jessriedel

Yea, but I strongly suspect the current Waymo price is much higher than their operating costs. I don't think we should infer to much from the price they are charging.

> I used an Uber on the way here and the car was dirtier

To be fair, the fact that Waymos are fancy clean Jaguars is kind of ancillary to the main technology. The tech is currently expensive, so they are targeting the luxury market, which you can also get on Uber if you select a black car or whatever. The people willing to pay for that are less likely to make messes, and the drivers put more effort into frequent cleanings.

Once the tech becomes cheap, expect the car quality and cleanliness to go down. Robocars do have some intrinsic advantages in that it's easier to set up a standard daily cleaning process, but they will still accumulate more garbage and stains when they are used by a broader cross section of the population and only cleaned during charging to reduce costs. (Of course, cheaper and more widely accessible tech is good for everyone; if you want a immaculate leather seats cleaned three times a day, you'll generally be able to pay for it.)

Thanks!

I don't really get how the horizon effect is something that could be confused/conflated with the effect of dazzle camouflage. The horizon effect is described as a predictable bias in angle estimation, relative to the true angle, when a ship is viewed such that it's near the horizon. This presumably always applies to the view from a periscope, so it would be ever present in any remotely reasonable test of dazzle camouflage (whether to a neutral control or to conventional camouflage patterns). They just say that Blodgett’s control was "too vague to be useful", but it would have to be a truly terrible control to lead to the suggested confusion, e.g., comparing dazzle camouflage through a periscope to conventional camouflage viewed from above.

As another comment mentions, SPHEREx is passively cooled. But fwiw, plenty of infrared space telescopes use consumable coolant:

> Notable infrared missions that carried consumable cryogen include IRAS (1983), ISO (1995–1998), Spitzer (2003–2009 in cryo mode), Herschel (2009–2013), WISE (2009–2011 in cryo mode), and Planck (2009–2013). Each relied on a finite liquid helium (or solid hydrogen) supply to keep detectors cold and reverted to a warmer operating mode or ended once their coolant was depleted.

I mean this is a long conversation but the major differences are: (1) agencies are mostly incentivized to do other stuff and (2) it's hard to objectively assess helpfulness per se rather than sales.

Tweaks like you describe are exactly what I think are doomed. The problem isn’t some small wording in the law that we just need to adjust. The problem is that (1) info request of complicated systems by their nature require good-faith coordination by both inquirer and respondent but (2) the agency responding to the FAOI request is incentivized to obstruct. This is why legal discovery is such a nightmare and so inefficient.

“Punish people for not being helpful enough” is a bad way to get them to be helpful.

This sort of experience shows how broken the FOIA law is. If it’s in the public interest to make data available, it’s in the public interest to make it available to a person with imperfect understanding of the extreme details of government’s crappy IT systems.

Not sure exactly what the fix is, but one idea is to have a state-wide ombudsman-like office for facilitating FOIA requests. Currently each agency usually has its own small FOIA office, which naturally protects its own turf. A centralized office could 1. …be independent of the agencies from which info is being requested, avoiding conflicts of interest in denying/delaying requests 2. …have commitments to confidentiality so agencies couldn’t justify withholding contextual info (“what’s a better way to ask this question?”) from the ombudsman 3. …afford building up more technical and legal expertise than any single agency-specific office.

Because the comments aren’t as toxic

Note that the modern cosmic distance ladder has multiple partially independent paths using different techniques, making it more like a DAG. The wikipedia page has a nice diagram.

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

I’m not saying the WSJ was the only place reporting on it, and indeed my link isn’t even an example. That’s an opinion piece.

The test wasn't explicitly discriminatory, just the way that it was used. And the way that it was used is disputed. The facts are still being litigated. All the coverage is from opinion pieces or right-of-center newspapers.

https://archive.is/lDyOB

> Page 44 of the PDF has a good overview of what this document is intended to be.

Yes, but unfortunately it doesn't much explain what the contents are like. Would be great to get an laymen-readable summary of this from an LLM.

I’ve taken a few dozen Waymo rides, but it doesn’t matger because this is not something you can really test as a person. The entire issue is whether you have, say, 7 or 9 nines of reliability (e.g., 10x or 0.1x times more dangerous than a human), and you can’t extrapolate that from how smooth it feels or whatever. FSD doesn’t have that reliability, which is why they don’t let you sleep.

Right but this is even more reason to not trash the technology.

> Do you have a reference for that claim?

