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User: apoc.famine

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  1. Disengagements are a concern, but saying that without the driver they would translate to an accident is completely false.

    I've definitely read about a number of cases where disengagement meant pulling over and stopping. I'd be really interested in a summary of what the end results of the disengagements are. If it's 10% accidents, that might be cause for concern because it's on the order of an accident every 4-5 years. If it's 1% accidents, that's better than human drivers, I'm guessing.

  2. Re:Waymo is not Uber on Fully Driverless Waymo Taxis Are Due Out This Year, Alarming Critics (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    I just had to swerve out of an exit lane, pass someone, and get back into it in front of them because they were going 30 under the speed limit at the start of it and swerving around all over the place. I was damn worried that the cars behind me exiting were going to plow into the back of me if I slammed on my brakes and went his speed. As I passed the jackass, I could see him pounding down a messy sub with both hands and driving with his elbow. And this means that he pulled it out, unwrapped it, and started eating it somewhere back on the highway.

    Sorry, but I'll take self-driving cars any day. At least their failure modes will have logical reasons for failing.

  3. Re: Waymo is not Uber on Fully Driverless Waymo Taxis Are Due Out This Year, Alarming Critics (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    That fact that you don't think people function like computers is tragic... and revealing.

    Seriously. If you don't know how dumb people are, you really should educate yourself.

  4. Re:Yet people will still claim automation is harml on New Autonomous Farm Wants To Produce Food Without Human Workers (technologyreview.com) · · Score: 1

    Without a well paid middle-class consumption will come down which will start hurting all companies: companies are able to prosper because of consumers with high amounts of disposable income, and since less and less people will be able to get money from their labor, economies globally will be facing large scale issues unless we put serious time and effort into solving the demand-side challenge created by increased and improved across the board automation.

    I completely agree with your conclusion. What's more, even the top 1% need to have that consumption base, because they also want the things that the middle class wants. They want gas and roads and airports and movies and food and a financial system that benefits them.

    Those things largely exist because of the consumption of the middle class. And yes, while you can hire people to create your own boutique versions of some of those, if the farmer in France can't afford to force-feed his ducks, you don't get pate. And if there's not enough goods to export, that cashmire sweater you paid $500 for isn't going to come across on the boat. Unless you're king-level rich, you just can't own enough land and hire enough people to get all the things you want. At some point, even a billionaire balks at the thought of paying hundreds or thousands of times more for something than it used to be worth.

    The robust economy that makes the ultra-rich rich requires the consumption of the middle class. I'm a little blown away that they don't realize that, and continue to squeeze it. At least Warren Buffet gets it. I just wish more did.

  5. Re: Yeah, I am a trump supporter... on New Yorkers Sue Trump and FEMA To Stop Presidential Alert (cnet.com) · · Score: 0

    What bothers me is most people can't name three things he did that they like, or at least agree with.

    What bothers me most is that folks like you can't understand that some of us see through the lies and understand that there is nothing but Trump First, America Second here, and you get pissed at us for not being blinded by your same partisan leanings.

    Trump is utterly inconsistent, and doesn't seem to hold any firm positions other than Trump First, fuck everyone else. (Well, maybe "wall" and "lock her up".) It's really hard to figure out even what Trump likes and supports other than Trump. And what things he does that we might profess support for, there's no guarantee that he won't undo them a day later with a Tweet. Or just lie about having done/supported them and while actually doing the opposite.

    There have been very, very few things that Trump has done that I like. And I'm not sure that he hasn't undone them since I heard about them. At the same time, he's done a shitton that I dislike, but I'm also not sure that he hasn't undone those either.

    I'm amazed that you and so many others are watching the dumpster fire filled with fireworks and telling us we should all be supporting it. There's so little of substance to support that it's maddening.

    All the shit you list other than a single air strike is not something that I'm aware that Trump has concretely done and/or consistently supported. And supporting random airstrikes in the middle east is absolutely something you should not be surprised to find people not supporting. You literally just pulled a "think of the children!", do you realize that? In your attempt to discredit rational disagreement with Trump, you're resorting to that level of bullshit.

    If Trump had a coherent, useful middle east policy, I might actually support that. Continuing several decades of dicking around and random bombings is not something I support.

