Brad Templeton

Uber has drivers. There's probably some reason to customize car design for taxis, I'm not sure, but that's a modest difference relative to no driver and the greater expected scale of supplanting most human driving in time. https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/design-change.html is very old and there are newer discussions, but I'm too lazy to find them for you. Also michaelmrose's answer.

> Following this logic, isn't training AI on Github or Deviantart 100% fair game then? Unlike forum comments, GitHub code generally has an explicit license attached which you'd have to respect - you know, for instance by giving attribution to every MIT-licensed source that was used. And even then, let's say someone releases a book with all your HN comments: you are definitely entitled to sue them for copyright. Here's some info from the BBS era, which is still relevant today: https://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

USENET never really solved spam. I remember the statistic that at one point one third of usenet traffic was spam and another third was spam cancels. Here's what people felt at the time: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html (the "cancel" message was hilarious since when invented it was unauthenticated, i.e. anyone could delete any post on any group in USENET! This had to be fixed: https://www.templetons.com/usenet-format/cancel.html ) Also found https://www.gdargaud.net/Hack/NoSpam.html which is a great little time capsule site..

One thing that I love to do is watch the streaming netflix stuff. Get a roku device and go to town with a $8/mo netflix account. The roku has a great interface and tons of outputs.(hdmi, composite, component, svideo, etc...) This is not a complete solution because you do not generally get shows or movies until some time has passed. But when they do have it on watch instantly it is great. MythTV has been going strong in the DVR category for a long while now but I haven't used it since it was an infant so I cannot attest to it's current level of maturity. If you try MythTV check out this plugin for some help recording: http://www.templetons.com/brad/myth/tvwish.html You can also try out a liveCD of MythTV+Ubuntu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythbuntu

It all depends on what your hourly rate is. Both the phone and your time. See the now ancient Bill Gates Wealth Page (http://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html): "Which means that if, on his way into the office, should he see or drop a $1000 bill on the ground, it's just not worth his time to bend over and pick it up. He would make more just heading off to work."

> You do realize that this is just like saying that "those pesky scientists out there don't cure cancer because that would put them out of the job"? It takes just one scientist to break this worldwide cartel, and he immediately will become billionaire and the one the most influential and famous persons of the century. Can you spot where your predictions contradict game theory? I think in that situation game theory predicts that that scientist is found dead in a burned out car with a bullet hole or two in the skull, eh? But I'm not positing a conspiracy of mustache-twirling villains. It's obvious that the vast majority of programmers are well-intentioned. But it's also obvious that we ignore our own history (and we're slaves to fashion, but that's a tangent.) Engelbart "cured cancer" in 1968[1], Alan Kay and co. "cured cancer" in the 70's[2], and Niklaus Wirth "cured cancer" in the 80's[3]. Things like Alice Pascal were around in the 80's.[4] > Besides, if there is one thing that programmers like to do, it's developing programming tools. Personally, I'm astonished by the amount of great tools available for free to everyone and the sheer amount of labor that people put there in their free time. Linux [1] alone is mind-boggling, and it's just a tiny fraction of the free codebase available to build your software on top of. That's a symptom of the problem, not an intrinsic benefit, most of that software is little more than video games for devs from the POV of human…

This is a good question, and doesn't deserve a snarky response. This is the long-term good-case scenario (using USA-focused numbers, but you can extrapolate to the rest of the world): -Car accidents will be reduced to nearly zero, saving about 34,000 lives and 250,000 injuries each year. The NHTSA estimates that this costs $871 billion per year[0]. -Because car accidents will be much less frequent, cars can be built lighter, saving the energy that's currently spent on armor. And in the scenario where people hail rides rather than own cars, the car that transports you will be the right size for you - i.e. a one-person car for most trips - which saves a lot of energy too. The energy savings help with intra-city air pollution, climate change, and decreased costs. -Self-driving cars free up the 50 billion hours that Americans spend driving each year. At the average wage, that's worth about one trillion dollars. -A lot of valuable land is used for parking (14% of Los Angeles, for example[1]). Hailed robot cars wouldn't need to park, and self-owned cars can drop their owners at their expensive destinations in a central business district, and drive a few minutes away to park in a garage where they pack together much more closely than humans can park them. The freed-up space can be used for housing or other valuable uses. -Hopefully, self-driving cars massively reduce congestion. Due to their much-faster-than-human reaction time, they can drive very close behind each other at…

