yorak

Mee too, please share in pastebin or somewhere.

Automating a fleet of trucks has come up few times in these comments. Many commenters have raised concerns of difficult and special situations.

I have worked with machine vision and currently I'm doing my PhD in computational logistics (mainly working on automating the deployment of Vehicle Routing Systems). With this background in mind have given some tought to this: What would be needed, at least in the transition phase, is technology that would allow remote drive-by-wire of trucks in difficult situations (platforms, urban traffic) and wheater conditions.

Imagine a system not entirely unlike the unmanned UAVs the US is using but for civilian use of remote controlling trucks. One driver could probably handle dowzen or so trucks because they would drive under full automation at least 90% of the time. In addition the truck driver could have a normal 9 to 5 job.

Of course there are technical challenges like communications delay etc., but I'd like to hear your opinion on feasibility of such system.

> the system tries every setting and graphs the results so it's easy to pick out the best setting. How would that happen? How does the system know what "good" is?

In a research field of Parameter Tuning we try to answer that question. The field is more focused to optimizing algorithm parameters, but it could be applied to physical world of robots etc., if it is feasible to automatically repeat the experiment few dozen to around hundred times.

If we would do like Bret proposed, by logging each experiment we would already have done some "probing" on the parameter space. This, in turn, would allow us to build a statistical model of the phenomena and then minimize/maximize on that. The resulting parameter configuration would then be evaluated, the model updated and the process repeated until satisfactory level of performance was reached.

See for example the recent works from Hutter et al. [1], where they use Random Forests with parameter tuning to make parameter "goodness" predictions (in order to reduce the actual experiments on the target algoritm/robot/whatever).

[1] http://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/beta/Projects/SMAC/

Also, I recently found out that Android app from Linkedin extracts your gmail contacts. From what I could gather, you cannot opt-out. I was quite annoyed by this. I also see this a more probable explanation to contact harvesting than hacking to email accounts.

In fact I just discovered that there are Pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants (PSPS) because they were planning to build one also to Finland into a old mine (with mile long shaft). PSPS could solves the power storage problem for wind and solar as long as there is enough suitable locations to use as PSPS reservoirs.

It could be worse, you know. The car colliding with the modern day Chevy could be European car of that era. Here, see Citroen 2CV (the first car in that queue to be hit) to disappear: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR0LRSLCN2I It is like magic, but scary.

After seeing that clip I've been somewhat scared to drive my 2CV around..

Perhaps could even be reutilized as one? I see it is a 50 USD off-the-self extruder for your DIY 3D printer. Add steppers with electronics, draw by hand some fixtures, add "vitamins" (nuts, bolts etc.) and and go.

There is a flaw in your rationale. Creative endeavours are a high risk activity. Heck, just see how big % of startups fail. Also, we do not know how many failed projects Bellard has started (I'd suspect hundreds?).

Us mere mortars have bills to play and children to support. It makes us unable to take on the challenges that could potentially lead to huge gains because the short term rewards are not guaranteed.

Also measuring every step of progress with monetary value does not work. New discovery (or project, or tool, whatever) may be the first step required on a long path to a great discovery, but by itself, worth €/$ 0 to everybody.

The question from previous discussion remains unanswered. How does he finance his production of top notch open source software? At least for me, the day to day churn of my day job leaves me too mentally exhausted to chase the crazy ideas I get from time to time, let alone finish them.

Imagine a world where hackers, artists and artisans could follow their passions and could chase crazy ideas without a risk of losing the roof on top of their heads and butter over their bread. How many Bellards, we as a humanity, would have running around flinging great code, solving great problems and giving away the fruits of their hard work?

I think we could afford it if we really wanted. If the world just accepted that because of automation fewer and fewer people are needed to work in production (food, items etc.) a huge untapped innovative potential is waiting to be unleashed. In playing Civilization this would be easy, just a click and your society has changed the emphasis of it's production to sciences and art. But how to do this in real life?

I guess I just have to wait and see if the government of Finland gets around and issues citizen’s income as propagated by the Green party. That would be a start and the consequences would be really interesting to see.

Ray Dalio, the founder of the investment firm Bridgewater Associates includes self-examination, honesty and introspection as one of the key ingredients in getting what you want from life.

I take the article as another datapoint to support his theory.

A good read: http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

I think some people take AVTizzles comment or, as I see it, flow of thought too harshly. My interpretation of his comment is that he is not giving a statement or preaching about the true way (tm) of doing things Right.

I feel that he did a honest attempt to understand why it is so that at the same time there is capable young people sleeping on the streets and capable young people donating $500 million to charity? Why this world is like that? Some people seem to get angry when someone is trying to find out the reason why as if they'd have the answers. We all know that shooting the messenger does not help. Is is some kind of self-blame in works what drives people to a sort of resentment presented in some of the replies?

Because: Finland? We have 2 month summer vacation in elementary school (189 work days/year). The school days seem to begin around 8.30 am. And we were long time the best country in PISA rankings (currently ranked 3nd after a city state of Shanghai and South Korea).

What many people who try to model the success of Finnish education system fail to see, is that Finnish society is highly equal. This is true between genders and especially between individuals from different social status and background. We work hard to give high quality education for everybody, no matter the cost.

This is the reason why sometimes I wonder how the projects that aim to export the Finnish school model to the countries like Saudi-Arabia can succeed, if the profound problems with the inequality deep in respective societies is not addressed first.

The PISA measures averages and it is in cutting the lower performing tail of the distribution where Finland excels.

I think one reason why dogmatic advocating is so prevalent is that introduction of new processes and methodology to a team or organization requires considerable push. You have to overcome huge amounts of resistance from the people the changes concern, even if your role in the organization allows you to make the decisions. Strong opinions of your chosen approach make it possible to overcome obstacles.

If all developers would be "inquisitive, curious and pragmatic" you could probably rationalize the decisions and carry the necessary actions without evangelism. Unfortunately the world is sometimes awfully imperfect.

I find this a good approach for marketing interesting new (indie) games for Android. However to be honest, the indie thing is not so much of an differentiator in mobile space than it is in PC gaming? Big studio games are still rather rare on mobile platforms.

But, why oh why the site does not work on the platform the games are intended for? The flash introduction videos do not run properly, the default browser lags because of the Javascript and my Transformer Prime2 (with ICS 4.0.3) rebooted itself because of the page.

I will probably purchase the bundle despite these grievances, though.. :)