iabacu

> and is now opportunistically patent trolling Nreal

Are you making this up?

I don't see any patent claim being mentioned in the article.

Google+ leadership was not trying to build a product and grow a userbase.

They were concerned about driving metrics, and only tangentially building a product.

As if you could shove a half baked social product down on enough peoples throat by inorganic means, then hope that the network effect will do most of the work for you.

The problem is:

- Autopilot doesn’t work in that area. Driver reports it to Tesla.

- Tesla fixes the issue in a software update.

- Driver sees the improvement, and happily relies on autopilot.

- After a while, a new software update introduces a regression.

- Driver doesn’t find out about the regression until it’s too late (and is not around to testify about it anymore).

Tesla needs a “Tim Cook”

Tesla self-driving is like Theranos.

A big fake-until-you-make promise that gambles with peoples lives, in exchange for some hype and funding.

People forget that cash transactions also have a cost.

It’s mostly on the risk of keeping and transporting cash, and the cost associated to mitigate those risks.

Small shops are usually more willing to take the risk to avoid fees.

Forced arbitration is broken, but not entirely useless.

The actual problem is vendor lock-in and the conflict of interest in those who choose the vendor.

There should be a law that allows you to pick whichever arbitrator you want (within limits, like picking court jurisdiction), rather than being forced into a single vendor.

Not using lidar for self driving cars is a giant premature optimization (just like premature automation, etc)

Then there are mixed reality applications. It won’t need HFT levels of low latency, but will demand a lot more bandwidth. Many of the tricks won’t work there.

That’ll require exploiting edge distribution to its limits, with an entire new level of internet infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet.

It was a software engineer role. I did get an offer but in the end I didn’t take it.

When I interviewed at Airbnb, they asked me about one thing I learned in the past that could be useful for Airbnb.

I suggested that people who are developing the product should once in a while spend a few hours handling user tickets themselves (perhaps shadowing an actual customer representative), so that developers get to sense (at the gut level) the pain points.

The interviewer did not seemed pleased with that suggestion.

Why plug into a hub?

I’d rather just wear those (inexistent) googles that create virtual screens anywhere I want.

Wondering if there is a reference/citation you might link to?

Autonomous cars is a solution that is flashy and sexy, and has its appeal with some audience.

However, being pragmatic, to avoiding drunk driving, I'd rather go with non-autonomous sober drivers that are already available today.

You know, traditional Uber, Lyft, taxi, etc.

No one is talking about reducing anything to zero — that’s a straw argument.

It you really want a fair comparison, one can start by controlling statistical variables by car price point, car age and driver demographics.

It’s not hard to spot blatant data fudging by companies that are big on marketing.

The argument that autonomous tech will save lives is the most dangerous. This will take decades to be true.

The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong.

There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability for accidents caused.

Autonomous driving is such a big opportunity, that trying to do it wihtout LIDARs is a giant premature optimization.

Just like trying to make fully automated assembly plants.

Whatever edge it may give on sensor cost savings in the long run, it has a steep penalty in time to market.

Even if eventually they make it without LIDARs, guess what? The competitors with successful fleets won’t be too far behind.

My wife received a job offer from a start-up, however her i-765 application (c09 category) has been pending for over 8 months with no action.

We filed a service request back in April based on the case outside of processing time. NBC responded saying we'll receive an action notice within 60 days. It's been over 80 days now and no status change.

We filed an expedite request, then faxed the job offer. They are asking to wait until next week. We have contacted one of CA's senator office in parallel, but not response yet.

How likely do you think this will finally go through? And is there anything else we can do? Her job start date is 3 weeks from now.

Exactly this.

Well, the same macro economics / historical factors that helped GM, could’ve helped Ford and others. In particular, other 2/3 of trucks must have come from somewhere.

Sometimes, it can be actually worse if the worst parts were implemented by people who still works there. Because you might need to battle the technical issue AND people being defensive about it.

I expect a 10x to be effective, and to know when to pick a fight or not.

In this case, it definitively shows a bent for the innovative and smarts, but shows lack of judgement / wisdom.

For a 10x, merely completing the test is a lot faster and more effective than trying to go change the process from the outside.

A lot of people commented on the pay.

Most companies don’t have the option to offer more to the good engineers in the first place.

First, they don’t apply at all, and if they do, the company will probably fail to identify them as good.

And if they do identity the good engineer, then they will tend to offer below market (for the good engineer), and then lose out because of pay.

But it’s not because the company is necessarily cheap: it’s so rare to have a good engineer that they probably don’t even understand the value of one (or can’t make good use of them) in the first place, and therefore can’t justify the offers that the market is swinging at them.

I guess not in the traditional sense of the “export” word, but from the foreign trade balance perspective, it’s essentially an export product.

So China is basically exporting energy for a hefty amount of foreign currency.

"...only enjoy generalizing, optimizing, refactoring, designing, and take zero pleasure in delivering an actual usable product"

Too many projects suffer immensely because of people who don't give a shit about delivering. In that mode, anything is an excuse: we need to reactor, we need to build a better framework, we need to revisit the requirements, etc.

Then real progress gets slowed down because of some ill fitting development philosophy that some of those folks pulled out of their asses.

What you need are wise programmers that care about delivering product, wise enough to balance long term maintenability and code health with actual delivery schedule.

The keyword is "wise".

This is a great article, thank you very much for writing it.

I pretty much agree with all points, except number 9 could probably be "Not challenging the Status Quo" instead of "Following the Status Quo".

Breaking the status quo just for the sake of it would be a mistake, while healthy challenge of status quo with open mindedness to accept to not change anything is probably a better direction.

> Areas of code that don’t see commits for a long time are smells. We are expected to keep every part of the system churning.

Or it could be an indicator of mature features that were well designed and implemented to minimize future headache: they just work and have very few stable dependencies, if any.

Several reasons, but again, it is just guessing that cannot replace actual data. That doesn't mean we should take the only data point available (90 million miles) and declare it settled.

Your point about people seeking to drive faster is a valid one.

The counterpoint is there are people who cannot afford luxury cars but also want to drive faster -- they'll end up buying cheaper cars that can drive fast within their price range. Those are likely to be more fatal than the average luxury car.

1) Hypothesis on car age. An accident on a 2002 non-luxury car model is supposedly more likely to be fatal than an accident with your average new car.

This matters because Teslas with autopilot are relatively new compared to overall car population.

2) Hypothesis that low cost cars are more fatal than an average luxury cars.

3) Demographic hypothesis. Because of price point, the buyer demographic of newer luxury cars will be different than the overall demographic. Age group (e.g. teenagers vs. young adults vs. older adults), education level, profession.

That's 90 million miles among all cars.

I'd wager that if you compare it with cars at Tesla price point -- mostly luxury cars -- Tesla would look pretty bad.

Given how many deaths happen due to car accidents, one would think that any car feature that decreases safety should be considered a bug (UX bugs included).

The sad thing is that Tesla has been repeatedly blaming the driver, instead of improving its technology in an openly earnest manner -- an approach that eventually made air travel the safest.

With so many sensors, car travel can eventually become safer than air travel in the future. If Tesla attitude improves, that future will arrive faster.