diskzero

A LIDAR sensor is a complex device with spinning motors, mirrors, lasers and more. Costs are coming down and less-expensive and more capable devices are coming to market. Once the price-points come way down, I wouldn't be surprised to see Tesla reconsider their decision to exclude them from their sensor platform.

As someone working in the field, I would never choose to eliminate the information provided by radar, lidar and any other sensor technology. Depending only on camera information would be too limiting.

I am a principal engineer for a major autonomous vehicle company. You can break this statement down into two components:

Adding more sensors slows his team now more than it improves system performance

I'll take his word on this. It is a lot of work to incorporate multiple sensors.

All necessary information is already in the pixel-space.

I hate to disagree with someone as distinguished as Karpathy, but this is simply not what I have observed from all of that data that we have access to. Given my knowledge of the various stacks deployed today, I would never ever ever get into a vehicle using a vision only stack and expect it to perform in some of the challenging environments encountered during testing.

Being on the ground and dealing with MOPP gear was no fun either. The Army certainly took the risk very seriously. The MOPP gear receded into the background on later deployments. While all the shots may be a slight concern, I am more afraid of breathing in all the invigorating air from the burn pits.

Call the main switchboard at DWA? 1-818-695-5000 When I was there, there were actual live humans answering and sending calls to people.

Cool. I hope your students are finding places at some good studios.

Not only did DWA have bloopers, there are entire sequences rendered and ready to go that didn't make it in the final movie. There is also some shorts and an entire film that made it to pre-viz that never were released.

I think I need more counseling to share a lot of them. Let me just say that Steve could be quite brutal. His level of brutality seemed to increase with the level of expectation he had of you. I never saw him be mean to any employee he randomaly encountered on campus. In fact, I saw him open doors, let people ahead of him in the salad bar and cashier line at Cafe Macs and be generally pleasant. It was in those closed door meeting or in rehearsals for MacWorld or WWDC events that you would experience the full wilting blast of scorching invective. Not fun!

The "original" Toothless was not Toothless. There were several other Night Fury designs. One amazing part of working in a studio (please try to tour one if you have any friend or reason to get on campus at Disney/Pixar/DWA) is seeing all of the storyboards and pre-viz art lining the walls. It is quite magical.

It can be real pressure cooker. Developers who come in not from the game development world are often shocked by the brutal hours. The artists have it the worst however. They tend to get laid off in droves as productions ramps down. Directors and writers also get fired. They seem to be less immune to being punished than other management types in more traditional software companies.

Yes, the recordings get done over many times. Sometimes we lose someone due to story changes or some other circumstance. This is a bummer, as there is more than the voice that is lost. While it is easier for some stars to drive over to Glendale from wherever they live in LA, they still "perform" the part and that performance is recorded. The video of the voice over work is referred to by the animators and influences a lot about the how the animated character behaves. I suppose in less expensive productions, you could just try and plop a voice over in, but all the top studios will use the video reference and ask the talent back for voice fixes.

In general, I found the talent to be really fun to be around and no-one just phoned it in. They really liked to work on the films. I ended up sitting next to Gerard Butler at the employee screening of Dragon at the now non-existent Universal Amphitheater. He stayed for the whole film. Unlike me, he hadn't seen it in thousands of tiny chunks during dailies, and had a blast.

I don’t know about that. I would need more info. The PDI tool chain used for Dragon used the same clamped p-blend curves that had been used for several generations of movies. Technology was almost never the issue for delays. It was usually story, direction, editorial, etc. If you get more context, maybe I can find out more.

You could try reaching out to Kate Swanborg. That sounds like some sort of partnership deal that she may have been involved with. Worth a try!

I think we made How to Train Your Dragon three times at DreamWorks. So many rewrites, director changes, character redesign, etc. If you ever wonder why a feature length animated film can cost over $300 million dollars, this is one reason.

Right. If I have to be honest, I don't think I have recovered from the PTSD caused by all of those Thursday Steve UX meetings. Oh the stories that could be told...

The first version of the driver was written by Be's VP of Engineering, Steve Sakoman. Steve started the "Big Newton" project at Apple and his experience with the AT&T processor was the reason the first BeBox prototypes used AT&T Hobbit CPUs.

