No my friend. On the contrary, this is how a country becomes rich. Space missions have hundreds and thousands of parts and services. If even half of these are sourced locally this gives a boost to the industry meaning a richer economy with more scientists and engineers and more engineering jobs. And when you have a rich competitive economy, you can fund a social safety net.
Churches have the same non-profit status as other 501(c)3 charities, are you advocating for removing the nonprofit tax exemption entirely or do you specifically want to target churches?
Interesting. But I have personally witnessed poverty and people dying of hunger in front of my very eyes. I’d rather help those people than invest in failed moon missions.
I've seen this argument come up a lot. It inevitably comes up with regards to foreign aid as well, expeditions, and all sorts of pursuits.
The thing is, sending things to the moon is part of that fight too. Pouring every last cent into say, food, isn't the best approach. To build an economy to greater heights, there has to be demand and motivation for great things. Think of all of the industries and support that is stoaked as part of an effort like that. There's downward effects that ripple outwards for many, many degrees. New problems to be solved from just "how do we build a better flange?" to "how do we feed a staff located at a remote site?". I'm not talking trickle down economics here, but real impacts on a nation's economy. And a government can do this very effectivally (provided it does so with integrity).
The other part to this of course, is that there has to be something to take pride in, something to point to as an accomplishment, something visible and concrete. Something your kids can aim for and strive to become. As important as tackling say, poverty, or homelessness is, those are long term struggles that are hard to point to and say "see, that!" except over long periods of time.
So, really, I wouldn't feel bad they tried. They should. Yes, India has many problems to solve. And there's direct ways they can and should tackle those. But pursuing endeavors like this is important to, and has an impact on those immediate problems as well.
I genuinely hope they keep trying and we (the rest of the world citizenry interested in pushing mankind's exploration starward) hope they succeed next time. Space travel is hard. Really hard. But they'll get there, and the planet will be better for it.
I think the point of GP is that astrophotography as demonstrated here is mostly implementable in software. If Google wanted, they could very well produce an app for iPhone that does all of the above.
It’s hardly a secret that innovation in smartphone cameras is mainly in software now. This software camera innovation is one of, or the, main area that phone manufacturers are competing on at the top end of the market, so characterising it as ‘easy’ seems strange.
It seems they have some ML stuff in there for specific features, e.g. sky / land light balance and hot pixel removal (probably similar to how denoising for MC path tracing works).
Aside: randomly recognised Ryan Geiss in the credits, he did the Milkdrop plugin for Winamp back in the day, and also some cool tech demos for Nvidia...
There's no machine learning involved for hot pixel removal. The way I have heard it described is that hot pixels stay in the same place across multiple images. One of the processing steps is to figure out the location of the hot pixels by looking at multiple frames. Stars will shift slightly in between the longer exposures where as hot pixels will not.
In that example the Pixel has a 6x longer exposure. While Pixels can currently get better night photos currently, it's simply because the software lets them take minutes-long exposures instead of seconds-long. From a hardware point of view I don't think there's an advantage.
Both the Pixel and iPhone have AMAZING camera hardware and software that is better than any others in their domain. It’s just that the two are roughly equal except for the exposure time used.
Yeah, but I think the software differences required for 30 seconds vs 3 minutes is minimal. 30 seconds is still long enough to have to deal with all the issues that would come up with a 3 minute exposure.
We are currently in the AI winter. What we have now is not AI it’s curve fitting. Don’t be fooled, the computer does not “understand” it’s doing blind curve fitting.
Funny thing is I know of of at least two other women that currently call themselves Crypto Queen, or a variation of that, who are doing the TED circuit and similar.
This is not Uber's real problem. The much bigger problem is that Uber's business model by definition cannot be profitable, and here is why:
Let's start with the costs of the business model.
What are the two costs involved in transporting a customer from point A to point B? They are:
- The car’s time
- The (human) driver’s time
Operating or leasing a car for a certain amount of time (maintenance/insurance/gasoline) has not become significantly cheaper since Uber was created, so there is no cost reduction here.
Hiring a human's dedicated time (at least minimum wage) has also not become significantly cheaper since Uber, so here too there is no cost reduction.
Therefore the cost to transport something from point A to B has stayed exactly the same, before Uber and after Uber.
To transport something from point A to point B, someone must still carry this unavoidable cost. If the customer is not carrying this cost, then Uber must be carrying it. Uber can do so for now because investor money has subsidized the cost. But Uber can’t do this forever because investors will lose patience and stop the subsidy.
Uber can only be profitable once the unavoidable cost transport is passed on entirely to the customer. At that point, Uber will have to charge the same price as any taxi. Stated differently, Uber can never be more profitable than a taxi company on a per-ride basis.
Given that customers have no loyalty to a ride-share service, because every ride is virtually identical, any taxi company can build a similar service, removing any "walled garden" or "network effect" Uber may have hoped for. In fact, Uber clones are doing well in other countries and are creating significant headwinds for Uber.
Uber therefore has no hope of ever delivering its promises unless it can deliver driverless cars. Even if it can do that, the technology will quickly become commoditized and ubiquitous, meaning that any other ride-share service could offer it as well, once again removing any advantage, and driving margins for all ride-share services to near zero.
