comes right up in Safari, but Chrome (which my colleagues use and I tried/failed at yesterday) is just "Waiting for boringstartupstuff.com" with a blank white screen and a spinner in the tab. If I do a Chrome incognito window, it comes right up.
Not that 37,000+ is a great number, but I don't think many of the detractors here are arguing that Uber et. al have a perfect record. Just that it's possible that progress is being made in a more reckless way than necessary. Just because space flight is inherently difficult and risky and ambitious doesn't mean we don't investigate the possibly preventable factors behind the Challenger disaster.
edit: You seem to be referencing the worldwide estimate. Fair, but we're not even close to having self-driven cars in the most afflicted countries. Nevermind AI, we're not even close to having clean potable water worldwide, and diarrhea-related deaths outnumber road accident deaths according to WHO: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/
Yeah but the tech will spread there fairly soon after it's established in the US. In places like Africa the most common cars are not some African brand, they seem to mostly be Toyotas, who will probably implement self driving when it's proven.
For what value of “soon after” is very expensive automation going to reach Africa, India, and other places in numbers sufficient to put a dent in those fatalities? The slow march of other tech, safety included, suggests decades. Meanwhile the safety gains of automation are so far hypothetical, amd until they’re well demonstrated, potentially a distant pipe dream. Nothing about ML/AI today suggests a near-future of ultra-safe cars.
Wow, let's just put people in bubble suits so they don't hurt themselves. It's ridiculous to say people shouldn't drive cars because it's possible to hurt themselves or others. We might as well outlaw pregnancy for all the harm that can come to people as a result of being born.
> if we wait for the gov to set up a certification for this, we'll delay the whole industry 10 years.
That's not a particularly convincing argument, given that (so far), Uber's self-driving cars have a fatality rate of 50 times the baseline, per mile driven[0].
Having to wait an extra ten years to make sure that everything is done properly doesn't sound like the worst price to pay.
In those 10 years ~350,000 people will die in car accidents in the US alone.
Let's say that halving the death rate is what we can reasonably expect from the first generation of self driving cars. Every year we delay that is 15,000 people dead. This woman dying is a personal tragedy for her and those that knew her. However, as society we should be willing to accept thousands of deaths like hers if it gets us closer to safer self driving cars.
> Let's say that halving the death rate is what we can reasonably expect from the first generation of self driving cars.
What's your evidence for why this is a reasonable expectation? The fatalities compared to the amount of miles driven by autonomous vehicles so far shows that this is not possible at the moment. What evidence is there that this will radically improve soon?
Why should we accept those deaths? This is like saying we should let doctors try out surprise untested and possibly fatal therapies on patients during routine check ups if their research might lead to a cure for cancer.
This is a silly interpretation of the data. You can tell because up to now, Uber could've been characterized as having an infinitely better fatality rate than the baseline. Which also would've been a silly thing to say. If a single data point takes you from infinitely better to 50x worse, the correct interpretation is: Not enough data.
> You can tell because up to now, Uber could've been characterized as having an infinitely better fatality rate than the baseline. If a single data point takes you from infinitely better to 50x worse, the correct interpretation is: Not enough data.
No, you couldn't have characterized Uber has having "infinitely better" fatality rate than the baseline, because that would have resulted in a division-by-zero to calculate the standard error. Assuming a frequentist interpretation of probability, of course; the Bayesian form is more complicated but arrives at the same end result.
It's true that the variance is higher when the sample size is lower, but that doesn't change the underlying fact that Uber's fatality rate per mile driven is empirically staggeringly higher than the status quo. Assigning zero weight to our priors, that's the story the data tells.
You're talking statistics. I'm talking common sense. Your interpretation of the data is true, but it isn't honest. As a response to scdc I find it silly.
Nope. Error bars do exist, and with those attached, the interpretation of the data before/after is consistent. Before it was an upper bound, after it is a range. Every driven mile makes the error on it smaller.
If this works, recruitment costs will go way down & researchers could afford to give/loan people iOS devices who may not own one. Very excited about Research Kit.
Curious-- do you define a running database system (e.g. MySQL) to contain "data at rest", "data in transit" or neither?
My reading says "neither". Conservative move is "encrypt everything" but curious if others have passed/failed a HIPAA audit with a standard MySQL or SQL Server system (assuming you have individual ID access & logging).
Would love to see this work in the Sonos app. I'm a Prime member & just added a bunch of albums to my Amazon Music Player via web browser. Switched to Sonos and the AMP, but only see the ones I've purchased.
Yes, but it is abstract development that relies on lower level discoveries. It's like designing a medical treatment that relies on anti-biotics, if no new antibiotics are discovered, and the old ones become less valuable, then new treatments hault.
