This is rich. China's surveillance state. How about the UK...
It's not the surveillance that's the problem. It's the willingness of the state to act upon that data in a way that violates human rights that is the problem.
I monitor my kids in very detailed and intrusive ways (well, at least that's what they tell me). However, I don't use that information to beat my kids when they say something bad about me. China has shown a willingness to imprison, intimidate, and physically harm based on surveillance, and that is a huge difference with most Western governments.
[If] it really is novel and nothing like it has been patented before it will be granted.
If you work for a large company, use the phrase, "with a computer," and can pay the application fees, it will be granted.
Why is this comment modded down as "funny"? There is so much truth in this statement. It's so funny that it makes me want to cry. This comment should be modded up, and the moderator should be modded down.
Because it's not true? Google Patents provides free and fast searching of issued patents. Go find one that was granted just because it says "with a computer".
It's definitely true. Of course, no one actually writes those exact words into the title. One has to give the patent examiner a little credit for finding prior art, so the ideas that are simply reapplied to a computer, a phone, a GPU, etc. are written such that the idea sounds novel. It's easier to get these patents through larger companies because they don't care about the $10k/patent fees and they're mostly concerned about the bragging rights to having more patents. The quality of the patents don't matter that much. Having worked in six different corporate research labs, I can definitely say this is true.
[If] it really is novel and nothing like it has been patented before it will be granted.
If you work for a large company, use the phrase, "with a computer," and can pay the application fees, it will be granted.
Why is this comment modded down as "funny"? There is so much truth in this statement. It's so funny that it makes me want to cry. This comment should be modded up, and the moderator should be modded down.
"Autopilot" is a poor name for Tesla's driver-assist technology because most people associate the word autopilot with "totally autonomous" and aren't bothered by the nuances of the technology as applied to aircraft. To most folks, autopilot means exactly what it sounds like, and it's pretty clear that there are a number of Tesla drivers treating it as such.
The comparison to an aircraft's autopilot, while technically correct, is irrelevant to the discussion. A remarkably minuscule percentage of the human population will ever see a cockpit, let alone operate the controls. Autopilot means George Jetson era autopilot and that's that.
Actually Autopilot is the perfect name for the technology, at least from a marketing perspective. It implies hands-off driving to those that haven't been trained to fly airplanes, i.e., just about everyone, and therefore drives sales. At the same time plausible deniability exists because there is some logical explanation that makes sense to some set of individuals.
I'm older (43) and still tend to answer the phone. But, one thing I do see is that people who don't like talking to people feel they don't have to anymore. There's other non-voice options.
This is especially true in workplaces, where the younger crowd is finally starting to reach the supervisory levels.
Yes, this. The concerns about spam are sort of an issue, but it's not the dominant issue. It's largely a generational thing. I ignore unknown numbers calling me, but I answer every single known number calling me because I feel it's impolite unless I'm really busy. Then I return the call later.
My pre-teen daughter refuses to call her friends, instead insisting to message them instead. In my generation, there is a feeling that voice conversations, in person visits, and hand-written notes are more personal, but the younger generation doesn't have that same sensibility. For me, I text people I care less about, but I call my wife and family, but Millennials seem to have a different mindset.
Many of Walmart's employees qualify for EITC, and higher pay will push them out of that bracket.... Tuition assistance avoids these problems. A dollar in is a dollar out.
Well, any extra income is helpful even with potentially higher marginal tax rates. Tuition assistance is also helpful, assuming that that particular form education is exactly what is desired. Otherwise, the money at whatever tax rate is preferable. The really big question is whether this education will result in better positions or pay within Walmart or better job opportunities outside of Walmart.
For every dollar extra that Walmart pays, about 60 cents ends up in the employee's pocket.
Assuming that a typical Walmart employee earns less than $38,700, their federal marginal tax rate would be 15%. Social security adds another 7.65%. State income tax rates at the low end range from 0% to 5.8%, with a 2.4% average. So, the expected total tax-based income tax rate should be about 25%. So, the average net pay should be about 75% of the gross. There are other optional deductions such as for 401k, ESPP, etc., but those generally still end up in the employee's pocket, albeit perhaps in a different pocket.
Xiaobing, another chatbot developed by Microsoft, was pulled from TenCent's QQ app in 2017 after being asked about its "China dream" and responding: "My China dream is to go to America". The incident received press coverage alongside a similar contemporaneous incident, where an unrelated popular chatbot named "BabyQ" was pulled after being reported for making some similarly unpatriotic responses.
