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general_ai

931 karma · joined January 10, 2017

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general_ai··on Toyota's Gill Pratt on Self-Driving Cars and the Reality of Full Autonomy
Ha-le-freaking-lujah! I've been saying the same for years, ever since I completed the Udacity self-driving car AI course (taught by Sebastian Thrun, then head guru of autonomous vehicle research at Google). 70% of the problem was solved in mid-90's, by Ernst Dickmanns et al, Daimler Benz had autonomous cars on the autobahn. After billions of dollars and two decades, we solved another 20% of the problem. The remaining 10% is not going to be conclusively solved in the next 20 years at least, not under the current constraints.

Now if roads are outfitted with instrumentation for autonomous vehicles, _and_ human drivers are prohibited on such roads, _then_ we _might_ see full autonomy. But not before.

If it were up to me, I'd focus on this instrumentation instead: RF guide wires/tags for car localization on the pavement, machine readable signage (even in fog, snow, and heavy rain -- conditions with which cameras and LIDARs cannot deal in principle), inter-car coordination mesh networks and security thereof, autonomous vehicle readable road work signage, police gear to direct traffic of autonomous vehicles, and so on and so forth. There. Hundred billion dollars worth of startups in one paragraph.

As things stand, you can only be fully autonomous at 25mph in California where it never rains, as long as there's no fog, no road work, and no one has messed up the markings on the pavement.

general_ai··on Short intro to C++ for Rust developers: Ownership and Borrowing
That's the first time I've seen a VS user praise MSBuild, which is utter garbage. On the unix side you won't hear much praise for GDB or LLDB, but for everything you've listed numerous tools exist. Eclipse in particular has superior code indexing/navigation capabilities. Both QT and GTK have GUI builders. NVidia provides a plugin to debug and profile GPU code.

What Microsoft compiler doesn't provide in my experience is decent codegen.

general_ai··on Inside Rolex's Manufacturing Facilities (2015)
That's what people failed to understand about Apple Watch. Everyone else makes wrist computers first, watches second. Apple Watch is the other way around: watch first computer second. It's not quite there yet as a watch, but it'll get there, probably this year. Jony Ive is a watch nerd, he knows it.
general_ai··on Short intro to C++ for Rust developers: Ownership and Borrowing
Of these I used all but Zortech. None of them compare to GCC6. I've also used Microsoft C++ compiler fairly recently. It's not even close. I don't use Xcode when coding C++ on OS X, vim + YouCompleteMe beats the heck of any IDE I have ever used. I prefer Linux "perf" to Instruments, too. It's not an option on the Mac, but if it was, that's what I'd be using.
general_ai··on Short intro to C++ for Rust developers: Ownership and Borrowing
That's what Microsoft wants you to believe. In reality C++ tooling is vastly better on any Unix, and it's 100% free in both senses of the word.

Also, there's no qualitative difference between C++ toolchains on macOS and Linux, since the same compilers are used on both.

general_ai··on Short intro to C++ for Rust developers: Ownership and Borrowing
>> you get great performance right out of the box

Yup. And if you don't you can drop all the way down to intrinsics and assembly. It's pretty nice.

general_ai··on Being confidently programming language agnostic
Nah. Google doesn't "train" per se. They expect that you already know your shit pretty well when you get hired, or else they just don't hire you. From there on out you're on your own. No one will "train" you specifically, although opportunities are sometimes available. In particular, no one will specifically train you to write tight code. Your CLs will just get rejected until you learn that on your own. Source: spent 8 years at Google.
general_ai··on To Obama with Love, and Hate, and Desperation
Some people receive responses, so if he wrote them himself you need to factor that in as well.
general_ai··on To Obama with Love, and Hate, and Desperation
Do you really believe he had the time to read 10 letters every day? Even at 5 minutes per letter that'd take 50 minutes. I just don't see how that's possible.
general_ai··on Short intro to C++ for Rust developers: Ownership and Borrowing
Therein lies the perception problem: a lot of folks think that C++ is a static target, but it's not. It has improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade or so, and will improve a lot more this year when C++17 support becomes widespread. I find anything from C++0x onwards pretty pleasant to work in if you're on a UNIX-like OS. Windows is another story entirely.
general_ai··on Being confidently programming language agnostic
I'd be surprised if it wasn't. This is immediately obvious to anyone who's tried to solve practical problems in languages, rather than just learned them for resume embellishment purposes. That's also why sane companies limit the languages that can be used for development: if you let your "theoreticians" run wild, you will soon end up with code written in Brainfuck and Malbolge using libraries no one understands. I'm exaggerating, obviously, but only slightly.
general_ai··on XNOR.ai frees AI from the prison of the supercomputer
Well, if you look at their website, they have an email there, which you could use to ask them directly.
general_ai··on How I got my attention back
Here's how you reclaim your attention: don't read irrelevant, self aggrandizing verbal diarrhea that's 20 screenfuls long.
general_ai··on XNOR.ai frees AI from the prison of the supercomputer
You're missing the fact that Jetson is $435, it draws a lot of power, and requires cooling.
general_ai··on Being confidently programming language agnostic
> As opposed to not responding to your hiring ads

Could be response rate, sure. Could be our proximity to Google, which manages to hire C++ devs just fine (fully a half of their codebase is C++).