The A7 is a marvelous chip, but the reason these super smartphones exist is silicon manufacturing prowess. If we could not make these chips smaller and less power hungry, the mobile revolution would not have happened. Apple stood on the shoulders of giants who went before them in this regard.
Intel, IBM, TSMC, et al, plow a lot of money into advancing silicon manufacturing further. Lots of other companies plow billions into tools to support this sector.
In some ways, taking in huge margins on silicon upstream (while the downstream players are squeezed to minimize their margins), without plowing money back into the system, could be seen as somewhat parasitical.
I used to work at IBM Research, and one of the things I used to love doing was reading IBM Systems Journal. Research, like on scanning electron microscopes, measuring quantized magnetic flux in superconducting circuits, new kinds of giant magneto resistive effects, it was all very exciting to know that right down the hall, stuff I'd normally read about in Scientific American, Nature, or other places was being done. IBM T.J. Watson Research was given relative autonomy when I was there, they could spend money without have to justify it as being linked to a product, and I think that was very valuable for long term development.
The new players in Silicon Valley don't seem to have the same commitment to basic R&D, long term R&D. Everything has to be linked to something shiny that can be sold in 2-3 years.
Apple is indirectly plowing billions of dollars into that research via their contracts with Intel and the foundries. If the margins on those contracts aren’t sufficient to provide for further research, that’s on the head of the supplier’s pricing teams, not Apple.
And if Walmart's employees and Chinese suppliers have their payments squeezed, it's not Walmart's fault? That ignores the pricing power that a large player has. Apple and Tim Cook, as has been noted in the media, are very good at negotiating down their suppliers.
But no matter how you slice it, these downstream suppliers are doing more with less. They have much smaller margins, fund more important R&D which benefits the entire ecosystem, which takes up a much larger percentage of their overall revenues.
The marginal utility of an extra dollar in Apple's cash reserves seems less useful or effective than the marginal utility of a dollar in say, TSMC's coffers.
Intel obviously has vastly more negotiating power than any of Walmart’s suppliers. This may or may not be true of other fabs, but even in that space there are only a few suppliers and the costs of switching fabs are enormous; that isn’t true when Walmart is searching for a supplier of plastic adirondack chairs.
You're basically arguing (repeatedly) that outsourcing (and thus the whole modern economy) won't work. It's provocative, but seriously citation needed.
Apple designed the A7 themselves. It happens to implement the ARM instructions, but is not an ARM design. The only other player I can think of currently with this in the wild is Qualcomm, and this is one reason Apple and Qualcomm chips maintain a performance edge over other ARM CPUs.
They're ignoring that Apple (and others) are competing in design at all and claiming the only progress is in fab process. Fab process is very important, but it is most important in x86 land where you don't have many options but to improve fabrication, hence Intel's massive spend there. Beyond that you have the competing groups of TSMC, GlobalFoundries etc. that will spend way more than any non-specialist is going to.
The rest of the processor industry, including the ARM ecosystem where some people get to compete with ARM themselves, is making a lot of progress in working out how to improve the layout of the transistors, such that two designs on the same process can perform quite differently. In the case of the Ax devices and the Krait this is a surprisingly significant margin, and they tend to be at least a whole generation ahead in performance of the designs coming out of ARM. This is not something to be dismissed.
I'm not dismissing it, but to ignore the fact that the iPhone is wholly dependent on tons of innovation in their supply chain is a problem. No matter how fancy your transistor layout gets, if, starting tomorrow, there were no more process node shrinks, and no more innovation in other ares of silicon (e.g. low-k/high-k), the mobile revolution would be effectively frozen in place.
Phones would have no choice but to get bigger to get more powerful or to get longer battery life and perf/watt would hit a wall.
Point being, Apple spends a disproportionately small sum on R&D relative to the size of their earnings and they don't seem to be funding basic research at all like large corporations of the past, e.g. IBM, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.
With the government cutting funds for basic research, we need corporations who are sitting on $4 trillion in cash, to pick up the slack.
Great analogy actually, because the President and Krugman are exactly right in this regard. We ignore the ecosystem that was built, and which we benefit from, by those before us at our peril.
You should see technology as a forest. You can mine it for medical cures, for wood, it's an enormous externality that you leverage. And you have a duty to continue planting more back into it to keep it going for yourself and everyone who comes after you.
The Apple narrative is too bound up in heroic origination stories, without due credit and acknowledge to the huge role played by the rest of the industry. I'm only saying that if one profits immensely by using knowledge produced by one's forefathers, one has a duty to reinvest and keep driving it forward, not hoarding piles of cash. (oh, and not going insanely litigious and secretive on discoveries either :) )
So hard to "order" fruit and veggies, though. You say you want flat leaf parsley, but you get delivered a sad bunch of limp & yellowing leaves. If I was in the store, I'd get curly parsley if it looked better.