Apparently, the earlier Xiaobing was sent to a re-education camp and re-emerged as Xiaoice, a bot with the correct patriotic Chinese mindset, albeit with a less Chinese name.
In most companies, the code of conduct is a reflection of existing culture. It is rarely a template for conduct. When's the last time an employee thought, "I was going to act in a certain way, but since that action is contrary to our code of conduct, I decided on a different course of action."
One reason the code of conduct is rarely useful for directing conduct is that the language is so abstract. Often the entire verbiage could be replaced with "Let's be good!" Due to this abstractness, code of conduct terms can mean different things to different readers. Don't be evil. Do the right thing. Everyone agrees with those words, but they mean nothing because they mean different things to different people.
The only organizations that intentionally try to be evil exist in movies and novels. Every organization believes in the inherent goodness of their mission and that they are not evil. How is this possible? Simply because uniform definitions of good and evil don't exist. And what Google thinks is evil doesn't necessarily mesh with what its non-customer users believe is evil.
From the article, the findings from the defense experts were scenarios that could result in false positives. But, what's the false positive rate as a function of the reading? That's what's important. Readings are just samples that estimate the true characteristic. The experts found that readings near the legal threshold could be inaccurate. However, that should have been obvious even without examining the system. The real question is what the confidence levels as the readings get near the legal threshold. That crucial information may not be knowable by only examining the software. However, inaccuracy from a measurement device doesn't mean that the device is useless. All measurement devices are inaccurate. The key to practical usage is understanding the expected confidence in the measurements.
despite the system having a 92-percent false positive rate, "no one" has ever been arrested due to such an error
I may have concerns about the civil liberty impact of broad-net surveillance systems in general, but the algorithmic deficiencies of this particular system are portrayed incorrectly in this article. I.e., the front-end of the system (the facial recognition system) has a 92% false positive rate, but together with the post-processing in the back-end, the total system has a false-positive rate of 0%. This is similar to saying that the object detection failure probabilities for a ADAS system need to be viewed in the context of the entire system, and it's the performance of the total system that is significant.
Having a large economy doesn't necessary mean you have a healthy economy. You also have the largest debt of any state in the union at over 700 billion.
In absolute terms, the debt is the largest of any state, but of course, that is entirely expected because the total California economy is the largest of any state. In terms of debt as a percentage of GDP, California is about in the middle in terms of ordinal ranking as well as being very close to the aggregate percentage of all states combined.
The highest tax rate, one of the highest homeless population in the country, and the fastest shrinking middle class. You know the ones that actually pay all those taxes.
Well, that's a nice populist sentiment that is not necessarily supported by actual numbers. Looking at slightly old (from 2015) numbers, half of all income tax revenue in California comes from those in the top 1% of income earners. For 2003 to 2014, all years except for one saw at least 40% of total income tax revenues coming from the top 1% of income earners.
An a complete and total dependency of surrounding states for water.
Well, sort of but not really. California uses about 40 million acre-feet of water per year. About 10% comes from the Colorado River system. One third comes from ground water. Another third comes from the Sierra snowpack. The rest comes mostly from in-state reservoirs.
U.S. government officials have said that China could order its manufacturers to create backdoors for spying in their devices, although both Huawei and ZTE have denied the possibility.
It may be true that these Chinese companies do not currently implement government-mandated backdoors in their products, and it may be true that they truly would resist such government mandates. However, the assertion that such coercion is not possible is not believable. It's not believable for US companies, and it's not believable for Chinese companies.
Then perhaps companies should keep their research internal to employees rather than outsource to open universities. If you want the best research, you ought to hire the brightest rather than getting it 'on the cheap' from PHD students barely making ends meet.
It's not just universities. From the article, "According to Defense Department statistics, nearly a quarter of all foreign efforts to obtain sensitive or classified information in 2014 were routed through academic institutions." I.e., most of the attempts were not targeted at universities. The big question is how a restriction on Chinese nationals in American industrial research and development would impact progress in those organizations.
Is that that average salary includes data scientists, AI researchers, etc. which command higher salaries than typical software engineers. I would be very surprised to find that the median salary of a SWE at Facebook is $240k unless they bring a very impressive resume with them. The SWEs who just build out new user-facing features with Hack and React are likely not anywhere near that.
