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ldesegur

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The low sunlight is hard to deal with by humans and computer vision isn't better. In the meantime, Tesla's CEO doesn't believe Lidar is necessary (https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/7/16988628/elon-musk-lidar-s...).

My advice to the company BOD & shareholders: have him take the Udacity's self driving car online course and after the first project, he'll clearly understand how limited detecting lanes by CV only can be. To Uber's ex-CEO's point: LIDAR is the SAUCE.

The Odersky's course is phenomenal. Highly recommended and it shows how much attention and craftmanship was put into designing Scala. Bonus: Martin speaks like Arnold and it's very enjoyable to have a "Terminator" voice teaching you complicated material.

Interestingly, you took the same path I did with Scala and ML. My criticism about these courses is that some of the projects and content can be too easy to get right, skimming on the surface in some areas that would need more time to grok. Lately I've moved to Udacity and there I can find more in-depth projects and discussions with virtual classmates. The price is steep but you pay for what you are getting.

Fun with Swift 11 years ago

Swift feels very immature in many areas. For example, Swift fails with generics out of most ordinary cases. Today, you still can't restrict protocol conformance (inheritance clause) to a type-constrained extension. That's a big issue with arrays. A struct wrapper is the go-to solution for many things where Swift generics break down and it's not the best or more elegant way to resolve its limitations. Many hopes for Swift 3.0 but I doubt they'll fix those.

In order to build iOS apps, you need to run XCode on MacOSX. The latest releases of XCode have been so unstable that I wonder how much longer before developers finally get discouraged to develop for Apple Hardware.

Gassee is the only executive I know who will actually try something before talking about it. It's evident that he reports on his personal experience with products and software before writing about those. He walked to the Stanford shopping center store to buy a copy (I did too and got similar experience.) See his previous post on iOS maps with hands-on feedback. I like his witty somewhat cynical (French?) writing style too. It reminds me of 'Mac the Knife' column on MacWeek (Gassee's period at Apple). It makes me smile.

Looking for active participants! The project is back on track!

First things, dusting off some features and fixing some bugs. Then ES 2.0 shift and sync up with latest iOS.

The issue with transitioning back to Linux is not the OS or its applications. The main issue to be able to find decent laptops that are able to run the software. Lenovo, HP, and Dell are among the brands that won't offer a quality experience (think antiglare screen, lightweight, battery efficient and decent weight.) Noise is also an issue with the fan level on most PC laptops today. SJ didn't like fan noise and it may have helped in designing the best laptop on the market today.

Richard Stallman is to software what Jean-Paul Sartres was to philosophy during his time and still now. JPS like RMS was living through his convictions and ideas to the point of refusing the Nobel prize because it would have tinted his motivations. RMS would do the same without any questions. Don't get them wrong: these people are not fanatic, they are just living and breathing a cause they started for a good reason. It takes courage not to give up to consumerism from corporates who try to milk everyone for the goal of making money and definitely not for bringing better living to our lives. Apple, Google, Facebook, they have a simple goal: $$$. When I see a guy talented and proficient like RMS defending his cause on a 9" OLPC, that takes guts.

OSX Lion in CSS3 15 years ago

You need to click on the arrow icon or the logo. It's buggy as hell. Click Help then all the windowing system is gone south. I found major bugs after playing with it for 2 minutes. Why hasnn't the author spent at least that amount of time to test it before putting it in the wild? It's mostly javascript btw. So the title of the article is wrong.

Yep. It's very similar to gun laws. They only affect the good guys and never stopped the bad guys from getting guns illegally. Laws in the USA mostly affect good citizens. Actors, rich businessmen and lawyers, and crooks are free to do whatever they want.

What's worse is that SOPA's motivation is primarily for Hollywood to continue milking Americans for entertainment content. Just because these studios can't adapt to rapidly growing technology, they decided to slow it down.

I've read a lot of technical stuff about rockets and space missions lately to the point of hurting my brain. I am not a rocket scientist (yet ;-) but I think what one needs is to launch a single robot in orbit while more components are sent to be assembled up there with balloons e.g. to build a unmanned space station. Could that work?

I tried Haskell but it doesn't cut it for me. So I switched to Go and have been very happy so far. I dig channels and co-routines. Type inference is great. I still wish some generics would happen in 2012. The lib is great for doing what C libs do in a more readable way.

I would be curious to find out if you guys ever consider LLVM since you mentioned backend work. How much work do you think it would take to switch your C backend to LLVM?

I browsed the net so much trying to fix these problems and never heard about this situation with Mac OS X. You got people out there who probably could contribute if they knew. Are you sure about this? The Mac OS X port is so bad, I would encourage VLC to scrap it until they can fix it, instead of giving false hopes to users.