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

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/people-c...

As one might expect, when people have their vision restored while still young children, they do OK. The older they are, the worse they do. For adults, it's basically nothing except the crudest things like brightness and vague large objects.

> I am somewhat skeptical if only because of an analogy with cochlear implants - deaf people can start hearing once the signal starts!

I don't think this is right. Again, kids can do ok, and the younger they are, the better. But my impression is that adults who get cochlear implants having been deaf since birth are not able to interpret almost anything. Like, they can sense there are louder or quieter noises, but they can't understand speech, match up sounds to objects, get directionality, or anything like that.

Let me know if you have cites to the contrary.

You could say the same sort of thing about Europe's Human Brain Project.

Yes but you can pick up an infection while immunocompromised that kills you even after you remove the graft and stop the immunosuppressant drugs, or before you have a chance to do so.

I explicitly brought up brain plasticity as not a convincing argument.

People who are blind (even if just blindfolded) from birth and have their sight restored as adults are still functionally blind. They get a bit of light and color, but basically can't interpret objects.

The issues I am talking about are all TA2, so the breakdown doesn't help. It's just a completely different technology readiness level.

Edit: Just looked at the video. There is ONE THIRD OF A SLIDE described for less than 90 seconds (28:27) that addresses the issues I raise. They just list random things people might try like "stem cells". Just bizarre

I have downgraded my respect for ARPA-H. Hopefully this is just some fluke to have gotten approved.

Can someone explain why this isn’t crazy? ARPA-H is new and supposed to be ambitious, but I assume they are still tethered to reality, so I must be misinderstanding.

Physically transplanting the eye ball and having it survive and not be rejected by the body is a challenging feat, but it’s been done quite recently and is based on known principles and techniques. However, that is like 1% of the difficulty. The hard part is making the eye nerves, which are basically an extension of the brain, talk coherently to the rest of the brain. Seems like it’s only slightly less hard than trying to take a chunk of donor brain, implant it in someones skull, sew it to their brain, and hope that they can use it to think. (Yes you can wave your hands and say “brain plasticity”, but brains adapting to damage by routing around it is just a completely different thing than getting pieces that have been mechanically severed to heal and interact usefully.)

Is there any reason this wouldn’t start in animals decades before it could work in humans? To my knowledge, no one has ever shown an animal can get any useful vision info from a transplanted eye, and that seems confirmed by the article.

Like, I don’t think we can even get cats raised from birth in weird optical environments (lack of horizontal lines) to see fully normally. You need to like completely reset the biological development stage of the animal. If we thought we could do that using stem-cell-whatever magic, wouldn’t it be a lot easier to start by treating minor developmental eye disorders than do full-on eye transplants?

A re-fueled Starship will be able to deliver ~100 tons to the surface of Mars, to be compared with the heaviest existing rover that was slightly over 1 ton. Yes, it will take ~10 Starship flights to fully refuel one Mars-bound Starship, but the fully reusable design is supposed to ensure this can be done for relative cheap.

Scott Manley has some good videos focusing on various engineering aspects of Apollo: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=apollo+scott+ma...

You could do worse than just reading all the Wikipedia articles on all the various pieces of hardware, e.g., the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle

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

That’s more than halfway through the post. The GP’s point that railing for pages about how X is good and Y is bad before defining them stands.

I understand that. I’m giving an example that is an instance of the sibling commenters’ claims that more transparently rebuts the idea that quantum codes cannot use redundancy because of no cloning.

Just an example to expand on what others are saying: in the N^2-qubit Shor code, the X information is recorded redundantly in N disjoint sets of N qubits each, and the Z information is recorded redundantly in a different partitioning of N disjoint sets of N qubits each. You could literally have N observers each make separate measurements on disjoint regions of space and all access the X information about the qubit. And likewise for Z. In that sense it's a repetition code.

Is there an implied valuation? Or not enough details released?

> Reading a transcript of the interview would probably be better

I might be reading to much into the "a" (rather than "the"), but to be clear: there is a transcript at the bottom.

No. That’s not what wikipedia says, and I feel confident asserting that an Earth-mass object forming on its own would not be considered a brown dwarf by the vast majority of astronomers. (Maybe it would also not be considered a “planet”, due to some Pluto-adjacent technicalities, but then what do people call it? I’m betting they use “rogue planet” in practice.)

shrug I have a degree in physics and have always heard people define brown dwarfs by size (and occasionally composition) rather than formation mechanism.