5,625 karma · joined October 6, 2015
It is primarily the hardware to software interface. It runs every feature in the car that converts software code into an out out voltage to do a thing. It is also how everyone interfaces with the car - teams, drivers, f1 tv, and even the race track itself.
The standardized ecu was introduced as a cost savings and fairness measure in 2008. The contract was won by McLaren Applied (which was part of the same McLaren that is the current reigning champion but is now spun off and owned by private equity).
The teams basically get an sdk and are largely responsible for the software the cars run at pretty much everything above the hardware layer of abstraction.
As a weird piece of history, McLaren applied was not the original winner of the contract for the first standardized ecu in 2008. When it was announced, in 2006, Microsoft was.
It is likely better in some ways and worse in others...and few of hte people involved will have the understanding to tell the difference.
Tristan Buckmaster speaks about his role in the controversial Navier-Stokes solution. We are seeking an interview with OpenAI too. ... Since the video was finalised and uploaded, we have heard back from OpenAI and we're trying to schedule an interview. If we're successful, it will be uploaded ASAP and linked here.
On a regular basis I have students bring me “machine learning” models they have trained, which sounds great. But they have no idea what problem they are solving, what data they have or should have, and no idea why that method, etc. There is no understanding. They use words and concepts from a broad variety of fields, with confidence, but with little deep understanding. The Internet and AI give access to knowledge which is necessary but not sufficient for wisdom.
While K-12 bears a lot of blame (as a system not “teachers”) I’ve come to believe the problem is more societal. What we value and what kids logically perceive will be them ahead in life. If all they ever see is that surface level performance of knowledge is enough…why bother with more?
Many people, see prior conversation on HN, have already decided that AI solved it. The standards of reasoning and rigor in academia are complex enough that we all argue over them and harumph as we epistemically trespass on each other's domains.
The public, really humans if care for Herbert Simon, are much more apt to evaluate knowledge emotionally and by other standards. We may see them as wrong but standards only matter in context. The NYT, HN, and Annals of Mathematics will always have different standards of truth.
Would anyone be surprised if major model companies had tagged the accounts of competitor employees for extra tracking? Given the concerns about distillation and bench marking it hardly seems irrational, but how it is used matters quite a lot.
That aspect alone would/should be unthinkable to any serious academic. Authorship reflects who did the work and changing it for business competition reasons should be a red flag for multiple different reasons. They include, the sheer tactlessness of treating a major theoretical advancement as a competitive posturing first, the norms of academia second, and all the misunderstandings of the culture of the disciplines culture that people will now suspect are hiding beneath the visible surface (insert topography joke).
Math as a field is fairly unique even in how they list authorship. It was long the norm that authorship to be alphabetical because the idea of first, second, senior etc authorship is harder to define than many other fields.
“The stated rationale for alphabetical order is that it treats co-authorship as intellectually joint work: every listed author’s name carries equal weight, and no one has to negotiate, or be seen to negotiate, over billing. That is a genuine advantage over position-coded conventions, where disputes over who is “first author” are one of the most common sources of authorship conflict in fields that use them” [0]
That norm is changing, slowly, but one option people are pursuing is notable: randomized author order. Their is a perception that alphabetical is too biased…that’s the world OpenAI is stepping into when they make that offer of authorship to one scholar with a demand that he exclude his partner.
I can’t speak to the facts of anything else in this, but if a grad student came to me and said someone made them that offer, I would tell them to run and if they were brave report it.
[0] a to the point lay description of the history of math authorship can be found here: https://casrai.org/guides/mathematics-alphabetical-authorshi...
An analogy is akin to reviewing a paper. If I review a paper with some novel findings and then use my massive lab of graduate students to do the obvious next step before the other paper makes it through type setting and then shove it out as a pre print, I didn’t win - I was a jerk.
There are lots of cases of people using peer review or other accesss to efectively forerun others work and get credit. It’s a known problem of the nature of knowledge validation in academia, it’s not solved and it’s not deterministic but people know it when they see it.
This has gone on for a LONG time, but the change to empower it with AI tools that are presumed accurate is the new amplification.
In this day and age, GPS mapping tools have major implications for societal function, safety, economics, national security, healthcare, etc. I'm struggling to think of an industry where a sudden absence/subtle changes of named GPS mapping data would not have an effect.
If everyone relied on the same data base which could push changes to the map in the pocket of every resident of a nation that would be the first thing I would think to hack. Probably easier than actually jamming or spoofing GPS/GNSS over a huge area.
The internet security practices I experienced when working with the DOD in a prior life were…interesting?
