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protip: Don't get inspiration from slate

This comic combines my pretentiousness about my humble knowledge of math and my undeserved elitism regarding faux-science journalism, and therefore I find it funny. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - The Talk

Good article on the EMDrive and why there's not enough information to draw positive conclusions yet: Uncertain Propulsion Breakthroughs?

Gotta be frustrating for cab drivers who possibly eeked out a lower middle class lifestyle to be disrupted by a company that was completely unprofitable but survived on VC funding. It's like the transport version of Walmart moving into a new town, crushing all the nearby stores via loss-leading...

in addition to gas cars being phased out slowly, yeah there are much fewer working parts on electric vehicles, but a lot of maintenance will still be necessary on EVs. And with the increase in responsibility that cars will get when they become fully autonomous, there's just more shit to worry...

It won't go away suddenly, it's not like cell phones where in a period of 10 years we'll all laugh at the existence of pay phones. Additionally, unless we find a chemistry dramatically better than what we have now, gasoline cars aren't going anywhere. It just might go from 0.01% of cars to...

Car prices haven't been exponentially getting more expensive. I think the color chart is the coolest part of this. 2013 is boring.

WE won't see Musk drive prices down. He'll be pioneering other big things (like autonomous cars!).

Cool. I hope in ~15 years we see budget-price electric cars for $10k.

I'd lose easily. If your argument is, "The cost of electric vehicles will greatly diminish as a result of commoditization, as the floor is extremely small due to the simplicity of an electric powertrain vs a gasoline one." that's true and I don't think anyone who knows vehicles will disagree...

Zapatta, what do you do for a living?

I know and it'll be awesome.

What expertise do you have in automotive supply chains and commodization?

This is the coolest thing ever. I'd love to see how far they're stretching the energy cost of moving a 10lbs package a few miles.

lol @ calling the Tesla price tag outrageous. They deployed the first decent system + infrastructure to support it and massively dropped the price.

Yeah they seem to be pretty tight lipped about it, but here's their car: Pretty standard looking setup. Two velodyne HDL32s on top, looks like a dual antenna GPS receiver, some cameras and radar. Not sure how I feel about GM's approach of just buying an autonomy group for 1 billion vs Ford's...

Sorry for my bad interpretation, but are you saying you work on the autonomous software? Or you make software that isn't onboard?

Gotta be a sweet future for bikers when enough autonomous cars are on the road that they can just lane split quickly through traffic that splits apart like the Red sea for Moses. I have no doubt that it'll be easy for autonomous vehicles to be more friendly to motorcycles than human drivers...

Yep. One second is probably like, 100-1000 iterations of their control system. My control systems have checks for a single iteration being goofy, and any kind of jitter is very noticeable and tracked down very seriously. If one iteration of totally wrong feedback is a weird twitch in your...

It's a good opportunity for people who aren't sure if they want to curate museums or develop games.

EQ VR would be terrible, it's too UI based.

Yes. Casually. It's actually a lot of fun.

For EQ at least, there's no reason they can't treat it like a cash cow indefinitely and just have a minimal dev team making minimal amounts of content. There's no need to try and revitalize the game, it's doing fine for what it is, and there's no excuse for it to not be revenue positive. DBG...

People are generally happy with it. There's some issues here and there, but the content is not buggy, good and enough to progress through. There's enough to do for a month or two casually. The massive number of fairly diluted and uninteresting AAs is daunting. For some classes there aren't that...

Next Big Future: Cannae will try to prove propellentless propulsion in space in 2017 and has ambitious space probe designs with 33 years of constant acceleration to reach 3% of lightspeed I'll take an avatar bet with anyone that Cannae will never launch a Cannae drive-driven space probe.

Asteroid Mining should have its own section (Planetary REsources, Deep Space Industries). It's the future!

Betteridge's law of headlines - Wikipedia

Did bounties through all the acts and did a rift. Also read a bit about the current meta of the game: http://us.battle.net/forums/en/d3/topic/17346426537 Monk Leveling and Fresh 70 Guide (Patch 2.4.2 / Season 8) It seems like the way to play is to pick a torment level you can faceroll, and just...

Cool. Ill check it out.

Came back to D3 after not playing since before RoS came out. Started off on default difficulty, kept cranking it up and got to torment I before finishing RoS. It seemed like it only took 3 hours to beat RoS, not really sure what to think but it felt uhh, really short. I didn't expect much and...

Well, there's a lot of possibilities and nobody has made a real industry standard way that everyone follows. Like anything else there's a spectrum of possibilities from low-end to ultra-futuristic-cool. On the low end you have a perception system that uses SLAM to map out what is immediately...

Re: the above truck picture, we've all been there in the northern states. Not like Kentucky. There's a textbook approach autonomy uses called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), where perception data is compared with previously generated models and live data to perform both...

landfill automation would be goofy. I don't know anything about landfills, but I imagine you'd have to carefully model deformable terrain while driving on it. No idea how much a landfill operator intuitively understands that by knowing generally what's in the garbage he's driving over.

On and re: GPS, with current tech you can expect that 3 meter bubble, but that can be heavily reduced with different methods of what's called differential GPS correction. Most error is atmospheric, so if you know what the current error is in a given location you can offset based on that...

Yes. Certain types of Ground Penetrating Radar can find ground beneath snow. MIT Lincoln Laboratory: News: Lincoln Laboratory demonstrates highly accurate vehicle localization under adverse weather conditions Ground Penetrating Radar Equipment for Ice and Snow Surveys - GSSI Ice and Snow -...

Yes, you'd absolutely need a fairly accurate world model generated from pre-snow data. That's what Ford is doing to do accurate localization (figuring out where the vehicle is) after heavy snowfall when there are no lane markings. Once you have that, you've got a optimization problem of trying...

Yeah it's much harder than that. Everytime you plow it'll require a different solution and you'll need a very smart system that can handle it an uncontrolled environment with a lot of precision.

Autonomous snow plows is a really, really hard problem. A good plow driver moves snow with a 3 ton truck with surgical precision, and can only do so because he's plowed that area many times and knows where all the curbs, bumps and gaps are buried beneath the snow. They have to operate with an...