technology

Tesla has released their full self-driving capability upgrade for selected vehicles some time ago. The beta testing is nothing new in the software world, but when the software is something like this it's entirely different thing. They are literally putting human lives at the stake.

Some time ago I read an article about causal AIs. While in the end it was an interesting article I was initially disappointed of it. As I did not read the title correctly the first time. I was in fact looking forward reading about casual AIs instead of causal ones. A little bit of dyslexia there.

So there were no casual AIs to read about. But that got me thinking what would such an AI be like. Is there already such applications in existence?

Self driving cars is s hard problem. Not least due to their reception and popular opinions against them. There is a lot of discussion and debating how safe or competent and adaptable they need to be to be generally accepted.

Brain-computer interfaces are already a reality, even though still a primitive ones. They mostly rely on weak signals to interact or enhance different things. But we are still far from being able to transmit any complex information directly to our brains.

While we might understand the basic concepts of how the brain works there is still a long way to understand enough of it be able to for example "write" into it directly. And even then it would most probably be analogous to writing to a traditional hard disk drive with a magnetic needle by hand.

Self driving cars might be still far away, despite the promises the automakers make that we'll get them in three to five years. There are some big technical challenges for sure. But the biggest challenges aren't technical at all.

In normal conditions an autonomous car can already beat a human driver. Only in the more unclear situations is the human reasoning still outperforming machine predictions. But those scenarios also assume the human specimen operating under optimal conditions.

While the desktop might be dead it's still needed. Maybe not that much for consuming, for that there are many better ways. But for creating it's still mostly needed. Or is it?

The year of the Linux Desktop has been coming for years, even decades. But it never happened. And it won't happen as the desktop operating system has become irrelevant. The desktop is mainly used to run a single desktop application: the Browser. Even that usage is diminishing and threatening the desktop Computer itself as well as it's little cousin the Laptop. It's all in mobile devices nowadays. And even there the Apps are losing.

There are people who want to experiment. They will go extra mile to try out new things and learn new technologies. They disregard all the prior work done to provide stable foundations for all projects. Every project is a bit different. But they wont commit to maintain this new creation indefinitely. They trust that others will be as inclined to learn the new things as they are.

After owning and driving a car with advanced driver assistance technologies I'm becoming worried about the implications getting accustomed to such technologies. They make driving so easy that driving without them feels too difficult.

From the start I have been using this site to write my daily posts. About a year ago I started cross posting the text to the 200wad site as well.

Along the way I have done few improvements. But at it's core it has remained the same. A self hosted Drupal site. There is nothing wrong with it, it just works. Still, I would like to do something new. Something more modern, cutting edge even.

I don't get to code much anymore at my work. So I need to find these hobby projects to satisfy that itch. There might not be the need for it. I just want to do it.