    Please examine the surroundings of your head, and understand that it's in a small dark place with limited visibility of the world. It's maddening for us to try to talk to you when everything is so muffled and hard for you to hear.

  6. Re:Why would you want to do nothing? on The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    Your reward is the payment for the time it took to automate.

    Well, that's your point of view. As the GP said,

    Why shouldn't you expect to be rewarded all the time from automation? The company pays you to do X. If you weren't able to automate X, you would still be doing X.

    I think that there's a missing piece, in that automation isn't do it and forget it. It needs to be monitored, and it needs to be maintained. It also is generally far more accurate than doing stuff by hand. So there is extra value in automating and maintaining that automation that isn't there if you do it by hand, and which is lost if you don't monitor and maintain the automation.

    If that's less work than doing it by hand but a greater benefit to the company, it would seem to me that the smartest thing for the company would be to keep the automator and his/her lower effort, and push some additional effort into documentation and reliability. Replacing them with someone doing it by hand again reduces accuracy. Replacing them with someone else to manage the automation is a gamble that they'll be able to do it.

  7. Re:Why would you want to do nothing? on The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    To add to that, if you're also documenting your automation with your new free time, you're doubly in the right. You've made a more efficient system, and that system will persist after you are gone. Then you've got some time to write some monitoring scripts, and document them. And you're still available, and your work gets better as time goes on.

    And then you can take a top down look at the world you've created, and decide that you need to refactor it so it's more efficient. So you create a new architecture for your automation system, diagram it out, and then implement it. Then spend some time testing and debugging. And documenting. And this one has some internal monitoring that happens, so you can create some use-case tests and drop those in and make sure that the internal logic works.

    At this point your annual review comes along and your boss asks what you've been so busy with, and you say, "Nothing really. I'm just working to make sure that my data entry has less errors. Trying out some new systems."

  8. Re:ha! that got their attention on Entire Broadband Industry Sues California To Stop Net Neutrality Law (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Though I'm not a republican and wouldn't want someone with Kavanaugh's views (don't care about his conduct) on the supreme court, the attention given to the accusations leveled at him was nothing short of remarkable, and the way the press (and shows like the Daily Show) pumped and milked the issue was pretty disgusting.

    Only because he was a shitty candidate with a shitty attitude and a shitty background from the start.

    This wouldn't have happened with a halfway decent candidate. Take Gorsuch, for example. What came up during his confirmation? Some of the passages in a book he wrote seemed to mirror work by someone else. That's the dirt they came up with on him. That's also why there was none of this sort of giant shitshow during his confirmation. Democrats obstructed, Republicans used the nuclear option, he got confirmed. (And like you, not a republican, and I don't agree with his views. But he wasn't a terrible candidate.)

    Kavanaugh is a stinker through and through. A former political operative specializing in smearing opponents, with apparently a very heavy drinking, giant asshole period of his life that he routinely bragged about at that point.

    There are plenty of decent candidates that wouldn't have anywhere near this level of scandalous shit-show happening if they were tapped for the position. But who does the tapping? Only the most ignorant and unqualified individual we've ever had on the job. It's a wonder that one of his two choices was actually pretty clean and decent.

    he was put in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.

    Well, yeah. He knew his own damn past, and should have known full well what could possibly turn up. (Unless he was as blackout drunk as his drinking buddies have talked about, I guess. Would explain something.) Would I volunteer for that? Fuck no. Given what we know about him now, I'm amazed that he figured it would be fine. If you've got a hard partying, "we're prolific pukers", "100 keg challenge" background, I'd expect you to think twice before stepping into the brightest political spotlight you can find. And if you decide to do it, I'd expect that you'd have a very well practiced response to any questions, and not just scream and throw temper-tantrums, and make obvious lies about what happened.

  9. Re:I have been told to slow down by my cow orkers on The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    If you're serious about automating your job, make sure your apps do a directory check to make sure you're still employed before it does it's job.... /s?

    Adding a dead-man's switch in your code is a good way to get yourself sued. It has happened before, and you're just looking for a world of hurt if you do it.

    Now, being sloppy and using your home directory as a temporary extract location as part of a deep and complicated routine, because you needed a quick way to debug it? And your well-commented debug script looks there for data? There's a reason they let you go, and it was quite possibly stuff like that.

