mdriftmeyer

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mdriftmeyer
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  • Steve Wozniak doubts fully self-driving vehicles are 'quite possible yet'

    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer
    cgWerks said:
    christopher126 said:
    Currently, there are approximately 36,000 highway deaths per year or about 102 per day. 50% are due to alcohol or some other drug induced impairment.
    It's about 1 fatality per 100M miles driven. In that regard, I don't think all AI vehicles combined have booked enough miles for their even to be 1 death, and there have already been a few.

    If we were really serious about improving safety, we'd do something about that impairment thing... or even give some reasonable driver training. This isn't about safety, though. That's just the sales-pitch.

    DAalseth said:
    After all who objects to anti-lock breaks? They were the first automotive AI technology. Who objects to cruise controls that maintain a distance from the car ahead of you? That's another one.
    There's nothing AI about either of those.

    SpamSandwich said:
    Also, autonomous vehicles as we know them today are not examples of "artificial intelligence", they are examples of "machine learning".
    Good point. That's a better way to talk about it... how hard it is to solve the machine learning challenge faced here. AI starts people thinking about sci-fi and terminator and 'self-aware' or systems that actually think, etc.

    radarthekat said:
    As for when, did Woz the visionary speak to how many more turns of Moore’s Law it will take before processing capability of machine learning systems will far surpass the capabilities of humans for discrete tasks like driving? 
    Moore's Law has nothing to do with this. It's a quantitative problem, not a quantitative one.

    kingofsomewherehot said:
    SnickersMagoo said:
    ... GM already has a 2019 model with ZERO CONTROLS....no steering wheel or pedals........
    No. They don't.
    They've made press releases saying they PLAN to... but they don't yet... and likely won't.
    No doubt. I think, was it Nissan made a bunch of futuristic videos too. But, I can make futuristic videos, as well. That doesn't mean I have a clue about how to actually do what is in the videos. It's marketing BS.

    tedz98 said:
    From a legal perspective I think states should limit autonomous vehicles to interstate highways for 3-5 years so the manufacturers can gain more real world experience.
    I don't think they should be allowed on public streets/roads at all. If they can't drive 20 mph, why let them go 60mph?

    dewme said:
    I think the Woz has an overabundance of skepticism coupled with a high level of risk aversion.
    In other words, he's far more wise than most of the commenters in this thread, and like 3/4 of the tech industry. :smiley: 
    It's a qualitative problem, not a quantitative one. That's the reason it'll never be solved by brute force. The human brain and it's instinctive leaps of outcomes won't be matched by machine learning. Machine Learning is no match for our ability to adapt on the fly. AI proponents are touting the machine not being distracted by other extraneous noise, when the noise is being constantly filtered by the human brain. No one size fits all algorithm will ever match it, and solve as a baseline for all outcomes.
    cgWerks

  • Apple, please move us all to USB-C across the board with the 2019 iPhone

    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer
    Mike Wuerthele said:
    MustSeeUHDTV said:
    Thunderbolt doesn't seem to work with my PCs and my iPhones, so I hope not. I have issues and I'm using Apple's USB-C to Lightning cable. My new Dell XPS 9570 crashes when unplug my iPhone X from it (this is every time and consistent). I still used my iPhone 7 as DashCam and when I transfer videos from my iPhone to my custom built PC (if I transfer too much data), the connection drops.
    This sounds like a Dell issue. I've got no problems with my devices on my Macs or my Intel NUCs.
    What's the value of adding the Macs into the conversation? It's a completely different architecture [OS X vs. Windows] and device driver series.

    Intel is notorious with firmware issues.

    Your one off about Intel NUCs adds no value. Are the NUCs using the same hardware USB controllers? Serial Numbers? What? The NUC is a single controlled platform BY INTEL.

    They better get that right and more importantly it's a very narrow case of USB controllers. Every single key piece of the NUC is made by Intel w/ perhaps the Power Supply by a third party.

    DELL like any third party OEM has dozens of vendors to coordinate with, exacerbating the probable errors.

    USB-C isn't smart for Apple. Lightning is a very specific small set of variables to control, thus reducing the recalls and costs on Apple's end.

    This iPad Pro will be a test case by Apple. How well or poorly that decision to include it will be determined within the next 12 months. Apple would be stupid to switch over their entire portable line to it w/o the guinea pig flushing out all the issues.


    williamlondontmaybaconstangpalomine

  • Apple's A12 Bionic comes close to desktop CPU performance in benchmarks

    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer
    I don't see any Zen CPUs, or recent Xeon or i7 CPUs on that benchmark. Just a bought of arm embedded SoC APUs.
    kirkgraywilliamlondon

  • Why macOS Mojave requires Metal -- and deprecates OpenGL

    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer
    mjtomlin said:
    tylersdad said:
    This still makes no sense at all. There is no reason why Apple can't support their native SDK (Metal) and OpenGL. Microsoft has been doing this for decades with DirectX.

    The majority of game developers won't bother with creating Metal versions of their rendering engines. There won't be enough customers to justify it.

    Two things...

    First, Apple hasn't updated OpenGL for a while now. Probably when they starting pushing Metal. So the OpenGL implementation included with iOS and macOS are fairly old, I think it's at 2.1, while the latest is 4.6. So there really is only a limited amount of "cross platform" compatibility for developers.

    Second, the entire industry is moving away from OpenGL. There is now a Khronos project, Vulkan, that is meant to replace OpenGL and OpenGL ES. And there is a version that "runs" on top of Apple's Metal called MoltenVk, so if developers must have cross platform compatibility, then they can move to it, instead of Metal.
    You're off on your OpenGL support. They stopped at 4.0.
    tmay

  • Tidbits you might have missed about Apple's big September announcements

    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer
    7nm was first discussed with the acquisition from IBM by Global Foundries. They were ramping up before a nerw CEO arrived whose changing direction.

    AMD was prepped for both GloFo and TSMC and moved solely to TSMC with GloFo's new CEO [and presumably with the blessing of the major owners] to back off on 7nm for the near future.

    Apple is the first on mobile and AMD will be the first on GPGPUs/CPUs in the destop/laptop/workstation/server space.
    jony0