Seems like autonomous personal air travel would be a far, far simpler problem to solve than road-based driving? Far less edge cases, once you are in the air the only obstacles you really need to worry about are other vehicles, birds, leaves and the odd stray plastic bag. With VTOL the whole thing could be an order of magnitude easier than driving. By the same principle, sea travel would also have less edge cases, at least in calm conditions. Is it the case that people aren’t seeing markets for those applications of autonomy or is there some other reason why there isn’t the same hype in those areas?
Vehicle cost; fuel cost; takeoff and landing; handling of edge cases (there's a reason that commercial airlines still have pilots despite autopilot being very effective in 90% of conditions).
A: Air travel generally is a far simpler problem to solve, because there's national standardization of the air navigation system, the airport paint and signage, and very clear rules of separation with very few edge cases. And yet we do not have anything close to self-flying planes no matter how much money you throw at it. And we're not even close to getting there. Whereas with cars, none of that is true, municipalities get wedged into violating their own equivalent of human interface guidelines all the time. Worn paint and signs for years, busted cross walk signals, confusing intersections, human driven cars that consistently do not follow the rules but in inconsistent ways.
B. Personal air travel has a significant regulatory burden in the transition from ground to air. The ground is city + state regulated. And immediately once airborne it's FAA regulated, but not under any kind of Air Traffic Control, as almost all airspace below 1200' above ground is uncontrolled. So ATC has nothing to say about it, and no central mechanism for negotiating conflicts.
Where are you allowed to takeoff and land is easily figured out today: airports only. And that's because it takes all kinds of things into account like obstruction clearance, noise abatement, anticipating engine failures and crashes. We can't even automate commercial flights - it might seem like it's more correct to say we don't automate commercial flights, but we could. That's not really true. The amount of changes to the air traffic control system, and on-board equipment for airplanes, is presently so cost prohibitive that it is effectively a "cannot be done".
Facebook jumped the shark when they started trying to encourage private individuals to “create engagement” and pay to boost their posts. If internal marketing jargon is leaking into your UX, you clearly have serious problems with how your staff are being incentivised.
Facebook could have become an engine that allowed society to maximise human capital and but they sacrificed all that potential at the altar of growth hacking and bleeding advertisers dry.
I remember when that first came out, and was based on how many friends you had. It would have cost me $90 to promote my vacation photos to a group of people semi-randomly selected by Facebook and chance from my friends list, and for people with more ‘friends’, they wanted up to $500, if I recall.
Socially, it is extremely out of touch to even offer such a service to individuals.
Nuclear weapons are the reason why the competing global powers have found new ways to compete and project power abroad. Global wars have mostly moved from being violence-based to being fought via propaganda and economics. It probably mirrors the way smaller communities moved from physical to intellectual competition.
Why are we still teaching assemby and C over development languages more popular, enjoyable, and accessible? It is not a good career path, it is not popular with kids or with the masses, and it is a lot more expensive than any other genre of software development.
That is comparing apples to oranges. C and assembly are what most applications and operating systems are built on in one way or another. Classical music is not the root of popular music nor does it carry over to other music genres that much at all.
Also, the way that music is taught in band rooms, is based almost entirely on sheet music and nothing on actually creating music. In fact most of the people I know who were very good classical band players had very underdeveloped ears and sucked at music creation. If you program in C, you will become a better python/js/etc. programmer, the same can not be said for classical music.
Plus, most computer science programs have switched from starting with C to starting kids off on Java or Python, so that argument does not make any sense. Most public schools do not even teach anything other than jazz or classical music.
Music is frequently taught at schools but not pushed as a career choice, so I'm not sure that the original complaint holds (at least not everywhere). Almost all children where I grew up studied music in some form at school and virtually none took it as a career, those who did were amply warned about the risks. This was considered unremarkable.
I am getting the Wikipedia list (“I found this on the web”). Tried asking it to search Wolfram Alpha (which spellcheck corrected to WolframAlpha btw!) and it said it couldn’t find that info on WolframAlpha
Apple autocorrect has gotten worse over the past few years. The worst part is that it often changes words that were correctly typed to something wrong without the user noticing.
There are also obvious mistakes with location that just shouldn’t happen. If I am in Glasgow and ask Siri “how far to Loch Lomond?” it should be obvious that I mean Loch Lomond in Scotland and not Loch Lomond VA.
It’s interesting to note Woz’s current enthusiasm for the watch because he was very down on it when it launched.
I don't know about other countries, but that also happens to me with Google Maps in Mexico. I sometimes query a street located in my city and it will send me thousands of kilometers away (even if they do have the street in their DB).
I guess Google Maps calculates the probability a place will be looked for, and of course a small street in a not too big city in Mexico will be less likely to be searched than a popular place in Europe. But common if I wanted to look for something in Europe I'll zoom out and place the map in Europe. If my zoom is in my city I obviously want to look something in MY CITY!
By far the greatest improvement I have ever made to just about all of my machine learning based apps was moving to San Francisco. You’d be surprised how well they all work here.
Whenever I go visit back home in Slovenia my phone loses about 60% of its utility overnight.
I was two blocks from WeWork in downtown San Francisco, which is not a place I know well, entered the exact street address, and Apple Maps sent me two blocks farther away, I had to switch to Google Maps.
This happens to me sometimes when I travel/move. I'll enter a search on Google Maps, and it will sometimes search where my previous settlement was. Like, I'll search for a Best Buy in my current location, but for some reason it will search where I was yesterday.
I’ve honestly wondered if autocorrect machine learning has picked up on poor autocorrect choices, causing a reinforcement loop, causing it to continue getting worse
