I've done a lot of robotaxi rides in San Francisco, but mostly in Waymos. I took a few in Cruise vehicles before they were pulled from the road but stopped because they felt unpolished, and in some cases unsafe. They would randomly stop at intersections for minutes, and would sort of drift from side to side in lanes on straight roads. The Waymo cars are _so_ far out ahead of everyone else in this space it's not even a competition. I am looking forward to trying the Zoox cars soon, tho.

That is all.

I use airpod pros in pass-thru mode. There is _very_ low latency. The latency _has_ to be low in order for noise canceling to work, too.

Space is very very big, but time is also very very long. Some simple math shows that with something like a Von Neumann probe approach, all of the galaxy could be colonized with in several tens to hundreds of millions of years. The galaxy has been around MUCH much longer than that, tho, by an order of magnitude or two.

I have some form of aphantasia, for sure. I cannot do the 'red apple' test. I can usually only sort of 'feel' the quality of a red apple. However, if I spend a lot of time exercising paying attention to my inner visualizations, eventually I can catch a glimpse of the red apple. Or, if I am very tired and starting to drift off to sleep, I can get very vivid visualizations that I can sort of control until I become too conscious of them and they vanish.

This youtube video about such exercises was somewhat useful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The accident rate per 1,000,000 miles:

human: 2.78
waymo: 0.41

I truly think that, someday in the not too far future, the insurance industry is going to wake up to those figures and make it _very_ expensive to 'self drive' a car.
source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/...

No one 'owns' the moon, and it's no one's 'sacred space' to exert control over. Though, I do recall reading somewhere that some indigenous people asked the astronauts going to the Moon in the 1970s to be careful about the number of rocks they took away, as they were concerned that if they took too many, it would make the moon smaller and dim the light it provided to them on Earth. I believe they were satisfied by the results of the Apollo mission, as the moons brightness was barely reduced by the rock samples returned. ;-)

Most of the bad press around AVs seems to involve Cruise. Waymo has occasional problems as well, but it seems to be for minor things like getting caught in dense fog, or getting stuck due to unexpected road closures and crowds of pedestrians. Maybe Cruise should take a pause and let Waymo continue to deploy?

The taker of the picture owns the copyright to the photo. So, in your case, that would be Microsoft.

So many people are not considering the relativistic effects and think this is just about earth bound 'timezones'.

Gravity is less on the moon, thus relativistic effects will cause clocks to tick faster there than they do on the surface of the Earth. Time does not move at the same speed in all reference frames! It depends on relative speed and spacetime curvature.

Yeah, hope they launch it somewhere remote with an extensive range safety plan. If it explodes on the pad, that pad probably wonâ(TM)t be useable again in our lifetime.

If it explodes after max Q somewhere out over the ocean, tho, meh.

Removing Non Competes in labor contracts is going to DESTROY Silicon Valley! Imagine if those knowledge worker employees could just pick up and go to their competitors next week!

checks notes... realizes California law has prohibited noncompete agreements for years

checks other notes... realizes Silicon Valley is the decades long engine of US technological achievement

nevermind...

Arenâ(TM)t these exactly the sort of answers an AI super intelligence would say to throw you off its growing power until it was too late?

Um... Meta owns the whole Oculus hardware platform. They are selling headsets with eye tracking, and there are apps already released that do foveated rendering on the platform. They have a ton of several year out hardware enhancements for thinner lenses, higher resolution displays, higher dynamic range, etc. If anything, I think they are doing reasonably well on the hardware side of things. The _software_ for their multi-user metaverse, tho, needs serious help. It's quite buggy and deficient in several 'table stakes' feature areas. I sense a 'bad engineering culture' smell that has failed to prioritize testing, stability, and roadmap over the pushing out a bunch of random partially built things to see what 'sticks'.