  10. I can see only two uses of this:

    1) Political bullshit
    2) Inciting mass panic

    Is there anything else that a nationwide alert system could possibly get used for?

  11. I definitely get it on The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm doing the same with my job. The nice thing is that I'm part of a fairly large organization with a lot of need, and as I free up my time, I'm in a position to help address other areas.

    But yeah, I do less work now than I did two years ago. Gone are the days where this position manually does a lot of things. Some massive data QA that used to take weeks now runs in about a half day. That's generally a prelim run, some fixes, and a few more runs to make sure everything is good to go. If nothing was wrong, it would be under an hour.

    If companies aren't pushing their technologically minded folks to automate things, they're throwing money away. Automate to free up time, use that free time to document the automation, rinse, repeat. The only downside is that this position is now going to require someone with more technical skill than it has historically had, and that costs a bit more money. The upside is that the quality of work being done is far higher, and the downstream effects are much more efficient, accurate, and productive processes and workers.

    I've worked with people handling data and managing processes upstream and downstream of me to create a much more robust and unified system. I'm now working with them to do the same on the other side, and that's starting to create a web of pretty high quality work throughout the organization. Not what I was really hired to do, but management loves it. There are definitely some sticks in the mud who can't adapt to change, so for the moment, we're working around them. You insist on manually editing spreadsheets and leaving errors in them for someone else to correct? We'll write a script to identify the most common ones, and to create summaries which are likely to highlight the issues. That next person's job just got 90% automated.

    I doubt I'll ever get to 100% not working, but I might hit 35% of my time monitoring and tweaking automation by the time I'm done.

  12. Well done in redefining it to mean the opposite!

    a la carte; adverb
    1.
    as separately priced items from a menu, not as part of a set meal

    How is netflix anything other that "a set meal"? It's the exact opposite of a la carte.

    Nobody is selling single channels you can pick and choose from. They are all selling massive bundles. Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc.

    You should go work for the Trump administration if this is your level of skill in defining things.

  13. Re:People don't care on Ask Slashdot: Why Does Almost Nothing Come With a Proper Printed Manual Anymore? · · Score: 1

    Wireless printers and modern routers are a great example. Press the WPS button on both. Wait a bit. Printer spits out a sheet telling you it's all set up.

    I may still have the manual for one of the first wireless printers I bought kicking around somewhere. I can still recall how much of a pain in the ass it was to get set up and configured. Wireless SSID and password which needed to be entered using arrow keys, choosing the correct settings, FFS might have needed some port fiddling too.

    Why spend a million dollars on hundreds of thousands of manuals when you can pay your engineers to design a push-button system? It's good for marketing too.

  14. Re:Nobody reads the manual on Ask Slashdot: Why Does Almost Nothing Come With a Proper Printed Manual Anymore? · · Score: 4, Informative

    You don't seem to be familiar with medical devices. To get FDA approval they generally have to have very limited, very well defined functions. And if you're going to make any substantive changes, you need to go through an approval process all over again.

    This leads to less-than-cutting-edge technology which has robust features and documentation. That's not shit that ships out with errors that need to be corrected most of the time. Often one model will be in use for years if not decades, and the manual will be unchanging during that time.

    It's a radically different mindset than most consumer goods, which get booted out the door to meet the schedule, and bugs fixed later. Companies that ship medical devices with bugs and incorrect manuals don't tend to last long. There's not an analogy to medical malpractice in the consumer electronics world.

  15. Re:I agree with this in principle, however: on California Governor Jerry Brown Signs a Bill That Bans Bots From Pretending To be Real People (nbcnews.com) · · Score: 2

    Most businesses aren't brain-dead. "Welcome to our automated service system. For the bot disclaimer, press 1. For Sales, press 2....."

    I can't imagine it taking more than 2-3 seconds to be compliant.

  16. Great username. You didn't even read the summary.

    The report notes that "all calls" will still receive standard police response, whether or not any swatting concerns are filed. "Nothing about this solution is designed to minimize or slow emergency services," the site reads. "At the same time, if information is available, it is more useful for responding officers to have it than to not."

