A good lidar system doesn't provide depth perception, it provides a centimeter(-ish blah, blah, Guassian) accurate 3D model of the world. It's actually pretty easy to take the point cloud from a lidar and, as long as it's accurately timestamped (PTP works well), synchronize it with GPS and an IMU and get a very accurate 3D model of your surroundings. Some flavors of lidar also provide doppler on every point in the point cloud. You aren't comparing frames against either other to determine if something is moving towards or away from you, every point in the point cloud will tell you that. To the point where you can see a pedestrians legs shift before they decide to cross the street.

You are 100% correct but, you are describing frequency modulation. The vast majority of lidar companies (on the order of 99%) are producing amplitude modulation systems that shoot out strong amplitude signals and cross their fingers hoping they can see and distinguish it when it comes back. These systems often use "avalanche detectors" to help their probability of return detection (look it up, it's insane). Driving directly towards a sunset can literally cause these systems to emit their magic smoke. Accidentally hit the wrong angle on a retro-reflector? Smoke. Having another system pointed in their direction means "something made a peak" and there is no way distinguish your light from another sensors light.

These problems are solved in the radar space but, the solutions are taking a long time to trickle down into lidar space. Mostly because it's very easy and very cheap to produce an AM lidar.

Your "static" scenario is exactly what will happen with AM pulsed lidar. It's (one of many) dirty secrets of the lidar industry: AM lidar doesn't scale. There are alternative ways to do lidar (FMCW for one) that can scale much, much better but, these kinds of systems are still a bit expensive and so won't see widespread adoption for a few years.

More likely these guys dialed it up to 11 for CES demos and got caught.

It's not professional wrestling. You're starting to see a generation of journalists who have had access to internet porn for most of their lives. In the near future, it will be possible to determine a journalists pornographic predilections just by feeding all their headlines into an algorithm.

These are not the numbers you are looking for...

I always brush off the Google recruiters when they call but, I didn't realize this was an option... Tell me more...

I haven't read the patent but telepathy probably isn't necessary. Humans leave a lot of subconscious clues about their intents and, if you have the right sensors, in many cases, you can detect what they are about to do before they have consciously decided to do it. My favorite example of this is FMCW Lidar and pedestrians at a crosswalk. You can literally see subtle doppler shifts in how they are distributing their weight well before they've taken a step and probably before they've even consciously decided that it's time to take a step.

I need to read the patent but, it wouldn't surprise me if seat and steering wheels sensors could provide enough information.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a manager with a Gantt Chart. You could probably track down the designer of the board and he would dejectedly tell you, "Yeah, it's a shit design and we had a respin ready but, it didn't fit in the schedule". Or you could track down the embedded software guy and he'd tell you, "We had this elegant upgrade path planned out but no one could figure out how it fit into the Gantt Chart so we dropped it".

The engineers want to do The Right Thing but, when The Right Thing is pitched to management, it's usually just crickets. I genuinely don't think it's malice, I think it's Gantt Charts.

I keep hearing this mantra about "OMG no NoScript!". Apparently people don't realize that the script blocker in uBlock Origin is *far* superior to NoScript. It was updated for the new Firefox months ago so, it's had plenty of time to brew. You can thank me later: https://github.com/gorhill/uBl...

I'd much rather dump heat into my house with 3D printers than bitcoin miners. If your electricity is cheap enough, sure, you are effectively heating your house for free but, you've still paid for the miners and they will be obsolete in 6 months (Actually, they are usually obsolete by the time China ships them to you). After a single winter you are going to have a pile of very hot, very expensive ASICs that no longer mine fast enough to pay for their electricity costs.

A 3D printer is presumably creating something you want so the heat is a beneficial winter-time byproduct. I have two in my home office. It's currently snowing outside and I have my thermostat set at 62F. The rest of the house is a bit cold but, they keep a 12ft x 12ft office nice and cozy and every few hours something interesting pops out of them. I didn't buy them to heat my office but, I suspect that my electric bill will be lower this winter because I'm basically just heating the room I'm usually sitting in.

This. Embedded is where it's at for older programmers. I'll list the awesomeness I've experienced as someone who has switched to embedded:

- You get to write code on a tiny machine that is still 100x as powerful as the 8086 you learned on but nobody else wants to touch because... OMG... C
- As soon as someone says Ruby on Rails, you are officially authorized to leave the meeting
- Agile? Fuck you.
- You get to build systems where understanding how they work is your damn job. You aren't working on layers upon layers of magical APIs that you couldn't debug even if you wanted to. It's your code, libc and the kernel.
- You don't have to ask, "What IDE do you guys use?". They use vi and make. I don't mean vim and cmake. I mean vi and make. Which means you get to giggle when someone says, "Why won't this editor backspace?!"
- Slow is a bug. If you love doing performance analysis and squeezing every drop of performance out of a system, embedded will bring tears of joy to your eyes.

Frankly, it's glorious. I'd never even consider a non-embedded job at this point.

You can't fight in here! This is the war room!

-- From Dr. Strangelove

I genuinely admire what you're doing and really wish that a vocational "Software Engineering Drudgery" degree would be a thing but, I just don't see how it's possible. The drudgery requires just as much logic skills as the product. I would almost say that the best software teams are the ones who make their smartest guys build the infrastructure (including Makefiles, networking, etc). Everything else floats on that raft. I sure as hell don't want my raft built by a 16 year old.

I say this as a guy who dropped out of college as a junior at the age of 18. 20 years later, my lack of degree has had *zero* effect on my ability to get a job but, I'm acutely aware of how bad I was at doing... well... anything... at the age of 18.

I'd love to have a vocational software assistant but, software is complex enough that I barely trust experienced co-workers to write it, let alone a 16 year old kid.

I agree with you in spirit but not in practice. I work for a small company and we had a top-notch, experienced EE doing design *and* soldering work for a while. Once we hired a technician to do the soldering work, the EE's productivity increased dramatically. I don't think the same can be said for many/most software jobs. I can't hire cheap labor to do my dirty work because there is no part of the process that can be pushed onto people with underwhelming qualifications. There is no equivalent of "the guy who solders my boards".

We hire interns whenever we can but, I've long thought that maybe I spend more time helping the intern than I would if I'd just written it myself. And, when the intern leaves, it's actually pretty common to just rewrite what they did. So, it's almost certain that they are, at best, a cheap prototype vehicle.

The tedious work in computer science is actually what a technician is *least* qualified to do. You want a 16 year old kid to create your Makefiles? Fuck that. You want a 16 year old kid to grok your network? Fuck that. Those are hard things to do and there is a reason that people make a lot of money doing them: If you are good at doing that level of tedious stuff, you are worth a lot of money. It's actually very hard to do.

So, no, we aren't going to see a huge surge of technicians in CS. We've already seen it. It's called offshoring. And the quality of software (and support) has dramatically decreased because of it. Cheap labor and quality software are not compatible ideas. A product that involves creative thought does not lend itself to technicians. And that's what offshoring gives you: Technicians.