If that is your threshold, then just go away unconvinced because that kind of analysis isn't going to happen in a slashdot discussion thread. Comparing the systemic complexity of transportation system design with and without the added variable of artificial intelligence is thesis material, at least. All you'll get out of me is that they are both very hard, subject to continuous change and improvement, and both very imperfect. No, I don't know the relative magnitudes and neither do you.
At least the people yielding when they shouldn't or going 3 mph have a sensible fail safe:)
The scary ones are the people who are like, huh, lights out... I guess I should just plow through the intersection as if there was no stop light at all!
And then THEY ALL can be fixed, probably with an over-the-air update. No drunk driving PR campaign, no driver outreach or training, no expensive modification of signage or intersections, etc. This is an advantage. Only a hardware limitation would be similar to the current paradigm, and even then it would be no worse.
Why is that inevitable? 1.3 million die in auto accidents every year. Life is already devalued. Historically, life has never been valued more highly. You used to lose dozens of people building a stinking bridge - now the largest public infrastructure project in the US has had one minor injury. The $4 billion Tappan Zee bridge was completed without any deaths or serious injuries.
This sentiment is common among people who favor heavy regulation of damn near everything. And I get it - engineering teaches you about the high price of engineering failures.
My beef with this mindset is the same problem I have with central planning - the idea that you will guess correctly and prevent failure is hilariously arrogant. It is better to regulate after there is a demonstrated need - in other words, institutionalize the process of learning from failures. If you want to be proactive, rather than have a bunch of bureaucrats and academics come up with a bullshit testing regimen, assign the task of failure analysis and regulation to an existing agency and staff them for it so that the inevitable regulations are timely. In other words, put a framework in place.
I have an adversarial scenario for you: turn off the traffic lights at any intersection and then watch as the brilliant, adaptable humans fail to treat it as a four-way stop and just zoom on through.
The spaghetti is amazing. When I moved in here, they had a cable come in from the pole, go to a splitter, which went to another splitter. One wire off the first splitter went into the basement to yet another splitter, which itself fed another splitter. There was another splitter after that to feed the two hookups in the basement. When they first tried to hook a digital box up, they were like - huh - weak signal... weird. They then proceed to replace the cable between the last splitter and the TV. I get it, people in the 90s started putting a TV in every room - and I think there were at least 6 hookups in this house... it was the WiFi of its era. But holy crap, what sloppy work.
I had the Com-craptic modem that they rented to me in 2009 when we moved in. It was, I think, $3/month. At that rate, you'd figure it would be fully paid for in 3 years at the outside. One day after a few years, with no notification whatsoever, I open my bill and the rate has jumped to something like $4/month. I grumble but pay it. Then a few years later it goes to $6, then $8. What the hell? Can you imagine if you leased a car, and then suddenly they just increase your monthly payment? There is absolutely no justification for applying this hike to existing equipment, other than they figured out that they could get away with it. For my part I bought a $60 modem of my own and it paid for itself in a few months. But what a bunch of shitheads. Good riddance.
Their customer service is awful, as is their automated calling to schedule thing.
But it's still better than Comcast. My personal favorites are: 1. Anyone can add services, but you need the account holder on the line to remove services "for your protection". Assholes. 2. That eager anticipation of awaiting your next bill to see how badly the customer service rep botched your call. Yay! Another hour-long call!
I also liked how you'd get an offer from them in the mail, call the number printed on the offer, and the person on the other end would have no idea what you are talking about.
And the techs (contractors?) that will happily drill a hole right through the side of your house and "secure" the cable by wrapping it around your chimney and attic fan. Or just sever an existing, carefully fished cable to replace it with a loose one. You like this hardwood floor? Ah, let me just blindly drill a hole up through it from the basement. And that's if they show up in their "window".
When they finally installed FIOS in my neighborhood, they door to door salespeople were greeted as heroes. We invited them in and made them tea or something. We gave them cookies. We signed up with whatever the hell they were selling. Neighbors made offerings of their first born.
Don't get me wrong, Verizon sucks. But holy hell, Comcast is even worse. They are so bad that we were happy to do business with Verizon.
Right - wealth can't be created. That's why our population has exploded and yet standard of living improves. It's all a fixed pie, and we're taking smaller and smaller portions but we don't notice because... Libertarians.
Public transportation yet again solves this problem in addition to just about every other problem you can think of.
Why is this a binary thing? In dense, urban environments a good mix of subways, buses, and cabs/vans works pretty well.
In rural areas, subways and trains make no sense at all, buses only make sense for certain routes, and cabs can't be kept busy enough to rely upon.
