I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

12 Replies to “I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords”

And as many will already of heard, Apple has admitted to slowing response time on the iPhone 7 and earlier models. No, it’s not that they want to force people to upgrade to newer models…. it’s that they’re concerned about the aging of the battery and want to ‘extend battery life’.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.

i still have a cell phone and i use it to make phone calls.

does it have one of those cranks on the side of it???:-)

it’s that they’re concerned about the aging of the battery and want to ‘extend battery life’.
Yes, that is in fact exactly what it is. I’ve worked in the smartphone/embedded industry. Battery aging is something no one thought would be an issue because the assumption is no one will keep your device for more than three years, tops, before buying a new one.
It was hamfisted of them not to inform customers they were doing this, but there’s no malice there. Just fairly typical engineer’s cluelessness about how products are used and perceived by normal people. This was Jobs’ real genius: he understood that technology had to be designed for the people who use it, not the people who design it.

In Apple’s defense (not a common phrase I use) … I read that their facial recognition software uses 30,000 data points to distinguish faces. Perhaps there IS something TO the notion that … “they all look the same”. I know my wife can not distinguish Chinese from Japanese (although I have no such difficulty). And of course what I just said is RACIST … and could land me in a Canadian thought-Gulag … but if 30,000 data points and fancy algorithms cannot distinguish between Asians … then perhaps there’s something to the old “racist” notion.
PS … I would like to see how Apple’s facial recognition does with the inbred Mormon clans in Southern Utah … where I can claim (with no fear of being called a racist) that I have a hard time telling one “Bankhead” from another. Telling one “Jeffs” from another.

Hey,if you know where I can get one of those …

It’s a matter of which data points the software is programmed to compare. Orientals don’t seem to have much trouble telling each other apart. But in early days of encountering the whites they seemed to think we all look alike, i.e. we all have skin colour that wasn’t normal to them, most of us have hair colours that weren’t normal to them, most of us have eye colours that weren’t normal to them, they were overwhelmed by so many glaring variations it took some getting used to tuning in because they had grown up in a frame of reference with much more subtle differences.

Perhaps? But 30,000 points would appear to cover all the bases ?
Actually … what’s more interesting to me is what determines a face to be “beautiful”. I have no difficulty in picking out beautiful Asian women from … the uh … not so blessed. Same with every other race and color. I am instantly attracted to some and not others. Yes, I know that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” … but those are subtle differences in “taste”. And I have read that “symmetry” is what defines “beauty”. I disagree. It has more to do with the “softness” of features and “proportion” … not so much symmetry. I wonder if Corporations (like Facebook) use mathematical metrics to hire only “beautiful” people. I have walked the corridors of Facebook HQ … and it is the land of beautiful people … at every turn, and in every conference room. It can’t be accidental … they MUST hire based on age and beauty discrimination.

sorry Tooner, the last one I saw, doing a clean out, got grabbed before I could get it, so I don’t even have a cranker phone, and the replica I did have got swiped!

On smartphones there is always the engineering and marketing urge to add extra functionality, and most of the time this functionality just gets added and older features are seldom removed. As the phone CPUs get faster, the latest OS is tested on the newest, fastest CPU equipped phones and tested mainly for compatibility (“will it run?”) on older phones (not so much “will it run fast enough?”). Apple does tend to make newer OS’s backwardly compatible and this is part of the performance problem. It also does make decisions about backward compatibility if they think some old model phones aren’t going to be able to run enough or don’t have the necessary hardware to support certain important Apple features. This is in addition to the battery life optimisation issue.
Just like computers, you expect that phones will feel slower every time a new operating system is released, just because more things are now happening in the background.