Yes, the -gate habit comes from the Watergate scandal. Watergate was during Richard Nixon's second term as president, in 1972-4. He was a Republican, and resigned the presidency before he could be impeached. The name comes from an attempted break in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC that ended up uncovering a whole pile of shady stuff Nixon had been up to.
Are Americans actually this ignorant of their own history?
They won't be able to afford to replace themselves and will be outcompeted by a company that can afford a fleet.
Why would you think that? Cameras a cheap, and LiDAR prices are coming down, too. As companies build them in larger and larger quantities, economies of scale and competition will drive the price down rather quickly. Best guess is that in five years, self-driving hardware will add about $15k to the price of the vehicle if they use LiDAR, or $6k if they don't. And that's including the cost of stuff that a lot of cars come with already, like the electric steering rack. I'd be shocked if it were significantly more than $20k.
So as drivers replace their cabs or semi tractors, they'll spend the extra $20k or whatever to buy versions that are self-driving. For that matter, once the tech is reliable enough, you'll likely see retrofit kits come on the market. There's no good reason you'd replace a working tractor unit when you can just swap out the steering rack, bolt on cameras, and add some electronics, and that's true whether you're an owner-operator or the manager of FedEx's fleet.
Long haul, local delivery, taxi, bus, you name a driving job and the ruling class will want to automate it.
Oh, absolutely. Most local delivery uses people who already work at the business, and delivery is just a small part of that person's job. So that impact is likely to be close to zero. But that still leaves probably probably around 5 to 10 million taxi drivers and probably three or four million truck drivers.
But taxi and truck drivers won't be replaced overnight. Most taxi drivers and many truck drivers own their own rigs, and although they may eventually replace themselves with robot rigs, they would continue to earn the revenue after doing so. They certainly have no incentive to fire themselves.
Ultimately, somebody has to own the rigs. There's nothing that necessarily requires that robotaxis be fleet vehicles owned by some big company like Uber, no matter how much companies like Uber might prefer it to be that way. Replacing all of those taxis with robot cars costs money, and Uber isn't capitalized that well. Uber's cash on hand wouldn't even be enough to replace all of the taxis in the United States. So while this may shift things around some, I wouldn't expect a taxipocalypse.
I do hope you know that O(350,000) is the same as O(1).
Sorry, was thinking orders of magnitude, not orders of complexity.
Aw, I'm disappointed there's no reply on Zuckerberg's origins.
Everything's an AI artifact. It's not like lazy people who slept through high school chemistry have been punching unit conversions into calculators for generations.
You are 100% wrong. The Uber business plan has always been to shift to self-driving vehicles ASAP, and to use humans only until that is feasible. He is planning to cause a problem, not to have a problem.
I'm not sure why he thinks it will be a problem for drivers. A study a few years ago showed that something like 96% of all Uber drivers quit within the first year. So worldwide, we're talking about only O(350,000) people who will have to find something else to do. The world economy can easily absorb such a tiny number.
That's no moon. It's a space station.
You can use the UV light. You need different material with a different bandgap. Basically a whole other panel, stacked on the first. But before you go after that 5% UV you're going to want to go after the blue, and probably the red and some of the near IR.
They're called multijunction solar cells and they're used in places where you need maximum efficiency, like in space. For regular use, single junction cells are much more popular because a single bandgap panel absorbing at the maximum solar emission is going to be more efficient price-wise than a multijunction cell where the extra bandgaps are in lower emission ranges.
Yeah, as if we needed any more reason to consider this bloated "security" software to be malware. I really don't understand why anyone in their right minds would install it or allow it to be installed on their systems. Giving some third-party company complete control over what software can run on your machines basically screams "I don't understand anything about security" better any almost anything else you could possibly do as a system administrator, IMO, short of posting the shared-across-all-machines root password on USENET.
For most IT administrators, having complete control over what users can run is the idea. There's no need for your work PC to be able to run anything and everything - most work can be done using a limited set of applications. If your job involves doing nothing but paperwork and filing stuff all day, you generally only need access to an office package and a web browser for the online components. You don't need them running things like music players or chat apps beyond the company required one.
Having control is very different from allowing a third-party company to send down arbitrary definitions at any time that suddenly render arbitrary software nonfunctional. The whole concept of Crowdstrike can be summarized as "McAfee Antivirus on steroids". I mean, this sums it up.
The 'explanation' is that the demo triggered all the devices within earshot because apparently a device designed to perform possibly-sensitive actions on your behalf was assigned a model line wide, public audio trigger in order to make it feel more 'natural' or something; rather than some prosaic but functional solution like a trigger button/capacitive touch point/whatever; and that the device just silently fails stupid, no even informative feedback, in the even of server unresponsiveness or network issues. Both of these seem...less than totally fine...for something explicitly marketed for public use in crowded environments on what we euphemistically refer to as 'edge' network connectivity.
This. The "someone says 'Hey Siri/Okay Google' on TV/radio/loudspeaker" problem is a well-known failure mode, and if they don't have reasonable mitigation in place by now, they don't know what they're doing, and their product shouldn't be taken seriously. Whether that mitigation is blocking it during meetings, doing handshaking to limit commands to the nearest device when multiple nearby devices detect the hot word at exactly the same time, making it recognize your voice and not other random people's voices, or any of dozens of other strategies for coping, having some mechanism in place to handle this should be considered a base requirement for any voice-based assistant.
Oh dear, I'm sorry I didn't read this before replying above.
Zuck was one of several government projects along the same lines back then, and he got lucky, that's all.
So is he a CIA operator indoctrinated from birth a la The Bourne Identity, a genetically programmed clone, or a straight up android?
"Free market" is a stupid propaganda cliche that is devoid of meaning.
Uh huh. Is this one of those "propaganda I don't believe" Instagram slideshows?
Free markets exist and are pretty widespread. They require government intervention to maintain. Adam Smith himself called that one of the primary functions of government in the economy. American corporatism isn't the only system in the world, and authoritarian "democratic oversight" as suggested by the OP is definitely not a good alternative.
It's perfectly reasonable a new OS version has higher system requirements. It's just in this case MS is pushing them to ensure manufacturers create PCs that can support certain security features. For example I understand TPM can help enforce boot security and disk encryption key storage. Good stuff to keep secure.
It is possible for Microsoft to do both, you know.
Then they just have to make sure the price difference is high enough to destroy any profit benefit from cutting corners on the hardware.
When you read "AI" on Slashdot, or in a business article, it's almost certainly a language model made by one of a handful of companies.
If it's about Nvidia it might have something to do with robots.
Promising costs nothing, it's the delivering that kills you.