Earlier use of whitespace coding: http://www.templetons.com/tech/proletext.html ... Invisible formatting information is embedded in trailing spaces and tabs on the ends of lines in an ordinary looking document. In addition, "blank" lines contain spaces and tabs with hidden formatting meanings. Assuming typical 60 column lines, one can have over 300 different codings on the end of a line without going past 80 columns. (Far fewer are needed.) On a blank line, almost a billion codings are possible. Documents with invisible formatting always start with a magic line, which begins with "<SP><SP><TAB><SP><SP><TAB>" followed by version encoding. Thus documents can be spotted and formatted even without a Mime Content-Type header for this new text type. This otherwise useless combination of spaces and tabs on a blank line should virtually assure that random documents are not treated as formatted. ...

Problem 1: This article is a giant anti-car rant with a few points of rational debate baked in that might help public policy. It's no more objectively helpful than reading a spiel from BimmerForums or ClubWRX on why they love their 300hp sports cars and would never give them up to be herded in a big, crowded, smelly bus. Problem 2: Cars are currently the best solution to the problems we have. That's why they are #1 in the US. Not because they are horrible inventions, not because there is some conspiracy to keep them in their cars (Americans CHOOSE to live in suburbs with large lawns and lots of open space, since not everyone lives in a big city with subway systems and whatnot). Building lots of parking lots is still cheaper than figuring a way to shuttle people around in rural areas. America is big, land is cheap. America doesn't look like Manhattan, NYC everywhere. For these people, cars are the best solution. And the next stage is not going to be a jetpack. It's going to be a self-driving car. The fact that average people put up with all the problems and headaches of cars that only car enthusiasts love (maintenance, repairs, buying, etc.) shows us that there are a LOT of advantages from cars that we need to match with new forms of technology. My take is: Improve cars, rather than trying to destroy them. Because 100 years of innovation of automobiles aren't for nothing. My take: The near future is efficient hybrids (2025), electric or fuel-cell cars (2035), then…

The term hasn't caught on widely, but "vansit" is a term or the midpoint between individual taxis and fixed-route oversized (most of the time) buses: https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/future-transit.html

This is what is in front of our eyes: https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/timeline.html Maybe yours see something different.

Brad Templeton's Robotaxi Timeline[1] (October 2024) shows a dozen milestones that Waymo has achieved over nearly 15 years from "Make a nice video" to "100,000 Rides per week." Waymo needs two more milestones to achieve "Production!" Waymo's competitors are behind on the timeline, but may move faster thanks to improved technology and a more welcoming social environment. [1] https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/timeline.html

People getting to their destination safer, faster, insulated from weather and crackheads, not listening to showtimes, not breathing in subway tunnel air [1], is good for the individual People consuming less energy to get to their destination [2] is good for society [1] https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/subway-air-pollution-disproportionate… [2] https://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

It might even be older according to the main page ("mostly written in 2001")[0]. Sure would be helpful if the author included a publish date. Many blog entries (and stack overflow type solutions) need time context (it may have been the solution/a reasonable position at the time) https://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/

Given the reference "I wrote a satire of issues around this some years ago" for a piece posted in 2005, I suspect the 2010 / 2011 year is reasonably accurate. https://ideas.4brad.com/node/221 https://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/sell-english.html

> We have to ask ourselves what these centralised platforms offer that decentralised ones like NNTP didn’t. Moderation and up/downvoting as a way to filter content. It took quite a bit of effort for volunteers to propagate cancel messages against all the spammers that started appearing at a certain point in time in Usenet's history, and a bunch of infrastructure to ensure that malicious control messages were dealt with as well: * https://www.templetons.com/usenet-format/cancel.html * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_message