We've managed to hire some folks after all, with some remedial training they're doing fine. I just wish it wasn't so hard to find them, and they wouldn't require months of close supervision after you hire them.

general_ai··on Being confidently programming language agnostic
Ok, "optimize" might be an overstatement in this case. More like "write code that's not totally oblivious to how compiler will compile it, and how CPU will execute it". A reasonable request for a software professional with a degree, one would hope.
general_ai··on The declining authority of statistics and the experts who analyse them
No, they didn't want "more resolution" for "certain demographics". They wanted these demographics overrepresented in the final sample, without disclosing the fact they are overrepresented. These are polls for external consumption, the kinds you'd then find on CNN, HuffPo and MSNBC. I'm sure they also had their own private polls which, while probably also cooked, were more accurate.
general_ai··on Being confidently programming language agnostic
> What makes you think

Personal experience. I've been trying to hire moderately competent, junior software engineers would be able to write and optimize C++ without much supervision. They're now more rare than the Sasquatch. Today, "caring about performance" means picking a language that's only 5x slower than C, rather than 100x slower. Hardly anyone even knows why alignment might be desirable, or how long it takes to fetch memory after a cache miss, or how concurrency primitives actually work. For my generation, "caring about performance" means that C compiler generates suboptimal assembly, and you handcode it because you know better and need that extra oomph.

> It depends on what you're doing

It sure does. You don't have to worry about the lower level stuff every day. We deal with extremely high performance code, and even _we_ don't think about it every day. But it definitely pays to know what's going on. Otherwise it's not software engineering, it's cargo cult science and rain dancing, prone to fall apart at the first sign of difficulty. It's like having a certified car mechanic who doesn't know how to open the hood. You can have a few of those to change tires and broken tail lights on the cheap, but you also need the dudes/dudettes who know what to do when "check engine" light comes on.

general_ai··on Being confidently programming language agnostic
I just wish those universities actually produced programmers who understand the low level mechanics of how computers work. I.e. Why your program runs 100x slower if you're not careful about cache misses, pretty basic stuff like that. Moore's law is over, it's time to start caring about performance again.
general_ai··on Being confidently programming language agnostic
Languages are easy, libraries are hard.
general_ai··on The declining authority of statistics and the experts who analyse them
We'll need to conduct a poll to see what people think about this... oh wait.
general_ai··on Playing with Docker 1.13 and Minio
Good to know. Looks like more of a PR initiative then. Some of my servers have more drives than that. :-)
general_ai··on Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History
You'll just front load the "bidding war". You will still be able to negotiate incidentals like PTO, signing bonus, etc. When recruiters from e.g. Japan or some European countries reach out to me it's easy for me to dismiss them out of hand since their comp is stated up front. This is also more fair to demographics which don't like to negotiate, and women in particular.
general_ai··on Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History
Can we go a little further than this? Can we require employers to post the details of the compensation package that comes with each job? That would save a lot of time for all involved and obviate the need to even ask this question.
general_ai··on The declining authority of statistics and the experts who analyse them
Silver gave Trump 2% chance of winning the primary. He also wheeled out this doozie a day before the election when it was pretty clear that Trump knew he would win. You don't do 5 rallies a day if you know you're losing.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

general_ai··on Playing with Docker 1.13 and Minio
Does anyone have large (PB-scale) deployments of Minio on premises? We have a need to store hundreds of terabytes of data, and we don't need a filesystem per se, so I was wondering how robust it is.
general_ai··on The declining authority of statistics and the experts who analyse them
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/26551
general_ai··on The declining authority of statistics and the experts who analyse them
Even the polls were cooked. E.g. to improve the odds of polls fitting the narrative, democratic leaning pollsters would disproportionately sample minorities known to vote predominantly democratic. The patron saint of pollsters, Nate Silver, was consistently wrong about everything all the way through the campaign. Now, if his main goal wasn't to peddle a particular narrative, one would expect him to make corrections to his models after getting things wrong, but no, he sacrificed his professional integrity instead.

I'm sure this is not the first time this happened, but this year it was particularly obvious, and I don't really trust the polls at all anymore except when it comes to completely non-political topics.

general_ai··on The declining authority of statistics and the experts who analyse them
The "statistics" is only in decline because it was blatantly used to try and sway the election. As in, oversampling demographics to get the necessary conclusion, phrasing the questions such that you're "literally Hitler" if you answer them "wrong" and so on. I quoted "statistics" because it's not statistics, it's pretty obvious propaganda, using the most shameless tricks in the book. Editors of Soviet Pravda would be proud. We know much of this thanks to Wikileaks now, as well as because it was so blindingly obvious that only a complete moron would think the polls were impartial.

I'm not afraid of "what's next" because as far as political polling is concerned (calling it "statistics" is way too generous), it just can't really get any worse than it already is.

general_ai··on Uber Hires Former Google Search Chief Amit Singhal as SVP of Engineering
People, sure. But he's not "people".
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