Category: Technology

I’m  not, but Twitter thinks I am. I use IFTTT to automatically tweet a blog post, so I don’t think about it much. But the last post prompted this. Maybe Erick Erickson gets the same reaction?

If you aren’t, you should be reading Om Malik. And this post, like many others, is excellent.

First what is Amazon Go: It is an 1800 square-foot retail outlet in Seattle with no staff, where you can grab and go and where you get billed directly to your Amazon account. It offers everyday grocery staples, ready-to-eat meals, snacks and Amazon Meal Kits.

…

The current retail industry insiders will come up with excuses around why Go won’t work and why Amazon hasn’t figured out the complexity of the problems. Just like they said Amazon Cloud is for kid-apps and it wouldn’t scale and won’t be a real business. I was an Amazon skeptic in 1998. By 2002, I had changed my mind. I am a Bezos Believer.

I am too…

The SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is basically three times more powerful than anything they’ve launched before and is the most powerful rocket today. It was raised vertical for tests at Kennedy Space Center:

When it launches, the two outer boosters will detach and land almost simultaneously at Cape Canaveral, while the center core will attempt to land on the floating barge in the Atlantic. Almost like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u26-CIDaazQ

Because  Elon Musk has a sense of humor, he will be sending his very own original Tesla Roadster into space:

And Elon thinks there’s a fairly real chance the first Falcon Heavy launch will explode:

“I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage. I would consider even that a win, to be honest,”

This is crazy cool stuff, whether it succeeds the first time or not.

Via xkcd, of course…

This is a brilliantly detailed comparison of Google Maps and Apple Maps. The conclusion is that Google has possibly a 6 year head start on everyone else. The detail in some of Google’s maps is amazing…

This will be the thing that eventually puts self-driving cars over the top. Britain’s largest auto insurance company is offering a 5% discount for driving a Tesla with auto-pilot turned on.

The NHTSA found that the crash rate of Tesla vehicles dropped by nearly 40 percent when Autosteer was activated.

There will be a point where people look at getting in a car with a human driver like driving without a seat belt. You can do it, but why? But once insurance companies start making human drivers much more expensive to insure, the tide will turn quickly.

Google’s Chess AI program, AlphaZero, just demolished the previously top ranked program. that’s not the impressive part

Oh, and it took AlphaZero only four hours to “learn” chess. Sorry humans, you had a good run.

Read the whole thing. The program was given the rules and “taught” itself. It’s a whole new world…