The Atlantic: “Inside Waymo’s Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars”

Originally developed as a way to “play back” scenes that the cars experienced while driving on public roads, Carcraft, and simulation generally, have taken on an ever-larger role within the self-driving program.

At any time, there are now 25,000 virtual self-driving cars making their way through fully modeled versions of Austin, Mountain View, and Phoenix, as well as test-track scenarios. Waymo might simulate driving down a particularly tricky road hundreds of thousands of times in a single day. Collectively, they now drive 8 million miles per day in the virtual world. In 2016, they logged 2.5 billion virtual miles versus a little over 3 million miles by Google’s IRL self-driving cars that run on public roads. And crucially, the virtual miles focus on what Waymo people invariably call “interesting” miles in which they might learn something new. These are not boring highway commuter miles.

The simulations are part of an intricate process that Waymo has developed. They’ve tightly interwoven the millions of miles their cars have traveled on public roads with a “structured testing” program they conduct at a secret base in the Central Valley they call Castle.

Alexis C. Madrigal

Fascinating inside look at the Waymo operation tasked with making autonomous cars a reality. The comparison with competitors in terms of real and simulated miles makes it evident how far ahead Google is on the software side. In my opinion, employing simulation is definitely the better strategy here, as physical cars would never be able to match the amount of simulated hours on the road; this also allows engineers to replay the same situation again and again and measure if and how the driving algorithm improves. Tesla is mentioned in the article as a strong competitor, because they are actively collecting data from their existing vehicles, but the company is limited by the number of cars sold (where they continue to have manufacturing issues) and the situations Tesla drivers are encountering.

Monday Note: “Tesla’s New Car Smell”

My first serious doubts about Tesla didn’t stem from missed schedules, I’ve been guilty of too many of these, they’re part of tech life. What seriously worried me was a July 2016 visit to Tesla’s manufacturing plant in Fremont, California. In taking delivery of my wife’s Model S, we were treated to a group tour of the site. Everyone marveled at the robot porn, at the activity on the assembly line, at the endless stores of spare parts piled to the ceiling.

Everyone but yours truly.

I couldn’t help check off the sins against the “Toyota Bible”, prescriptions for car manufacturers that are lucidly detailed in The Machine That Changed The World (a great and, in parts, sad read). In particular, one mustn’t stockpile parts on the floor, they must be fed in small quantities at small time intervals. If a part has a problem, only a small quantity needs to be shipped back to the supplier who can inspect, correct, and quickly adjust their own production process.

Jean-Louis Gassée

Sounds like the Tesla myth is starting to crack. From random firings to handmade parts in a plant that is supposed to be automated, and now the company has missed production goals for the Model 3 – by a lot! Somebody in their management team should really look up ‘Lean manufacturing’ when they’re not being yelled at by Elon Musk. This doesn’t make me any more confident that Musk’s other high-profile bet, SpaceX, can deliver on their plans for future space launches.

Photoshop Blog: “Introducing: Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic CC and more”

What’s the Difference between Lightroom and Lightroom Classic?

Going forward, the product you’ve known as Lightroom will be rebranded “Lightroom Classic CC”. Why change? We have introduced a new photography service that will now be called “Lightroom CC”. It is designed to be a cloud-based ecosystem of apps that are deeply integrated and work together seamlessly across desktop, mobile, and web. Lightroom Classic CC is designed for desktop-based (file/folder) digital photography workflows. It’s a well-established workflow solution that is distinct and separate from our new cloud-native service.  By separating the two products, we’re allowing Lightroom Classic to focus on the strengths of a file/folder based workflow that many of you enjoy today, while Lightroom CC addresses the cloud/mobile-oriented workflow.

Tom Hogarty

Big news for Lightroom users, but slightly confusing on several levels. Basically, there are now two applications named Lightroom: the ‘Classic’ is an update to the previous software with new features, and there’s a new, cloud-based Lightroom. It’s not mentioned clearly in the announcement, but there are now two Creative Cloud photography plans to choose from: one includes Photoshop and the two Lightroom flavors like before, and the other offers 1TB cloud storage space for RAW file backup, but only the new Lightroom as desktop/mobile editing app.

The Guardian: “Israel-Palestine: the real reason there’s still no peace”

The real explanation for the past decades of failed peace negotiations is not mistaken tactics or imperfect circumstances, but that no strategy can succeed if it is premised on Israel behaving irrationally. Most arguments put to Israel for agreeing to a partition are that it is preferable to an imagined, frightening future in which the country ceases to be either a Jewish state or a democracy, or both. Israel is constantly warned that if it does not soon decide to grant Palestinians citizenship or sovereignty, it will become, at some never-defined future date, an apartheid state. But these assertions contain the implicit acknowledgment that it makes no sense for Israel to strike a deal today rather than wait to see if such imagined threats actually materialise. If and when they do come to be, Israel can then make a deal. Perhaps in the interim, the hardship of Palestinian life will cause enough emigration that Israel may annex the West Bank without giving up the state’s Jewish majority. Or, perhaps, the West Bank will be absorbed by Jordan, and Gaza by Egypt, a better outcome than Palestinian statehood, in the view of many Israeli officials.

