Because I'm crazy enough to think others might want my opinion, here's the list of films, complete with trailers and my comments. No plot-summaries (you can follow the IMDB links and watch the trailers for that), just my random comments and opinions.
Enjoy
DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Co (GM.N) is seeking U.S. government approval for a fully autonomous car - one without a steering wheel, brake pedal or accelerator pedal - to enter the automaker’s first commercial ride-sharing fleet in 2019, executives said.
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GM is part of a growing throng of vehicle manufacturers, technology companies and tech startups seeking to develop so-called robo-taxis over the next three years in North America, Europe and Asia. Most of those companies have one or more partners.
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GM wants to control its own self-driving fleet partly because of the tremendous revenue potential it sees in selling related services, from e-commerce to infotainment, to consumers riding in those vehicles.
At a Nov. 30 briefing in San Francisco, GM’s Ammann told investors the lifetime revenue generation of one of its self-driving cars could eventually be “several hundred thousands of dollars.” That compares with the $30,000 on average that GM collects today for one of its vehicles, mostly derived from the initial sale.
GM’s Cruise AV is equipped with the automaker’s fourth-generation self-driving software and hardware, including 21 radars, 16 cameras and five lidars - sensing devices that use laser light to help autonomous cars “see” nearby objects and obstacles.
This is amazing. Two years from now, we will be seeing true driverless cars on the road, at least in some cities in the US. It may be a while before the tech matures enough to let us have this capability for ourselves - to own one and use it everywhere we currently drive, but this is still an incredible next step.
"Likely" meteor lights up sky over Michigan, National Weather Service saysThe National Weather Service in Detroit said a flash seen over Michigan and the boom heard was not thunder or lightning -- but instead a likely meteor. According to CBS Detroit, residents have been calling in to report what some describe as a boom or blast heard just after 8 p.m.
That must've been a sight to see. I should get a dash-camera installed in my car, just in case something similar happens when I'm around.
Source Code for Apple's Lisa Operating System to be Released for Free in 2018The Apple Lisa, released in 1983, was one of the first personal computers to come equipped with a graphical user interface, and soon the operating system that ran on the Lisa will available for free, courtesy of the Computer History Museum and Apple.
As noted by Gizmodo, Al Kossow, a software curator at the Computer History Museum, recently announced that both the source code for the Lisa operating system and the Lisa apps have been recovered. Apple is reviewing the source code, and once that's done, the museum will be releasing the code publicly.
This is really awesome news. Hopefully it will spur some people in the emulation community to make a Lisa emulator we can run on our modern computers under macOS, Windows and Linux. I, for one, would love to be able to try out this historic computer and compare the experience with what I remember from the early Macs, with the design ideas Jef Raskin developed, and other contemporary computer systems.
It had never previously occurred to me that Excel's drawing tools could be used for actual art and not just business graphics. I'm impressed.
Google AI teaches itself ‘superhuman’ chess skills in four hoursHuman chess grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen tells the BBC that he’s “always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on earth and showed us how they played chess.”
Well, move aside, ugly, giant bags of mostly water: now we know, because Google’s “superhuman” AlphaZero artificial intelligence (AI) taught itself chess from scratch in four hours. Then, it wiped the floor with the former world-leading chess software, Stockfish 8.
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From the paper, whose authors include DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis: a child chess prodigy who reached the rank of chess master at the age of 13:
Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi [a similar Japanese board game] as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.
A very impressive achievement. A huge leap forward in the field of machine learning.
Is it actually intelligent? I suppose that's going to depend greatly on how you define the word.
The creator of Dilbert explains Trump's persuasion style and reminds us why people stopped caring about facts
A great article by Scott Adams explaining an interesting technique in the art of persuasion that Trump appears to use to great success. After reading this, you may still hate what he has to say, but you will also be fascinated to discover what he's really doing and how well he's doing it even after you know the trick.
Yesterday, the Mozilla people released Firefox version 57. And with it, they have removed the old "XUL" based add-on system. So all add-ons must now use the new WebExtension API. Unfortunately, many add-ons (including a lot that I use) have not been updated yet, despite Firefox issuing warnings for the last several revisions. In many cases, the authors have abandoned the code, and in others, I don't think they care enough to want to re-implement it for the new API.
The result is that I've had to remove and replace many of my favorite add-ons. Here's a list of what I had to change and what I think of the results.
But, although very relevant news these days, that is not what I'm writing about today. Today's article is just to share a few links describing how far Facebook's data mining goes in order to build profiles on people for the purpose of targeting ads.
It is known that they maintain a "shadow profile" (a term they don't use and don't like to hear) on all their users. They track not only the contacts you've uploaded and the content you post/view/like, but they also tie it to the profile (contacts, content, etc.) of all your friends. And also people they think might be your friends - any other user who uploaded a contacts list with you in it is fair game here as well. Then they tie it to "web beacons" on sites all over the Internet to track what sites you visit, what you're searching/shopping for and what you purchase, including the browsing/shopping habits of everybody associated with you (including your friends and people they think might want to be friends). And then they tie it in with GPS location monitoring if you have granted access to the FB app/web site in order to discover where you shop, when you're traveling, and what events you are attending. And of course, the content of any text, photos and video you (or your contacts, friends or possible-friends) share via Facebook Messenger, What's App or Instagram also contributes to this profile.
There have even been accusations of them going so far as to listen in via your phone's microphone in order to target ads based on things you say, but Facebook explicitly denies this charge (everything above has pretty much been confirmed - Facebook doesn't deny any of it, they just don't like to talk about it a lot).
None of it should come as much of a surprise, but it looks pretty shocking when it's all piled together in one paragraph.
Sources:
h/t to the Michael Tsai blog for the link that caught my attention this morning.
