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>We have to have systems in place which have such monetary/time losses factored in.

Sure, everyone agrees with that. Can you propose a model that will work?

Are there any reasons to use a full synth these days? I'm not a musician but I've been dabbling in digital audio on and off and I really like the sound quality of sampled instruments especially for Piano. I haven't used the original DX7 only a VST (Dexed) for it.

>to me, the defining sadness is that the past decade has been the death of apis, the end of interoperability. the word web evokes a weaving together, a connectedness, and that, to me, always extended far beyond the link.

I think to an extent, interoperability is forced upon businesses for commercial reasons. Its business 101 to want silos and total ownership and control over services and data.

I think we need a law that states that if you capture/index public data, it must be made available to the public in one form or another. You may have a modest fee to cover your expenses.

Yup, we're in violent agreement :)

Well, but the point was that human performance on any task has a lot of variability. Therefore - 'worst' - as a label, does not strictly apply in the qualitative sense. Maybe a probabilistic risk model would be more appropriate. What complicates things is that you cannot compare a human to an AV algorithm apples-apples. For even the worst human driver is extremely unlikely to confuse a human on the road with a paper bag - something that a ML classifier algorithm can (if there was a bug).

> As I was leaving the supermarket I watched her struggle to open her car door before slowly getting into her car. I sat in my car for a few minutes watching as she struggled mightily to simply back her car out of her parking spot.

That is your cue to stay away from such drivers for your own safety. Just like if you see an idiot swerving on the freeway. Or if you hear loud honking and cars braking there is probably something going on. An AV would likely miss such cues unless it was specifically programmed to do so.

>That future may not even want or need cars.

Agreed, 100%. Instead of AV, we could focus on remote presence and other tech to make cars and/or daily commute unnecessary.

>Because the author’s skepticism doesn’t extend to the human factor.

And your over-enthusiasm for AV doesn't extend to the human factor. We all have our own blinders ;)

>The notion that we are safe because we can read humans is not substantiated by anything.

That is your own misinterpretation. I did not read the comment that way.

>If AV risk is so obvious as you claim then why does the enormous amount of data show that AVs are involved in the less accidents and lead to less fatalities than cars operated by humans on a mile per mile basis?

What you mean when you say AV, is actually "AV + Human". We're running controlled experiments, limiting the unknowns, and we're mandating a human be present - because the current AV technology sucks.

> We can debate the “when” in terms of AVs but debating the “if” seems pretty out of touch with the way society has progressed with respect to our willingness to depend on technology.

People used to say that about flying cars 40 years ago.

Well, those countries are not global powers, yet. Quite a bit of the China bashing comes from the US, and that's why I brought it up. If we judge the US and a lot of the other so called world leaders by the same standard as we judge China, things don't look so rosy anymore.

Not the OP, but personally I don't want other self-driving cars on the road with me risking me and my family. We know how easily, and plentifully, software bugs get introduced every single release, I would imagine developers being the last set of people who are willing to risk their life on software.

What does "worst" mean? Did they get into an accident once or twice, but drive just fine on otherwise? Do they drive bad every single day? etc etc.

>Through adoption of autonomous vehicles, many predict we will drastically cut the number of fatalities.

Who are these many people, and why should we believe their predictions?

> We’ve proven to be perennially distracted, we have terrible reaction times, we have extremely narrow vision, we panic in situations instead of remaining calm, etc. and yes, these faults do lead to the deaths of children.

We've also proven that all software has bugs, and developers keep introducing new bugs in every single release. There is no reason to think that self-driving car software will be any different. Whats worse is that when software is updated, these bugs will now be pushed out to tens of thousands of cars - instantly.

Bit much to call someones position nonsense when they're just skeptical of obvious stuff :)

By design, democracy favors entities who care, and therefore lobby for change. Corporations do the majority of the lobbying and it shows.

The US peoples voted into power a President who pardons war criminals. And the next incoming President supports (or has supported in the past) wars and bombings which cost the lives of countless non-combatants. Which places has China bombed? If the claim is China has lots its moral standing, then The US is not on any firmer moral ground either.

>You’ve just had a “protectionist” President, US is worse off by almost every measure... as a counter example to your “protectionism is needed”

That is not a counter-example to anything AFAICT. We didn't have a 'protectionist' President. We had an incompetent President, who faked to be a protectionist.

A real data point would be this:

https://imgur.com/a/q3GUEzc

The US had a decent economy when we had high import duties.

You are correct that its easy to mis-apply broad sweeping statements based on individual complaints, however, Apple's extended warranty program generates billions of dollars and the Apple repair market is also worth hundreds of millions (sorry don't have a handy link, this is just waht I remember the last time I looked. Should be easy enough to Google). Its clear that like any other product Apple products too fail, and its also clear that the customers understand that Apple products fail.

+1 That is an amazing book.

>If you don’t like their computing model then don’t use it. Railing that they aren’t supporting your vision lockstep is pretty freaking arrogant.

If you don't like/agree/see value in this persons comment then why are you engaging with them? That's how silly your position sounds.

Now back to the substance of your comment.

>Or maybe different people have different needs and don’t care if every device is “open”.

How could "not open" be a need of someone?

>These are tools. Does the tool do what I want with the least amount of friction? That’s what they care about.

How does an Apple engineer documenting the design add friction in any way to what you're doing?

