jakelarkin

the ugliness is intentional, and i think this was even acknowledge by bmw execs to an extent. the margins on EV are comparitively very low, the (battery) supply chain is fragile. less profit + production headaches = don't make the product any more appealing than it needs to be

Q3 2018: 41.3 (0.7%)

Q3 2017: 41.0 (1.5%)

Q3 2016: 40.4 (-15%)

Q3 2015: 47.5 (35%)

Q3 2014: 35.2 (13%)

seems pretty flat to me

"inauthentic behavior" is an strange way to put it. propaganda, information warfare, disinformation, incitement, false flags, fake news ;)

cheaper yes but I think they are also perpetuated because they satisfy the egos of leadership. There's the visual satisfaction of seeing rows and rows of their diligent workers, and managers can easily inspect anyone's availability, walk up and demand instant attention.

guessing this also has to do with the fact that most American homes are single-family wood framed structures, so the relative importance to people is perhaps higher.

after 5-6 languages and coming back to Python I would say the worst things are

- large and inconsistent stdlib api,

- extremely wordy but somehow still vague documentation

- overwrought build/packaging system (although tooling has improved)

- endless runtime gotchya debugging in production

- almost all the baggage of OO boilerplate but none of the benefits of type-checking.

- half-baked functional paradigms

mobile app installs growth must be a KPI for pitch decks / funding.

look into discharging wife's student debt due to permanent disability. pursue divorce as legal strategy if it helps obtaining relief

human drivers routinely do things that are not justifiable by vehicle physics (e.g. stopping distances) because they have a comparatively sophisticated and unconscious understanding of our physical world, how changes may develop and how other human drivers or pedestrians might react. self-driving is a much harder and unlikely problem than the perpetual hype-cycle is willing to admit.

its probably insanely expensive/complex to revisit the cheap commodity touchpad hardware and the crappy drivers that already available. & doesn't pencil out with the razor thin margins for PC laptops

some differences by region but most mobile phone companies get your location passively, store it and optionally hand it off to the government or sell it to interested corporate buyers.

construction labor is seemingly entering a vicious cycle where workers can't afford to live near where the most new homes are needed.

... and that self-driving car will make its passengers car sick and get rear ended by the human driver behind it.

those types of twitchy driving mechanics aren't normal and don't share the road well with normal humans. The physics of cars and reaction times would dictate that we program a self-driving car to drive like Grandma .... always maintain safe low speeds, very long following distances and braking hard for sketchy actions by other cars or random things near the road, but we know that actually makes the road more dangerous as humans drivers will aggressively cut-off and rear end this self-driving grandma. Secondly, that type of driving creates a bad public impression of self-driving cars hurting their chances of adoption. If you read some of the earlier impressions of Google/Waymo cars its clear they went down that path initially and had to change their approach.

you can break it down to various expert-system subproblems

- perfect cv image classification (+ low visibility )

- anticipating behavior of bikers, children, elderly, animals, near roads

- responding to human non-verbal communication

- responding appropriately to never before seen obstacles/scenarios without being a nuisance on the road or endangering other drivers

- vehicle dynamics (+ in rain, ice, snow, emergency etc)

...

I would guess to do these tasks with accuracy similar to humans approaches a problem space that's as difficult as general AI

some of these seemingly require the machine to have theory-of-mind which is general AI

deciding how/when to make panic stop or evasive maneuvers without routinely becoming a hazard requires advanced AI

determining the path of travel through lanes markings that suddenly fade out while moving in 70mph on a busy freeway requires advanced AI

its pretty clear the self-driving gods are not giving these cars a grounds up understanding of physics and self-preservation. They best thing they come up with is programmed to drive X mph and to respond probabilistically to a large but finite set of training input scenarios.

the best software engineering company in the world has spent over a decade and hundreds of $millions on this problem and they are still stuck in a private beta in the easiest road environment they could find. what does that tell you about the feasibility of the solution.

There's no evidence that Cruise is in the same class as Waymo.

normal driving requires anticipating the behavior of other humans who may or may not entire your path of travel or anticipating unseen obstacles. it has less to do with "reaction times" than one would think. Humans routinely over-drive their vehicles capability to safely stop for an obstacle in front or adjacent to their path of travel.

self driving systems cant well reason about untrained scenarios or the intent of other humans on the road. I think the people have grossly underestimated how driving in an uncontrolled environment is really a general AI problem, which we're not even close to solving.

that's not wrong but for the sake of argument perhaps its better to look at the DoD budget through the political lens ... its a corrupt jobs program in which the government funnels money to a broad swath of American states and counties, mostly via defense contractors.

Yes its incredible dumb and inefficient but many millions of people earn their livelihood, healthcare and pensions by building useless bombs, so its hard (politically) to say we'll take that away to shore-up Social Security or whatever.

have thought about this as well ... there's just so much runway to more effectively monetize the core audience. a lot of businesses are still figuring out how powerful facebook ads are and how to leverage them. fb revenue still growing. thats what wall st is focused on right now. certain long-term engagement numbers have been deteriorating for over a year its not really on the radar yet.

nit: Jane Kim a SF supervisor did not have a vote a California State Senate bill

interesting data point on its performance but the reason decision makers might be cloud happy is amazon has the resources to scale this to thousands of RPS and develop the backend codebase up to hundreds of engineer contributions for many years, even as key talent comes and goes. The same might not be true of your prototype especially if the core competency of your business is sales or legal compliance not distributed computing platforms.

progressive taxation for a safety net is great. let's just apply it equally across income/wealth bands. why should our laws give a few lucky poor people hugely valuable rental subsidies and give many other equally poor people nothing. why should some capital owners (property) pay for the above and while other types of capital (large financial and corporate assets) can pay nothing.

narrow rent control law is a capricious policy in general, not just for property owners. a bunch of semi-corrupt political lotteries don't make a good government or just society.

certainly its also dysfunctional that we legislate that random property owners must provide the safety net for the poor & elderly.

Nevada figure probably includes taxes paid by casinos. Income taxes are closer to 5%.

how hard is it to put a location based speed governor on the train instead of using antiquated mechanical signals to enforce max speeds? or is that just too much common sense for the MTA?

not if the local planning department refuses to issue demolition permits for the existing structures

not at the cost of decent housing options for people across a broad range of lower/middle incomes and also not accommodating baseline population growth regionally.

85%+ of available water in California goes to commercial agriculture

SF residents use 50 gallons/day of water. Compared to 85 gal/day average across the state.

NIMBYs deploy a range of shifting rhetorical arguments (concern trolling, strawman etc) but in my observation the principle motivation is fear of change and the negative externalities of increasing population ... traffic, parking, what if the new people are different from me, etc.

Money is part of it but less than many assume because (1) home equity is paper wealth and many owners can't afford to move due to Prop13. and (2) the way to actually maximize land value is to upzone, so NIMBYism not exactly optimal in terms of economic self-interest.