I agree that LIDAR or radar are better solutions than image recognition. I mean, that’s literally what those technologies are for.

But even then, that’s not enough. LIDAR/radar can’t help it identify its lane in inclement weather, drive well on gravel, and so on. These are the kinds of problems where automakers severely downplay the difficulty of the problem and just how much a human driver does.

You are making it far simpler than it actually is. Recognizing what a thing is is the essential first problem. Is that a child, a ball, a goose, a pothole, or a shadow that the cameras see? It would be absurd and an absolute show stopper if the car stopped for dark shadows.

We take for granted the vast amount that the human brain does in this problem space. The system has to identify and categorize what it’s seeing, otherwise it’s useless.

That leads to my actual opinion on the technology, which is that it’s going to be nearly impossible to have fully autonomous cars on roads as we know them. It’s fine if everything is normal, which is most of the time. But software can’t recognize and correctly react to the thousands of novel situations that can happen.

They should be automating trains instead. (Oh wait, we pretty much did that already.)

That may be part of it, but Saudi Arabia also has a long track record of being incredibly abusive and generally just not giving a shit about worker’s rights.

Absolutely terrifying… but thank you for the insight.

Yeah, the only way someone is dying in a furnace before feeling pain is if you’re dealing with molten-metal-type temperatures. Not a bakery oven. I’m sure this poor woman experienced excruciating pain for far too long.

Yeah, 100%. This is the town’s fault IMO - not maintaining the markings in the first place (it’s not the contractor’s fault that the old marking is non-existent), and then probably refusing to pay the contractor “extra” to repaint the whole thing.

Even talking about it this way is misleading. An LLM doesn’t “guess” or “catch” anything, because it is not capable of comprehending the meaning of words. It’s a statistical sentence generator; no more, no less.

He can give himself whatever titles he likes, that doesn’t mean he makes any positive technical contribution.

Did you tell him you guess you have to stop doing non-web development then? Clearly you’re not qualified if you can’t have the corresponding title.

“Strategy” implies he actually thinks about it. I think it’s just a reflex; fault belongs elsewhere, always. The man is incapable of critical thought, especially inward.

Machine learning has many valid applications, and there are some fields genuinely utilizing ML tools to make leaps and bounds in advancements.

LLMs, aka bullshit generators, which is where a huge majority of corporate AI investment has gone in this latest craze, is one of the poorest. Not to mention the steaming pile of ethical issues with training data.

Very nice writeup. My only critique is the need to “lay off workers to stop inflation.” I have no doubt that some (many?) managers etc… believed that to be the case, but there’s rampant evidence that the spike of inflation we’ve seen over this period was largely due to corporate greed hiking prices, not due to increased costs from hiring too many workers.

I mean, there is a hard limit on how much info your brain can take in. It’s time. Every hour spent learning one thing is an hour not spent learning everything else.

Agreed. The solution to this is to stop using LLMs to present info authoritatively, especially when facing directly at the general public. The average person has no idea how an LLM works, and therefore no idea why they shouldn’t trust it.

My guess is that your name is so poorly represented in the training data that it just picked the most common kind of job history that is represented.

Yeah, exactly. The issue is precisely that it’s NOT just showing search results. MS’s software is generating libelous material and presenting it as fact.

Air Canada was forced to give a customer the compensation its chat bot made up. Germany/Europe in general is a bit stronger on public protections than Canada, so I’d expect MS would be held liable if this journalist decides to press a suit.

Bullshit generator generating bullshit, news at 11.

Libre Office

It was not a nuclear explosion, that would be insane. Pure hydrogen is highly explosive, which is why it’s suitable for a combustion vehicle like the Mirai.

Others have pointed out the degradation issue, but you’re also assuming that all plastics are thermoplastics. They are not. There’s huge variation in chemical composition and material properties between different plastics, and most of them can’t be melted and reformed.