iiiggglll

No argument with any of that, but I think that the theme of the movie in question was merely using a population crash as a proxy to explore what happens to society when it has lost all hope for the future. I don't believe it was actually trying make any statements in particular regarding risks around population growth (or decline).

> The one aspect of the film that doesn’t seem to be coming true is its central premise. The idea is that no human beings have been born in the last 18 years, so when Theo meets Kee, an African woman who is miraculously pregnant, he has to protect her from the various groups who want to exploit her condition. Obviously, we know that this infertility pandemic hasn’t happened: in Children of Men, the youngest person on the planet was born in 2009. But even as a concept, this particular one doesn’t resonate with our current anxieties, because overpopulation is more worrying than population decline.

It's not really about population -- it's about having no future, which is something a lot of people constantly worry about.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103774

This whole thing is ridiculous. It only works because it piggybacks on the hard work of engineers at major manufacturers who put front-facing radar into their vehicles, plus a little bit of image recognition based lane keeping running on a smartphone. It's not "self-driving". It's time to put this sort of thing into perspective: it's Yet Another Half-Baked Level 2 Automation System (YAHBL2AS ?).[1] The world doesn't need another one of those. There's nothing new here. For reference, there's a comment elsewhere in this very HN thread from someone who said they did image recognition based lane keeping as a university project, and they said they did it 10 years ago using Matlab.

If there is going to be a new AI "winter" (and I'm starting to think that's more and more likely every day), it will probably be the result of too much hype around overblown ego-driven claims such as this. Hotz is probably doing more harm than good at this point.

[1] http://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf

> Maybe Americans value their rights more than anything else

I certainly do, but sadly not every American agrees. There are many "law and order" types who would have that person arrested and beaten if they could. Fortunately our rights are still intact, even after all this time. People can do such things without fear. Far from being "laughable and disrespectful", I consider it a sign of a healthy, functioning society. "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism", as the saying goes.

It's likely that the Castro regime's defenders will dismiss any sources I provide as "western propaganda", but these are a good place to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba#Contempor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Cuba

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/03/six-fact...

I do not know about a specific instance of someone holding up a sign like the one in the photo I linked to, but I also sincerely doubt anyone in their right mind would attempt such a thing.

The closest recent example I can find is someone painting the names of the Castro brothers on a pair of pigs and being thrown in prison for it (in 2015):

http://www.newsweek.com/cuban-protest-artist-el-sexto-you-ha...

Far worse things happened during the early days of the revolution. I was going to link them but I changed my mind because I don't want to weaken my point. Freedom of speech is far stronger in a place like the US than in a place like Castro's Cuba.

> He believed in freedom

> I detest the hypocrisy I see in many (not all) western commentators.

A counterexample: this photo was taken in NYC after the most recent US presidential election:

http://i.imgur.com/DcVbqAm.jpg

It's a picture of someone standing in front of Trump Tower holding a sign that says "You're not my president. Fuck you."

Can you imagine someone getting away with that in Castro's Cuba?

Remember a few weeks ago when it was a headline that the "going rate" for talented engineers working on self-driving cars was $10 million per head?[1] Meanwhile, comma.ai the company only got $3.1 million from a big-name investor?[2] Yeah, don't quit your day job...

[1] http://www.recode.net/2016/9/17/12943214/sebastian-thrun-sel...

[2] http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/04/technology/george-hotz-comma...

Good grief, that's nothing. I've seen security review questionnaires for enterprise SaaS contracts that were longer than that. If George Hotz or one of his employees really couldn't produce a response like the one Honda gave, there's no way anyone should trust his product. I'm glad he canceled. I don't want his crap on the road anywhere near me.

If I were one of his investors I'd be pissed right now.

> I've never met someone who was extremely good at these questions who turned out to be a dud after hiring.

I have. More than once I've brought on folks who aced algorithm questions but turned out couldn't handle complex business logic. They could basically only understand code that fit on a page / screenful. Anything beyond that and they floundered.

Highly illustrative example of privilege. Over and over we're told that Kelli Peters is the perfect victim, that anyone else would not have been believed, yet nowhere other than that one sentence does anyone even come close to pointing out how wrong that is.

The whole affair is also an example of the fallout from over-criminalizing everything when it comes to the "War on Drugs" -- mere possession is enough to destroy entire lives, making it easy (and apparently tempting) to use it against one's enemies. Statements from former members of the Nixon administration[1] confirm this is of course intentional, and mainly targeted at minorities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#War_on_drugs

There's the classic joke where someone goes to the doctor and says "it hurts when I do this", and the doctor says "well don't do that then".

