... content goes to die. I've bookmarked a bunch of interesting videos over the years. Some of them have just disappeared.

And they wonder why people scrape this stuff from the site?

Suing who? Government puts up a warning speed limit ahead of a curve. You didn't take the hint. It's your problem.

"B..b..but SOMEBODY has got to pay me!" Insurance companies. So this is all about protecting their business models.

Which Americans are these? None that I've met.

Oh, no question that it's a hard problem. The difference is that self-driving can be broken down easily into a bunch of smaller hard problems, and each problem has, to some extent, a right answer, or at least relatively straightforward ways to objectively verify that an answer is not wrong. For example, you can fairly objectively define what constitutes a reasonable driving path, and provide guard rails in running your tests against newly trained models that fail if it goes outside of those parameters. So this is more in the NP-complete level of complexity, where computing it is hard, but verifying the solution is of polynomial complexity.

What constitutes a reasonable architecture for piece of software is either entirely subjective or an intractably large set of objective constraints or some combination thereof, because maintainability considerations play a role, along with data backwards/forwards compatibility, etc. I'm not even sure where you would begin trying to define adequate guard rails. This is more like the broader NP-hard level of complexity, where computing it is hard, and verifying it may well be even harder.

No disagreement on any of those points. The tolerances for self-driving car tech are indeed higher than the tolerances for tools that write software. But part of the reason for that is that there's a human in the loop in the latter situation. You aren't trying to write software that can design a word processor from scratch. You're writing software that can design a single function or maybe a small class that performs a specific behavior from scratch, and all of the hard work happened before you even asked — specifically, coming up with the specifications.

I know that's true for self-driving as well, but the difference is that the specifications for working self-driving behavior are largely consistent across platforms, with the exception of some specific rules of the road being different in different countries, whereas the specifications for a word processor are entirely unrelated to the specifications for an image editor or a web server.

So at that general level, being able to drive a car is at best like AI being able to write a word processor, and AI being able to write any arbitrary piece of software is by definition a much broader problem.

Probably not. The robotic vacs can be used entirely offline; you just lose the ability to control it remotely if you do. And if you believe their privacy policy, no data is stored remotely except for aggregated data.

I mean, that's the very definition of AI.

That would be Cruise, I suspect. The general perception of Waymo in SF seems to be pretty positive.

I wouldn't call it "highly confined". The biggest constraint was lack of support for driving on the freeway. They just started testing that in early 2024, and got regulatory approval in California in mid-2024. Without freeway driving, self-driving cars wouldn't be feasible in a lot of cities. Now that they've started doing freeway driving, I suspect you'll find that the number of situations and environments that they can't handle is remarkably small, bounded largely by the need to do high-definition mapping drives first.

I agree that it is imperfect, particularly when construction is involved, but the difference between the modern Waymo cars and the hesitant Waymo cars from a decade ago is night and day, speaking as someone who periodically ends up driving near one.

I disagree on the first part, but I agree with the second. I have little faith in any mass-manufactured humanoid robots being usable right now. But if they bring the cost of the hardware down enough through mass manufacturing, then as long as they run some sufficiently open operating system, other folks will find interesting ways to use them, and will figure out how to make the software work.

For example, electronics PCB manufacturing is already highly automated, with human workers loading tape reels of components into pick-and-place machines, and the machines doing all the rest. It would be hard to replace all of that hardware with new hardware designed for any sort of automated loading, but it seems obvious that a humanoid robot with the right programming could fully automate the loading of components. That's well within the realm of what robotics can do today.

Similarly, Amazon warehouses have non-humanoid robots that can already pick a lot of things off of warehouse shelves. A humanoid robot could probably do a better job, and they actually have the software engineering resources to make that happen. Whether any of that software would ever become available outside of Amazon is, of course, a different question.

... warmer weather will make guys junk bigger. Verified scientifically by jumping into swimming pools of varying temperatures.

We think you are hiding 1% from us, comrade. We will stop by and toss your commie block cell to find it. Or at least to make an example of you.

I'm going to buy futures in the Yanomami Sovereign Wealth fund. With all the foreign direct investment they are getting for not cutting down trees, it's bound to skyrocket in value any time now.

Actually way more impressed with Gemma 3, which is from the same people and downloadable. They have versions that will run on your home PC. But honestly, all of them spew bullshit.

There is another system.

Don't worry, they are not sitting on any secrets that give Gemini a competitive edge, because it suuuuuuuucks.

I share the assessment contained in your comment, but isn't this in fact a reasonable prediction? They're definitely not going to want to admit fault, as they want to sell these systems. The corporation also has a history of blaming users.

Spending all that money on advertising surely does something, and they track where the applications come from pretty closely so they do know when and where it's working, but they also send just a total shitstorm of ads to the same people which is surely unnnecessary. I applied for a Capital One Visa because there was a referral deal, but I didn't qualify and didn't want their consolation deal. They then sent me an expensive glossy ad packet about every week for two months, and followed that up with another couple monthly ads after that. I've already been turned down for the deal they're "offering" me with their ads, and repeated applications would affect my credit rating, so there's no fucking way I'm going to apply again. That advertising money spent was obviously wasted, and the customers have to pay for it somehow.

I have a CC from my CU, and even there the rate is vaguely starting to approach something reasonable only after my first limit increase.

One answer to this is that the AEB system should be a separate system from the self-driving system, and it should win. And if someone stacks you from behind because they were following too closely, that's why you have rear crumple zones.

We have to get to the point where we no longer expect to drive unsafely because our transportation systems are bullshit and we otherwise won't all fit on the road, because that's what's causing the accidents which aren't caused by serious drug use or medical emergency. (The former problem is hard to solve, the latter could be solved with more sensors.)

Practically never. Also, the exams are pathetic, and so are the driving tests. Only commercial drivers have anything like a reasonable requirement. In fact there are parts of it which are excessive, like having to pass a drug test including cannabis. By all means, test drivers while they are driving, but not permitting them weed practically guarantees they'll be using something that leaves the system quicker and is also more dangerous.

Anyway here in the USA you can drive most vehicles you'll be interested in on your basic license, which is easy to get and easier to keep, and the results aren't great.

TBH, The Grauniad did try to make me 40% poorer with their donation popup.