• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • For the news articles themselves, each of the major companies is using a major CMS system, many of them developed in house or licensed from another major media organization.

    But for things like journalist microblogging, Mastodon seems like a stand-in replacement for Twitter or Threads or Bluesky, that could theoretically integrate with their existing authentication/identity/account management system that they use to provide logins, email, intranet access, publishing rights on whatever CMS they do have, etc.

    Same with universities. Sure, each department might have official webpages, but why not provide faculty and students with the ability to engage on a university-hosted service like Mastodon or Lemmy?

    Governments (federal, state, local) could do the same thing with official communications.

    It could be like the old days of email, where people got their public facing addresses from their employer or university, and then were able to use that address relatively freely, including for personal use in many instances. In a sense, the domain/instance could show your association with that domain owner (a university or government or newspaper or company), but you were still speaking as yourself when using that service.









  • Also, the main problem with LIDAR is that it really doesn’t see any more than cameras do. It uses light, or near-visible light, so it basically gets blocked by the same things that a camera gets blocked by. When heavy fog easily fucks up both cameras and LIDAR at the same time, that’s not really redundancy.

    The spinning lidar sensors mechanically remove occlusions like raindrops and dust, too. And one important thing with lidar is that it involves active emission of lasers so that it’s a two way operation, like driving with headlights, not just passive sensing, like driving with sunlight.

    Waymo’s approach appears to differ in a few key ways:

    • Lidar, as we’ve already been discussing
    • Radar
    • Sensor number and placement: the ugly spinning sensors on the roof get a different vantage point that Tesla simply doesn’t have on its vehicles now, and it does seem that every Waymo vehicle has a lot more sensor coverage (including probably more cameras)
    • Collecting and consulting high resolution 3D mapping data
    • Human staff on standby for interventions as needed

    There’s a school of thought that because many of these would need to be eliminated for true level 5 autonomous driving, Waymo is in danger of walking down a dead end that never gets them to the destination. But another take is that this is akin to scaffolding during construction, that serves an important function while building up the permanent stuff, but can be taken down afterward.

    I suspect that the lidar/radar/ultrasonic/extra cameras will be more useful for training the models necessary to reduce reliance on human intervention and maybe reduce the number of sensors. Not just in the quantity of training data, but some filtering/screening function that can improve the quality of data fed into the training.







  • Compared to AMD FX series, the Intel Core and Core2 were so superior, it was hard to see how AMD could come back from that.

    Yup, an advantage in this industry doesn’t last forever, and a lead in a particular generation doesn’t necessarily translate to the next paradigm.

    Canon wants to challenge ASML and get back in the lithography game, with a tooling shift they’ve been working on for 10 years. The Japanese “startup” Rapidus wants to get into the foundry game by starting with 2nm, and they’ve got the backing of pretty much the entirety of the Japanese electronics industry.

    TSMC is holding onto finFET a little bit longer than Samsung and Intel, as those two switch to gate all around FETs (GAAFETS). Which makes sense, because those two never got to the point where they could compete with TSMC on finFETs, so they’re eager to move onto the next thing a bit earlier while TSMC squeezes out the last bit of profit from their established advantage.

    Nothing lasts forever, and the future is always uncertain. The past history of the semiconductor industry is a constant reminder of that.


  • I just mean does it keep offline copies of the most recently synced versions, when you’re not connected to the internet? And does it propagate local changes whenever you’re back online?

    Dropbox does that seamlessly on Linux and Mac (I don’t have Windows). It’s not just transferring files to and from a place in the cloud, but a seamless sync of a local folder whenever you’re online, with access and use while you’re offline.