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Comment Re:Good luck with that (Score 3, Informative) 50

So the problem with these things is they Don't really work. Google admitted that at a congressional hearing.

Citation needed.

They're basically remote controlled cars with really really fancy driver assist features. Frighteningly it appears that they are sometimes piloted from the Philippines. Publicly Google will tell you that's not true but that's not what they told Congress when they were under oath...

Google doesn't even have self-driving cars. Maybe you're thinking about Waymo (which is part of Alphabet, not Google).

Regardless, no, to the best of my understanding, they cannot be driven remotely at all, at least by any normal person's definition of the word "drive". When intervention is required, the remote operators get a dump of camera images to review, and then they draw a proposed path on a map. The car then tries to follow it, and aborts if doing so would result in hitting anything. This may have to be done more than once to get it out of the problem situation. When the vehicle says that it is comfortable proceeding on its own, the remote operator tells it to go ahead, and it takes over path planning again.

At no point is any remote operator in direct control over the vehicle. All they can do is propose an alternative path when the vehicle's path planner gets stuck trying to figure out how to safely extricate itself from some situation. At all times, the vehicle's software is the driver. The remote operator is just hinting that it should go to the left of safety cone A, to the right of cone B, etc. (or whatever the situation happens to be). This is why it takes so long to extricate a stuck car. If there were an actual remote driver that could take real-time control, it would take just a few seconds.

The obvious problem with all this is that they're going to have problems with ambulances and such.

From what I've read, when a Waymo car sees emergency lights, it stops driving and gets out of the way. I do see one (presumably) recent video where a Waymo stopped in a place that actually delayed an ambulance from getting past it on a narrow street, so unless that's an old video, I'm guessing there's still a bit more tweaking required in terms of recognizing whether the right choice is to stop or to move out of the way. I'd imagine someone is already working on making sure that particular edge case doesn't happen again.

What I'm not seeing is evidence of some widespread problem with autonomous vehicles in general. There's an edge case here or an edge case there where something didn't work as expected. And they'll complain about it, and the AV company in question will figure out why the car did the wrong thing, update their training sets, and that specific scenario won't happen again.

(This, of course, ignores Tesla, because the emergency vehicle drivers can't tell if the vehicle is being driven by the car or by a human, making any sort of reporting problematic at best.)

So realistically, I suspect that the answer to a vague demand from a government agency demanding to know what AV companies will do to prevent bad interactions with emergency vehicles will always be "exactly what we're already doing", because apart from coming up with new simulated situations to test (which they're always doing), there's really nothing they can do to prevent the car from behaving the wrong way in some vague unspecified future situation that nobody has thought of yet. And the answer to what they're doing to prevent a specific situation will usually be "We've already updated our training sets and that won't happen again."

To that end, I'm really not sure what they're trying to accomplish with sending a letter like that. Seems more like political posturing than any actual attempt at solving a problem. *shrugs*

Comment Bleagh, (Score 1) 66

You can get Veracrypt to work with the Mac, via FUSE, but I don't know how safe/robust that is. It's probably more secure than anything Apple has. It's certainly more secure than anything Microspot has.

But, yeah, it's getting extremely irritating that useful stuff is being taken out of commercial OS' and junk put in.

Comment Re:Amazing (Score 2) 18

Will this AI be able to release the Epstein files?

Yes, what would you like to be in these files?

Could it please implicate every member of the federal government in whichever party I choose, so that I can throw the next election to whoever promises to fix the inefficient traffic lights near my house? Thanks.

Comment Re:Being too wealthy really is sociopathic (Score 1) 165

This level of aversion to having to "slum it with the masses" where every last bastion where you might come across a person with a 5 figure income is systemically avoided

So the much the same as those with 5 figure incomes who drive rather than take public transit to avoid the homeless people.

I'm not convinced those people exist. Rather, the people with 5-figure income can afford to take a car, so why would they willingly walk for ten minutes to the nearest bus stop and then spend an hour on two different modes of public transit to go somewhere that takes fifteen minutes by car?

I'm also not convinced that very many people exist who would pay $5k a year to go through a different entrance to the airport just so that they don't interact with anybody who isn't in the six-figure club.

That said, I'll admit that having someone drive me to the gate would be nice, assuming it is efficient. Unfortunately, realistically, it won't be unless they build the private terminal on top of or under the main terminal or otherwise provide a cart path that doesn't interact with pedestrian traffic in the main terminal).