Nathan Thrall

That’s a damn valid reason! Israel (as a state) has little to lose from the status quo, given the unwillingness of the international community to impose tough sanctions. This lack of resolve is somewhat understandable, seeing how Israel is the only real long-term ally of Western democracies in a region largely controlled by military and religious autocracies – including Turkey lately. On the other hand, it exposes a dangerous double-standard, if we compare it, for example, with Russia’s incursion in Crimea, where sanctions were swiftly imposed.

Vanity Fair: “How Elizabeth Holmes’s House of Cards came Tumbling Down”

Like Apple, Theranos was secretive, even internally. Just as Jobs had famously insisted at 1 Infinite Loop, 10 minutes away, that departments were generally siloed, Holmes largely forbade her employees from communicating with one another about what they were working on—a culture that resulted in a rare form of executive omniscience. At Theranos, Holmes was founder, C.E.O., and chairwoman. There wasn’t a decision—from the number of American flags framed in the company’s hallway (they are ubiquitous) to the compensation of each new hire—that didn’t cross her desk.

And like Jobs, crucially, Holmes also paid indefatigable attention to her company’s story, its “narrative”. Theranos was not simply endeavoring to make a product that sold off the shelves and lined investors’ pockets; rather, it was attempting something far more poignant. In interviews, Holmes reiterated that Theranos’s proprietary technology could take a pinprick’s worth of blood, extracted from the tip of a finger, instead of intravenously, and test for hundreds of diseases—a remarkable innovation that was going to save millions of lives and, in a phrase she often repeated, “change the world”. In a technology sector populated by innumerable food-delivery apps, her quixotic ambition was applauded.

Nick Bilton

Silicon Valley arrogance at it’s finest. While some startup failure stories have an almost comic quality, this one verges on tragedy. Not for the founder, who seems so entangled in her illusions of grandeur that she completely lost touch with reality, but for the patients who used her fake blood tests.

War on the Rocks: “The Rise and Fall of Erdoganocracy: Why Victory May Defeat Turkey’s President”

Eventually, the alliance fell apart in 2013, as Gulenists turned against Erdogan. The war between the two culminated in the coup attempt, which allowed Erdogan to purge most known Gulenists and opponents of all other ideological stripes from the state institutions and beyond.

Having relied on Gulenists as a substitute for secularists in the bureaucracy, this presents Erdogan with a human resource challenge. Erdogan and the AKP’s best bet in the short term is rewarding loyalty, not necessarily merit. The long term impact of this strategy will be dire: increased corruption and nepotism, decaying institutional effectiveness, and a flailing economy. Erdogan will likely blame all of this on Turkey’s opposition, but populist rhetoric has its limits, usually defined in terms of what everyday people experience in their own lives.

There will be a short term impact, too. Within the AKP, Erdogan will increasingly favor his die-hard loyalists. It is unlikely that the resulting resentment against unadulterated patronage within AKP ranks, as some commentators argue, will lead to the implosion of the party. More likely is a future where the AKP, marginalizing whatever is left of its own talent, will cannibalize what made it a big success story in the first place: institutional coherence and discipline. Put simply, one cannot have the cake and eat it too. As sociologist Max Weber recognized a century ago, “charismatic authority” and “bureaucratic authority” cannot easily co-exist. Erdogan’s rise as the “one man”, not only in Turkey but also within his own party, will also mean that AKP will start to decay as an organization.

Burak Kadercan

Interesting insights into the political situation in Turkey, which is becoming increasingly tense and polarized under the current president’s authoritarian measures. The secular, democratic state that his predecessors strived to build seems further and further from reality. I found the paragraphs above especially striking, as I suspect a similar situation is developing in the United States under the presidency of Donald Trump.

The Verge: “Apple now sells an iPhone dongle with a headphone jack and charging port”

It took an entire year after the release of the iPhone 7 for Apple to start selling a dongle that lets you plug in headphones (or your car’s AUX cable) and charge at the same time. But now it’s here. Apple is just selling the thing, mind you — not making it. In September, Belkin quietly announced a new, second version of its “Rockstar” adapter that now includes both a 3.5mm jack and Lightning port.

Chris Welch

More courage!