wirehead

From the article: "Tesla began delivering the Blade Runner-inspired truck in November 2023"

Me: Fuck you. That is an insult to Syd Mead's legacy.

I hope that, at some point in the series, they reference his prized bottle of Chateau Picard that he's been saving for a special occasion.

It's the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

(I am referencing the Soviet Union implementation thereof, for clarity)

It's never going to bite the hand that feeds it, where people will voting-ring or the owners will just force-edit it to prevent that from happening. Outside of that, sometimes it might say something useful. The problem is that today's problems are not because of a lack of advanced mathematics understanding or new programming languages.

I mean, I think he's a textbook example of why not to do drugs and why we need to eat the rich, but I can understand the logic here.

When you navigate a car as a human, you are using vision, not LIDAR. Outside of a few edge cases, you aren't even using parallax to judge distances. Ergo, a LIDAR is not going to see the text on a sign, the reflective stripes on a truck, etc. And it gets confused differently than the eye, absorbed by different wavelengths, etc. And you can jam LIDAR if you want. Thus, if we were content to wait until the self-driving-car is actually safe before throwing it out into the world, we'd probably want the standard to be that it navigates as well as a human in all situations using only visual sensors.

Except, there's some huge problems that the human visual cortex makes look real easy. Because "all situations" means "understanding that there's a kid playing in the street from visual cues so I'm going to assume they are going to do something dumb" or "some guy put a warning sign on the road and it's got really bad handwriting"

Thus, the real problem is that he's not using LIDAR as harm reduction for a patently unsafe product, where the various failure modes of the LIDAR-equipped self-driving cars show that those aren't safe either.

It's important to realize that the nerd you saw on the news has always been someone wearing nerd as a costume and the entire history of technology is loaded with examples of the real nerd being marginalized. It's just that in ages past the VC's would give a smaller amount of money and require the startup to go through concrete milestones to unlock all of it so there was more of a chance for the founder's dreams to smack up against reality before they were $230m in the hole with no product worth selling.

... you mean the skies are looking Fantastic tonight?

More to the point, the company using shady means to collect the data does not need to care if the data is useful, just that it's marketable.

Yeah, Blucifer has killed and will kill again.

While there is arguably a larger pool of people who you can reach by not having open racism and the CEO whipping his dick out (and mysteriously not slamming it into his Tesla door, even if it is a masterful gambit) you can still get a lot of white men of privilege who are smart and hardworking who don't nominally worry about being on the receiving end of most of the harassment so it's OK as long as they end up part of the winning team because they'll get mega stock bucks at the end. And this does extend to the factory floor, at least people's impressions while joining the factory floor. They wouldn't be an engineer but they'll be a supervisor or something?

It's kinda un-earned? Like, there's stories that people tell each other of questionable veracity? Some set of startups in the days of yore gave their cleaning staff or whatnot options so I think it's become part of the cultural mythos now even if the reality is that the cleaning staff these days is contractors who are mistreated so even if it did actually happen then, it won't happen now.

And, dono, once you've solved the hard problems early on, there's less of that drive to do the truly novel things and so you get more of the people who want to be part of a company that's going to the top and wouldn't mind if they could coast and/or fail upwards along the way.

The problem is that employers tend to presume that they can continue to abuse people going forwards into the future because they've gotten away with it so far. Until they do things like yank offers from new college grads or laying off too many of the professional staff, at which point you've shattered the illusion.

tl;dr: Elon sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Elon reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

I always thought Troi should have been more of a goth princess. The real kind, the in-a-black-hoodie-screeching-for-snacks-writing-bad-poetry-on-the-living-room-floor kind, not the dressed-up-for-a-show-in-black-fishnet-and-lace-finery kind.

All things being equal, however, I'd rather they do the version more likely to remove themselves from the gene pool.

Masterful gambit, sir.