
And the most impressive part is how completely, utterly terrible Beats headphones actually are! Really, go and try some reasonable Sennheiser, Koss, AKG, Pioneer, hell even Sony...
What do you mean "even Sony"? The set of Sony headphones I purchased in 2005 are the third-best I've ever owned (The best were a set of Phillips purchased in 1991, with second-prize going to a Sennheiser from 2012).
"The tire is almost 200 years old. It had its last big innovation about 70 years ago (radial tires)."
I guess you forgot about run-flat tires and the countless innovations in compound and tread design. Whereas it's not a NASCAR type thing, watch F1 to see how tires are constantly bring improved.
Stupid argument - all those innovations you list don't prevent compatibility between 70 year old cars and new cars. The Apple "innovation" (and I use that word very loosely when talking about Apple products) does remove compatibility.
An electric car is no more expensive than an ICE car in the long term - an ICE car's fuel and maintenance costs are vastly more expensive while an electric car is more expensive up front (and has the long-term occasional concentrated maintenance cost of a new battery pack).
I doubt it. The EV may be missing an engine, but it's hardly ever the engine that gives problems. Engines typically outlast most of the other crap that falls off cars. As an EV owner you'll still have the gearbox, the suspension, the brakes, the hydrualics, the electrical system, the aircon, the heater and most of the other mechanicals present in a non-EV car. With a single exception, my repairs for the last 25 years of driving have been electrical or non-engine mechanical problems.
Engines just don't break without abuse.
hmm, vim doesn't complain, but it doesn't seem to work either -.-
Very odd - it works in both vim and gvim (although in my vimrc I leave out the colon at the beginning of the line). Might be a good idea to do :set noet once vim has opened (to turn tabs on).
a rule is all you need for indentation and/or alignment once you have the language in a generalized form.
Lisp s-expressions *are* the generalised form for all programming languages. XML, for example, is syntactically a limited and crippled but more verbose representation of s-expressions. All XML can be run through a regex that will spit out conforming s-expressions, but not all s-expressions can be regexed to XML.
doesn't work in my vim ... are you sure its correct that way?
/. ate the unicode characters. Replace A and B below with the unicode chars you want to represent tabs and spaces. I use right->arrow for tabs and a dashed bendy line for trailing spaces.
:set listchars=tab:A\ ,trail:B