21,130 karma · joined January 24, 2010
Postdocs at IBM Research (under Charlie Bennett) and at Perimeter Institute. UCSB Ph.D. 2012 (advisor: Wojciech Zurek). Princeton B.A. 2007. TJHSST 2003.
jessriedel.com
Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.
But enforcement is not even my point. I'm referring to a moral principle.
"The risk of tumor seeding after liver biopsy is 2.7%"
https://easl.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Hepatocellular-Ca...
Tissue containment systems for uterine morcellation
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safety-communications/up...
> In any case, the software updates rolled out by the company appear to be quick and easy to install. Many airlines completed them within hours. The software works by inducing "rapid refreshing of the corrupted parameter so it has no time to have effect on the flight controls", Airbus says. This is, in essence, a way of continually sanitising computer data on these aircraft to try and ensure that any errors don't end up actually impacting a flight.
The author's mistake was this: "[my colors] are equidistant in the hue circle". The problem is that the hue circle (at least under the parameterization scheme he used) is not uniform over discrimination, i.e., the ability to discriminate two hues is not invariant under displacing them an equal amount along the circle. (I presume this is one of those situation where it's misleading to think about three primary colors on equal footing because of quirks of human vision biology.)
First, the author could have chosen 7 hues at max-saturation that were easier to discriminate than this. But more importantly, he should have used the other color axes: saturation and brightness. dark red (~maroon) and light red (~pink) are a lot easier to discriminate, even when not next to each other, than the two shades of green he used.
Reusable, propulsively landed stages for rockets capable of putting payloads into Earth orbit is stupendously harder. The speeds involved are like 10-100x higher than these little hops. The first stages of Falcon 9 and Starship are still the only rockets that have achieved that. Electron has only re-used a single engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(Titan_space_probe)
The single image from the surface by the Huygens probe leaves a lot to be desired.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Huyge...
The preprint announcing the discovery lists the semi-major axis as 838 au, so the major axis is 1676 au and aphelion is about 1630 au.
Of course it does. Pre-Uber, we had both standard yellow cabs and black car services at different levels. (The main reason you see relative homogeneity within yellow cabs is that the government forces it by setting prices, not because of anything intrinsic about a fleet. Black cars are excluded from these rules.)
In shipping we can pay for different speeds and types of handling. On planes and trains we have different class tickets. In the rental car market, we have Hertz and we have rent-a-wreck. And even within Hertz, there are different car quality levels, which somewhat decreases flexibility (since you need to have more cars on hand than you would with a homogeneous fleet), but it's worth the upkeep to charge the wealthy customers more. Etc.
> Then please explain how cars would get dirtier as the service scales up? If today is already seeing the cars at full utilization, barring a cost-cutting measure that determined that cleaning less frequently would be a significant cost savings (which is a big assumption on your part), then we should be seeing roughly how clean the cars will be into perpetuity.
1. Tech prices come down, so the average customer willingness to pay for cleanliness comes down.
2. Services often launch with non-scalable attention to detail to control the initial public impression (eating the cost), and then relax over time.
3. Segmentation that's not feasible at the current scale but will be in the future.
Incorrect.
> unless they explicitly make an expensive "oft-cleaned" tier and a less expensive "less-oft-cleaned" tier,
That's exactly what I'm saying would happen. We already have it with Uber Black.
> You're assuming that the cars today don't get maximum utilization, and that with more utilization you'd see dirtier cars.
No, I'm not assuming that.
> As another note, I just don't see how cleaning-based market segmentation would make good operational sense
Again, Uber Black.
If a service is necessarily expensive, it will more by wealthy people, who have a higher willingness to pay for cleanliness.
> As it stands, clean cars are important to their customers.
This varies depending on the customer.
> If usage increases, cleaning can ostensibly increase too, no?
Greater usage can lead to economies of scale that push down the cost of cleaning, but I think we're already at the scale (hundreds of cars) where most of the economies of scale have been reached. I expect it's close to linear from now on.