We need a mix of transportation options, just like we need a mix of freight delivery options. We have a mix, and I think it could due with a bit more of the trains and buses options - but it's not a panacea unless you want to abandon sparsely populated areas (and presumably food production?).
Agreed. "Aggressive" when talking about labor-management should be a much higher threshold. Examples of actual, literal aggression abound on both sides of the issue. When the nurses went on strike at my wife's hospital and nurses who crossed the line had their tires slashed, that was aggressive. When Philly steelworkers burned down a church that was being constructed by a non-union workforce, that was aggressive. When companies would hire local cops to violently break up a strike or walkout, that was aggressive. A watered down opinion expressed in a training video is not aggressive.
But that doesn't really hurt the argument that the entire school and learning setup is skewed to favor females. Having essentially the same classroom setup, lecture-homework-test regime, schedule, etc but then plopping a guy vs a gal in the teacher's position doesn't really change all that much.
All of these bias arguments are very squishy and they require a lot of careful data analysis. Even fairly obvious biases like racial bias against black males are hard to suss out in data. Like I said, I'm kind of taking a devil's advocate position here - but it's definitely one way to interpret the data: "Look how biased schools are against males!"
It's only "better" if you don't think it's better to come out of school doing something productive for ~$60-80k/year while your non-engineer friends are "paying their dues". Sure, your 15-year outcomes may be the same, but in the interim you actually had an income and did some interesting stuff.
If you are only becoming an engineer for the money, then yeah, run away. You might as well do engineering for the chicks:)
To some extent, making sure there are liquid markets is an important function. There are extremes at play which benefit no one except the players - such as high-frequency trading. Still, those people are playing by the rules, and it is the rules which need to be tweaked. People won't stop being people.
According to the most recent population survey released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor, the teaching gender gap is still alive and well. Male educators constitute just 2.3% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers, 18.3% of the elementary and middle school teacher population, and 42% of the high school level teaching staff. These numbers are down from 2007, but suggest a clear female majority in the teaching profession, especially in the earlier grades.
Slashdot Mirror
If that is your threshold, then just go away unconvinced because that kind of analysis isn't going to happen in a slashdot discussion thread. Comparing the systemic complexity of transportation system design with and without the added variable of artificial intelligence is thesis material, at least. All you'll get out of me is that they are both very hard, subject to continuous change and improvement, and both very imperfect. No, I don't know the relative magnitudes and neither do you.
At least the people yielding when they shouldn't or going 3 mph have a sensible fail safe :)
The scary ones are the people who are like, huh, lights out... I guess I should just plow through the intersection as if there was no stop light at all!
Also true of signage, intersection design, human training, etc.
And then THEY ALL can be fixed, probably with an over-the-air update. No drunk driving PR campaign, no driver outreach or training, no expensive modification of signage or intersections, etc. This is an advantage. Only a hardware limitation would be similar to the current paradigm, and even then it would be no worse.
Why is that inevitable? 1.3 million die in auto accidents every year. Life is already devalued. Historically, life has never been valued more highly. You used to lose dozens of people building a stinking bridge - now the largest public infrastructure project in the US has had one minor injury. The $4 billion Tappan Zee bridge was completed without any deaths or serious injuries.
This sentiment is common among people who favor heavy regulation of damn near everything. And I get it - engineering teaches you about the high price of engineering failures.
My beef with this mindset is the same problem I have with central planning - the idea that you will guess correctly and prevent failure is hilariously arrogant. It is better to regulate after there is a demonstrated need - in other words, institutionalize the process of learning from failures. If you want to be proactive, rather than have a bunch of bureaucrats and academics come up with a bullshit testing regimen, assign the task of failure analysis and regulation to an existing agency and staff them for it so that the inevitable regulations are timely. In other words, put a framework in place.
Without knowing the circumstances of each "disengagement", I think it is presumptuous to assume they would have all led to accidents.
It could be analogous to a human driver pulling off the side of the road in heavy rain - a fail safe.
I have an adversarial scenario for you: turn off the traffic lights at any intersection and then watch as the brilliant, adaptable humans fail to treat it as a four-way stop and just zoom on through.
Sure, the FATALITY rate is roughly 1.25 per 100,000,000 miles in the US, but the ACCIDENT rate is around 600 per 100,000,000 miles.
The spaghetti is amazing. When I moved in here, they had a cable come in from the pole, go to a splitter, which went to another splitter. One wire off the first splitter went into the basement to yet another splitter, which itself fed another splitter. There was another splitter after that to feed the two hookups in the basement. When they first tried to hook a digital box up, they were like - huh - weak signal... weird. They then proceed to replace the cable between the last splitter and the TV. I get it, people in the 90s started putting a TV in every room - and I think there were at least 6 hookups in this house... it was the WiFi of its era. But holy crap, what sloppy work.