It's not clear what "salary" means in the Wall Street Journal article. Is that base salary, or does that include stocks and other bonuses? Certainly the sampling of salaries on glassdoor and payscale are not consistent with the numbers in the WSJ article. From my experience, the glassdoor and payscale numbers are more believable than the WSJ article. For example, payscale says that the median age and tenure at Google are 29 years old and 1.1 years, respectively. If the median salary is $197k, that means that offers for new college grads at Google at somewhere near $197k, which is mind-blowing. The payscale estimate of median salaries is $107k, which is more believable (at least before considering stocks and bonuses).
Bezos just announced last week that they have over 110 million Prime subscribers. So an extra $20 a year means potentially another $2.2 billion in their pockets. Sure, they'll lose a few but the number that drop the service over the increase but the vast majority won't. I'd be surprised if even 5% didn't renew because of it.
Amazon has learned the Costco lesson. Membership fees = profit. 100 million Prime members * $99 = $9.9 billion > $1.6 billion/quarter * 4 quarters = $6.4 billion. The membership fees alone account for all of Amazon's profit. OK, not all members pay $99, but it's still a huge number that is likely more than the total profit. So, the retail part of the business only exists to justify the Prime profit center, and that retail operation doesn't need to be profitable or even break even.
Another data point for how well Google engages users:
Tesla isn’t the only Silicon Valley tech giant with a bad BBB rating. Google currently has a “D.” But last week it had an “F.” The Mountain View company typically responds to complaints periodically, so its rating goes up and down, McFarland said.
Most of the teams in Google basically never think about advertising... or even about monetization. It's all about user impact and engagement.
If Google is really doing the best it can for user impact and engagement, then you'd think there would be at least some noticeable effort toward... well engaging the user. However, as anyone who has frustratingly tried to send in bug reports, suggestions, and complaints has known for many years, user engagement is not only not easy, I'm not sure it's possible.
I think what you meant to say was that Google is all about **customer** impact and engagement. Non-paying user (NPU) impact is only important as a means to the real end. I suppose that it's possible that some Google employees are actually trying to positively impact the NPU, but it's obvious that such beneficence doesn't include communicating with the NPU. It would be trivial to significantly improve NPU experience by simply implementing the myriad of trivial and obvious suggestions in the NPU forums, but most suggestions get ignored for years, implying that this non-engagement has to be policy because no company could actually be that incompetent at managing user input. You might think I'm exaggerating, but just read the forums. It's mind-blowing.
China would trade their honor students and their (poorly) speaking English population in a heartbeat for any other country's situation.
China the people might sorta maybe, but China the leaders absolutely wouldn't. Preservation of party power is the prime objective, and economic prosperity is encouraged/tolerated because it furthers the prime objective. From an external perspective, this prime objective has one good side-effect. China will not risk an external war because such a war potentially threatens the prime objective. Saber rattling on the other hand furthers the prime objective, as long as an actual war doesn't start.
As far as trading China's strengths for the strengths of other countries, well, I'm sure there are some things that they would like and some things they wouldn't. Educational excellence has been a China value for a very long time and is unlikely to be "traded" for a very long time.
I see a parallel between cigarettes and Tesla Autopilot. For both, the manufacturers know that there is a danger in the way the the products are likely to be used. Warnings are issued, and branding/advertising are used to contradict those warnings. There is no question that the consumers behaved in a way that directly led to bad health and death. The question is whether the companies have any liability in the way that they brand and market their products, or do the legal warnings absolve them of all liability.
If you hear "autopilot" and think "well, no humans required!" then you are badly misinformed.
I do think autopilot means no human intervention required, and I would be badly misinformed, but I would also be representative of the majority of people. That last point is the most important one. It's the point that makes Tesla's branding effective.
We're talking about branding and marketing. The dictionary meaning or the "real" meaning is irrelevant. Only what the majority of potential buyers think is important. That these explanations about the "real" meaning are necessary strongly indicates that the majority of people do not share these perceptions about what the word "autopilot" means.
You don't want to know how many accidents there were in cars with autopilot, that doesn't matter. What you want to know is miles per accident *with autopilot engaged.* Using the other number is highly misleading.
Exactly. Furthermore, it's very likely that Tesla knows the number of number miles and accidents with Autopilot on and off. So, they could trot out the comparative mean miles between accidents/fatalities if it were in their favor. That they don't implies that the comparative numbers are either similar or worse with Autopilot.
