Random Thoughts....

Hey, congrats!
 
Random Thoughts....

And I'm over here thinking it's funny to park in a coworkers "assigned parking spot" other people are actually bettering themselves. :p

Seriously, this joker thinks certain people have assigned parking. We don't. So yesterday, the guy was right behind me coming and I park in his spot (it's been a contest of who gets to the office first to park in "his" spot. This is the first time anybody's been there when he is. Longest horn blare I've ever heard and some shouting. Made my morning. :D
 
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I just finished screwing the last two showcases to the walls of my new apartment, now the rest (~30% of my model car collection) will be unpacked...
 
Last Ford off the Australian production line today.

:(
 
Such a shame....another of those little quirks in the automotive world, gone.


I swear to God in 15 years time we will all be driven around in an identical, nameless, plastic, electric pod.
 
Such a shame....another of those little quirks in the automotive world, gone.


I swear to God in 15 years time we will all be driven around in an identical, nameless, plastic, electric pod.

"Be driven around in" being the key phrase here. I fear a future where you are no longer allowed to drive yourself because some people suck at it.
 
"Be driven around in" being the key phrase here. I fear a future where you are no longer allowed to drive yourself because some people suck at it.
That's definitely going to happen. And it sucks.

The segment of outspoken techies who hate driving and are excited for this compare us enthusiasts to horse and buggy enthusiasts around when the car was invented - we're clinging onto a silly, outmoded and dangerous hobby. - They say we'll likely have "driving parks" to augment tracks for those regular people who miss driving.

It's still not the same though. Ex: Driving without necessarily a destination in mind but just to get out and just spend time reconnecting with you and the car.

You can't do that at a driving park.
 
Even if self-driving cars become the norm, I believe it will be a very long time before manually operated cars are outright banned.
 
They found a nice niche with a few cars and they won't simply let it go away.
 
That's definitely going to happen. And it sucks.

The segment of outspoken techies who hate driving and are excited for this compare us enthusiasts to horse and buggy enthusiasts around when the car was invented - we're clinging onto a silly, outmoded and dangerous hobby. - They say we'll likely have "driving parks" to augment tracks for those regular people who miss driving.

It's still not the same though. Ex: Driving without necessarily a destination in mind but just to get out and just spend time reconnecting with you and the car.

You can't do that at a driving park.

The problem is that from a technological point of view it makes perfect sense to only have computer controlled vehicles on the road. You can make them communicate with each other which means they can drive much closer to one another because every car is aware of what every other car around it is going to do at any given time. Adding manually controlled cars in the mix screws this up big time, it's adding a very big and potentially very dangerous unknown variable to the system. It requires much more from an "A.I." to deal with complex and sometimes unpredictable human behaviour compared to just dealing with other A.I. controlled vehicles. It's not necessarily that the people developing/selling autopilots hate driving or the people doing it, but it makes their own job of putting computer controlled cars on the road much more difficult.

Many years ago people thought that teaching computers to visually recognize objects would be a moderately difficult, but ultimately solvable problem. Now we have 2016 and computers still can't even recognize a few letters in front of a scrambled background:

captcha_example_mspassport.jpg


So how could you possibly expect to go from that to recognizing "the world around you" in real-time while you're doing 100 kph with a computer? Hence the computer has to rely on other sensory data that's easier to process and not based on visuals. But literally everything involving traffic right now is based on visual clues: traffic lights, signs, markings on the road, indicators and so on. Most of this is easy for us humans but extremely difficult for a computer to process. And I'm not a tech-hater, quite the opposite actually, I even try my hand at ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) just to see what they can do, but one of the major challenges is to convert your data to something that your ANN can understand, and images are about the worst when it comes to converting them. Especially when we talk about images with megapixel resolution (which are obviously needed to identify objects further away from you and see further ahead), since basically each pixel needs its own input node, leading to an ANN with millions of nodes. Then there's the question of training such a network reliably so that it can make accurate predictions and decisions, which again is a gargantuan issue that only becomes more difficult when your data becomes more complex and difficult to understand.

So yeah, it might be a long way to true A.I. that can blend in with humans when it comes to driving. And we're probably going to see more than one half-assed attempt along the way.
 
Social media makes you fucking paranoid. Decided to finally make a heartfelt post on facebook about how I've been chronically suicidal and why I ended up disappearing for a month, etc. Came back, realised I set my statuses to "Only Me"...

(yeah I've not been doing so good lately, that's a story for another day)
 
In the last year I've gone through a whole lot of crap. Some of it by my own fault, the rest of it just sheer blind shitty luck.
Once or twice in the night when my brain was in its own little world.....I had thought about it.

Luckily, I have family that was there for me or...well....I dunno.

But talking about it does help
 
I spoke about it once to a friend via AIM and toward the end, she printed out the entire chat log and told her parents who contacted mine. I don't blame my friend, she was meaning well and obviously cared very much. Having your mom ask you about it though is really embarrassing and made me feel even worse. That's only because I've grown up with her sharing random shit to friends of hers on the phone and I had a feeling this would be "new material." After that, I held more of my feelings back. Nothing really came about it but I just didn't feel comfortable sharing anymore.

Now I just play video games to vent off stress and watch funny shows. Seems to work I guess? Having a dog helps because, he won't know why I didn't come home or am not waking up the next morning.
 
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