One of the dumbest deals I've ever seen. You could pay me to build something like Windsurf, or many of us could, for less than what they paid.

Who says we don't know how to do it? Technology has advanced since the 1970s.

"We do not."

We do. Look into how Cyc works, and the work of Doug Lenat. Look into how Palantir works. Just because you don't know how to do it, or you haven't seen it, it doesn't mean it hasn't been done or isn't a lot easier to do now that CPUs, ram, and other technologies exist which didn't exist back then. The same reason people thought neural nets couldn't scale, until the technology got to this point where it could be scaled using GPUs. That is what changes things, the ability to have broadband, faster chips, so now it's just a matter of putting them to use.

Specifically, neurosymbolic AI. In the centralized approach that means something like Google's Alphafold/Alphaproof which uses reinforcement learning combined with the LLM. For the decentralized approach it means something like Tau.net which is logical AI at the foundation layer and machine learning as an extension. The combination of logic GOFAI allows for common sense mechanical reasoning. The addition of machine learning, allows for the pattern recognition, prediction, probability based methods.

An assumption is that robots will not have sophisticated AI and will always need a human to manage it. What happens when the AI is able to manage it and has no need for human managers or a corporation?

Suppose the self driving car is able to act as a self contained corporation, earn it's own profit, pay for it's own repairs, hire or pay for it's own new designs based on data it and it's clones collected from passengers?

The problem is either going to be "who owns the robots" or "who pays the taxes". Human beings don't want to pay taxes but don't want robots to pay taxes because a very small group of humans expect to own in concentrated fashion the robots which they don't want taxes.

But there is no technical reason why robots require human owners. An autonomous agent which can take on all the functions of those humans need not even be very smart or sophisticated to have the ability to interact as a self contained business or individual economic unit.

"they couldn't secure financing for manufacturing and shipping the first batch of units"

If only we had a way to provide funding for products? We could set up websites that enabled people to post commercially unviable ideas, collect sales in advance, and then bullshit for two years about why they haven't shipped, promised features have been removed, etc.

We'd have problems with fires - which would get massive - before we had problems with crops dying off due to lack of CO2. Also, the ocean's pH would change and that'd be quite bad news indeed.

> As an example, you say that this study from a Canadian university is racist and has been debunked extensively, which is clearly total bullshit.

The study was published in "Intelligence", which is a journal for the "International Society for Intelligence Research."

A quick google for "International Society for Intelligence Research racist" shows that recipients of it's "lifetime achievement award" and board members are widely criticized as promoting junk science, white supremacy, and furthering nazi concepts on race.

Let's take a look at some examples.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

According to sociocultural anthropologist Francisco Gil-White, in publishing studies financed by the Pioneer Fund, Linda Gottfredson is part of a concerted effort to legitimize racist ideology through pseudo-science, together with an assortment of other people with inadequate or completely missing scientific qualifications for studying human intelligence"

Rushton has been discredited for over thirty years and he's viewed as nothing more than pseudo-science fuel for white supremacists like you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And his co-author on that paper? An idiot who thinks racists like him are "the next galileos." https://www.google.com/search?...

He's so desperate to spread his bullshit that he paid to have a booklet about his work mailed to professors around the country

Rushton is a racist - this is both well known and extensively documented by comments he's made publicly and white supremacy publications he's contributed to. His science is beyond junk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The man has been repeatedly and thoroughly discredited scientifically as ignoring evidence that doesn't fit his prejudices, his testing methods as biased against black people, and using non-equivalent groups.

He was president of an institute classified as a hate group. He speaks routinely at eugenics conferences and has published articles in white supremacy magazines and online websites.

"Most bike accidents happen to inexperienced riders and/or idiots."

There is absolutely no evidence to support this incredibly victim-blaming comment. There is plenty of evidence to refute it, if you simply google the phrase "cyclist driver fault study"

Examples: http://www.executivestyle.com....

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05...

http://www.theguardian.com/lif...

You're a classic victim-blamer. See, it's those other, stupid, slower, more inexperienced cyclists who get hit. Not you. You're experienced. Dressed like a dayglo traffic cone clown. Covered in lights.

"If they spend $1.4M and got the rand() function, then terrorists might be able to exploit it to escape random searches." Like lining up sequentially with 2, maybe 3 people?

I live in New England, haven't owned a car in roughly a decade and have been commuting 20 minutes each way every day for work by bike in addition to whatever other daily transportation i need, and own/use snow tires for said bicycle. I also own a nice road bike which gets ridden on weeknight group rides and weekends. I started out on a $350 hybrid I bought from REI on special, and it lasted me several years and thousands of miles, until I decided I wanted something better.

So yes, I do actually know what I'm talking about. And incidentally, Minnesota has more bike commuters per capita than many much warmer locations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There have been dozens of studies over the years showing that riding a bicycle for transportation, even slowly, brings health benefits over people who sit in their cars for transportation: https://www.google.com/search?...

Oh, and which is it? Everyone flying along so fast they'll fatally injure pedestrians they smack into? Or people who "toddle around with their heartrate under 100bpm so slow it doesn't do them any good"? Hmm?

Please, save the "you want to put grandma on an iceberg" crap. I wasn't advocating forcing people onto bicycles. I'm saying driverless cars aren't going to fix problems with congestion and pollution.

"Of course, the obvious question is: Will the bike stop at stop signs?"

And yet 99.9% of pedestrian injuries and deaths are caused by motor vehicle drivers, who also blow through stop signs and run red lights.

Where were the jokes about autonomous cars running red lights, and how cities won't be the same without cars speeding, running red lights, not stopping for pedestrians, double parking, making turns without yielding to oncoming traffic, etc?

When a bicyclist doesn't stop for a pedestrian, they bump and (both, probably) fall down. When a car doesn't stop for a pedestrian, the pedestrian ends up in the hospital, or dead.

A bicycle costs $500, emits no pollution, uses little roadway, doesn't cause wear and tear on infrastructure, generates no noise, and provides health benefits. An autonomous car costs....probably $100,000 minimum, uses a huge amount of energy/emits pollution, causes wear and tear on infrastructure, generates a lot of noise, and results in more sedentary behavior.

Do we really think the future is 200 bicycles for the price of one autonomous car?

With only a PCB-trace antenna and one ethernet port, that is nearly useless.

Which do you think is computationally more expensive? Crawling a website, or serving the website being crawled?

Here's a hint: aside from the fact that one involves repeatedly parsing a scripting language, database calls, logging, etc and the other requires little more than generating URLs and downloading them....one involves random access retrieval and the other involves writing the stored data.

Also: the different in computing power between laptops and servers of similar age is less than an order of magnitude. Server equipment typically runs further from the bleeding edge than retail/consumer equipment, and often is kept in production much longer than consumer equipment.