Nuclear power plants have a design life. The flux from the reactor causes
permanent damage to the surrounding structures. Think of putting a bullet
through a wall of your house once a day. Do you still think it will be safe
after 40 years? MIT has a free course on nuclear reactors and they mention
this damage as a lifetime limiting factor.
I have a fairly deep expertise in the area. Masters level work in machine vision,
many years of robotics at Unimation, IBM, and CMU. Current hacking on LLMs.
I have programmed for 53 years.
FSD is "indistinguishable from magic".
This thing drove from my house to the destination and back without a single event.
It has never seen either path. It handled stop signs, traffic lights, country
roads, a flock of birds in the road, highway entrance/exit, directional
traffic lights, traffic merging, speed adjustments, lane changes, rain, etc.
I am beyond impressed.
As for the "safety issue", my Y has airbags on the steering wheel, knee,
and "curtain airbags" on the windows and seats. The Y has the highest
safety rating available. It won't roll over easily. The passenger compartment
is well isolated from front/rear collisions. Plus it apparently has emergency
braking if a collision is likely.
In all possible circumstances even humans get confused. Two weeks ago I had a
turkey fly across the hood of my car. I didn't know turkeys could fly. I thought
it was a boulder at first. So FSD can't be perfect. But it is damn good.
This is what I loved about the PDP-11 series. The instruction opcodes were so
painfully obvious you could read them in octal.
I would use a hand punch to
create holes in paper tape that was the program. (Just a metal block with holes
drilled and a metal dowel to punch the tape).
"Patching the tape" involved finding a section of code that could be "overpunched"
to be a jump instruction to the current end of tape where you could punch in a subroutine and a return statement.
If all else failed you'd create a "patch tape" that was read after the original
tape and overwrote memory locations.
It was all very convenient since you could "single step" the program from the
front panel and watch the registers change.
Life got really sweet when the new teletype had a reader/punch.
