I've had good luck with video team rooms vs. having lots of video meetings scheduled. With a video team room you basically "hang out" like you would in a real team room. You might have 4 people with one sharing while another helps work through the current issue and the other two are working on related things and just being present to help if needed. In that type of setting the informal self seems to work about the same as it does when working together in a physical team room.
I own a home in a very rural part of the US, but do a lot of work with people in large cities. I was talking with some people in NYC about our 5 bedroom home that we bought for $120,000 and how most of the houses for sale in our town are about half that price. The people from NYC couldn't imagine such a thing. One said, "So does that mean that no one needs to take out a loan to buy their home?" I explained that the people in my town weren't making NY level wages either.
The idea that there were parts of the US where you could buy a house for $60k was just as foreign as the idea of someone making $25k per year. They simply had no frame of reference for what wages and cost of living look like in places that weren't big cities.
Just having a book that you've written on any topic listed somewhere on your resume is nearly always a positive. It is kind of like having a college degree in that it shows you can start something and finish it.
way more people finish college than publish a book though. It's a higher-level signal IMO, even a self-published book is a massive accomplishment that shows huge dedication.
If you like the idea of a small lisp machine, you should look at uLisp. Last time I priced out the components they came to somewhere in the $20 to $40 range.
Do most people think that autopilot is used to avoid other planes and obstacles like mountains? I always assumed autopilot was basically like cruise control for planes and just kept it level, at a fixed direction, and constant speed. Same thing as autopilot on a sailboat.
Old autopilots did exactly that, in addition to keeping a predefined climb/sink rate (long ascents/descents are really boring to do manually in small aircraft).
New autopilots in commercial airliners can do many things (follow GPS tracks or radio navigation waypoints, control engine throttle, line up and bring the airplane 50-100ft over the runway etc) but they never do collision avoidance, landings or terrain mapping.
Airliners also have alarms for low altitude (most have radar altimeters) but they prompt the pilot for action, they're not supposed to avoid anything on their own. Apparently Tesla doesn't even do that.
Modern airliners can and sometimes do do automatic landings [1] [2] [3] [4]. It's done when visibility is very poor. If it is not required, most pilots prefer manual landing. It's less work. The autoland system is more complicated to set up, and is more work to monitor in order to take over if something goes wrong. But when the visibility is low enough, many airlines require their pilots to use it.
+1, Instead of developing super smarts autopilots we could just instrument the highways so they can tell the car where to go. The instrumented roads could send out warnings and give control back to the driver when there are roadworks ahead.
That would require a massive infrastructure investment. And seeing as we can't seem to even get a good chunk of roads to even be in good repair, I don't have high expectations for the possibility of instrumented roads.
So be it. We already have extreme amounts of signage for traditional drivers, it's time we stop treating autonomous cars like second rate vehicles and start providing detailed surveys of roadway boundaries and all of the signage that drivers rely on to autonomous vehicles in a manner suited to them instead of a human.
You say that it would take a massive investment but realistically existing signage, reflectors, and road markings probably cost more than the equivalent for an autonomous vehicle would.
If we were willing to do that, we could have had self-driving cars decades ago. They were showing off systems with magnetic lane markers on the Discovery Channel when I was a kid.
The exciting thing about self-driving cars this time was that they worked on existing roads, making them financially feasible.
And what happens when the lanes are shifted for road construction? Killing a driver is bad enough, killing an innocent construction worker would be marginally worse.
Key thing that unlike Tesla's self driving system. just about nothing can happen in a plane that will kill you if don't disable the auto pilot in 1-2 seconds.
Perhaps final stages of ILS approach? That'd be the exception, but pilots are trained and certified for this - and definitely not allowed to snooze off then.
(I'm not a pilot, but have spent a fair amount of time and money on various PC flight sims; edit: and used to drive a Mazda 3 with a very good radar cruise control and AEB, before ditching it for a bicycle because getting old and fat).
