If you want to dig more, I suspect Microsoft got a lot (if not all) of it from blackshark.ai . They're one of the companies whose logo shows up during game start.
I knew their name because, when I worked for an Airbus subsidiary, we talked with them about a solution to generate 3D environments for any/every airport.
They had some cool stuff but also some wonky stuff at the time (like highway overpasses actually being rendered as walls across the highway).
blackshark.ai was used for generating building models with textured facades from footprints. Their thing for generating airports was actually not used in MSFS. The photogrammetry from satellite photos in MSFS 2024 was done by Maxar Technologies.
My side-project is working on addons, so I spend a lot of time with Flight Simulator.
2020 didn't have the photogrammetry from satellite photos, only from aerial photos in major cities. The blackshark buildings are used wherever they don't have any photogrammetry available.
Come now - you really believe that Elon saw DOGE as a good faith effort to cut costs in the government?
For someone with such a vaunted intelligence, he was either dumb or complicit. "Working things out from first principles" would have had him leave after the very first step.
> 2009, renowned artist Ai Weiwei published an image of himself nude with only a 'Caonima' hiding his genitals, with a caption "草泥马挡中央" (cǎonímǎ dǎng zhōngyāng; 'a Grass Mud Horse covering the center'. One interpretation of the caption is: "fuck your mother, Communist Party Central Committee"). Political observers speculated that the photo may have contributed to Ai's arrest in 2011 by angering Chinese Communist Party hardliners.
>It is _also_ your job to make them less bad - this is good because your incentives are aligned.
This depends on the number of shits given. I can make anyone better who gives a shit, but there are a whole lot of people who don't and are irredeemable. If this seems to be the case, it's best to cut bait and find someone else quickly. In the 90s, it was "hire fast, fire fast," and somehow this was discarded. It was a tough but highly effective model for making really good teams.
To add to this, it seems people are either unwilling or unable to figure things out for themselves. There are some proprietary things that are really tough to figure out, but it seems a lot of devs these days spend about 5 minutes, then ask for help. "Back in the day," devs would spend a day or two banging their heads agains the before asking for help, and they were better for it.
This no shits given isn't limited to developers, but BAs, PMs, Biz and QA people. It seems a lot worse today than 10 years ago. I ended up spending a good chunk of my day doing people's jobs for them. The people that were hired to take stuff off my plate end up putting stuff on my plate.
Personally I'm with you on "many people no longer able to figure stuff out". However, we may differ on the time frames we're willing to "take" from them.
Back in the day, you figured stuff out on your own, because you had no other resources. I remember breaking my computer's ability to boot into a working DOS prompt (too long ago to remember what exactly went wrong and how I fixed it). I had a few hours until I would have to tell my dad that I "broke the computer" I had just gotten. That was motivation to try a lot of things and figure it out. My dad never knew in the end coz I fixed it. I also had no internet or other people around to ask for help even if I had wanted to.
But today, if I see someone struggling for a day or two on something that in the end I'll be able to solve for them in less than 5 minutes once they do ask, then I do think that's too long given they have the whole wide internet, AI tooling as well as coworkers to help them out available to them. The worst for me is when they struggle with the same type of stuff over and over or when they are unable to pick up the strategies I used when solving it for/with them. I try to solve things with them as much as I can but with some people it's just too frustrating. Like you want to just throw lots of things at the wall quickly and see if they stick but they're too slow / don't even seem to understand the concept or don't have enough ideas of what to try and throw at the wall.
The wits in robotics would say we already have domestic robots - we just call them dishwashers and washing machines. Once something becomes good enough to take the job completely, it gets the name and drops "robotic" - that's why we still have robotic vacuums.
I think that’s a bit silly. The reason we don’t commonly refer to a dishwasher as a robot isn’t because dishwashers exist and we only use “robot” for things that don’t exist.
(This should already be clear given that robots do exist, and we do call them robots, as you yourself noted, but never mind that for now.)
It’s not even about the level of mechanical or computational complexity. Automobiles have a lot of mechanical and computational complexity, but also aren’t called robots (ignoring of course self-driving cars).
I'm more interested in how we regularly use the term, rather than how we might attempt to come up with a rigorous definition (particularly when that rigorous definition conflicts awkwardly with regular usage).
My point is simply that we absolutely do not refer to a home dishwasher as a robot. Nor an old thermostat with a bimetallic strip and a mercury switch. Nor even a normal home PC.
Similarly, we already have AI, which is really MI (Machine Intelligence). Long before the current hype cycle the defense industry and others have been using the same tools being applied now. Of course, there are differences, such as scale and architecture, etc.
I know I could google it, but I wonder washing machines originally was called an “automatic clothes washer” or something similar before it became widely adopted.
It isn't a bad thing - unless you don't have a job/have been stuffed with the idea that meaning and good pay could be yours if not for those foreigners.
https://www.telotrucks.com/
Not launched yet though.
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