Steve returned to Apple as VP of CoreOS or something like that. I was super happy when he came back. I think he is living in the rain forests of Hawaii now, clad only in palm leaves.

The loss of that library was sad, but didn't all the books go to the Stanford Apple archive? I also grabbed a book on parsers.

I know some people from ATG found places to stay if they really, really wanted to, but unless you could directly related your work to something on Steve's agenda, you were gone. Kim stayed and worked on voice recognition, Larry Yaeger stayed and worked on InkWell, Jerome stayed and worked on latent semantics analysis for email spam detection, etc.

The development team was very small. I worked on audio mixing code, capturing video encoded from Bt848 cards, audio and video codecs, anything related to audio and video timing. Several great programmers were there and continue to do amazing things at other companies big and small. I ended up working with many of them at Apple. At some point, it seems many had to choose between Google or Apple.

I agree. Larry Tesler is no longer around to write such a retrospective. I am not sure who else might be able to do it. One of my favorite ATG project was the Dylan[1] programming language.

Larry was working a lot on what would become Stagecast.[2]

There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down. As I said above, it wasn't at all clear that Apple would end up turing into the Apple we have today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecast_Creator

Steve loved black, until he loved glossy pastels, then rich Corinthian leather interfaces and then brushed aluminum. This was one of the most very frustrating things about designing user interfaces for him; once you figured out his internal design language, he would radically change it overnight!

When I came back to Apple in 2000, I remember walking to visit a friend from Eazel (John Harper) who was working on CoreAnimation and seeing your office. I was totally star struck, way more than having to deal with Steve every week. I mean, you are the guy who wrote Glider!

I have a fairly interesting perspective; I was there when Steve first returned, left after a few months and then returned in less than eighteen months.

I initially joined as a refugee from Be, as it became obvious the PowerPC would no longer be a viable platform for BeOS. I joing the Final Cut Pro team, which has just joined Apple as part of an aquisition of the "Key Grip" video editor from Macromedia.

The FCP team located in IL1 on the third floor I believe. Most of the floor was occupied by the Apple Advance Technology Group. ATG had a really cool space with private offices ringing the outside walls and interior areas with lots of whiteboards and space for doing whatever ATG did. Larry Tesler had a double wide private office and there was a lot of commotion.

The "Blue" team working in MacOs 9 was below us. It was very busy down there as OS 9 was the engine that still powered the company. Those first cool iMacs and MacBooks weren't running OSX! I don't think we even had a "Beaker" build yet.

Steve simply didn't like ATG and over the next few months the spaces rapidly cleared out. We were once stuck in a corner and soon we had a lot of room to set up a couple of large commercial quality edit suite with Avid Media Composers and other high end gear to help make FCP a commercial success.

I wasn't part of any sort of political competition; we just kept making FCP, but watching the exodus of ATG people and seeing how stressed out Steve Glass was running the Blue team was getting me down.

The NeXT people were setting up their world in IL2, with Avie taking an office on the 4th floor and an unofficial sort of NeXT hardware museum springing up outside of the area where the pool table was. It was a cool place to visit; lots of neat NeXT hardware and some SparcStations as well. A Symbolics workstation also showed up in a conference room on the second floor, although it may have been at Apple earlier. If you looked in various hardware labs, there was always intersting hardware to be found; DEC, Infographics, VAX and more.

It wasn't at all obvious to me that Apple was going to figure things out; Steve was being disruptive (in a good way?), but Gil, Ellen, Steve Glass and others were still around and all the NeXT people were doing their thing. I was convinced by some former Be people to go join Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Mike Boich and some other Apple engineering heroes of mine (Darin Adler, John Sullivan) at Eazel.

Eazel folded within eighteen months and I was back at Apple as part of a group hire Andy helped setup with Steve. Anyone who wanted to work at Apple just showed up the next Monday and got to work! Many of those who didn't come to Apple ended up going to Danger Research, Google and other startups. A lot eventually ended up at Apple anyway.

The Apple I came back to was different in that Steve was officialy CEO, but the divisions between groups were still there. It would take several more years before I felt that things felt healthy. As soon as I did think things felt good, Steve become ill, Scott Forstall erected a secure fortress on my floor on IL2 and the political shenanigans began. My initial stock grant priced at $14 a share had grown, gone through a couple of splits and the company was doing billions of dollars a quarter. A far cry from the bleak days of 1997!

