The brilliance of this gem of a book by Trevor Noah blew me away. What an amazing childhood and upbringing Trevor has had growing up in South Africa! Respect. He paints it in brilliant strokes and educates the reader on the history of this southern tip of Africa in lucid detail. It’s equal parts beautiful and excruciating and heart-wrenching and funny.
Read MoreA better queuing system is badly needed at Tesla Superchargers. Some do have a queuing area automatically forming, but a few are an exercise in frustration and chaos, like at the Computer History Museum and at the East Palo Alto Target. At the former one, I have witnessed otherwise friendly and peaceful folks almost come to fistfights with those cutting ahead of them inadvertently due to the L-shaped compact area and lack of visibility.
Read MoreToday was the happiest day of my life with the Tesla - when I got to listen to all my Spotify playlists on the morning commute. Pure bliss. A case of the real experience being even better than what I’d been expecting. I was beaming the whole ride to work and looking forward to the commute back like never before. Bye bye Premium LiveXLive - I hardly knew you.
Read MoreTesla made a wise decision to not have a blatant external indicator when AutoPilot is engaged, even though sometimes I wish the in-the-car indicator was more obvious, like a green ring around the steering wheel. Once in a while, engaging the AutoPilot only engages the Traffic Aware mode without AutoSteering. Darn, that second pull of the little lever stick did not register. At the same time, I do wish the loud sound when AutoPilot is engaged could be disabled. And please, oh god, please, get rid of the stupid cowbell Easter Egg, Mr Musk!
Read MoreI must have listened to Sam Smith’s Too Good at Goodbyes over a hundred times in the last week. Something about it makes it resonate intensely. His voice, the lyrics dripping with emotion and hurt, the melody, the accent (“less” sounds like “liss”), the all-race and all-gender inclusive video - there’s so much to like. Everything’s crystal clear - no subtitles needed.
Read MoreI first heard about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos when the Wall Street Journal article came out in the beginning of its rise to fame. As a fellow needle-hater, Elizabeth was easy to empathize with. Her mission was my mission. Over the years, positive news about Theranos was popping up everywhere. When the pinprick testing at Walgreens started, I signed up. Giddily, I drove to a Walgreens at Palo Alto, only to have the most painful blood testing experience ever. The nurse had to squeeze my finger intensely to ooze out the blood. Not fun, not going through this again. The test results were all over the map. I discarded them and got another test done the old-fashioned way. Lucky for me.
Read MoreBinge-watching Dead To Me on Netflix has got to be one of the must fun things to do with your time. Only 10 episodes barely 30 minutes each, so about 5 hours and you’re done. There’s so much to like about the show. It’s funny and dark and twisted. It’s emotional and will have you in tears one moment and laughing your guts out the next. I had to pause several times just so I could take it all in.
Read MoreThe Tesla Autonomy Day last week Monday April 22 was an interesting affair. Two things are clear. The fact that Elon Musk has an inspiring vision is an understatement. And, that his predicted timelines for full self-driving (FSD) are credible is somewhat of a stretch.
Rather than the softball ones lobbied by the analysts, questions I would have liked to see answered:
Does each car have its own machine learning model and does it do model training as well? What is the need for a lot of computation power in the car?
Is each car learning in real-time and adapting itself from what its driver is doing?
There are several good reasons why Tesla AutoPilot requires hands on the wheel at all times. Scenarios that the AI cannot handle yet are:
An object on the road in front of the car that is not safe to run over
A perpendicular vehicle (there have been 2 fatal crashes with near identical conditions)
Cones in a construction zone
Humans have been driving automobiles for well over a century. I myself have over 2 decades of experience under my belt. In all this time, we have taught ourselves to drive hours at a stretch, tweaking the experience over months, years and decades. An hour long daily commute can happen largely on auto-pilot, without needing much exertion.
Enter the Tesla Autopilot. Introduced 5 years ago, almost 200,000 cars have collectively driven 1.2 billion miles on Autopilot. 6 months ago I got my Model S 100D. And every week since, I have been getting more comfortable with the Autopilot features.
A self-driving car may be the ultimate gift for a gadget geek. But would you trust your life with it? What if it doesn’t stop in time? Just needs to fail once. There’s so much variability — day/night, weather, seasons, road conditions, sunlight and shadows, aggressive driving styles, motorbikes, big rigs etc. How much testing could Tesla possibly have done? Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s safe.
Read MoreGot to try out the Oculus Rift and the controllers this week. What a mind-blowing experience! Super smooth motion, no jerks at all. You really feel you’re on another planet. If Google Cardboard is a baby, then this is the teenager.
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