Just an English clarification. The wording "the road indicated to them was actually mined" would typically be interpreted as 'They were pointed to a road which happened to be mined'. The interpretation of "indicated" in this case is referring to the fact that someone "indicated" the road to them, not that the road somehow "indicated" it was mined (e.g. with signs).
The sentence as worded _could_ be interpreted that way but that would not be the typical interpretation and was almost assuredly not the intention from the article.
2030 seems impossible to me. In NY, you might not be able to see the road surface at all due to snow. Curbs and other landmarks that are necessary for Waymo to work (they map _everything_) will be covered. Seems unlikely to account for all conditions necessary for level 5 in 7 years.
Yeah. The against side of this bet seems like a no brainer. Is it possible (maybe even more likely than not) that there will be a fully autonomous system that will be available in that timeframe that can navigate many limited access highways in certain weather conditions by then? Absolutely.
And that actually looks very interesting to me for long drives. I actually care less about handling local driving including urban driving near me. I want the long highway drives to be handled.
Yes, 100% autonomous is another kind of interesting and opens up use cases like dropping me off at the airport. But that seems really hard.
I was going to post a top-level comment but I wanted to make sure to point out that the parent is the most important point; You are burned out and need some rest and perspective.
That said, consider that with a career in medicine, you could get into research aspects, learn some machine-learning on your own, and apply that to your medical research. I believe it would be much harder to go in the other direction.
What you say is absolutely true. But I will also say that most people have warped ideas of proper weight. Using myself as an example, I was 195 and felt like I was overweight but not obese. If only I could get down to 165 again I'd be skinny. Charts said my "normal" range was 120-140 and I felt like that was ridiculous. When I reached 160 I was surprised at how much fat was still on my body. Again at 145. When I reached 130 I could finally see that those numbers made sense. I was fit, not a lifter but not sedentary either. The range was perfect.
Agreed with everything except the first sentence. People's subjective judgements of normal have been warped because most people are fat. Hell, 42% are obese. Everyone is the captain of their own life but at people should at least be objective and honest with themselves and not try to dismiss reality as a coping mechanism, even if it is an unconscious one.
Correct. We use Flyway and have it setup through GitLab CI/CD pipelines. We used to have a bottleneck on one of two people with permissions. Now, if data needs to be pushed to the production system for some reason through a script, an Issue/MR in GitLab gets the Flyway script, it must be approved by two people on the team (other than the person who did the work), it must make it through the test system, and then can be pushed to production directly through GitLab. It increases the process but is safer and reduces the bus factor.
Is this any different from any new tech? The first car owners had to know a lot about taking care of that car. When I was young, you were expected to know how to do many regular maintenance tasks on your car and fix the simple things. Today most people couldn't do much of anything on a new car. Same trajectory.
It goes beyond even tech. Home repair especially. The pragmatic knowledge had by my grandparents generation was just astounding to me. My grandpa was so damn smart. He was an engineer for Alcoa working with drafting tables and a slide rule. His brain was just rooted in mathmatics. One time we had a roll of some tar paper for a project and we needed to figure out how many feet we had left on the roll to see if we should buy another roll. He just put a ruler across the diameter, stared at it for a while, stared at the sky with his mouth open for a second, then he had the correct length. Blew my mind when I went home and looked up the formula he worked out correctly in his head in about 30 seconds:
𝐿=𝜋∗(𝑅2−𝑟2)/𝑇
I'd need to pull out a calculator to do anything with pi.
I've been wondering why that is, why this older generation was so much more focused so to speak. It makes sense when you consider the cultural influences surrounding that. My grandpa grew up in the great depression and rebuilt china after the japanese occupation during WWII. It was a matter of survival and pride to focus and improve yourself for your family. My fathers generation, it was popular to ditch class to smoke weed in the woods rather than pay attention in class. My generation, it was popular to be on your phone all day rather than pay attention in class. If all the generations since my grandfathers were as focused as his was on learning things, my word, maybe their now wild predictions on the glorious would be future in the atomic age would have actually materialized.
Just because this is an older problem doesn't mean it's not a problem.
Yes, people that loved fixing up cars would have complained about "kids these days" not knowing how to fix a car. I was certainly one of those kids.
However seeing this happen with a field I know makes me realize those people complaining about people not knowing how to take care of their cars were right.
And while this is true of "any new tech", it's a relatively recent phenomenon as tech has only been advancing this rapidly in last 100 years or so.
It is a bad thing to be increasingly alienated from the tools you rely on for your day-to-day existence. Of course it's in part because cars and computers have both been increasingly designed by their manufactures to be difficult to take apart and understand. Tools that you don't understand increasingly control you rather than the other way around and I personally think this is a trend worth resisting.