To get a sense of how far ahead Waymo is, take a look at the disengagements report Waymo published last year and then look at everyone else's. At least in California, Waymo has more miles driven than everyone else combined and their disengagement rate is much lower
It's hard to derive any useful conclusion solely from these numbers. It's not clear what the apples-to-apples bases of comparison are. Disengagements are self-reported and perhaps interpreted differently each company. Waymo says, "The vast majority of disengagements are not related to safety." Nvidia says, "Disengagements were when a driver completed a test, or assumed manual control of the vehicle due to discomfort." So, it is not clear whether the metric is uniform or even useful for evaluation of safety.
Second, as anyone who has driven behind a Google/Waymo car in Mountain View knows, those cars drive very conservatively, even to the point of annoying surrounding human drivers. It's not clear that the miles driven by the set of companies is comparable. A more aggressive set of driving scenarios and conditions would be more helpful for engineering feedback, but a less aggressive set of workloads would be better for marketing.
In this offering Intel at least put the proper durability that Optane is *supposed* to have in the specs. Around 8900TB... nothing to sneeze at when most NAND drives have durabilities in the 200-400TB range.
But the NAND drive has such relatively low endurance due to economic motivations. SLC NAND has significantly higher endurance at a higher price point. The consumer market requires the lower price point. What would the Optane endurance be when scaled and designed for the consumer-viable price point?
I have several friends who do it for extra cash (or, in one case, because they actually enjoy it - weird, but that's their thing), and none of them are anywhere near dumb enough to do it for a net of $3 and change. That number should, literally, be unbelievable, and yet many people believed it anyway because it fit a highly (absurdly) hyperbolic narrative.
We'll no one would work for a check that comes out to $3/hr, but lots of people work for net N dollars where they get paid P dollars and have to incur E incidental expenses, where E is on the order of N. Because the expenses are incurred at a different time and not necessarily for direct expenses, they may not be considered in the true earnings equation. Uber is one example. How many drivers actually sit down to calculate their total profit after expenses on a spreadsheet? Working, married moms are another example, where the taxes at the husband's high marginal rate coupled with child care expenses often yield surprisingly low net true earnings.
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This is rich. China's surveillance state. How about the UK ...
It's not the surveillance that's the problem. It's the willingness of the state to act upon that data in a way that violates human rights that is the problem.
I monitor my kids in very detailed and intrusive ways (well, at least that's what they tell me). However, I don't use that information to beat my kids when they say something bad about me. China has shown a willingness to imprison, intimidate, and physically harm based on surveillance, and that is a huge difference with most Western governments.
[If] it really is novel and nothing like it has been patented before it will be granted.
If you work for a large company, use the phrase, "with a computer," and can pay the application fees, it will be granted.
Why is this comment modded down as "funny"? There is so much truth in this statement. It's so funny that it makes me want to cry. This comment should be modded up, and the moderator should be modded down.
Because it's not true? Google Patents provides free and fast searching of issued patents. Go find one that was granted just because it says "with a computer".
It's definitely true. Of course, no one actually writes those exact words into the title. One has to give the patent examiner a little credit for finding prior art, so the ideas that are simply reapplied to a computer, a phone, a GPU, etc. are written such that the idea sounds novel. It's easier to get these patents through larger companies because they don't care about the $10k/patent fees and they're mostly concerned about the bragging rights to having more patents. The quality of the patents don't matter that much. Having worked in six different corporate research labs, I can definitely say this is true.
[If] it really is novel and nothing like it has been patented before it will be granted.
If you work for a large company, use the phrase, "with a computer," and can pay the application fees, it will be granted.
Why is this comment modded down as "funny"? There is so much truth in this statement. It's so funny that it makes me want to cry. This comment should be modded up, and the moderator should be modded down.
"Autopilot" is a poor name for Tesla's driver-assist technology because most people associate the word autopilot with "totally autonomous" and aren't bothered by the nuances of the technology as applied to aircraft. To most folks, autopilot means exactly what it sounds like, and it's pretty clear that there are a number of Tesla drivers treating it as such.
The comparison to an aircraft's autopilot, while technically correct, is irrelevant to the discussion. A remarkably minuscule percentage of the human population will ever see a cockpit, let alone operate the controls. Autopilot means George Jetson era autopilot and that's that.