I don’t agree he makes good points at all. His arguments essentially come down to two things: 1. LiDAR is expensive - this makes sense from his perspective because he has already declared all Tesla cars on the road are capable of “full” self driving with their current hardware. If he walks back on his, he would have to retrofit a million cars. 2. Humans can drive with just vision, so why can’t computers? This is a naive argument because human vision isn’t just vision, it’s linked to a ridiculous intelligence in the form of human brain. And computers are nowhere close to replicating it. If you want to read more on LiDAR’s importance, read some of Brad Templeton’s writings. https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/cameras-lasers.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/05/06/elon-musks-war-o…

So, Tim Harford from the BBC/FT did a radio show on this and they say: Darcy's 10K can be: 1. Inflation adjusted to 838K GBP 2. Earnings power adjusted (as labor purchase price parity) to 9.995M GBP 3. Adjusted by a Per Capita GDP percentile factor to 65M GBP (or income off of capital assets/'Consols' of $3B GBP) BBC More or Less Podcast: How Rich was Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csvq3g PS- They basically mirror the NOL guy's article's antecedent from '016 And whatever happened to tracking how much money bill gates could drop and not pick up due to the value of his time ? { 1999: https://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html ;} That was a good frame of reference.

You get one or the other: low density housing, or effective public transit. https://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

This is a common copyright fallacy. So common that Brad Templeton was combatting it 20 years ago. Publication does not waive copyright. * https://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

Brad Templeton has some very relevant discussion of this in https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/levels.html including > There is additional controversy, it should be noted, about the proposed level 2. In level 2, the system drives, but it is not trusted, and so a human must always be watching and may need to intervene on very short notice -- sub-second -- to correct things if it makes a mistake. [...] As such, while some believe this level is a natural first step on the path to robocars, others believe it should not be attempted, and that only a car able to operate unsupervised without needing urgent attention should be sold.

you listed a bunch of advantages of wealth that I dont think anyone would dispute. and you talk about taking that away. how is this supposed to help people who are already impoverished? it seems like you want there to be more people in poverty, not fewer. > http://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html riddled with fallacies and calculated to produce envy. totally irrelevant to our discussion.

I found this critique of those fairly convincing. http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/v2vdata.html Pithily, "It can never be that useful because if it's being really useful, something is very wrong."

Brad Templeton's essays are the place to start: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

Here is an article comparing sensor types: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/cameras-lasers.html

Brad Templeton (EFF board member and prolific robocar blogger) calls this the "humans hate being killed by robots" effect. If you're into robocars you can do a lot worse than checking out his robocar page: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

While I don't advocate for breaking up ICANN, this article "Fixing DNS -- how to break up ICANN" (http://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/fix.html) presents a decent approach to the TLD 'problem' that would not focus on useless branding TLDs but instead encourage only TLDs that were going to add value to the Internet. In short, the idea is to only allow non-generic TLDs to be registered to force the TLD operator to differentiate their TLD from others, rather than just being the first one to register '.bank'. It doesn't offer a solution to the complaint in the article that organizations will have to register 'apple', 'mcdonalds', or 'cocacola' in each new TLD, but I'm less sympathetic to that concern.

Also consider how much he must optimize his attention compared to other people: http://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html He simply has to think differently than most.

If you're interested in more, Brad Templeton has been singing the praises of a future with robot cars, and how to get there, for many years, both in all the futurism un-conferences I've visited in the bay area, and on his very thorough website: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

Facts and ideas can't be copyrighted, but their expression and structure can. http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html This is definitely a copyright violation, and I am shocked and enraged that this was voted so highly on HN and not flagged. [Edits] 1. The standard "Recipes and collection of recipes" argument. This is a collection of recipes. 2. I am not shocked that there is a copyright violation. I am shocked that such an egregious violation has been voted so highly on HN. We are all digital workers on HN, and such disregard for digital work is (still) shocking.