For the number of articles I have read about how "self-driving cars are never going to happen," including such details as their total inability to make an unprotected left turn, Google seem to be opening a lot of (presumably functional) services.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/10...
https://www.lifewire.com/why-s...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/0...

What gives? Feels like some people desperately want them not to happen...

Yeah, that statistic does comes off as totally made up...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...
https://www.politifact.com/fac...

> And honestly.. at the time you went there.... do you remember anyone speaking of "quality issues" with German brands?

It was one of my most memorable experiences of my professional life, largely because I was touring this plant with a colleague who used to do Quality/TPS at Toyota. While I was wildly impressed with most everything I saw (even the beer vending machines), my Quality friend was visibly and audibly horrified with some of what he saw from a QA/LEAN PoV. So I gather the German auto companies were still lagging the Japanese at that time.

Still - the beer: probably not a big deal. Americans are still rather puritan about alcohol: as a European by upbringing, it was normal to have a beer at lunch when I worked there in the 90's. After I moved to the US I quickly learned that that was considered very unprofessional here.

but the CEO is the deepest level it CAN go (unless you want to point to the board, which would be fair). They shouldn't be 'following a bad rule.' They get to decide the rule.

The CEO is supposed to be in charge of the culture, it's literally their job to provide and demonstrate leadership up and down the company.
Look at Steve Jobs, or for a less tired example Sam Palmisano at IBM. They call the shots about what the company does and doesn't do. They set the tone, and if the company is failing they (should) carry the can.

What IS going on in these suppliers? 50 fuselages with errors is a systematic issue of both manufacturing process (what is being done) and QA (catching what is being done). It's a very serious inditement of their QA, which has implications for their ability to catch other, unrelated additional errors.

It reminds me of the time I got to tour the manufacturing plant of a major luxury car brand in Germany (one of the three you just thought of).
I saw with my own eyes: beer-dispensing vending machines for workers *right alongside* the production line. Wow. That's gotta help quality.

> why would you think that the USA has done exactly what Diector Wray suggests that the Chinese have done?
For one example, stuff like this:
https://www.risidata.com/index...

Isn't a bit like MAD theory with nuclear weapons? If both sides have a weapon so powerful, neither side can use it?
I suspect the US has penetrated every bit as deeply as China has, and they both have their hands all over the critical infrastructure (energy, finance, telecoms, IT, etc). There doesn't seem to be much that either side can keep secret if they try (eg. the Shadowbrokers taking out the elite NSA TAO group).
I imagine that we'd see much more strategic disruptions, ones that causes maximum embarrassment or the right system at the right time, rather than wide-spread pandemonium.

+1 on this. Bear in mind that this is a basically an early tech demo: the next challenge is getting the increasing the acceleration rollers can safely deliver in a precise match to your natural motion.

The principle isn't that hard: done perfectly, monitoring your gait (through measuring the kinematic distribution of load across your feet, and probably using external vision systems) high accelerations should enable people to walk perfectly naturally, not the slow, careful plodding in the demo. Done even slightly wrong it will throw you to the floor.

But getting to a system that works that well requires passing through this stage first. This looks like a great 'first step' to me ;)

Here's a pretty comprehensive run down on the evidence. It's compelling, including applying to California state regulators for permits to drive prototypes on the roads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Meanwhile, I live about a mile from the location where they are rumored to be developing this car and I see a LOT of otherwise unbranded white Lexus's driving around with a sensor pack on the roof that looks distinctly apple-y.

After a couple of decades working in Silicon Valley, from what I see the most important roles of a CEO are to:
a) be a figurehead inside and outside the company to put a face on the company
b) raise money from investors
key skills for success are a) being convincing in person b) playing golf

- I can't see an AI really filling those roles. The COO does all the day-to-day execution work that an AI might actually be good at.

I agree with you, especially about Trump being a disaster to everything he touches, but getting this one thing right is ironic, because it's the one thing that probably doesn't matter at all.

Boeing is too-big-to-fail in the same way BofA is, it would never be allowed to go under. It's more properly seen as an essential part of the US Government's defense establishment, supplying government-supported jobs (150,000+) across the US and ensuring a strategically-important technologically advanced manufacturing ability.

Money is shoveled into Boeing in many ways, not least tax breaks and those under-scrutinized defense contracts. Whether or not Boeing makes money on Airforce One is probably most relevant to the shareholders who would like to get paid dividends on profits, not the actual future of Boeing. I would guess the money they lose on this contract will probably be replaced by new over-priced government contracts elsewhere.

This is the perfect example of how perfectly dumb chat GPT is. And the funny thing is that it keeps trying to tell us, and we ignore it!

Me: How many ‘e’s in the words ‘carbon dioxide’?
Chat-GPT: There are two letter 'o's and no letter 'e's in the phrase "carbon dioxide".
Me: There is an 'e' in 'dioxide'
Chat-GPT: I'm sorry for my mistake. There is a letter 'e' in "carbon dioxide"

It doesn't KNOW anything. It's building 'sentence-like' word structures, word-by-word, based on what the most probable next word is.
And then it says "As a large language model, I can't" and we don't pay any attention!

It's also a special kind of stupid that I find particularly annoying.
There's a mode of writing (rhetoric) where the writer adopts fancy news-speak language to try and convince us they are a credible source. This particular gem means to imply that the *reader* is dumb if they disagree with the writer's interpretation that this is "extraordinary language" and that there must be "compelling evidence." Both of which are just a matter of opinion/leap of logic on the part of the writer.

There's more and more of this garbage writing on the internet, I think we learn it from the worst sources of news on TV (MSNBC, Fox, whichever, all of those that start with a position and work back to a story). You aren't a credible source because you can use 10c words. You're a snake-oil salesman, and (for me) it discredits any position *even* if you're right.

... and it's also untrue in that in the UK also doesn't have mandatory ID cards or an SSN. The closest equivalent is a driving license card (that it isn't mandatory to carry, even when driving) and a National Insurance card and number that isn't used for anything at all as far as I can tell. I'm pretty sure I've lost mine.

Yet somehow banks still exist. There are many ways of proving identity beyond a state-issued number or document.

Some people come to sites like Slashdot just to start arguments or generally be negative. "Owning" them is to stylishly and conclusively prove them wrong. If you take the high ground of being reasonable and polite in doing it, all the better.

The person who challenged you may not really be a 'troll' (what they said was troll-ish, though) and you may not have been trying to slap them down, but the effect was the same.

Your bird art is really lovely! Great energy and terrific confidence in your lines. (I'm not qualified to comment on poetry)