It's good to point out that this is an issue and even better to encourage more people to be curious, and learn how things work. Another example that I'm surprised of is people's homes. I know a shocking number of home owners that cannot fix a single thing in their own home without calling a "professional" (and it's increasingly surprising how many professionals also don't understand what they're doing!) This was extremely evident during the freezing temperatures in Texas where many people didn't know how to shut off the water to their homes.
One of the best parts of the "hacker" mentality is to encourage people to not be scared of their tools and the things they own. While things have gotten more complicated, you can do a large amount of repair and modification on your own for almost everything. It honestly feels very liberating (not to mention saving you a lot of money) to snake a clog 12 ft deep in your drain, replace your car's serpentine belt, restore old hardwood floors, repair broken refrigerators from parts, etc.
Yes, it is different. With a car, no matter how modern, you still (used to) command where it drives you. In a smartphone, someone else makes this decision for you. (Or at least someone else limits your options.)
There is obviously a difference between not knowing what a URL is and not being able to read assembly. Both could be seen as "arcane details of computer knowledge" that enhance your autonomy when using a computer, but one is in principle accessible to 95% of the world's population without much effort, the other is a highly specialized technical skill.
There's also a weird thing with computers where people are a lot less willing to think a problem through.
If you put someone in an unfamiliar car and ask them to drive it somewhere, the most trouble they're likely to have is if they need to figure out how to turn on the wipers in the dark. The controls may vary but they're close enough that people figure it out.
Put that same person in front of their work computer, but rearrange all the desktop icons and change the color scheme. There's a non-zero chance that they immediately freeze up and act like there's no possible way for them to do anything. They act like human macros, any slight change throws everything off.
Not exactly analogous though. They didn't need to know how to fix their cars to get through high school assignments. How the hell did kids turn in essays and whatnot? I doubt they were printing them. Or was literally everything done in Google Docs?
From my experience most non-IT workers were the same pre cloud.
They just do things by rote and save everything to a single folder or their desktop - its why a lot of office workers hate change to new application or operating system versions, they don't understand how it works they have just memorized a bunch of steps to follow to get a task done.
When Chromebooks came out, Google made schools a major target for those devices. Looks like it worked.
And meanwhile, the 'directory structure' of Google docs remains one of the worst I've seen. Haven't opened a document in 6 months? Good luck finding it without using the search bar.
Usually when turning in it's either a document already created in google clasroom, so you just click a button and it turns in, or it's found via the list of "recently opened documents."
I don't think she knows the difference between those document types other than she can type into one but not the others. A PDF and a read-only google text document are essentially the same thing as far as she is concerned.
OP is referring to the improvement in cars over time. Something I just barely remember the tail end of (and I'm not old). Over the 20th century, cars went from something you basically had to be a mechanic to own and drive, to machines where you push a button and steer.
Until modern engines under computer control (1980s) it wasn't guaranteed your car would start when you turned the key. Especially in a cold place like here. Pop the hood, fiddle with the carburetor, fiddle with the fuel ratio, apply a heating pad. Something like that was the morning routine for my father's old pickup truck.
Such unreliability would immediately result in such a vehicle being discarded as defective today, but it was pretty normal back then. I seem to recall far more "sorry I'm late, but the car wouldn't start" even in the 90s than today. Of course, getting rid of the handcrank to start was probably the biggest improvement but that was before my time :)
The nostalgia for old cars being simple and reliable is baffling, I guess because they were always cantankerous a bigger failure wasn't as jarring, whereas modern cars are like appliances that work reliably all the time until something big happens like a timing belt or transmission fails.
I really enjoyed this. It's about building on the web (js specifically) without the use of libraries or frameworks. I wish the policy here was to post with a useful description since the title tells you nothing until you've already started reading the article. I clicked out of boredom, but was pleasantly surprised.
Ok, I see, thanks; even found a wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babylon_Bee. "The Babylon Bee is a conservative Christian news satire website that publishes satirical articles on religion, politics, current events, and well-known public figures." Might explain why the text is not funny.
The Bee is terrible satire. This is a reasonably good joke, because they stole it[1].
Which they then made worse by adding some cruelty. "Admit" is their fantasy: "ha ha, you're not so great, you're not really that smart". The original gag "Computer Programming To Be Officially Renamed “Googling Stackoverflow”" is better: it's programmers being in on the joke instead of punching down.
Punching down is pretty much what The Babylon Bee does. Another of their articles is "Dumb AOC Accidentally Strangles Herself Tying Her Shoes (Because She Is So Stupid)". I literally thought that was somebody's parody of the Babylon Bee, but no, that's a real thing:
Well, apparently the sample of my take of satire is also not recognized as such; admittedly, without context, I would also take your comment as serious.
The sentence as worded _could_ be interpreted that way but that would not be the typical interpretation and was almost assuredly not the intention from the article.