After the initial 60 seconds of shock that nobody is at the wheel, the rest of the ride makes you quickly realize how much better AI is at driving than regular humans.
I've very interested in this, and completely agree we are still trying to evolve the horse carriage without realizing we can move away from it.
How can I follow up on what you're building? Would you be open to having a chat? I've found your github, but let me know how if there's a better way to contact you.
I remember about 12-15 years ago, as a weekend project, I reached out to the creator of OpenSubtitles dot org and asked him for a dump of all the subtitles, which he promptly and happily provided. I then indexed them all in elasticsearch (it was a pretty nascent tech at the time), and created a movie quote finder, with timestamps. E.g. you could search for "i love you" and it would tell you all the movies and timestamps that phrase would be uttered. My lazy ass didn't go beyond a localhost version, but I still remember fondly of having gotten that working, it felt like magic at the time.
Sadly, I'm in Germany. Which is a third world country when it comes to decent connectivity. They are rolling out some fiber now in Berlin. Finally. But very slowly and not to my building any time soon. Most of the country is limited to DSL speeds. Mobile coverage is getting better but still non existent outside of cities. Germany has borders with nine countries. Each of those have better connectivity than Germany.
I'm from the Netherlands where over 90% of households now have fiber connections, for example. Here in Berlin it's very hard to get that. They are starting to roll it out in some areas but it's taking very long and each building has to then get connected, which is up to the building owners.
The "coverage" they are reporting is not by area but by population. So all the villages and fields that the train or autobahn goes by won't have 5G, because they are in the other 10% because of their very low population density.
And the reporting comes out of the mobile phone operators' reports and simulations (they don't have to do actual measurements). Since their license depends on meeting a coverage goal, massive over-reporting is rampant. The biggest provider (Deutsche Telekom) is also partially state-owned, so the regulators don't look as closely...
Edit: accidentially posted this in the wrong comment: Then there is the problem of "5G reception" vs. "5G reception with usable bandwidth". A lot of overbooking goes on, many cells don't have sufficient capacity allocated, so there are reports of 4G actually being faster in many places.
And also, yes, you can get 5G in a lot of actually populated areas. But you certainly will pay through the nose for that, usually you get a low-GB amount of traffic included, so maybe a tenth of the Microsoft monorepo in question. The rest is pay-10Eur-per-GB or something.
I usually lose connectivity on train journeys across Germany. I'm offline most of the way. Even the in train wifi gets quite bad in remote areas. Because they depend on the same shitty mobile networks. There's a stark difference as soon as you cross the borders with other countries. Suddenly stuff works again. Things stop timing out.
I also deal with commercial customers that have companies in areas with either no or poor mobile connectivity and since we sell mobile apps to them, we always need to double check they actually have a good connection. One of our customers is on the edge of a city with very spotty 4G at best. I recently recommended Star Link to another company that is operating in rural areas. They were asking about offline capabilities of our app. Because they deal with poor connectivity all the time. I made the point that you can get internet anywhere you want now for a fairly reasonable price.
When I travel in Germany I use a Deutsche Telekom pay as you go SIM in a 5G hotspot, and generally get about 200Mbit throughtput, which is far higher than you can expect any place you're staying to provide. It's €7 a day (or €100 a month) but it's worth it to avoid the terrible internet.
Well good for you. On my side of europe, I pay €50/- for a cheap 50Mbps(1 month cancellation notice period). I could get a slightly cheaper 100Mbps from a predator for €20/- for first 6 month but then it goes up to €50/- and they pull bs about not being able to cancel if you even move because your new location is also in their coverage area(over garbage copper) and suffers at least 20 outages per month while there are other providers with much cheaper rates and better service.
Some EU is still suffering from Telekom copper barons.
They lied a lot for a good few years saying "OMG fibre broadband!" When in reality is was still copper for the last mile so that "fibre" connection in reality was some ADSL variant and limited to 80/20mpbs.
Actual full fibre all the way from your home to the internet is I think still quite a way behind. Even in London (London! The capital city with high density) there are places where there are no full fibre options.
According to ThinkBroadband's tracking [1], the headline figures are 85.20% of premises are gigabit capable (FTTP/FTTH/Cable [DOCSIS]) with 71.86% being full fibre.
Only a few I know are on ftth. I guess I live in a fairly affluent area in Zone 3 which is lower density than average - zero flats etc, all just individual houses so perhaps not worth their effort rolling out
What do you mean? It's basically steel blades and sharp/pointy edges on wheels. I'm sure other vehicles will hurt if they hit a pedestrian at speed, but even getting hit at 5 mph by the cybertruck could create very dangerous wounds.
An F150 or Dodge RAM, despite being ludicrously large, is much less dangerous than the cybertruck at low speeds because instead of sharp and jagged protrusions they just have a smooth wall-like front end.
At high speeds? Compare their weights and you'll see that making a pickup truck electric also makes it really heavy.
At high speeds pedestrians are dead anyway. The problem with extra weight is that over a certain weight trucks plow through safety barriers into oncoming traffic when get loose control
I have pretty much the opposite take: years from now we'll tell our grandchildren that the AI APIs we used to use were paid BY THE TOKEN!
We're in the dialup days of AI, where capabilities are in the hands of very few companies because hardware and training costs are prohibitively expensive. Sure, the apps we use are heavily subsidized by investment funding and the competition is very fierce. I'll also concede that 99% of the AI startups today will fail. But that doesn't mean only the 1% will be left: new ones will continuously enter the arena, compete for attention, and to do that they'll need to lower their prices. All the while, hardware costs will decrease, and incumbents like NVIDIA will inevitably grow stagnant and others will come to eat their lunch. It's the circle of (business) life.
