Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Ah, the beauty of having all the money in the world

Herd mentality. People can be made to believe ANYTHING if they think that everyone else believes it too. Also known as mob mentality. Convince enough people that your election was stolen and they'll invade seat of government.

I'd probably take my kebab back if it smelled a bit Musky!

"Tesla is making a profit, but it would need to be about 20x bigger than it currently is to justify its share price, and that would be more than 100% of the total car market."

Share prices and corporate valuations are just fantasy wishes of gamblers investors, primarily short-term get-rich-quick types. The real investors, those with large stakes, are looking at long term trends, not short terms gains/losses. Just look at what happened to Netflix shares. It was obvious to everyone with an ounce of common sense there was a going to be a huge growth during lockdown and a huge reverse afterwards. The get-rich-quick investors piled in at the start of the rise and the smartest ones already divested as people went back to work.There's probably a lot of smaller investors that were late in when lockdowns started and have lost a lot by being late to divest. The big investors will mostly still be in because they've been in a long time, made a lot of paper profit and see the huge pandemic value rise as a blip. The price is still above what it was 5 years ago and will likely recover some of the recent days falls so those long term investors will probably still be quids in in the long run. Telsa has had drops in the 20% region a couple of times, but the trend is upwards overall, and are still massively overvalued.

Re: Good luck in the real world!

All of the above, I do too, as a car driver. It's how everyone ought to drive. It's probably why I'm accident free after 20+ years of up to 60,000 miles per year.

Re: Bah!

I think Dr Who did a story about that. Ah yes, Gridlock

Re: Bah!

"A leisurely trip to Florida, overnighting in the car as it tootles along if I don’t want to break my journey, no need to face forward, watch the traffic (and traffic jams - those will be a thing of rarity when everyone is doing it my way) and no steering wheel needed."

Except when it needs to recharge, pulls off the freeway into some scruffy little backwater Nowheresville because that's the only working, non-occupied charging point it can find, and you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of duelling banjos!!

Yes. Any car which requires a human to take over at any stage isn't autonomous. It assisted driving. A truly autonomous car won't have drivers control at all so using a hand-held mobile phone should be fine. On that note, it was interesting that thet statement didn't differentiate between a hand-held mobile phone and a hands-free phone, which ALL modern cars have the facility for. Hands-free use of a mobile phone is legal. Even m y crappy mid-range 6 year old car has bluetooth and voice control/steering wheel controls for my phone. A brand new AI car will surely have at least the same.

Re: Tad premature

"But actually going public with this now is jumping several guns. Have they nothing better to do with the Highway Code?Is it so perfect that there are no other revisions needed much more pressingly?"

It's talking about nice shiny things tomorrow instead of partygate. win-win!

Re: It's a paradigm shift

"And how will you find it when it parks elsewhere when it returns because the on street parking space it came from has been nicked by another vehicle?"

You press the "Come pick me up" button on your phone app of course!. Then you wait in the pouring rain for 15 minutes while your AI car "argues" with an AI car from a rival manufacturer over who has right of way down the now single lane road because of all the cars parked down each side. :-)

"You can already look at the stats for self driving vehicle incidents, since they are already driving more miles in a day than basically anyone will ever drive in a lifetime."

That's just silly. You are comparing aggregated AI driving of many, many cars with a single person. I frequently drive 300-400 miles per day. I wonder how many AI cars do that many per day tootling around town at 25mph?

Oh, and personal stats here: Last 20 or so years, ~1.2million miles driven, no accidents. There are probably many people out there, especially truck drivers, with far more miles than me and no accidents.

Re: too poor to ever own a car.

Yeah, and the subsidy is declining. As that disappears, and more people switch, the road tax will have to go up and per mile road charging will be introduced to replace the fuel duty losses to government income. I expect there to be no EV subsidy at all within the next few years and guarantee it will be gone by 2030 when the sale of new ICE cars will be banned. (Only 8 years away now!)

Re: Don't forget truck drivers

"much more so than in the UK/EU where rail is used much more extensively so there is much less long haul trucking."

Whilst I agree with your post, I'm not sure the above is true. I don't see freight trains with random containers on the flatbeds. What I tend to see are freight trains made up of one long train with identical tank or coal-like wagons in the make up. I spend most of my day on the road, and lorries make up a large part of the traffic on the roads here in the UK, many still EU registered trucks. Rail freight may possibly be a larger percentage than in the US, I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be a significant percentage based purely on my observations and "feeling".