Actually Autopilot is the perfect name for the technology, at least from a marketing perspective. It implies hands-off driving to those that haven't been trained to fly airplanes, i.e., just about everyone, and therefore drives sales. At the same time plausible deniability exists because there is some logical explanation that makes sense to some set of individuals.
I'm older (43) and still tend to answer the phone. But, one thing I do see is that people who don't like talking to people feel they don't have to anymore. There's other non-voice options.
This is especially true in workplaces, where the younger crowd is finally starting to reach the supervisory levels.
Yes, this. The concerns about spam are sort of an issue, but it's not the dominant issue. It's largely a generational thing. I ignore unknown numbers calling me, but I answer every single known number calling me because I feel it's impolite unless I'm really busy. Then I return the call later.
My pre-teen daughter refuses to call her friends, instead insisting to message them instead. In my generation, there is a feeling that voice conversations, in person visits, and hand-written notes are more personal, but the younger generation doesn't have that same sensibility. For me, I text people I care less about, but I call my wife and family, but Millennials seem to have a different mindset.
Many of Walmart's employees qualify for EITC, and higher pay will push them out of that bracket. ... Tuition assistance avoids these problems. A dollar in is a dollar out.
Well, any extra income is helpful even with potentially higher marginal tax rates. Tuition assistance is also helpful, assuming that that particular form education is exactly what is desired. Otherwise, the money at whatever tax rate is preferable. The really big question is whether this education will result in better positions or pay within Walmart or better job opportunities outside of Walmart.
For every dollar extra that Walmart pays, about 60 cents ends up in the employee's pocket.
Assuming that a typical Walmart employee earns less than $38,700, their federal marginal tax rate would be 15%. Social security adds another 7.65%. State income tax rates at the low end range from 0% to 5.8%, with a 2.4% average. So, the expected total tax-based income tax rate should be about 25%. So, the average net pay should be about 75% of the gross. There are other optional deductions such as for 401k, ESPP, etc., but those generally still end up in the employee's pocket, albeit perhaps in a different pocket.
From the linked Wikipedia article
Xiaobing, another chatbot developed by Microsoft, was pulled from TenCent's QQ app in 2017 after being asked about its "China dream" and responding: "My China dream is to go to America". The incident received press coverage alongside a similar contemporaneous incident, where an unrelated popular chatbot named "BabyQ" was pulled after being reported for making some similarly unpatriotic responses.
Apparently, the earlier Xiaobing was sent to a re-education camp and re-emerged as Xiaoice, a bot with the correct patriotic Chinese mindset, albeit with a less Chinese name.
In most companies, the code of conduct is a reflection of existing culture. It is rarely a template for conduct. When's the last time an employee thought, "I was going to act in a certain way, but since that action is contrary to our code of conduct, I decided on a different course of action."
One reason the code of conduct is rarely useful for directing conduct is that the language is so abstract. Often the entire verbiage could be replaced with "Let's be good!" Due to this abstractness, code of conduct terms can mean different things to different readers. Don't be evil. Do the right thing. Everyone agrees with those words, but they mean nothing because they mean different things to different people.
Google's completely forgotten about "Do no evil."
The only organizations that intentionally try to be evil exist in movies and novels. Every organization believes in the inherent goodness of their mission and that they are not evil. How is this possible? Simply because uniform definitions of good and evil don't exist. And what Google thinks is evil doesn't necessarily mesh with what its non-customer users believe is evil.
From the article, the findings from the defense experts were scenarios that could result in false positives. But, what's the false positive rate as a function of the reading? That's what's important. Readings are just samples that estimate the true characteristic. The experts found that readings near the legal threshold could be inaccurate. However, that should have been obvious even without examining the system. The real question is what the confidence levels as the readings get near the legal threshold. That crucial information may not be knowable by only examining the software. However, inaccuracy from a measurement device doesn't mean that the device is useless. All measurement devices are inaccurate. The key to practical usage is understanding the expected confidence in the measurements.
despite the system having a 92-percent false positive rate, "no one" has ever been arrested due to such an error
I may have concerns about the civil liberty impact of broad-net surveillance systems in general, but the algorithmic deficiencies of this particular system are portrayed incorrectly in this article. I.e., the front-end of the system (the facial recognition system) has a 92% false positive rate, but together with the post-processing in the back-end, the total system has a false-positive rate of 0%. This is similar to saying that the object detection failure probabilities for a ADAS system need to be viewed in the context of the entire system, and it's the performance of the total system that is significant.
