"But of course, the CCP is ideologically opposed to self-representation."
Don't think it's to do with ideology, just desire of a small cabal of people to have absolute power and control over a country and everyone who lives in it.
In my view, accidents aren't the main issue, it's more the disruption caused if an AV, with no human driver, encounters the 'freezing robot problem' (I.e. When traffic lights not working, with policeman directing traffic) & gets stuck in a busy city centre, blocking traffic all around.
I'm not aware of any fallback remote takeover mechanism that can be used to recover AV's on this situation.
EDIT: I'm convinced, that until we majorly overhaul our road infrastructure to be more 'robot friendly', it's hard to see _fully_ autonomous AV's work in major cities I.e. electronic beacons on lane dividers, electronic signals on traffic lights, vastly stronger GPS network or replacement thereof, six nines level mobile network coverage at high bandwidth.
"AI is the phrase behind which magic hides and people love magic. Everything that has the aura of “humans don’t fully understand how it works in detail” will be used by charlartans, snake oil salesmen and conmen."
"Uber/Lyft do have a VCs-will-not-race-to-the-bottom-with-them moat, and tomorrow they might as well raise their prices to turn profitable."
That's the multi billion $ question, if they hike prices to become profitable, will customers swallow it, or jump to local alternatives. My feeling is the latter, I don't think you get economy of scale for running a taxi business, because your biggest cost is paying local drivers.
I presume it's because they're contracting? It's the way to cash out in software in the UK, I believe in most companies, contractors get to sidestep the HR/salary budget hierarchy, usually because the company is really desperate, and they tell themselves "they're only temporary, so won't apply salary banding on them"
"10 teams of 3 each owning their own little slice of the pie sounds like an organizational nightmare; mostly, you can't keep each team fully occupied with just that one service, that's not how it works. And any task that touches more than one microservice will involve a lot of overhead with teams coordinating."
I guess that's where the critical challenge lies. You'd better be damn sure you know your business domain better than the business itself! So you can lay down the right boundaries, contracts & responsibilities for your services.
Once your service boundaries are laid down, they're very hard to change
It takes just one cross-cutting requirement change to tank your architecture and turn it into a distributed ball of mud!
I think other professions emphasise past experience and referrals more. That and official credentials, especially in certified professions (I.e. Medicine).
That said, I think all interviews have an element of silliness to them. I know a financial consultant who was quizzed over articles published in the days financial times newspaper. Also know one of our analysts makes candidates do long division on paper! Don't forget the infamous how many golf balls can you fit in a jumbo jet kind of thing.
Personal experience on this. My degree (physics) was nearly completely orthogonal to my career (software engineer).
But I have no doubt it helped me get not just my first job, but also subsequent ones, probably due to 'his code/tech talk could be better, but he seems smart and has a physics doctorate from a prestigious institution'.
Think software hiring+quality would be much better if we had an apprecticeship culture, instead of based on perceived prestige from excelling at University.
"The ways engineers are terrible managers non-technical managers are often terrible too. In addition to that, they also know less about work itself and are more likely to be insecure about that."
I would put that as another human/personal trait, the ability to openly acknowledge ones limitations and delegate/defer when someone else has more expertise than you. For example, when making a technical decision, deferring to the tech lead & individual contributors.
If anything, a technical manager whose tech skills are/have slipped away is more likely to be insecure than someone non technical.
"Non technical management - this should speak for itself. I've done it before to much regret."
I wouldn't put this as a con, I've seen lots of engineers turn into terrible managers, because the skills are completely orthogonal, they also then lose touch with the tech - because that's what happens if you stop coding for even a few months.
Vice versa, I've worked with lots of good non technical managers, who respect and defer to you for technical decisions, planning etc
And of course the other way round, also seen good technical managers and bad non technical ones.
In summary, technical experience of a manager is not an indicator for me, what is are the human factors, do they micromanage? Are they happy to cede control and delegate? Do they give realistic deadlines instead of death marches?
I'm not sure it's easy for a software engineer to develop a model, it's quite an orthogonal skill, you need a solid grasp on mathematics and especially statistics.
Must have been really exciting time to be particle physicist in those days. SLAC & other colliders enabled a revolution in physics, culminating in the formulation & verification of the standard model - a truly unparalleled feat of scientific progress.
I always understood that the Stress–energy tensor in general relativity has a momentum component, so two electrons whizzing past each other at near the speed of light would exert a stronger gravitational pull between them, in all frames of reference, than if the electrons were 'at rest', relative to each other? I admit I didn't study GR so happy to be corrected!
Minor clarification. The standard model does not describe gravity. It ignores it, which is fine at LHC energies because it's orders of magnitude weaker than the other three forces.
At the planck energy scale, this is no longer the case, the relativistic mass of particles becomes so big that gravitational interaction is too strong to be ignored, and the SM loses it's ability to predict how particles interact, decay, combine etc
Indeed, I've never in my career (in high level businesses, I.e. Finance, advertising) seen such a thing as a proper 'specification'.
It's more the business has a high level, rough idea of a change/feature to improve the business, and we figure out together the exact details, some of which surface during implementation, and then verify it gradually in the wild.
We could have spent x10 time instead drawing up a formal spec up front, but it would have so many assumptions baked in, that it'd get invalidated in the wild anyway.
Terrifying stuff, it literally is straight out of a black mirror episode.