prower
Joined 6 years ago
Karma
192
Submissions
88
Member since
Jul 29
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
From an outside perspective, American system looks more like "right" and "extreme-right", disguised as choice over small-ish policies.
Sadly that's an extreme them-or-us system that's being slowly exported pretty much everywhere else.
Comment · 5 years ago
Some online banks (don't know how widespread this is) allow you to create "virtual card" that expire either after 1 purchase or at a specific date (and with a set maximum of budget). I use them for every single purchase I make online, it's inconvenient but at least i've never entered my real card info anywhere.
Comment · 5 years ago
Programming is hard because you need to have a lot of pre-acquired knowledge before you can even start to delve in the only interesting aspect of it, which is the logic solving.
Is like having to learn everything about how a lego brick is built (from the materials used, to the production processes used in the factories, to the composition of the houses where lego bricks are used) before being able to play with them. Everyone (aside from an very motivated subset of people) would find Legos "Hard" in that context.
Having to memorize a myriad of arcane incantations, software setups and a million "standards" will always make programming look "hard" and daunting, even for those who have an interest in logic problems, but not have an interest on babysitting a computer.
Comment · 5 years ago
Isn't this, like, a very evil thing to do?
I know there aren't any laws there yet but why should be expect no morals at all from people with power?
Is Elon Musk simply another bad person?
Comment · 5 years ago
"You're free to quit" doesn't sound like the most correct groundwork to build an honest society.
Comment · 5 years ago
Not to mention the elephant in the room that an over-optimized environment is not suitable for human life.
Comment · 5 years ago
I can accept "un-sentimentality" only in the case we're hiring and firing robots.
Comment · 5 years ago
I totally agree. But also, critically, an auto-pilot is precisely expected to have "a brain", it's implicit in the name.
Maybe we should just agree that auto-pilot, in its common interpretation, is currently just a sci-fi concept, and communicate more honestly what a computer inside a car can't and can do.
Apparently, dodging weird obstacles is something it struggles with. Which is a problem, since all driving is, essentially, dodging weird obstacles.
Comment · 5 years ago
I wonder how many flaps you could possibly check on your Tesla during your commute (i'm being sarcastic).
Also, I could imagine that an airplane is, from a totally theoretical and simplicistic point of view, much easier to manage for a computer, even for simply having a lot of space to maneuver, and knowing constantly what other airplanes are doing.
But driving a car? How can a computer possibily handle a scenario where edge-cases make for a good 85% of each travel, unless you drive in the desert?
Comment · 5 years ago
> In my opinion, this is yet another case of people being lulled into a false sense of security that the car drives itself, when in reality the Tesla's driver should have been attentive and should have reacted.
In every similar story I always fail to imagine how the driver can possibly stay in a state of "active attention" 100% of the time, while also not doing anything active. That's not how much of the human race works.
At this point it's a lot easier to just actively drive, instead of having to make a sudden split-second decision while being dulled by the inaction. I feel like non full-autonomous driving just doesn't make sense at all.
Comment · 5 years ago
It's also a matter of perceived consequences. To put it bluntly, most people simply don't have the energy, at the end of the day, to chase "feel good", distant, ethereal causes. Yeah meat consuption leads to pollution, but that's such a stretch of the imagination, and I'm hungry, so please let me see what I need to do to pay this month's rent and taxes instead.
There's an oil spill in the ocean? Man, that sounds bad. But what can you do, it's in the ocean, someone will take care of it eventually.
I know it's a defeatist way of thinking but you can't build a running society (meaning with, literally, people running all the time) and expect to conserve energy for non-primary, non-immediate, non-localized causes.
To put it even more bluntly: I would be very happy to change my whole way of life if I didn't have to run after money. But I have to, and I'm exhausted, and that's the problem.
Comment · 5 years ago
Is there an online interface where i can try this myself?
Comment · 5 years ago
May I suggest the PS4 videogame Dreams?
Could be the perfect trojan horse to get him into programming.
Beware it's a MASSIVE time-sinker.
Comment · 5 years ago
It would be fun if this ends up being just a test of how suggestible or easily influenced people are.
I used to have discipline. Don't know what happened.