We used to have a fairly decent number of "Freitliner" terminals around the country where local trucks would deliver standard shipping containers, forward them by rail, and get picked up by truck at the other end for onward local delivery. Many no longer exist, the remaining ones seem to be just trucking hubs or container storage sites now with rare or no rail head any more.

All the government chauffeurs who used to drive Ministers around will be retrained as litter pickers. There's a lot of skill in picking just the right kind of litter and putting it in the correct recycling bin.

Government Ministers, who never drive themselves, at least when on official business will, of course, be at the front of the queue for self-driving AI cars.

Re: 'Peak Netflix'

FWIW, Virgin Media are the same. 18 month contract, any change by the customer resets the clock, customer tied to more obligations than the provider. Possibly, in law, an "unfair contract".

You almost make it sound like the "telly tax" for an ad-free BBC is a good thing :-)

Re: 'Peak Netflix'

"Graze. Sign up for one for a couple on months. Watch what you want to watch. Then move on to the next. It's the capitalist way: it incentivised them to create good, new content."

Until the first one blinks and stars tying customers into 12 month contracts. If one does it, and gets away with it without too much loss of subscribers, the rest will quickly follow suit. The end result will be a massive loss of consumer choice because it will simply be too expensive to subscribe to all of them.

Re: tenure

"Pay people for their contribution, not for how long they've managed to not get sacked or promoted."

Not everyone wants to be promoted. People doing a job for a long time are often better at it than some wet behind the ears oik fresh out of school.

Re: Ambitious!

Get yer Apples 'ere! Only 999 squids each! (Wheels extra)

Re: site stupidity.

"Seriously, it's like posting your nude pictures publicly and expecting that pervs shouldn't be able to see them, only good-looking, educated and wealthy bachelors please! It's either terminally naive or extremely disingenuous:"

On the other hand, collecting every face you can find on the web and then using them as the basis of a facial recognition database isn't on. According to most commentards here anyway, whenever ClearView gets mentioned.

It's not just about scraping publicly accessible data, it's about doing it on an industrial scale and what it's then used for that counts. However, drawing a line which must not be crossed will be an immensely difficult task.

Re: What a _real_ AI would do.

"John, I'm not sure regular folks would employ their own AI software"

I was thinking along the lines of commercial customers on the receiving end of sales calls. That's what I felt the article was driving at. High value sales.

Re: What a _real_ AI would do.

I was think along different lines based on the same quoted part of the article. *IF* it works, which is doubtful, not only will it help separate the best salespeople from the rest, it'll help separate the good products from the bad if the bullshitting salesperson can be called out on his/her AI emotional analysts. After all, there's no reason why the customer won't have their own AI software at their end too. :-)

Which raises an interesting point. How would that section of the article have read if the author had wrote it from the point of view of the potential customer using it to separate the wheat from the chaff?

"When someone with a big pulpit starts making overtures directly to shareholders, there's a reasonable chance that a significant number of them will go for it despite its being underpriced. When that happens, the 40% or whatever who wanted to hold out - are screwed. They have no recourse but to go along with it, whether they like it or not."

You just described how Governments and Presidents are elected

"When that "someone" has a reality distortion field of Musk's calibre, the risk is much higher."

Trump (A card game reference :-)

Nah, the BOFH said they can do a serial port based firmware flash that takes hours to do because it usually fails 4 times out of 5 and is slower anyway, rather than the quicker network port based flash because now it's borked the port based flash is no longer an option.

RTFA, as they sometimes say around these here parts :-)

Re: Sorry Elon, but what's the point ?

Second Life. Myspace. Friendster. Google+....

Re: Sorry Elon, but what's the point ?

"On the one hand, Musk could start Mutter and fail to get enough users to make it viable."

I'm not sure the build fast, fail fast, learn, rebuild model works in this case :-)

Although to be fair, I'd much rather see a Twitter crash'n'burn rather than a Falcon or Starship.

Re: Strewth !.... How much more evidence do you need fed to you?

Maybe someone with a lot of money has bought the source code to amanfromMars 1?

Re: Money can't buy maturity

"That would be "cave emptor", I believe - Latin being very, very beholden to the endings of words (as any fule kno)."

I didn't kno that! Clearly I'm not a fule!! Oh, wait. You git! Now I know too!!!