I'm a pilot and wouldn't consider them autonomous. In the most sophisticated systems, you can plug in a fairly complex route to destination but there's a disconnect in automaticity when transitioning from cruise to approach. There are standard terminal arrivals, but they all assume contact with ATC for specifics, and in the case of lost communication in instrument flight you're expected to use your best judgment for ambiguous sections of the route clearance. Autopilots don't have judgment, and they also can't do two way communications either, so they're not able to accept ATC clearances directly, a pilot has to do that. So yeah not autonomous.
Now that's a nice device, and is a true time of flight sensor. There's a similar model with 1.2m range.[1] Don't know whether it's a pulse LIDAR or an RF-modulated beam. The ones that use a pulse laser can have much more range and can work outdoors. They must far outshine the sun, but only at one wavelength and only for a nanosecond. That's quite possible.
> During the ranging operation, several VCSEL infrared pulses are emitted, then reflected back by the target object, and detected by the receiving array.
VCSEL is Vertical cavity surface emitting laser. Therefore I would say a pulse laser.
I am suspicious about this statement for the following reasons:
* Some ST patents [0] say they are doing time of flight but have actually came up with slight variation on reflected signal phase shift measurement (see reply by Animats).
* Seeing internal API functions like this [1] in APIs they provide for sensors of this family. Of course, this might be something else (e.g. phase shift of internal PLLs/whatever).
* The shortest time in which this sensor performs measurement is on the order of few tens of milliseconds, and the high accuracy modes take up to 100ms. True time-of-flight systems (e.g. [2]) should have the answer ready on the order of nanoseconds (for the distances this sensor works at) and I haven't yet seen designs where there is so significant post-processing of the data which could explain this latency.
Don't take me wrong, I've worked with VL6180X and VL53L0X (and look forward to work with VL53L1X), and these sensors are the best in this size but I'm just suspicious that they are directly measuring time for the signal to bounce back, but are instead inferring the time based on some other measurements.
Actually, this made me think that I probably have photodiodes with wide enough bandwidth laying around so I could check the transmitted signal on oscilloscope.
Short range low cost time of flight devices are usually modulated-beam things. You modulate the outgoing light with an RF carrier around 20MHz or so, and then detect that carrier on the receive side. Measure the phase difference between the two to get distance. There's a neat trick borrowed from FM radio to do this - down-convert both input and output signals with the same local oscillator. The resulting down-converted signals have the same phase difference but at a lower frequency, where you can count it easily.
Are those actually referred to as "time of flight" devices though? Phase-difference measurements are cheap and extremely effective, but I usually see them labeled as such.
Obviously, this can be used to simply lie about not having a dog. On the other hand, it is also the way you deal with any objections that might be raised if you are dealing with a claim that is wrong on many different levels. Say that someone posts what they claim is a video showing a Tesla roadster wrecking on autopilot while the driver was watching a movie.
It is very logical for Tesla to point out if it isn't actually a roadster in the photo. Further, they can say that even if it was, the roadster doesn't have autopilot. Even if it was a roadster and the roadster came with autopilot and the driver was using autopilot, the driver is still responsible for paying attention to the road and keeping hands on the wheel.
Nand2Tetris was very good. I think Coursera has it listed as "Build a Modern Computer from First Principles: From Nand to Tetris." The course does an incredibly good job of walking you through building a CPU starting with NAND chips.
Keep in mind there is a whole spectrum of what constitutes thought leadership. Several times, I've had clients say, "Last night I was looking for X and I found a great article on it. Turns out it was something you wrote!"
Another organization was going through their contracting process with me. One of their managers later told me that when they Googled for my name they were blown away by the size of my online footprint. Most of that was simply 10 years of blogging a few times each month about whatever topics I was finding interesting.
Also based on my blogging, I've had fairly well-known companies interview me for their blogs or webinars while using descriptions like "one of the worlds leading experts in X." This was all based on years of blogging on the topic.
Another great way to be viewed as a thought leader is to write a short book. Imagine you are looking at hiring two candidates that both look good, but when you search for their names you find that one has a book for sale at Amazon on a topic of interest to your company. It is a very strong way to market one's expertise.
