Or the untested hardware that isn't guaranteed to be as good as the established player.

Simiiformes is a clear and distinct clade.

Yes but who says that specific clade maps to the colloquial taxonomic word "monkey"?

Monkeys are a social construct. Like trees.

Yes, everything that can be expressed as letters is in the Library of Babel. Finding anything meaningful in that library, though, is gonna take longer than just writing it yourself.

Yeah, I think for most of what OP is describing, an earlier generation Pro with RAM and storage upgrade is a better bargain than spending the same amount of money on the newest processor. Not sure if OP can access the refurbished Apple store, but that's where I'd be looking.

Yup, the base M chips can only support two displays, including the built-in, so a base MacBook Air can only support one external monitor. This was not a limitation of the Intel versions from before 2020.

Yeah, I'm not sure my reaction to them adding Pandas as a playable race (in the Warcraft III expansion) was that they were "really badass" as OP seemed to think.

Also, the main problem with LIDAR is that it really doesn't see any more than cameras do. It uses light, or near-visible light, so it basically gets blocked by the same things that a camera gets blocked by. When heavy fog easily fucks up both cameras and LIDAR at the same time, that's not really redundancy.

The spinning lidar sensors mechanically remove occlusions like raindrops and dust, too. And one important thing with lidar is that it involves active emission of lasers so that it's a two way operation, like driving with headlights, not just passive sensing, like driving with sunlight.

Waymo's approach appears to differ in a few key ways:

• Lidar, as we've already been discussing
• Radar
• Sensor number and placement: the ugly spinning sensors on the roof get a different vantage point that Tesla simply doesn't have on its vehicles now, and it does seem that every Waymo vehicle has a lot more sensor coverage (including probably more cameras)
• Collecting and consulting high resolution 3D mapping data
• Human staff on standby for interventions as needed

There's a school of thought that because many of these would need to be eliminated for true level 5 autonomous driving, Waymo is in danger of walking down a dead end that never gets them to the destination. But another take is that this is akin to scaffolding during construction, that serves an important function while building up the permanent stuff, but can be taken down afterward.

I suspect that the lidar/radar/ultrasonic/extra cameras will be more useful for training the models necessary to reduce reliance on human intervention and maybe reduce the number of sensors. Not just in the quantity of training data, but some filtering/screening function that can improve the quality of data fed into the training.

BYD was just a cell phone battery company, and was like "well we've got the lithium supply chain locked down, you know what needs huge batteries: guess we're doing cars now."

Waymo chose the more expensive but easier option, but it also limits their scope and scalability.

I don't buy it. The lidar data is useful for training the vision models, so there's plenty of reason to believe that Waymo can solve the vision issues faster than Tesla.

I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here's a list of major legislation.

• Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
• The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
• The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
• Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
• School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
• Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
• Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.

That's a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.

Plus that doesn't include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).

Our heads are just loaded with sensory capabilities that are more than just the two eyes. Our proprioception, balance, and mental mapping allows us to move our heads around and take in visual data from almost any direction at a glance, and then internally model that three dimensional space as the universe around us. Meanwhile, our ears can process direction finding for sounds and synthesize that information with our visual processing.

Meanwhile, the tactile feedback of the steering wheel, vibration of the actual car (felt by the body and heard by the ears), give us plenty of sensory information for understanding our speed, acceleration, and the mechanical condition of the car. The squeal of tires, the screech of brakes, and the indicators on our dash are all part of the information we use to understand how we're driving.

Much of it is trained through experience. But the fact is, I can tell when I have a flat tire or when I'm hydroplaning even if I can't see the tires. I can feel inclines or declines that affect my speed or lateral movement even when there aren't easy visual indicators, like at night.