No argument on gps and lidar from me. Streaming doesn’t work. You are probably thinking about Microsoft flight sim, which completely fails (and is the first “completely streamed” map). Out in the “real world”, you don’t have a fiber connection to stream gigabytes every hour.

Does the taxi driver remember every sign in the city, every road and parking spot? No. They are humans - they remember the streets, some important spots that are confusing, maybe a couple of shortcuts. There is a huge difference between having a 3d map of everything in the city in the memory, and setting a GPS to an address, reading the signs as you go by and adhering to them. Also if self driving tech is to expand, you don’t go putting the entire world into memory - that’s not scaleable.

And as I said - a symbol is never “simple as a still life painting”. If it were still life painting only, why is this news? Why didn’t she change the background to a different one that didn’t have the watermelon? Why is there so much emotion surrounding it?

The truth is - a watermelon is a symbol for Palestine now. We organize watermelon parties in public parks and everyone knows what it is. Sure, it’s a celebration of culture, not political, generally just a party. But at the end of the day, it is a symbol too. Playing dumb doesn’t suddenly make people go “oh okay I guess this is just a watermelon”. People see a duck, hear a duck, think a duck.

All flags are inherrently political. A flag is the ultimate symbol for nationalism. Usually you shouldn’t display them in any context, especially in a job that makes you face people from different backgrounds, ethnicities or nations.

So yeah, I’d tell someone to take off the Ukraine background too, not for the “someone might be offended” reason

As with everything, it isn’t about the watermelon, it is about the symbol it represents. To anyone that doesn’t want to excuse / explain, a symbol represents something - in this case support for Palestine. So it is treated the exact same as if she had a Palestinian flag in the background. Especially because she is Palestinian.

The only idiotic part is the “antisemitic” thing, when 1. Palestinians are Semites too, 2. Supporting Palestine isn’t antisemitic.

I’d probably ask a person with a flag background to take it down too tbh, no matter if it was the Israeli flag, Palestinian, British or US. Just probably not for those reasons that they stated.

I can figure it out. You are more gross than either.