A Self-Driving Freight Truck Just Drove Across the Country to Deliver Butter
December 12th, 2019Autonomous freight transportation? Yes, now/soon/regulatory barriers.
Autonomous robotaxis? Don’t hold your breath.
Automakers Are Rethinking the Timetable for Fully Autonomous Cars:
My guess is that, if it happens, it will happen in the freight market first. Freight is a walk in the park compared to the robotaxi concept that Musk is talking about.
With freight, you can train the machine on a specific route and annotate, by hand, the areas that it’s not able to navigate properly. The machine wouldn’t be able to self drive without this training and annotation process.
That is far less sexy than what Musk is claiming is right around the corner, but I could see route specific AI systems being good enough to begin firing some truck drivers in the not too distant future.
With regard to this story, here’s an absolutely critical point, which I doubted would be included in the article, “zero disengagements”:
The trip took about 41 hours to complete, according to data from Google Maps, and spans over 2,800 miles. It took the Plus.ai truck three days to complete the journey, during which it made a few stops, but never because it couldn’t handle the driving. In fact, there was a safety driver aboard the vehicle, but they never had to take over and intervene for the truck other than during fuel stops and federally mandated breaks. The company said there were zero “disengagements,” where the truck lost control.
Via: Popular Mechanics:
If you happen to live in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, some 50 miles outside of Philadelphia, your next stick of creamy butter just may have been delivered via self-driving freight truck. It’s believed to be the first time an autonomous freight vehicle has made a cross-country trip, let alone a commercial delivery.
Google Hands Feds 1,500 Phone Locations In Unprecedented ‘Geofence’ Search
December 12th, 2019If the mobile radio is on, always assume that the device is phoning home your location, and a deluge of other privacy compromising information. If airplane mode is on, assume it will transmit your movements as soon as as you turn off airplane mode and it connects to the Internet.
If the mobile radio is on, the mobile network always has your position if you are within range.
You can trust that a mobile phone isn’t spying on you if you remove the battery. Hint: Most mobile devices “feature” a unibody design, meaning that the back of the phone is glued on, preventing easy battery removal.
Via: Forbes:
Two dead dogs and more than $50,000 in damaged property were just some of the casualties of arsons carried out across Milwaukee, Wisconsin, throughout 2018 and 2019.
To find the perpetrators, officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) demanded Google supply records of user devices in the respective locations at the times the arsons took place, Forbes has learned. Though federal agents had used the technique before, they’d never received such a data haul back from Google.
The requests, outlined in two search warrants obtained by Forbes, demanded to know which specific Google customers were located in areas covering 29,387 square meters (or 3 hectares) during a total of nine hours for the four separate incidents. Unbeknownst to many Google users, if they have “location history” turned on, their whereabouts are stored by the tech giant in a database called SensorVault.
In this case, Google found 1,494 device identifiers in SensorVault, sending them to the ATF to comb through. In terms of numbers, that’s unprecedented for this form of search. It illustrates how Google can pinpoint a large number of mobile phones in a brief period of time and hand over that information to the government.
Armies of Low Paid Contractors Transcribing Recordings from Tech Company Surveillance Platforms to Improve AI Apps
December 12th, 2019Ah yes, the AI secret sauce in your “smart” speaker…
Via: Bloomberg:
How the world’s biggest companies got millions of people to let temps analyze some very sensitive recordings.
The Origins of Cyberpunk
December 12th, 2019Via: Indigo Gaming:
Epstein and Prince Andrew Victim Virginia Giuffre Tweets That She Is Not Suicidal
December 12th, 2019Via: Virginia Giuffre:
I am making it publicy known that in no way, shape or form am I sucidal. I have made this known to my therapist and GP- If something happens to me- in the sake of my family do not let this go away and help me to protect them. Too many evil people want to see me quiteted ? https://t.co/8463mPR6YU
— Virginia Giuffre (@VRSVirginia) December 11, 2019
Local mirror:
More: Epstein and Prince Andrew Accuser Posts Chilling Tweet: “I Am Not Suicidal”
Ultrasound Destroys 80 Percent of Prostate Cancers in One-Year Study
December 11th, 2019Via: New Atlas:
Treating prostate cancer through traditional means such as surgery or radiotherapy carries certain risks, with some patients experiencing impotence, urinary problems and bowel trouble, among other unwanted side effects. Safer and less invasive treatment options could soon be on the table, however, including a novel MRI-guided ultrasound technique that eliminated significant cancers in 80 percent of subjects in a year-long study.
The new technique is called MRI-guided transurethral ultrasound ablation (TULSA) and has been under development for a number of years. The minimally invasive technology involves a rod that enters the prostate gland via the urethra and emits highly controlled sound waves in order to heat and destroy diseased tissue, while leaving healthy tissue unharmed.
These waves come from 10 heating elements built into the length of the rod to treat the entire prostate gland. An algorithm controls which of these elements emit the sound waves at any one time, along with their shape, direction and strength. All of this takes place within an MRI scanner, allowing doctors to keep a close eye on which tissues are being heated and by how much.
World’s First Electric Commercial Airplane Completes Test Flight
December 11th, 2019Via: Business Insider:
A Vancouver-based airline is one step closer to launching the world’s first all-electric commercial plane after a successful test flight on December 10. Harbour Air’s ePlane completed a 10-minute trip across the Fraser River in Richmond, BC.
The ePlane is a six-passenger DHC-2 de Havilland Beaver, a Canadian-designed aircraft that has been in use since 1946. Harbour Air developed the ePlane alongside magniX, a company that’s designed multiple electronic propulsion systems for planes. Harbour Air plans to build a full fleet of commercial seaplanes based on the ePlane’s design.
No Safe Spaces
December 11th, 2019Via: No Safe Spaces:
These Secretive Oil Companies Control $3 Trillion In Wealth
December 11th, 2019Via: OilPrice:
They control the vast majority of the world’s oil and gas assets, yet the average person has never even heard of them, outside of those that are famous for things like getting attacked by missiles or becoming embroiled in a high-profile corruption scandal.
State-owned oil and gas companies (aka, the national oil companies, or NOCs) control at least US$3 trillion in oil and gas assets, compared to around $2.5 trillion as of 2017, and hold an estimated 90% of all known reserves–considerably more than publicly listed companies such as BP, ExxonMobil and Shell. Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco leads the pack as the world’s most profitable company.
That means that NOCs control about as much wealth as all U.S. billionaires or roughly twice the assets of global multilateral development banks.
The Afghanistan Papers
December 11th, 2019
Via: Washington Post:
A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
Related, 2007: The War in Afghanistan is Simply a Big Money Heroin Racket
