safog

It's pretty amazing the amount of money they make on services. It's almost 45% of the iPhone revenue, while I was under the impression that it was more like 3-4% of overall revenue.

This is the key thing here - Uber for instance doesn't need to solve L5 self driving. They need to figure out what routes are frequent in their network and what routes can be driven by their self driving car and route a ride appropriately.

It will never be Uber flicked a switch and replaced all their human drivers. It will be a very gradual transition over to self driving that may never reach more than 25-30% of all trips.

Is that worth the billions of dollars they're pouring into self driving? https://www.uber.com/newsroom/company-info/ says they complete 14 million trips a day. That is 5.1 billion trips a year (and growing). 10% of that is a 500 million trips a year. Assuming the average trip is 13$, that would be $6.5 billion per year in revenue, I think that's more than enough to turn a significant profit even accounting for R&D, Capital expenses to maintain the fleet etc.

The reason self driving will be a reality is purely economic. Noone's developing it to change the world or reduce the number of people dying in accidents or whatever shpiel they cook up.

Why does it matter if it's Americans listening to it vs third world contractors?

Also Google and Amazon are a large American companies that mostly try to do the right thing in terms of user privacy. I'd be more concerned about the random IoT microwaves and fridges made by a small company in China or Japan with their own assistant features built in sending audio to god knows where. Atleast I can reasonably trust the wakeword implementations for Alexa and Home, you can't even trust than with other h/w.

It again comes back to, yes, researchers listen to a carefully chosen random selection of audio clips and they're not really targeting a single user. It's impossible to explain that nuance in marketing material.

[Citation Needed]

Maybe a micro-kernel that just runs the networking stack and couple of drivers for any custom h/w they're using?

I also wonder if by optimizing for some combination of battery life, battery size, device size, Cost, QPS required, Sensors on-board we'll end up with something that has interesting monitoring capabilities in very remote regions.

It would then become American football where offense and defense get swapped out as soon as there's a possession change. No thank you. I like soccer just the way it is now.

Are there any good soccer data collections (free / reasonably priced) for an individual programmer to build something like this?

Not sure about the state of the world currently after living in BigCo filter bubble for the past few years, but do you even need custom tools to calculate the delta between the schema as checked into VCS vs the database's actual state?

Spanner (https://cloud.google.com/spanner/) I think can auto-compute the diff between its current state and a given schema, generate appropriate SQL statements to perform a migration and get user confirmation for destructive schema changes.

+1 - You've vocalized my thoughts much more beautifully than I ever could have. Aside from the general cultural aspect of it (better content, interesting forum discussions, Adium conversations with friends at 2AM), programming as a profession lost a bit of magic for me as well.

Life just became all about getting that next refresher, the next good rating / bonus, the next promo in an almost mindless push towards higher comps.

There isn't that sheer fascination / joy in discovering what you can do with technology anymore. Maybe it's because working in a generic big-co is intensely competitive and once you've given so much there, it's hard to come back home and engage in more deep thought. Maybe it's because we just got older, had families and do what normal adults do (reading some linux driver code at 2AM in the morning to get the wifi / trackpad working doesn't sound as fun anymore).