Yeah, the cheque from Andrej Karpathy is in the mail. I hope it doesn't bounce.

Yep, I once built an unsupervised learning algorithm for discovering vulnerabilities in a network topology. It was always over 95% accurate with most errors being false positives. When I wrote it ten years ago nobody wanted it. Now they are all over it and very little of that code has changed since. The security admins just came around.

Well, you could be right or it could turn out that your town will just depopulate as people move to big cities to access the convenience of the new technology. FWIW I live in a rural town myself. But I don't kid myself about where the world is heading.

I guess we are just going to have to wait and see, aren't we? Here why I believe you are totally incorrect with your prediction. Software companies want autonomous cars to happen, car companies want autonomous cars to happen, logistics companies REALLY want autonomous freight. It's only a matter of time. And your proverbial family of four or their relatives will be appeased with a five million dollars lawsuit settlement and the whole thing will proceed anyway because that's what the big money wants. As for the tech itself, you should pay more attention to where the research is. scene recognition is at near human levels already and in many cases at superhuman levels. A couple more years of hardware and software progress and humans will be no match for a self driving car in terms of safety and efficiency. None of the latest systems are hardcoded in any way. They are _trained_ on millions of hours of safe human driving data and they are getting better every hour of every day. How many hours of driving experience have _you_ logged in your lifetime?

Correct. And the fact that we are technologically on the cusp of cracking this means we have AI that is on the cusp of automating a shit ton of other stuff. The future I'm painting may not materialize for another two, three decades what with the red tape and the cultural shifts. But it WILL come. Probably within my lifetime and I'm not spring chicken.

The world will change whether people who enjoy driving like it or not. Just like nobody today insists on riding in an assisted elevator those people will have to adapt. Over time the pressures of technology will make human driven cars more expensive to own because of the higher insurance rates, having to add more mechanical steering components etc. Even just individual vehicle ownership may become very expensive because car sharing services will likely become extremely prevalent and efficient. Owning a vehicle outright will make very little economic sense. There will always be a market for manually operated cars but those cars are likely going to get relegated to race tracks and that market will probably be as big as the market for chariots today. And yes, chariots are still a thing and there is a chariot racing track not far from my place. And it's being used daily. But needless to say the people who go there don't ride chariots to the office in the morning.

My work is my true love and passion in life. I make great money doing it and really periodic burn outs are my natural modus operandi. I tried the "slow and steady" approach but it didn't work for me personally. I'm most productive when I dive into something really deep and come out with great things at the tail end of that. And then I'm sort of burned out and slack off for a month or two. My employer seems to be pretty understanding of my idiosyncrasies as I get good raises year after year. But I know this is probably not the "approved" approach but I imagine most creatives work in this way.

the concepts behind Clojure and its sibling ClojureScript are exactly what they are describing. Maybe the time would be better spent popularizing a language with immutable structures and software transactional memory as opposed to creating yet another one?

Balancing the budget? LOL! This government has blown the hole in the budget that Canada had never seen in its entire history. The federal debt has skyrocketed under this regime while the funds to provinces were cut. The 'tax and spend' Liberals maintained balanced budgets for years and years until these clowns grabbed a hold of the steering wheel. Their first stupid move was cutting the GST by two percentage points just before the debt crisis hit. As for their approach to science they had a creationist as a minister of science; enough said.

the prime minister can tend to more urgent issues like porn at Starbucks. Got it.

My brokerage account will be blocked too?

I have a love/hate relationship with this cam though. Love the size, the viewfinder and even the 'retro' looks. But the slowness of the autofocus really hampers the experience of the camera. Especially in artificial light. Here's to hoping that X100s fixes the issue once and for all

I think slashdot has a post about you.

Here's a very interesting read (long but worth your time) about how the original was conceived: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/18/features.weekend

The BBC Micro was terrific. It was entirely made of off the shelf components like the 6502 and 6522 so understanding its design was easy and transparent. The BBC Micro was probably the best computer to teach assembly programming on as the 6502 assembly was such as joy to learn and use.