Having a large economy doesn't necessary mean you have a healthy economy. You also have the largest debt of any state in the union at over 700 billion.
In absolute terms, the debt is the largest of any state, but of course, that is entirely expected because the total California economy is the largest of any state. In terms of debt as a percentage of GDP, California is about in the middle in terms of ordinal ranking as well as being very close to the aggregate percentage of all states combined.
The highest tax rate, one of the highest homeless population in the country, and the fastest shrinking middle class. You know the ones that actually pay all those taxes.
Well, that's a nice populist sentiment that is not necessarily supported by actual numbers. Looking at slightly old (from 2015) numbers, half of all income tax revenue in California comes from those in the top 1% of income earners. For 2003 to 2014, all years except for one saw at least 40% of total income tax revenues coming from the top 1% of income earners.
An a complete and total dependency of surrounding states for water.
Well, sort of but not really. California uses about 40 million acre-feet of water per year. About 10% comes from the Colorado River system. One third comes from ground water. Another third comes from the Sierra snowpack. The rest comes mostly from in-state reservoirs.
U.S. government officials have said that China could order its manufacturers to create backdoors for spying in their devices, although both Huawei and ZTE have denied the possibility.
It may be true that these Chinese companies do not currently implement government-mandated backdoors in their products, and it may be true that they truly would resist such government mandates. However, the assertion that such coercion is not possible is not believable. It's not believable for US companies, and it's not believable for Chinese companies.
Then perhaps companies should keep their research internal to employees rather than outsource to open universities. If you want the best research, you ought to hire the brightest rather than getting it 'on the cheap' from PHD students barely making ends meet.
It's not just universities. From the article, "According to Defense Department statistics, nearly a quarter of all foreign efforts to obtain sensitive or classified information in 2014 were routed through academic institutions." I.e., most of the attempts were not targeted at universities. The big question is how a restriction on Chinese nationals in American industrial research and development would impact progress in those organizations.
Is that that average salary includes data scientists, AI researchers, etc. which command higher salaries than typical software engineers. I would be very surprised to find that the median salary of a SWE at Facebook is $240k unless they bring a very impressive resume with them. The SWEs who just build out new user-facing features with Hack and React are likely not anywhere near that.
It's not clear what "salary" means in the Wall Street Journal article. Is that base salary, or does that include stocks and other bonuses? Certainly the sampling of salaries on glassdoor and payscale are not consistent with the numbers in the WSJ article. From my experience, the glassdoor and payscale numbers are more believable than the WSJ article. For example, payscale says that the median age and tenure at Google are 29 years old and 1.1 years, respectively. If the median salary is $197k, that means that offers for new college grads at Google at somewhere near $197k, which is mind-blowing. The payscale estimate of median salaries is $107k, which is more believable (at least before considering stocks and bonuses).
Bezos just announced last week that they have over 110 million Prime subscribers. So an extra $20 a year means potentially another $2.2 billion in their pockets. Sure, they'll lose a few but the number that drop the service over the increase but the vast majority won't. I'd be surprised if even 5% didn't renew because of it.
Amazon has learned the Costco lesson. Membership fees = profit. 100 million Prime members * $99 = $9.9 billion > $1.6 billion/quarter * 4 quarters = $6.4 billion. The membership fees alone account for all of Amazon's profit. OK, not all members pay $99, but it's still a huge number that is likely more than the total profit. So, the retail part of the business only exists to justify the Prime profit center, and that retail operation doesn't need to be profitable or even break even.
Another data point for how well Google engages users:
Most of the teams in Google basically never think about advertising... or even about monetization. It's all about user impact and engagement.
If Google is really doing the best it can for user impact and engagement, then you'd think there would be at least some noticeable effort toward ... well engaging the user. However, as anyone who has frustratingly tried to send in bug reports, suggestions, and complaints has known for many years, user engagement is not only not easy, I'm not sure it's possible.
I think what you meant to say was that Google is all about **customer** impact and engagement. Non-paying user (NPU) impact is only important as a means to the real end. I suppose that it's possible that some Google employees are actually trying to positively impact the NPU, but it's obvious that such beneficence doesn't include communicating with the NPU. It would be trivial to significantly improve NPU experience by simply implementing the myriad of trivial and obvious suggestions in the NPU forums, but most suggestions get ignored for years, implying that this non-engagement has to be policy because no company could actually be that incompetent at managing user input. You might think I'm exaggerating, but just read the forums. It's mind-blowing.
