Interesting Links for 18-06-2019

[andrewducker]

Why Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

(tags:cars design ux control )

Millions at risk of retiring on incomes below living wage

(tags:pensions uk doom )

Domino's will start robot pizza deliveries in Houston this year

(tags:pizza delivery automation )

China is harvesting organs from prisoners

(tags:China organs murder OhForFucksSake )

Extinction Rebellion protesters tied together to block Edinburgh streets (outside my office!)

(tags:Edinburgh globalwarming doom )

Boris Johnson: Bar Scottish people from being prime minister

(tags:conservatives scotland )

Inspirational Fitness Quotes Over Pictures of People Taking a Dump

(tags:toilet inspiration funny satire viaSkreidle )

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

(tags:airplanes Malaysia crash )

Dogs evolved 'puppy dog eyes' to help them get on with humans

(tags:dogs cute evolution )

UK firms overcharging loyal customers could soon face instant fines

(tags:uk money business )

Lack of eating disorder training causing preventable deaths as patients feel they have to be dangerously underweight to get help

(tags:nhs mentalhealth eatingdisorders training )

There's no such thing as a tree

(tags:trees evolution plants names ViaDrCross )

Austerity: The issue no-one talks about is still ruining lives

(tags:austerity uk OhForFucksSake )

Ireland to ban new petrol and diesel vehicles from 2030

(tags:ireland globalwarming cars )

Comments

Why Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

[jack]

Because to operate a touchscreen you need to look at them to see (a) where the buttons are and (b) what the buttons are currently configured to do. I heard people decrying this in the 90s!

What I've no idea of is what bellends put touchscreens in a car, ever, and how they got away with it :(

I mean, ok, for things you're really sure the driver will only operate when stopped, but don't replace the "normal" controls.

Re: Why Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

[birguslatro]

I'm sure Tesla's logic is it'll be far safer leaving the driving to the car while the passengers get on with tapping on their screens. Plus you can't do updates on non-digital knobs and bobs via the cloud.

Re: Why Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

[jack]

"I'm sure Tesla's logic is it'll be far safer leaving the driving to the car while the passengers get on with tapping on their screens."

Indeed, but first they have to design cars that don't drive into large, stationary objects in the road.

"you can't do updates on non-digital knobs and bobs via the cloud."

I mean, this is the reason why they DO want it. But usually, if you can only get things by getting people to drive cars into other people, we say that it isn't worth the cost!

Re: Why Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

[birguslatro]

I've been involved in four car crashes in my lifetime. Once when a woman drove into the side of my car on a crossroad because she didn't see me. And I've been shunted twice. Once by a man who thought I wasn't going to stop at a stop-sign, and once when I was stopped at a traffic light - the woman driver said her shoe had got stuck on the peddles somehow. And the other time was when I went to park on a one-way street just as someone decided to pull out of their parking space.

Unlike with self-driving cars, no attempt was made to improve people because of those crashes, or the millions of others caused by people all the time. And that's the main difference between self-driving cars and human driven ones. As you can be sure that in every crash where a self-driving car was found to have caused it, they will try and improve the car so it won't happen again. They don't have to be perfect, just better than humans, and they'll keep getting better.

[pseudomonas]

"There's no such thing as a tree" is only true if you think that only monophyletic categories with clear boundaries and no edge-cases are meaningful. I get why it's a catchy title, but it's a bit unhelpful to reify some categories and not others like that.

The conclusion you end up with is that many (most?) categories of things don't exist and, well, for some purposes that might be true, but it's pretty at odds with the way human language and culture seems to work.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, this. When I took AI in college (back in the mid-80s), the single session that stuck with me most was the one where the professor challenged us to define "chair". We spent 45 minutes at it, and couldn't come up with a definition that he couldn't counter-example. It drove home, quite deeply, that human beings are primarily about loose pattern-matching, rather than rigorous definition...

[symbioid]

Wow WOOSH Boris, does he not know who King James was?