Cognitive behavioral therapy is basically the same thing but it boils down to: "it feels bad when I think about this" / "well don't think about that then".

Smartphones. Blackberry, Symbian, Palm, and Windows were the leaders just a few years ago, but now iOS & Android pretty much own it all.[1][2]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/20...

[2] http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3415117

Travis is unbeatable because he's good at Wii Tennis, or something:

https://medium.com/@sacca/why-i-would-never-want-to-compete-...

It's "find my phone" for your car.

Long commutes? Once vehicles are self-driving, there will be whole swaths of the population who will simply live in their cars and not have another home. Imagine reddit's "vandwellers" times ten.

Then there will be political fights over city congestion taxes and other ways of extracting money from people who do that.

Interesting times...

Kodak and Apple already collaborated on a camera, back in the early 1990s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake

I think that both major mobile platforms need to revamp their photo flows to adapt to all the buckets mentioned in this article, along with a "private" bucket for things like naked photos and other pictures not everyone would want automatically "shared" onto a feed (Apple has dipped a toe in this water with the "hidden" flag on photos, but there is still a long way to go). And while I'm wishing, I would hope that they do all this while still allowing for automatic cloud storage and backup without compromising privacy.

It seems one of the main reasons Snapchat is so successful is that it provides a flow for photos and other communication that isn't the traditional "single stream that also doubles a permanent and mostly public record" style of organization. It seems inevitable that iOS & Android will both have to eventually adjust their built-in camera & photo handling apps to acknowledge the realties of how people actually use their devices in this regard.

> So: help! I've genuinely spent weeks on this but it's a massive job.

I'd love to help, but how? Is the only option for people to go driving all these "roads" in person to see which ones are actually roads, or is there another source of data that can be used to compare against?

> Speaking conservatively, a 25% difference in performance would turn an 8 hour wedding edit into 10 hours.

That's only true if all 8 hours are 100% spent waiting on the machine, which doesn't seem likely. This doesn't seem like a CPU-bound task. Most of the time is probably spent by the human actually looking at the photos and making decisions.

> The fact that Sam Altman is turning this into a public spectacle is further evidence that he knows YC fucked up badly, and probably doesn't have a legal case. The only reason to write what he wrote is if you're out of actual ammo.

Between this incident and pg's "startups must be allowed to break the law whenever they want or else civilization might collapse" essay a few months ago, it's getting hard to take anything the higher-ups at YC say seriously.

> $20B+ business

There is no way it's worth that much. As we saw from the Square IPO ("valued" at $6B+ in their last round of private funding; current post-IPO market cap about half that), the valuations of the past few years are all wildly overstated, just as the pundits have said all along. AirBnB will never be worth that much in a public market.

Man, I feel sorry for anyone who actually buys into the "flat meritocracy" myth.

Not to mention the size of stitches and seams will be greatly magnified on a very small clothing mannequin (which is what Barbie is ultimately -- it's all about the outfits). This means that places where the clothing should hang and flow also have to be exaggerated, so the tiny waist makes sense.

His tone might seem unnecessarily harsh at first, but when taken in context of the amount of ass-kissing that goes on here, it starts to seem more like an appropriate counterweight.

San Francisco's budget is vastly less efficient than other comparable US cities:

http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/the-worst-run-big-city-...

As for people living vs. working in SF, this comment does an excellent job explaining it, with sources:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10875936

tl;dr: The increase in population due to daily workers commuting in from outside is vastly smaller than in NYC.

> They also tend to believe, rightly or wrongly, that "density" would just mean lots of high end expensive apartments that nobody in the "middle class" can afford.

That would be wrongly.

Supply and demand are real. The fact that SF is now more expensive that NYC proves it. Restrict supply long enough, and prices will go up.

People who refuse to believe in simple, verifiable facts deserve what they get, "sinister" or not.

> But robots totally flip the market on head.

Yeah, as in people will be able to mod their existing cars to be self-driving and then rent them out AirBnB-style when they aren't using them. There's even a distributed storage system already built to handle that ... people's driveways and garages.

Similar experience at my company. Lots of mistakes, almost certainly due to things being done by hand behind the scenes. We stopped using them after too many mistakes involving people's paychecks.

It's also weird that this is on Medium and not Amazon's own website. If this is an official company response to the article in question, shouldn't appear more that way?