Ohhhh, you triggered me again :)
I had the Com-craptic modem that they rented to me in 2009 when we moved in. It was, I think, $3/month. At that rate, you'd figure it would be fully paid for in 3 years at the outside. One day after a few years, with no notification whatsoever, I open my bill and the rate has jumped to something like $4/month. I grumble but pay it. Then a few years later it goes to $6, then $8. What the hell? Can you imagine if you leased a car, and then suddenly they just increase your monthly payment? There is absolutely no justification for applying this hike to existing equipment, other than they figured out that they could get away with it. For my part I bought a $60 modem of my own and it paid for itself in a few months. But what a bunch of shitheads. Good riddance.
Their customer service is awful, as is their automated calling to schedule thing.
But it's still better than Comcast. My personal favorites are:
1. Anyone can add services, but you need the account holder on the line to remove services "for your protection". Assholes.
2. That eager anticipation of awaiting your next bill to see how badly the customer service rep botched your call. Yay! Another hour-long call!
I also liked how you'd get an offer from them in the mail, call the number printed on the offer, and the person on the other end would have no idea what you are talking about.
And the techs (contractors?) that will happily drill a hole right through the side of your house and "secure" the cable by wrapping it around your chimney and attic fan. Or just sever an existing, carefully fished cable to replace it with a loose one. You like this hardwood floor? Ah, let me just blindly drill a hole up through it from the basement. And that's if they show up in their "window".
When they finally installed FIOS in my neighborhood, they door to door salespeople were greeted as heroes. We invited them in and made them tea or something. We gave them cookies. We signed up with whatever the hell they were selling. Neighbors made offerings of their first born.
Don't get me wrong, Verizon sucks. But holy hell, Comcast is even worse. They are so bad that we were happy to do business with Verizon.
"Yours"?
The user sees no benefit from a simplified development toolchain, huh? You are management material, I'll give you that.
I guess if nothing else it will still function after 2038.
They'll need at least one of us to jizz into a jar. They'll probably make it into a reality TV show.
Right - wealth can't be created. That's why our population has exploded and yet standard of living improves. It's all a fixed pie, and we're taking smaller and smaller portions but we don't notice because... Libertarians.
Public transportation yet again solves this problem in addition to just about every other problem you can think of.
Why is this a binary thing? In dense, urban environments a good mix of subways, buses, and cabs/vans works pretty well.
In rural areas, subways and trains make no sense at all, buses only make sense for certain routes, and cabs can't be kept busy enough to rely upon.
We need a mix of transportation options, just like we need a mix of freight delivery options. We have a mix, and I think it could due with a bit more of the trains and buses options - but it's not a panacea unless you want to abandon sparsely populated areas (and presumably food production?).
Agreed. "Aggressive" when talking about labor-management should be a much higher threshold. Examples of actual, literal aggression abound on both sides of the issue. When the nurses went on strike at my wife's hospital and nurses who crossed the line had their tires slashed, that was aggressive. When Philly steelworkers burned down a church that was being constructed by a non-union workforce, that was aggressive. When companies would hire local cops to violently break up a strike or walkout, that was aggressive. A watered down opinion expressed in a training video is not aggressive.
If by "just" you mean 20 years ago :)
Probably - especially at the high school level.
But that doesn't really hurt the argument that the entire school and learning setup is skewed to favor females. Having essentially the same classroom setup, lecture-homework-test regime, schedule, etc but then plopping a guy vs a gal in the teacher's position doesn't really change all that much.
All of these bias arguments are very squishy and they require a lot of careful data analysis. Even fairly obvious biases like racial bias against black males are hard to suss out in data. Like I said, I'm kind of taking a devil's advocate position here - but it's definitely one way to interpret the data: "Look how biased schools are against males!"
It's only "better" if you don't think it's better to come out of school doing something productive for ~$60-80k/year while your non-engineer friends are "paying their dues". Sure, your 15-year outcomes may be the same, but in the interim you actually had an income and did some interesting stuff.
If you are only becoming an engineer for the money, then yeah, run away. You might as well do engineering for the chicks :)
To some extent, making sure there are liquid markets is an important function. There are extremes at play which benefit no one except the players - such as high-frequency trading. Still, those people are playing by the rules, and it is the rules which need to be tweaked. People won't stop being people.
I also have personal experiences which differ from national averages.
From the AAE