Patch

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Elon Musk's Neuralink implants brain tech in human patient for the first time

Or read Renée Descartes.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Elon Musk's Neuralink implants brain tech in human patient for the first time

Autopilot could kill the engine and lock the brakes without turning itself off. By turning itself off and giving control to a human mere instants before a crash it's effectively ensuring the engine isn't turned off (as there'll be no time to do it before the crash, and the human may not be in a fit state to do it afterwards).

But more to the point, regardless of whether there's a good reason for it to do that or not, it shouldn't be used to claim on a "technicality" that autopilot wasn't active "at the time of the crash", as clearly it meaningfully was at all points leading up to it.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in After getting crushed by Apple and Google in smartphones, BlackBerry is in their sights again

Maybe I'm a lone voice here, but my Skoda has QNX and it's...not very good? It takes an age to start up, and an age to load navigation mode to a point where it's ready to start being used. Bluetooth integration is rudimentary (in the context of the age of the vehicle) and unpredictable. The touch UI is spongy and easy to make mistakes, even if you're the passenger giving it your full undivided attention. The voice command system is almost unusable.

It's not terrible, don't get me wrong. But I don't understand why anyone would be writing any lovesongs about it.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in NASA invented wheels that never get punctured

It's a fair point. Curiosity has "only" travelled about 20 miles over its 12 year life so far. And while it weighs some 900 kilos, Martian gravity is only 38% that of Earth.

Obviously it's absurd to compare the wear and tear on something rumbling around the Martian tundra cut off from any support or maintenance for a decade, but it is a very different use case to your average Earthly car or lorry. What lasts a decade going at 0.1mph for 20 miles in an alien desert is not necessarily going to last a week going at 70mph down an asphalt highway.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in NASA invented wheels that never get punctured

At some point we're just getting bogged down in semantics. Someone invented the internal combustion engine, and the earliest versions ran on gaseous fuels. Somebody else "invented" versions that than on liquid fuels. Engines that ran on petrol (gas) and diesel were "invented" by separate people. Engines based on turbine, reciprocating pistons, and rotary mechanisms were all "invented" by separate people.

The degree to which you consider any of those independent "inventions" versus simply modifying and improving existing inventions is essentially arbitrary.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Scientists Train AI to Be Evil, Find They Can't Reverse It

In an earlier iteration of the script, the machines were using connected humans as a distributed computer network rather than a power source. Which makes much more sense, but apparently they deemed it too difficult a concept for audiences to grasp so we ended up with the power source thing instead.

Not only does that make more sense in the sense of "humans don't make a great power source" (why not just use cows, or wind power, or geothermal, or nuclear?), but it also explains why the simulated world of the Matrix is so intertwined with the machine world itself, why The One is so important etc.

My head canon is that the distributed computing thing is in fact what was going on, and the humans of Zion have just gotten the wrong end of the stick.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in They warned you: Someone allegedly used a politician's cloned voice to interfere with an election | It will most assuredly not be the last time this happens

Desecrates could think that if he has an idea it has to be true

That's not what Descartes said, by the way.

"I think therefore I am" was all about "I know I must exist, because I'm here to think about it". It wasn't about "if I think something it must be true".

In Discourse he sets about trying to establish what things you can know for sure, vs which things are subjective (and could just be a trick of the mind or an illusion). He establishes the first principle that the one thing he knows is definitely true is that he is an entity that is capable of thought (because otherwise, who else is doing all this thinking?) and therefore at the very least he must exist, even if nothing else does.

If you're of the position that truth isn't subjective, "Cartesian doubt" should be right up your alley. Trust nothing until you can prove it! Not a bad position for a philosopher to take.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Microsoft's current OS has been shrunk to a ridiculous 100MB in size, but only by getting rid of windows from Windows

In the context of the people who did it, I think it's just a "bit of fun"; a hobbyist hacking project to see how far you can take something.

But that said, it is absolutely insane how much disk space Windows needs. Windows Server 2022, with its most minimal "core" installation option, still has a minimum requirement of a baffling 32GB of hard disk space. By comparison, Ubuntu Server's published minimum requirement is for only 2.5GB (with more specialist minimalist distros like Alpine coming in at well under 1GB).

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Online travel agent allows customers to filter out Boeing 737 Max planes

Did you reply to the wrong comment or something?

I didn't say anything about Boeing not being able to make aeroplanes. Only a note of surprise that the parent comment would dismiss Airbus as an alternative manufacturer of aeroplanes when they are the largest manufacturer of aeroplanes in the world.

I'm stoked to hear that you live near a Boeing factory though. That must be very exciting for you.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Online travel agent allows customers to filter out Boeing 737 Max planes

Why not Airbus? They're the largest manufacturer in the world by market share. Boeing is not a monopoly.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Former CEO of Google has been quietly working on a military startup for “suicide” attack drones.

The headline is kinda burying the lede. You're absolutely right that "kamikaze drones" already exist. Others have rather glibly pointed out that cruise missiles that have existed for decades are essentially this, and more recently there have been a great many "loitering munitions" drones which are what this startup is talking about.

The thing that seems to be novel here is that they are intending to make them fully automated, with AI-driven target acquisition, and capable of operating in a zero-comms environment. Currently drones generally still need a human at the controls.

The idea of what amounts to the equivalent of Tesla's "Full Self Driving" tech being in charge of deciding who lives and dies and what should be reduced to a smouldering crater is, it has to be said, faintly unnerving.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Nose wheel falls off Boeing 757 airliner waiting for takeoff

It can be Occam or Ockham. It's named after William of Ockham, but it was the fashion at that time for scholars to "Latinise" their names, hence the alternative spelling.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in "How Google perfected the web" or how google made everything worst

It's also worse because it completely undermines the point by using a horrendous fixed width typeface and dark green on black colours for the text.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Apple Vision Pro failed to sell out on launch day

How dare you question Ming-Chi Kuo 😤

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in X appears to be juicing MrBeast’s views to woo the YouTuber to the platform, pushing video upload into users’ feeds as an unlabeled ad

Some of them were actually pretty good artists; occasionally you'd see them do other stuff and it'd be genuinely good on an artistic level.

The whole stick man, lumpy face, primitivist thing was just an "in" aesthetic (while also being conveniently really quick to produce).