> Indeed Apples existence and continually pushing computing in new areas has benefited everyone in the last 40 years - whether you use Apple or not.

Apple has helped popularize the smartphone as a consumer device to consume music/media, do light business on (emails, IM, documents, etc) and do a few minor creative tasks digitally such as drawing, music, etc. They do get a lot of credit for that. They have also co-created an application platform for other businesses to sell software. But then they robbed 30% of their sales too - They get negative credit for being so greedy.

Your argument that they have "continually pushed computing" is a bit of a stretch. Give us your best argument/examples/facts.

>Could it be possible that male fossils are more likely to have usable DNA and thus bias the results?

You can't change the hypothesis to match data. We try to avoid doing that in science ;)

>Googlers are not that stupid, there would be huge internal strikes if the health data was sold to, say, health insurance companies.

So if any random set of employees at Google don't threaten to quit, that means that they're doing great? Also, why would any company sell the very thing that makes them money? :) They can make more money allowing companies to use the data by targeting certain users.

>By the past they have proven numerous time that they have a lot the sense of responsibilities -- as employees, as a whole.

What "sense of responsibility" does Google have? There is zero accountability here. They continue to spy on users and collect personal data, which now includes health data. A private company doing that for profit, makes it unethical in my view.

Why would your personal data be safer with an advertising company? Google is amassing personal data so they can charge higher rates for their so-called targeted/personalized ads. With all your personal data residing with a single ad company, it will be far easier to offer discounts to certain people, in-effect introducing tiered insurance pricing. The health insurance companies just want to figure out a way to charge sick people more, and healthy people less so they can maximize their customer base. It won't happen overnight, but then again Google started with the mission of organizing the worlds information. Hah, how often do you hear about that from them? You can barely go past page 10 on search results from the "millions" of supposed results.

Hmm, yeah that is odd! Maybe its a bug in the alignment tool?

What software do you use ? We use bwa/samtools/varscan/bcftools and we've reprocessed old data right from the fastq files a few times. So far we haven't gotten different results.

I think coming up with the final formula requires an understanding of not just taste/food science, but also manufacturing logistics, raw material sourcing, etc. There's probably a lot of trade-offs involved, as you can imagine as well. I agree with you that it's a team effort, but unfortunately the impact of such stories is probably diminished if they weren't about the janitor walking into the CEO's office and hitting a home run.

Yes, Apple can and does design chips. But as you can imagine - "Designing chips" can mean anything.

With respect to CMOS chips you can go from from calling up Sony and ordering one off the menu with your custom requirements, to designing the NAND/pixel interconnects, microlenses, downstream dual-gain architectures, to working on the bonding chemistry, masked pixels, CFAs etc, etc. However, all this stuff is patented up the wazoo, and companies like Sony, Samsung, Aptina, OmniVision etc do not simply hand-over world-class tech like this.

Apple is very good at supply chain logistics, overall packaging and design, UX, Software, etc. However, I don't see them challenging the established players on core technology.

If speed was ever a major factor in ranking - the search results would be dominated by pages without trackers/ads/etc. Google would never do that.

Can you explain the contribution of Apple here? I believe they simply buy the sensor tech from Sony. Sony currently makes the the best (or close to the best) consumer grade sensors for a wide variety of markets from dinky sensors for smartphones to full-frame and medium-format sensors for professional applications.

Also, I don't think Apple (as of today) has the capability to "obliterate" the pro market. Are you simply talking about buying other companies, or making new home-grown products?

You hit the nail on the head, the set of images that can only be taken with a DSLR/MILC is getting smaller and smaller.

To counter that a bit I'd like to add that there is a rise of video/youtuber folks wanting smooth 4k video with tracking auto-focus, and real bokeh which is making cameras, or hybrid cameras relevant again. I don't think phones do fake bokeh in video mode or do low-light video w/o looking like ass.

I strongly suspect you may be putting everything on auto and hoping the camera will focus on the right thing. It wont, because the camera has a very crappy auto-mode. It will, when you learn how to use manual mode and pick your own focus point. I fully accept that this is not something most people are interested in, but that camera can and does take wonderful images. Here are a few samples (randomly picked by flickr - I hope they're good :P ).

https://www.flickr.com/cameras/canon/eos_digital_rebel_xsi/

A 600mm F/4 lens gathers a lot of light per-unit sensor-area, and there are many reasons why professional nature photographers have historically needed such a large lens

(1) Older digital sensors weren't good at all with high-iso (high read-noise, low photon-electron conversion efficiency, etc)

(2) An off-sensor DSLR AutoFocus array has a very small effective-aperture, making the lens aperture very important in low-light situations for autofocus (which a lot of nature photography is)

(3) Bokeh - Ofcource nothing beats large aperture bokeh, but this can be tackled perhaps through computation?

For (1) and (2) Modern imaging sensors perform beautifully in high-iso scenarios. Also, with mirrorless, there are cameras that can AF down to F/22 - something unimaginable (and impossible) with DSLRs.

While the demand for 600mm F/4 is there from a professional standpoint, there is an even larger demand for cheaper options - and.. this point is important, you can produce award-worthy images using those cheaper potions. In fact if you look at any nature competition a lot of the awards go to images made with cheap/budget gear.

I was going to type the sentence differently, but then had a brain fart. Sorry about that :)