China would trade their honor students and their (poorly) speaking English population in a heartbeat for any other country's situation.
China the people might sorta maybe, but China the leaders absolutely wouldn't. Preservation of party power is the prime objective, and economic prosperity is encouraged/tolerated because it furthers the prime objective. From an external perspective, this prime objective has one good side-effect. China will not risk an external war because such a war potentially threatens the prime objective. Saber rattling on the other hand furthers the prime objective, as long as an actual war doesn't start.
As far as trading China's strengths for the strengths of other countries, well, I'm sure there are some things that they would like and some things they wouldn't. Educational excellence has been a China value for a very long time and is unlikely to be "traded" for a very long time.
I see a parallel between cigarettes and Tesla Autopilot. For both, the manufacturers know that there is a danger in the way the the products are likely to be used. Warnings are issued, and branding/advertising are used to contradict those warnings. There is no question that the consumers behaved in a way that directly led to bad health and death. The question is whether the companies have any liability in the way that they brand and market their products, or do the legal warnings absolve them of all liability.
If you hear "autopilot" and think "well, no humans required!" then you are badly misinformed.
I do think autopilot means no human intervention required, and I would be badly misinformed, but I would also be representative of the majority of people. That last point is the most important one. It's the point that makes Tesla's branding effective.
We're talking about branding and marketing. The dictionary meaning or the "real" meaning is irrelevant. Only what the majority of potential buyers think is important. That these explanations about the "real" meaning are necessary strongly indicates that the majority of people do not share these perceptions about what the word "autopilot" means.
You don't want to know how many accidents there were in cars with autopilot, that doesn't matter. What you want to know is miles per accident *with autopilot engaged.* Using the other number is highly misleading.
Exactly. Furthermore, it's very likely that Tesla knows the number of number miles and accidents with Autopilot on and off. So, they could trot out the comparative mean miles between accidents/fatalities if it were in their favor. That they don't implies that the comparative numbers are either similar or worse with Autopilot.
To get a sense of how far ahead Waymo is, take a look at the disengagements report Waymo published last year and then look at everyone else's. At least in California, Waymo has more miles driven than everyone else combined and their disengagement rate is much lower
It's hard to derive any useful conclusion solely from these numbers. It's not clear what the apples-to-apples bases of comparison are. Disengagements are self-reported and perhaps interpreted differently each company. Waymo says, "The vast majority of disengagements are not related to safety." Nvidia says, "Disengagements were when a driver completed a test, or assumed manual control of the vehicle due to discomfort." So, it is not clear whether the metric is uniform or even useful for evaluation of safety.
Second, as anyone who has driven behind a Google/Waymo car in Mountain View knows, those cars drive very conservatively, even to the point of annoying surrounding human drivers. It's not clear that the miles driven by the set of companies is comparable. A more aggressive set of driving scenarios and conditions would be more helpful for engineering feedback, but a less aggressive set of workloads would be better for marketing.
In this offering Intel at least put the proper durability that Optane is *supposed* to have in the specs. Around 8900TB... nothing to sneeze at when most NAND drives have durabilities in the 200-400TB range.
But the NAND drive has such relatively low endurance due to economic motivations. SLC NAND has significantly higher endurance at a higher price point. The consumer market requires the lower price point. What would the Optane endurance be when scaled and designed for the consumer-viable price point?
I have several friends who do it for extra cash (or, in one case, because they actually enjoy it - weird, but that's their thing), and none of them are anywhere near dumb enough to do it for a net of $3 and change. That number should, literally, be unbelievable, and yet many people believed it anyway because it fit a highly (absurdly) hyperbolic narrative.
We'll no one would work for a check that comes out to $3/hr, but lots of people work for net N dollars where they get paid P dollars and have to incur E incidental expenses, where E is on the order of N. Because the expenses are incurred at a different time and not necessarily for direct expenses, they may not be considered in the true earnings equation. Uber is one example. How many drivers actually sit down to calculate their total profit after expenses on a spreadsheet? Working, married moms are another example, where the taxes at the husband's high marginal rate coupled with child care expenses often yield surprisingly low net true earnings.