As always, the issue isn't "When is the AI pefect?", it's not even "When is the AI good enough?", if you consider that typical humans are not "good enough" either. Safety, collision rates, death tolls, etc. for human drivers might go down as technology improves over the decades (ABS, crumple zones, power steering, etc.), but I doubt humans themselves have improved noticeably over the years. Hell we might even be worse than some peak point in the past because now we over-rely on the vehicle itself...

The point is that eventually, on a per km basis, is AI *better* than a typical human? If so, time to stop driving and be driven instead.

AI will still cause some mind-bogglingly dumb accidents that get all the Luddite hand-wringing headlines. But a human running a schoolbus stop sign and mowing down a couple kids somehow doesn't get anyone to say "If only AI had been in charge, this wouldn't have happened".

It's simply a numbers game as to when that threshold has been crossed and then we should all stop driving. Anyone have any idea where we are on that timeline?

"Pretending the Conservatives aren't the most likely party to win the next election right now is disingenuous."

JFC your're so sad you're making multiple subthreads to argue with me over things I never said. I literally said "Sure Liberals are likely to lose," did you need me to specify that that means the Conservatives are the likely winners, or did you think I meant someone else?

butthurt? out of touch? you're selectively reading what you want from my comments. Sure Liberals are likely to lose, though 2 years is loooong time and I wouldn't rule out them being on either side of yet another minority government and then everyone can be miserable. Feel better now? Still doesn't change the fact that their policies were popular enough through 3 elections, that was my only point, dunno why that's a bridge too far for you

story? what story? The Liberals won elections in those years and their environmental platform was a major part of their campaigns. They may not have won solely because of their environmental platform, but it's disingenuous to suggest that it wasn't a significant factor or that they won in spite of the environmental platform. That's fact, not story.

2015, 2019 & 2021 a plurality of voters elected Liberals in large part due to their environmental platform. Despite themselves, they'd be further along too, if every conservative provincial government didn't throw sand in the gears all the way to the Supreme Court.

or they can do nothing and overspend to catch up to the rest of the world. like it or not, fair or not due to differences in geography and population density, Europe and China are charging (no pun intended) ahead. adapt or be left behind...

I bet you say that to all the boys...

Calculus on Pornhub: if it's not hard, you're doing it wrong

Hacking the contents of the actual phone, of course is valuable, but how much value is there in hacking a phone's camera? Front facing camera shows my face, but if someone's hacking my phone, they probably already know what I look like or they at least suspect that I'll be the face that belongs to the phone they've been tracking. The rear camera *might* occasionally show some interesting documents if it's pointed at my desk, but generally you'd just see my lap. Otherwise the real video value is in the Facetime/Zoom stream and there's better ways to get that than hacking the phone's camera.

It's not like your phone's camera is a remote surveillance camera "they" can control to scan the room when you're not paying attention.

Controlling the microphone can also be valuable, which brings me to my point: when will laptop & phone manufacturers build physical killswitches into their devices? Some laptops have covers that slide over the webcam lens, but not too many from what I've seen (the laptops my corporate overlords provide don't even have webcams, I've gone through Covid largely Zoom-free) and I've never seen a killswitch for the microphone.

That doesn't save us from the phone contents being hacked, but it's so easy to at least not make our phones and laptops a value-added target by having always-on components

Cowboy Neal transcribes all my dictation for me...

I'm just an average home user who would love to be free of Microsoft, so every few years, I dabble with the latest Fedora. I get a little better, Linux gets a lot better, and I might be close enough to take the plunge next time I need a new system..but Gnome's decision to not allow graphical representations of files on the desktop baffles me. Default install has a "Desktop" folder within my home folder, I'm just not allowed to have anything clickable on the GUI. 5 minutes of googling and everything I find is from 2-3 years ago saying this is the "new (at the time) design philosophy" with no further explanation as if the reasons/advantages were self-evident.

I mean I understand as a security/privacy policy for shared computers, but that's not what's happening here. Instead of having all my most-used files & software one click away, I have to go to file manager and navigate to them. This is not a Linux vs. Windows war, this is a Gnome vs. all GUI-based operating systems ever (seriously, is there a graphical OS that doesn't use desktop metaphor?) and they've decided that a filing cabinet is a better metaphor than a desktop.

I get that there's extensions and other GUI, but Gnome is all I (and many others) have ever known and it just seems such a "fuck you, we know better" move that is a roadblock to noob would-be converts almost right out of the box

Im betting median wage/salary skews lower than average wage/salary. Therefore someone of average intelligence has odds against average salary. The greater that disparity between mean vs. average, the greater the chance that gambling on perpetual debt isnâ(TM)t due to a lack of understanding or foresight, but rather a greater chance of desperation, possibly to the point that perpetual student debt canâ(TM)t make it worse.

The thing is, we're *supposed* to leave enough following space behind the car in front of us so that we don't need visual cues like the driver is applying makeup or talking on the phone. Legally, that may mitigate our liability if we end up in their trunk, but the starting principle is to allow enough time and space that we can stop if they stand on the brakes without warning (they see a kid run in front of them that we can't see so they stop), otherwise we're tailgating. AI (unlike humans) will drive w/o tailgating, mooting the need to recognize what's happening inside the car.

Imagine how you would safely drive if all cars had tinted windows and/or you had a police car following you. Your accident rate *shouldn't* go up (it would likely go down) and that's how AI would approach that aspect of driving. Many of our computing advantages are about predicting the environment so we can "cheat" by driving too fast, following too close, running yellow lights, etc. AI will be painfully conformist which reduces computational complexities by orders of magnitude

my bad, it's been a long time since the days of lining up for lab time on dial-up at uni...

1995 hotmail is still my primary e-mail because I moved around a lot and didn't want to be tied to a particular local provider's domain...of course my main alternate was a yahoo address for same reasons and I may have to rethink that strategy now...