Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'Self-driving'

Weekend Reading: Virtual Oncology, Waymo Data, and the Future of Programming

April 11, 2020 ā€¢ #

šŸ§Ŗ Virtual Oncology

A discussion among physicians on how oncology is changing and will likely continue to evolve in the wake of the coronavirus. Testing, chemo, and other treatment steps currently considered to be standards of care will change, and things like telemedicine will change what options doctors have in working with patients.

Iā€™ve got a set of scans and a follow up this week, so will see how Mayo Clinic has adapted their approach in response to this crisis.

šŸš™ Using automated data augmentation to advance our Waymo Driver

Neat technical paper showing how Waymo and the Google Brain team are using data augmentation to expand training data volume.

šŸ”® The Future of Programming

From 2013, a typically genius talk from Bret Victor. Everyone should aspire to giving ā€œevergreenā€ talks like this.

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Weekend Reading: Neutrinos and Math, Waymo Progress, and Freemium in SaaS

December 14, 2019 ā€¢ #

šŸ§® Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math

As long as you consider linear algebra and eigenvectors ā€œbasic mathā€:

Theyā€™d noticed that hard-to-compute terms called ā€œeigenvectors,ā€ describing, in this case, the ways that neutrinos propagate through matter, were equal to combinations of terms called ā€œeigenvalues,ā€ which are far easier to compute. Moreover, they realized that the relationship between eigenvectors and eigenvalues ā€” ubiquitous objects in math, physics and engineering that have been studied since the 18th century ā€” seemed to hold more generally.

šŸš™ Waymo celebrates first year of self-driving taxi service

Progress here seems positive:

The Google-backed service has delivered more than 100,000 trips to more than 1,500 monthly riders in the Phoenix area, according to a blog post. The number of weekly rides has tripled since its first full month of service in January 2019.

šŸ†“ The Three Rules of Freemium

Iā€™ve been reading more lately about freemium models in SaaS, where they work, where they donā€™t, risks vs. upsides. This is a good one from Christoph Janz on the basics.

Unlike most other enterprise software, which traditionally used to be chosen by the IT department, Dropbox is typically adopted by individual employees from various departments, who then lobby management into switching. As I noted in my piece, Dropbox was one of the early champions of the ā€˜consumerization of enterprise softwareā€™ movement, which was one of the strongest drivers of SaaS success in the last ten years.

But not every SaaS company can be a Dropbox or a Typeform. Done wrong, freemium can end up cannibalizing your paid user base while also draining your companyā€™s precious engineering and customer support resources. So how do you know if launching a freemium product is the right move for your company?

IT consumerization is one of those secular shifts thatā€™s changing many factors in the software space. The key to getting freemium right (assuming your product and market are conducive to it in the first place) seems to be a willingness to experiment with where the boundaries should be between whatā€™s free and what isnā€™t.

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