Thanks for that observation. You are totally right. Having learned to dive into framework headers and map idioms from one to another is totally something I learned at Apple, especially in the early days of creating a lot of the frameworks that form the foundation of the OS. I have always found Apple's docs to be frustrating, but when I look at them without the benefit of my background, I can see how it must be maddening to developers coming to the platform.

I may be an anomaly, but most of the Ask Apple topics wouldn't be terribly useful for me. In general, I haven't had much difficulty figuring out how to use the various frameworks and features as they are released. I don't want to discount the experience of anyone who has had difficulty however. Getting direct technical help may be the key to their sucess.

I am a former Apple employee but this has given me no special privileges or advantages at all. Perhaps it has given me some particular skill at diving into header files to figure out a solution to a technical problem.

The issue(s) I need the most help with revolve around generating revenues that don't involve advertising, subscriptions, dark patterns or racing to the bottom on pricing. The AppStore model makes it very difficult to use some of the techniques that worked in the old days of shrink wrap and direct online distribution; trial periods, version upgrades and other concepts that don't fit into the AppStore buy it once and get upgraded for life.

It was my decision to make an application that incurred expensive development costs and it was also a risk to depend upon Apple and the AppStore. They sure do make it hard for small developers to try and make a living selling "professional" level applications.

Exposing this sort of capability is very interesting, especially coupled with agents is indeed interesting. Getting this type of functionality added to the core browser seems like a long and complex standardization process. Perhaps a plugin would be one means of doing it?

The semantic web hasn't been adopted, so one challenge would be how to categorize and expose the content to any sort of API. Perhaps such a system already exists.

The emacs ecosystem is a good example, but as you stated, it really requires expertise to utilize. I know of commercial service like IFTTT [1] but the thought of having this type of service be a utility available to any browser user is more interesting to me.

[1] https://ifttt.com

My guess is that it would take a really good understanding of what task the user is trying to accomplish. Working from that, you could then create the interfaces.

I frequently catch myself writing code more from the "I am able do this" rather than the "should I do this" point of view. In my experience, not having a clear goal that benefits a user makes it hard to get any idea adopted.

What do you think an empowered user would want to do? All the pieces are probably there to make things work.

These types of integrations are nice and very much appreciated as a way of demonstrating the liveness of the code. I have taught a few courses using these types of live evaluation plugins and the question students always have next is "How can I draw a line or modify the text in the browser itself?"

There are several live document editing solutions out there and a recent interesting one comes from Gilad Bracha's Newspeak [1] project. His latest live Document [2] demo is quite interesting as you can edit a live document with the web page. You can also execute Newspeak code and use the results to modify the document as well. His ideas are worth a look if this is sort of thing you find interesting.

[1] https://newspeaklanguage.org

[2] https://blog.bracha.org/WYWIWYG/out/WYWIWYG.html?snapshot=WY...

For some reason things seemed more possible back then for other platforms. Maybe it was just the afterglow of the personal computer era of the 80s? The Gobe team took a risk, I took a risk with my video editor and a many other teams dove into making apps for BeOS knowing it was a gamble. We were all also much younger, but in general the environment seemed more open. I should emphasis "seemed" as Microsoft came along and made life very hard for Be and Eazel and I am sure others who tried to get their operating systems onto PC hardware.

This is a great story and it brought back some good memories. I was in Portland, OR at the time and my wife had started the PDX Bug BeOS users group. We had Bruce, Carl and Scott over for a demo of Gobe Productive and it blew everyone away.

Both my wife and I ended up working for Be and moving down to Silicon Valley. I would drive by the Claris wedge building on my way to run on the San Tomas Aquino trail and think about what could have been if things had worked out a bit differently.

I eventually ended up at Apple along with some of the Gobe team and a lot of people from Be. Good times!

Partially true. There were also some very smart and opinionated engineers who had their own projects in development as well.

I wrote the Time Machine interface and was sweating like mad sitting in the third row or so during the demo. It was a lot of fun getting all the animations and UI elements sliding around smoothly.

One interesting fact about the entire presentation of all the new features is that all of the backup Macs but one had crashed by the end. If you watch closely you can see the mirrored demo machines switching in when the live demo box locks up. Whee!