  17. As the AC here said so eloquently:

    Because majority of users don't see systemd as a problem and are not interested in those fanatics who overblow systemd problems.

    If your use-case involves you failing to be able to use systemD, then don't use Debian/Ubuntu. But assuming that it bothers the rest of us is asinine. The only time I remember that it's my init system is when I come across a post like yours.

  18. How do you think about a world where a cat is alive and dead at the same time?

    Incorrectly, since that though experiment was designed to highlight the problem with applying QM to everyday objects and situations. It's literally a "QM doesn't work here" example, and it's amazing that everyone comes away with the opposite conclusion.

    Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics.

  19. This problem has troubled physics for the past half-century...

    This "problem" is why we are here. How about not calling the existence of the universe a "problem"?

  20. Re: Optimal Busses on MIT's Elegant Schoolbus Algorithm Was No Match For Angry Parents (bostonglobe.com) · · Score: 1

    That's really common where I live. Those little neighborhood paths are awesome, and can easily take 10 minutes of walking and trim it down to 2.

  21. I just go to my credit union's web portal, go to the Travel section, click the start and end days that I'm traveling, check off the states/countries, and I'm good to go. Never had an issue traveling anywhere.

    Does your bank not offer a service like that, or do you not know about it?

  22. Re:How do they store the hydrogen? on First Hydrogen-Powered Train Hits the Tracks In Germany (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Hydrogen embrittlement will destroy every container you make.

    Not at all. It's trivial to gravitationally contain hydrogen without any embrittlement at all. It's like hundreds of orders of magnitude more common to store hydrogen like this than any other way.

  23. Re:We figured out stuff before video existed ... on US Lawmakers Say AI Deepfakes 'Have the Potential To Disrupt Every Facet of Our Society' (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    It's far worse than that. How, exactly, do eye witnesses tend to share their experiences with people? Through videos. Which can be faked.

    So now not only do we have the problem of video fakes of politicians and politicians claiming real video is fake, we have the problem of eye witnesses being faked on video, and video of eye witnesses being called fakes.

    On the flip side, maybe print journalism will have a resurgence, as we're headed back to the reputation of an individual who talked to eye witnesses being the only reliable way to spread that news.

  24. Re:Censor what WE say is unacceptable ... on EU To Give Internet Firms 1 Hour To Remove Extremist Content (go.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure that you can draw that line. There's far to much gray area to do that. In fact, I'm not sure how you even figure out where the gray shading ends and the "white pure speech" begins. It is unworkable, because it really needs a panel to consider each case with background on the individual and their history of comments. You can't really automate it, and if you just put a couple hundred people on the job and give them each some things to review, whether or not you get past will depend on the person, the message, and the day.

    It's really hard to figure out when something is informative for the sake of good, or informative for the sake of evil.

    Gray area shenanigans happened during prohibition. Companies sold grape concentrate and gave instructions for how to reconstitute it, along with warnings to drink it quickly and not to let bread yeast get into it, or it would turn into wine. That's responsible, right? Don't want people to do something illegal.

    If you mix these chemicals together and ignite them, they make a wonderful colored flame. But make sure it's uncontained! If it's in a sealed container, it will explode and someone could get badly hurt. They're decently safe in small quantities like these, but definitely don't mix larger quantities! If you have just two pounds of this stuff it can put a hole in a tank!

    While the Koran condemns people like Hassan to death, we know that's not allowed under the current government. For now, Hassan can walk free, knowing that he won't be punished for his crimes. He is lucky to be living in a time like these. In the old days, he would be stoned to death.

    Add or remove some information from any of those examples, or change the tone a little, and they fly from one side of that gray area to the other. And that's for clear, unambiguous language.

    A little bit of clever wordplay, and AI or censors will notsee the deeper meaning in an otherwise informative post. To make an analogy, gray area posting can be like overripe fruit, succulent and hard to resist. Trying to squeeze meaning out of it will just make a sticky mess, even after you eliminate all the juice.

  25. Re:Gmail, the worst interface EVER on Google is Killing Its 4-Yr-Old Inbox Email App (fastcompany.com) · · Score: 1

    The gmail app was so bad I switched to the outlook app. That still sucks, but it sucks a lot less. I'm very confused how google engineers use email, because it does not seem to be the way most normal people use email.