There has never been a fad held in as much secrecy as the self driving car craze. It's been 15 years of startups, yet no source code or algorithm has ever been released by anyone working on a full sized self driving car, while past generations were quick to release source code for quad copters, web browsers, operating systems, & video codecs. Every Stanford student is working on some self driving car project, but with no place to start. It's like thousands of Linuxes being written from scratch, with no-one making any progress beyond what can be done in the 5 years between graduation & a better living through flipping houses.


Tried enhancing the only released footage of the Uber crash, the 1st fatality caused by a self driving car, but it was a downscaled, compressed copy of a video. The dynamic range was too poor to resolve any details in the shadow, where a human would have seen details.  The current generation has an attitude that the car did everything possible & blindly accepts the company claim that the secret autopilot was extremely sophisticated.  To someone programming autopilots for years, it didn't seem like a very capable autopilot at all.



The car was going too fast to stop in the visible distance, which for the car could have included the LIDAR range. Human drivers are told to go no faster than they can stop in the visible distance.  Someone with no ivy league degree would have at least used a better camera in a self driving...Continue Reading

FULL Elon Musk’s session at SXSW 2018 on latest news | March 11, 2018 (1 hr 9 min 42 sec)

Watermarking, elevator music included.

Hard to believe he still sticks to direct democracy, after Calif*'s experience with it. Half the state is in poverty & the infrastructure voted in by direct democracy is the same thing he's trying to undo.


If he's still sticking to the claim of building the 1st BFS, it's most definitely in pieces on the mane factory floor. They'll send it in pieces down the 110 to a boat & complete it in Texas. They already moved a much larger tank to Seattle.


The biggest existential threat is not artificial intelligence or a world war, but economic collapse. Modern dogma since 2014 has said debt never has to be repaid, but we can endlessly innovate our way out of it. Some say it will have to be repaid, leading to a new dark ages. Modern dogma feels exactly like 1999, when they said the internet was so valuable, it made all previous debts meaningless & was like starting a new economy from scratch.

You know the one.

Listening to Ready Player One, the lion kingdom is reminded of Lawnmower Man & Cloak & Dagger. The problem with books about the best computer game ever made is for the book to be convincing, the author has to really invent the best computer game ever made, which no author ever does.

The Oasis sounds incredibly boring. The author devotes too many pages to the rules & gameplay of something so boring, when it should just be an accessory to the plot.

Otherwise, the technology has existed to make the Oasis & certainly Lawnmower Man, for 20 years. Why hasn't it actually materialized? It would be trivial to make a chatroom using $5 VR goggles like what the book described, but lions suspect such a program would be incredibly boring.


The other thing was, driving the robot for 10 miles while listening to the book is like being in the book. The sky gets darker & the LEDs get brighter as the cars full of ordinary mortals line up on their commutes. You bang away on the only game controller of its kind in the world, throwing down mile after mile on the only robot of its kind in the world. The lion kingdom wondered if the mane character ever had to pause the game because his running robot only had 10 miles of battery power.