Perhaps the engineer could sit down for 8 hours a day during the work week. The Silicon Valley obsession with having no life and working weekends is so endemic.
Print book sales are down, although not as much as people want to believe. Book stores are making a comeback but in terms of number of books on shelves I'd say the average one is ~50% less. We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. We have not returned to that, and certainly books that you'd pick up on a whim like an end-cap item have reasonably suffered for it, or increased their prices to fairly insane levels.
>> We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines.
I don't know if there was ever a bookstore that ever had a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for. Maybe Powell's back in the day if you counted the technical bookstore along with the mother ship. Certainly not Barnes & Noble. There are still multiple rows of magazines at B&N today, including ones on Linux, programming, network admin, Raspberry Pi, etc.
The one I go to is the same size as the ones I went to 20 years ago and an order of magnitude larger than the mall bookstores I went to 40 years ago. Although some of that space is taken up by the coffee shop, Legos, and vinyl records.
Barnes & Nobles and Borders were both the ultimate in retail bookstores and also the beginning of the end of retail book stores. They killed local bookstores, and then Amazon killed them.
But none of what you're describing actually happened. The big chains didn't kill local bookstores at all -- mom-and-pop bookstores are still ubiquitous -- and many of them are actually doing better than they used to due to the ability to list their inventory on Amazon, AbeBooks, etc.
And B&N itself is doing just fine, and is opening new locations. Borders is the only major chain that failed to adapt. Other large book retailers are also still going strong, e.g. Books-A-Million.
Maybe in some places. Growing up there was no bookstore. We had a library, and a mall far away, and there were some small book stores at the mall that continued to do just fine as B&N and Borders grew. And while everyone says Amazon killed bookstores… maybe some. But what I saw were malls dying anyway, and downtown rents growing to the point where selling just books wasn’t enough to cover costs.
They didn't, you're right, but book stores themselves are on the decline [1]. Borders brick and mortar footprint is gone in the U.S. and they used to be the #2 bookseller. Barnes and Noble is holding on, thankfully. I love physical books and just the quiet ambience of a good bookstore.
This information is out of date. LIDAR costs are 10x less than they were a decade ago, and still falling.
Turns out, when there's demand for LIDAR in this form factor, people invest in R&D to drive costs down and set up manufacturing facilities to achieve economies of scale. Wow, who could have predicted this‽
Cost is relative. LIDAR maybe be expensive relative to a camera or two but it’s very inexpensive compared to hiring a full time driver. Crashes aren’t particularly cheap either. Neither are insurance premiums.
Huawei has a self-driving system that uses three lidars, which cost $250 each (plus vision, radar, and ultrasound). It appears to work about as well as FSD. Here's the Out of Spec guys riding around on it in China for an hour:
Tesla spent about $10 billion on AI training hardware in 2024.[1] They just might not be getting as much bang for the buck, due to their paucity of sensors. Huawei get similar performance without Tesla's four billion miles of training data.
You know what used to be expensive? Cameras. Then people started manufacturing them for mass market and cost when down.
You know what else used to be expensive? Structured light sensors. They cost $$$$ in 2009. Then Microsoft started manufacturing the Kinect for a mass market, and in 2010 price went down to $150.
You know what's happened to LIDAR in the past decade? You guessed it, costs have come massively down because car manufacturers started buying more, and costs will continue to come down as they reach mass market adoption.
The prohibitive cost for LIDAR coming down was always just a matter of time. A "visionary" like Musk should have been able to see that. Instead he thought he could outsmart everyone by using a technology that was not suited for the job, but he made the wrong bet.
It's not 2010 anymore. They will asymptotically reach approximately twice the price of a camera, since they need both a transmit and receive optical path. Right now the cheapest of the good LiDARs are around 3-4x that. So we're getting close, and we're already within the realm large-scale commercial viability.
The point of engineering is to make something that’s economically viable, not to slap together something that works. Making something that works is easy, making something that works and can be sold at scale is hard.
That's simply not true. Engineering can exist outside industry. "Stuff costs money" is not a governing aspect of these kinds of things.
FOSS is the obvious counterexample to your absurdly firm stance, but so are many artistic pursuits that use engineering techniques and principles, etc.
Industry includes FOSS and artistic endeavors, anything that’s done professionally.
My intent was to exclude research efforts, which is fundamentally different from engineering, which is a practical concern and not a “get it to just work” concern.
That's an interesting question, the question of whether engineering per se is strictly pragmatic. I personally think drawing a hard line between research and engineering is a misstep and relies too heavily on a bureaucratic kind of metaphysics.
There is no market for such a thing. At that price point, you get a personal chauffeur. That’s what rich people do and he can do stuff that a self driving system never can.
And the rich people who don't want a chauffeur like driving the car. They will buy a $10M car no problem, but they want driving that car to be fun because that's what they were paying for. They don't want you to make the driving more automatic and less interesting.
This article feels like it’s about what and how this person stores their dotfiles and then has two lines about them feeling too personal to share. I’m surprised it’s so highly voted since it’s basically “I use stow”.
Buying an old beater car as your first car has been the norm forever. But that’s because young people still have no wealth, ie they are poor, not because they don’t want a shiny Audi.
I'd be a lot more likely to pay if they didn't do everything possible to make the experience unpleasant.
Even if you pay you still get served ads, bombarded with trackers, and half the time publications make unsubscribing incredibly hostile (if not impossible online).
It's no wonder half the population gets their news solely from reshared headlines on social media.
If your pr deploys a machine learning model then that would be a suitable comment. I suppose the idea is similar, we can determine that this drug helps so a (hopefully) statistically significant degree so even if we don’t know how it works we want to use it.
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