I can only assume that the food would be free and readily available like in an Admiral's club (though I suppose you're paying for it, so not truly free), so having something like this at connecting airports would be great, but far less useful at either endpoint.

If they include prepaid valet service for your car as part of the cost so you can just drive up and they'll whisk you to the gate straight from your car with only a brief stop at the security checkpoint, it could have some value — not enough value to spend an extra fifteen to thirty minutes and fly out of SFO, mind you, but some value.

I can't imagine it being worth $5k a year, though, so what I'd expect is that honeymooners will do it as a once-in-a-lifetime way to be treated like they're important, and all the people with money will continue to do their usual.

Comment Re:This is nonsensical (Score 1) 24

Apple wouldn't license Broadcom ARM cores. They have their own. I could see Apple using Broadcom ASIC cells for Wi-Fi, but that wouldn't be a Broadcom part at that point; it would be an Apple part, because it being a Broadcom part would imply that Broadcom can make the part available to other companies.

Comment on the other hand (Score 1) 80

These things are giant agriculture robots that can shred or squish or dis-arm you in a blink.
The guidance system is complex and (of course) requires accurate and precise calibration,
interacting with whatever is attached to the bus and mechanicals.
You can see Deere's potential legal liabilities here.

There's an assumption that salt-of-the-earth farmers will know what they're doing,
will follow all documented procedures and not take shortcuts.
Doubtful. They have other work to do.

Comment Re:We have been doing this all along... (Score 4, Insightful) 80

...and we will do this for another 10 years. So, are they saying that after 10 more years, they're not going to do it anymore?

I think the 10 years only applies to FTC supervision, not the expectation of the right to repair.

It's an out-of-court settlement. After ten years, if they lock down repairs again, it's not a breach of the agreement, so the government will have to care enough to file a lawsuit.

I feel like the real way to solve this problem is to wait for the all-electric Chinese-made tractors to get good enough, then let John Deere shrivel on the vine. They're only able to pull this stuff because there isn't much competition.

Comment Re:This is nonsensical (Score 1) 24

Apparently broadcom does have fabs and they make chips and apple uses them for that. I don't really think of broadcom like that but yeah I guess they do. So it's Apple designed chips being manufactured by broadcom.

You missed my point, which is that if Apple is designing them, they're Apple chips, not Broadcom chips. That's the part that didn't make sense.

Comment This is nonsensical (Score 1) 24

This article seems nonsensical to me. If Apple is designing the chips, how are they Broadcom chips? Either Apple is designing them (or has designed them), in which case they're Apple chips, and Apple is paying Broadcom to build and maintain fabs for them, or Broadcom is designing them, and Apple is paying them to make them in the U.S.

Comment Re:YMMV - But the knockoffs have a legit market (Score 2) 119

Depends on whether I want to wait for the longer shipping.

For me, there are three classes of products:

  • Need now - Something I'm actively working on is waiting for parts, and I need them quickly and/or food is involved.
    • For name-brand stuff, Walmart is my top pick, because they can deliver same day. (Amazon occasionally can, but rarely, and only in big cities; Walmart can deliver same day even to my mom's house in Tennessee.) Amazon is my second choice.
    • For things where quality doesn't matter, Amazon is more likely to have it than Walmart, though if the price is high enough, I'll compare with Walmart.
  • Need exact specifications - Something I need to buy must meet specific requirements. Time may be important, but is of less importance than meeting the requirements (and if it is time-sensitive, I'll do without rather than buying something that doesn't meet the requirements). These searches are the essence of hell.
    • I'll try Amazon briefly first. Their Alexa engine occasionally produces usable results. (Their search engine is basically worthless for this category.)
    • 99% of the time, I end up using Google search (not product search) with site:amazon.com and a whole bunch of quoted terms and "-undesirable" terms, then opening each possibility in a new window and closing it one right after the next until I get something that actually meets the requirements
  • Things where cost, rather than speed, is the primary concern. For these, I do a combination of Google shopping, AliExpress, and Alibaba. I'll glance at Amazon, but 99% of the time, they are not competitive. By item count, 98% of those purchases come from AliExpress. By dollar amount, 75% of those come from AliExpress, and the rest come from Alibaba.

That last category has been the largest category of my purchasing for the last year and a half or so. For example, my Chinese-made contrabass flute (Alibaba) saved me probably about $15,000 over a name brand. So even though I'm still trying to get the middle section to stop leaking, it's playable, and it is totally worth the extra minor repair work to save ~80% off of such an expensive purchase.

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