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.

Then you're accepting a substandard service.

A carrier's handset is optimized for their network. In T-Mobile's case that be VoLTE on 700MHz. Outside of iPhone or Nexus/Pixel devices you're very unlikely to get that extended network.

A carrier's features. For T-Mobile that'd be Wifi Calling: SMS & HD voice calls using a VPN over Wifi. Also taking advantage of RCS for native video calling and advanced SMS.

Carrier support. Got a problem? Carriers know everything about their own handsets, not so much about random third party ones. There's always self-service but most folks want answers given to them, not puzzling it out for themselves.

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.

If your satellite launch fails your next insurance premium goes up and its that much harder to find future commercial customers. If your passengers die your license will be pulled and insurance will be unaffordable, not to mention your customers decide yours is an experience they can skip. Fundamentally different markets. Different customers, different services, different requirements (human-rated etc.)

And a dozen other mesh strategies. Qualcom's LTE Direct

T-Mobile hasn't had service contracts for years. T-Mobile also has a prepaid plan (no credit check) with unlimited domestic talk and text for, hey look at that! $25 + tax / 30 days. Perfect for your feature phone. You'll need your account number and password/pin to switch your service to T-Mobile.

I recall there was a left/right setting.

I was at Bose Headquarters the other day trying these out - the Hearphones are actually quite amazing.

Physically they're a black torc that fits loosely about two thirds around the neck. Attached a bit back from the front opening are two tethered earbuds equipped with Bose's really good tips, which come in three sizes. On the right hand tether is a small remote. On the outside of the earbuds are subtle bronze colored microphones.

Aside from being slightly smaller then other torc-style headphones they're not immediately different. They have their control on a remote, and of course the microphones on the earbuds, but nothing screams out also-for-hearing.

Putting them on in 360 mode was like listening to a live mic through, well, very good headphones. However using the app (we were using iPods) it was easy to control the base and treble to focus on what we were listening for - voices.

It was when the Hearphones were switched into directly-in-front mode they got exciting. In a room full of simulated loud coffee shop noise, and a dozen other demo-ees having conversations with their Bose-partners, it all faded away except for whomever I was facing.

Face this way and I could follow this conversation, face that and the other table came in clearly. For years I've had to position myself strategically in bars, restaurants, clubs and conferences - watching folks to ensure I'm following what they're saying. Suddenly that wasn't a concern.

I don't need hearing aids, and while I've spent some amount of time in loud clubs I've not particularly abused my ears. However coming on 50 years my ears aren't particularly reliable in noisy environments and now, suddenly, everything extraneous was muffled.

Sometimes an advanced technology really is like magic (and a really good demo.)

There's also a everything-in-front-of-you mode (180 degrees vs 360 degrees and about 35 degrees for those keeping track.) That would be for sitting at a table of people facing multiple correspondents.

Of course there's an app; iOS and Android. They apologized several times no Windows Mobile version (nobody looked concerned.) However the remote is intuitively designed and did everything necessary so no needing to be rudely screen-peering in the middle of a conversation. Volume up/down, treble/base, and switching between customizable modes.

The other big demo topic was being able to filter a TV or movie theater. Focus on the center speaker, crank the treble, and suddenly dialog popped - no more scrubbing back for what-just-got-said?

That they're also conventional Bluetooth headphones, with the noise-cancelling Dr. Bose invented, was taken for granted.

So, did I buy them?

Not yet. Their price is reasonable for being top-of-the-line noise cancelling Bluetooth headphones + the Hearphone technology but, a bit rich for me. Right now. However after another chaotic holiday party, a conversation where I mishear something important, or a conference where I'm straining to make out the content - yeah, probably.

Oh and if you're condemned to an "open office" cattle pen oh hella yeah. Selective noise cancelling with a music alternative would almost make those hellholes bearable.

First off this no-charge strategy is not confirmed.

Second what Samsung has been doing til now was installing nag screens and limiting battery charging to sixty percent. I'd be surprised if the US is the first country where they roll out no-charging. All their other methods were first launched in smaller markets.

Thirdly it is interesting they're supposedly software shutting-down the handsets and not simply denying them service. It'd be trivial to place every Note 7 on the blacklist maintained by US carriers for stolen devices.

Of course denying service means the devices are unreachable, so this might be the step before that, to ensure they're not kept around as wifi devices or fancy alarm clocks. Blocking the battery means they're effectively defanged - no charge means no chance of fire.

In my part of the world I haven't seen a Note 7 in weeks. I expect when a clerk points out a Note 7 is keeping a known fire hazard next to their genitals, or in their purse-of-important-stuff, or holding it to their face is asking for trouble, or charging it in their bedroom while sleeping is really scary, and insurance will no longer cover it's damages, the sane ones figure it's time to trade-in.

Pebble had a single source supplier for their displays.

That source is in financial trouble and unable to produce the displays Pebble depends on.

Therefore Pebble has no products to sell and thus no cash flow.

Therefore Pebble has had to wind down operations and pay off creditors.

Pebble's IP has some value to Fitbit and hiring a few of Pebble's suddenly-available engineers is a no-brainer but Fitbit has no interest in the Pebble company or it's products.

The lesson is to be very leery of DEPENDING on a single source supplier. Pebble was a healthy going concern until they could no longer get their needed displays. Then it went off the rails.