Outside of the classified realm, there seemed to be little to no on the ground understanding of the Internet. Many things where internet connected that shouldn’t be or weren’t that should. I was involved in one contract where we had to demonstrate the ability to remotely access and control a system (to satisfy the system’s owner) as well as demonstrate that the system could not be remotely accessed via the internet (to satisfy the base IT folks). The solution was a hotspot kept in a lock box…that I doubt was ever locked after we left because it was constantly attached to our internal monitoring network despite our pleas.
To call it out again...
(1) almost no white space - every square inch is communicating information
(2) no clear hierarchy - almost in search of minimizing white space and presenting maximum rather tham maximally useful information.
(3) no consistency of any taxonomy for presenting information across the page
(4) no guidelines or legend for interpreting what any of the visual cues (color, size, etc.) mean.
There is a huge push in engineering at least to try and introduce better communications skills into curricula. It is hard in part because students are very much of the mindset that information and meaning is inherently shared and structuring a narrative or story is to whit unnecessary. This is in part because so much of their education is focused on the bulk transfer of facts and an assumption they will stitch information together into knowledge.
In the UK you can apply to upto five colleges.
In the US the recommendation seems to be between 5-8
I can’t pull older numbers on my phone at the moment but in the last 12 years the number of applications to colleges (applicants*applications) has risen 50%.
So correct for the reality that…
1) that immediately skews your denominator and changes your percentages.
2) the upper middle class students are the most likely to apply to the most schools (because they can and don’t have the other paths)
3) more and more marginal students who previously would not have gone to college are getting encouraged to apply.
And their model is just breaking.
* The biggest product market fit note to me is that this misunderstands the information access challenge. My experience has been that you are on 'step 2' of the information - organizing it and accessing it. Step 1 is getting the information out of the person, all of it, correctly, willingly. These are hard conversations and structuring them is less of a challenge than the emotional piece.
* In the zero trust/everything is multifactor age what I have really found is that access to cell phone and email are the most critical. I don't see where this prioritizes those...because I won't be able to login to anything of (say) my mom's from my laptop until I have those two things to verify identity.
* I can't quite tell whether you are pitching this at 'healthy people to set this up for the future' (a nonstarter because of annual subscription cost) or 'healthy person helping sick family member' (they have enough going on that starting using a new piece of software is an unsustainable cognitive load delta no matter the ease).
Big picture...what I recommend for friends and family is a password manager with a deadmans switch someone else (your estate personal rep) can trigger. That, plus good estate planning is basically sufficient. You should (and almost always can) have some document in there listing major accounts nad bills that is mostly up to date. This stuff doesn't have to be perfect it just needs to be good enough because no matter why you are activating it perfect is not going to be an option or even helpful.
Thinking about this as slashing science or making it more efficient or short sighted or innovative is all a distraction.
It’s just another opportunity to give money to the friends of those in government and take money from those you don’t. Say want you want about how it used to be, but this and the new rules around “political oversight” are just corruption and grift that are either wearing a mask of ideology or efficiency based on your political stance
I happily had a job in academia in the US. Probably what most would call “successful” after exiting a startup and getting a PhD I was US engineering faculty for 8 years.
We picked up our keys to our new house in another country a few days ago and I start next month with a faculty promotion. Many of my colleagues are or are looking to follow.
Starting with the assumption that all or even most investors / actors are rational is a continuing pox on both economic scholarship and societal thinking
Add to that that the quality of math learning outcomes and math learning in K-12 has gone WAY down. I point this squarely at 2 factors - No child left behind and the rejection of the common core because parents no lnoger felthtey understood the math their kids were learning. (and teachers did not understand math well enough to teach it well as a conceptual matter).
Even if they are getting the grades and even getting the test scores, they increasingly undersstand very little. They are not prepared for understnading they are prepared for question answering. Even in advnaced classes I see students actively reject learning and understanding for just answering - answering is the point they have learned. Right answers are the point, the only point.
A colleague and I were recently talking about what they see their middle nad high schoolers being taught in math classes. They termed it 'calculation as a defense against analysis'
SATs might help some but they aren't the problem they are a stop gap. K-12 (and by extension college) have so heavily sought to (poorly) quantify every aspect of experience to evalute people that they have stripped any meaning from the process. The problem is nothing has useful predictive value anymore in a process that is oversaturated by a 115% increase in the number of decisions an admissions office has to make. Its a math problem more than a cultural or standards problem.
* We does not mean everyon every time - it means the people from whom an official vests their power.