Brad Templeton

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…

> 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…

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…

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. ...

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-on-lidar-who-is-right-and-why-do-they-think-that/#3fbad5c2a3bd

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