Last I checked the local government said so. They have indemnified waymo in every market they have launched their taxi service. I don't think that would hold up if they killed a human being, at least not one that isn't homeless, but so far it's held up for the more minor stuff that's happened.

Basically waymo cannot be cited for traffic violations and killing a pet is just a traffic violation. The most they could be held responsible for would be the value of the pet which is usually under $100.

The entire positive side to bureaucracies and committees and governments is that they have enough people in them to do multiple things at once.

Usually when someone says something like what you said and I quoted above here, they are trying to argue that human drivers shouldn't exist. Maybe this is true, for some particular set of truths, but there's always a number of ways you can look at a situation. For example, I would argue that no one and no computer should be driving in the bulk of situations we are currently driving in, because cars are a terrible mode of transportation in the cities where most people live.

That's true, but that doesn't make what you said above correct. Left and right are very, very different things, and it very much does matter which you get.

And to be fair, I have no idea what that is yet either, so far all the "real world" type devices have been big flops and the public reputation of the whole thing is iffy at best. One thing it doesn't seem to be is just chatbots, they're very impressive already so I don't think making them "even better" is going to move the needle.

For me personally the thing that's hard to shake is the trust factor of it. I don't think I can trust them to give accurate answers and information, both by either the lack of context or hallucinations or outright manipulation by the operators of the service, either by greed ("This chat session brought to you by Oreo cookies if you're wondering why all the responses hint at their deliciousness") or just straight up represent personal preferences (Grok)

My feeling for all of these companies and OpenAI that those diversification projects they just put on hold, they are all looking for the one thats really going to capture the mass public zeitgeist of sorts. In business AI is moving for sure but to the general public there really isn't that breakthrough yet. The money going into AI is trying by force of nature to make it as large as when the WWW first took off or like when smartphones took off.

OpenAI thinks it's Apple in 2009 but there's no App Store yet that turned the iPhone from a very cool smartphone to "everyone and their mother has one". They haven't found that real world mass public AI breakthrough yet. The Jony Ive thing in particular I bet they have a lot riding on on being the new thing everyone will want to have.
 

It used to take decades for companies to fully enshitify themselves. AI truly is an increase in productivity!

It's that we all know this is a grift and we're all trying to figure out how the grift works.

I can think of a few possible things but I don't have enough of a finance background to really say for sure of what they are up to, but I know damn well that billionaires don't just hand out billions of dollars for the hell of it. There is a reason that Bill Gates is still one of the wealthiest people on the planet despite telling us 20 years ago he was going to give away his fortune.

Billionaires have been lying to us for as long as we've had billionaires, some of us just figured that out

But given this administration's history of corrupting everything they touch it's not something we should get behind from this administration because it's almost guaranteed to turn into some kind of scam that puts money in their pockets.

There is nothing wrong with a sovereign wealth fund per se if your government is relatively uncorrupted. Ours is not, the Trump administration is without a doubt the most corrupt and criminal administration in American history and that is saying a lot.

Simply put you cannot expect good things to come out of this administration even if the underlining ideas are fine. And I don't think that's any kind of exaggeration or partisan bickering. The Trump administration is openly murdering Venezuelan fishermen in the lead up to another war for oil without even the slightest pretexts. That alone should tell you we are in for a bad time. You don't have to be a genius to extrapolate from that data point and the dozens of other data points like the illegal tariffs or the huge bribes like the cryptocurrency or the jet Qatar gave the Trump or the fact that the taxpayer is going to be retro fitting that jet for his use...

If I had to guess, and it's just a guess, I would say that they are positioning themselves to profit from the money put aside for the kids. Probably sitting themselves up to redirect the money being invested in the companies that they own.

The one thing we can be sure of though is that this is a scam and the only question is what are the details of the scam.

You don't become a billionaire by being altruistic. People who genuinely care about society at Large stop accumulating wealth long before they become billionaires. To become a billionaire requires a certain level of sociopathy. There's a reason why the old phrase, never ask a Man how he made his first million, exists. That phrase has been around so long that a million dollars isn't a lot of money anymore but you get the idea.

The supreme Court has overruled 94% of the lower court rulings Trump has lost. It's painfully obvious they will just rubber stamp anything Trump wants. More importantly anything the heritage foundation and Peter thiel wants. Trump can't stay awake through an entire cabinet meeting so it's not so much that he wants anything but he would like to stay in power because he is making billions of corruption and bribes.

Meanwhile the Republican party does not have a viable candidate for 2028. Vance is a joke and a couch fucker and the rest of them are so mired and scandal they are completely unelectable. None of them have Trump's Teflon because they aren't perceived as outsiders.

So the Republican party is going to run Trump unless Trump is physically incapable of running. Meanwhile the news media will protect Trump and will convince the public that it is perfectly normal for Trump to run for a third term. We saw this in 2024 with sane washing. Which is the practice of crazy shit Republicans do, especially anything crazy Trump does being reported as normal and good in the news media.

This probably isn't enough for Trump to actually win a third term but the Republican party will use common voter suppression tactics to stop enough casual voters from making it to the polls in order for Trump to win.

It is possible the voters won't buy into this but at the same time they did elect a felon with 28 credible rape accusations for a second term because he promised cheap eggs and because trans people gross them out...

And of course if anyone can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory it's the Democratic party. They are on track to nominate Gavin newsom and he's fine but I could easily see them coming up with some scandal to take him out so they can put yet another unpopular woman forward. There is a contingency of the Democrat party that is obsessed with the first female president and will do anything to get it. And unfortunately they have a lot of pull in the party...

So yeah Trump cares because Trump is going to run for a third term. This is why he's backing off on some of his tariffs

And the only reasons they were able to do that was the productive society that they, you, me and everyone else plays a hand in creating

I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.' No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Well first it was just a figure of speech but second I have no particular issue with Dell hardware. I'm not a fan but they've been perfectly cromulent systems when I've used them (i'm a Thinkpad fan myself)

But with something like this much like many have done with Target this year it's just a little nudge from "ambivalent" to "actively avoid"

Your whataboutism is a weak, stupid person's argument and isn't even tangentially related to anything being discussed here.

Go fuck your own face.

Who the hell just trusts AI code to not do bad things without at least looking it over once, or running it in a sandbox VM?

Anyone who does that deserves the output they get.

I love getting modded down by people who support rape. If the worst pieces of shit hate me then I must be doing it right.