You're treating the current law as a standard handed down from on high, incontrovertible and guaranteed-correct, which must be applied verbatim. And, indeed, laws must be applied as written... but that doesn't mean the laws are perfect forever. Laws are written within a context, and when the context changes, the laws have to change.

In a world where all cars are driven by humans, if you want to protect highway workers one way to do it is to attach serious prison time to killing one and to publicize that fact loudly so that all of the drivers know that they should be especially cautious around highway workers, even more than they would around other sorts of pedestrians (let's put aside the moral debate about whether we actually should protect highway workers more than other pedestrians).

In a world where some cars are driven by software systems, that strategy doesn't really work -- as your question correctly points out -- but the right conclusion isn't "Therefore self-driving cars shouldn't be allowed", or "Therefore we must identify some scapegoat human at the company to put in prison". The right conclusion is "Therefore we need a different kind of regulation to keep highway workers safe from self-driving cars". What should that be? I can think of lots of possibilities, both pro-active (e.g. require self-driving vehicles to demonstrate in rigorous testing that their vehicles stay far from highway workers, with whatever minimum distance you want to specify) and reactive (severe penalties, up to heavy fines and/or immediate loss of permission to operate). The point is that the law should choose an approach that works with the new context.

And? They still drive 10% better than the average driver. And I realize that number is just an example, not intended to be accurate, but I still feel like I should point out that, statistically, it's too low.

The fact that the self-driving cars will all concentrate their worst behaviors in the same regions of the space of all driving conditions doesn't change the fact that, on average, they're quite a bit safer than human drivers. This wouldn't be true if the roads somehow changed so that the problematic-for-self-driving scenarios predominated, but they don't.

So you consider most human drivers too dangerous to be on public roads.

You're taking a binary position (too dangerous to be on public roads), so you should expect people to evaluate your position in a binary way. Your other position, trying to position Waymo safety within the wide continuum of driver safety, is more nuanced.

My position is that if they're statistically safer than average human drivers, which makes them far safer than the worst human drivers on the road, then replacing human-driven cars with self-driving cars makes the roads safer. This is straightforwardly obvious. It doesn't mean the companies shouldn't be held accountable for their failures, and certainly doesn't mean that we shouldn't expect them to to continue working on improvements.

This might work when there is a simple, easy search that can verify a fact. But that's often not the case. In my experience most cases of hallucination are cases where the LLM needs a fact mid-response, and the fact check requires both a non-trivial query and complex evaluation of the response data, sometimes involving judgement calls. When that happens, the LLM just gets lazy and goes with its guess rather than doing the check.

I'm speaking in the context of advanced models, mind, not the kind of thing that was available in 2022, nor the kind of thing that is available in Google search's limited-capability model, or open source models. Those are far more prone to hallucination. I won't say that, say, Claude Opus never hallucinates, because it does... but the hallucinations are common only when the models is being pushed hard, operating near the limits of its capacity, which makes it prone to taking shortcuts.

Well, I think Trump would be immediately stopped by the courts, too. Probably faster than they stopped Biden, since they've very reasonably gotten intensely skeptical of almost everything this administration does.

Partisanship aside, presidents really should obey the law. If the law is bad, the solution is to change it, not to break it. Yes, that means we need a functioning Congress, something we haven't had for quite some time, but that's still no reason to break the law.

Indeed, truth and accuracy is important to me, and I think it should be important to everyone. It baffles me that so many people don't seem to care about whether what they believe or say is true. I recognize that those people who care are often in the minority, but that just makes it harder to understand, not easier.

It doesn't seem that bad anyway. They can run arbitrary code, for that boot... But the flash encryption key is in the secure enclave, right? So all the user's data is safe, the OS can't be tampered with, and since it's only in memory a power cycle or probably even just a reboot will clear it.

I'm sure some Israeli company is working on a chained exploit as we speak, but I think if you are concerned about that you probably want to avoid Apple devices anyway. They are a very popular target for those companies.

Most people had pretty crappy soundcards back then. Credit to him that he came up with tunes that sounded decent even with the naff guitar and drum sounds on a typical Soundblaster compatible card.

Could also be interesting for cold brew iced coffee.

But this is all looking at the past. Now we have renewables and storage on a scale that was unimaginable even a few years ago, and especially given that new nuclear takes at least 20 years to build in Europe, even when factoring in climate change as a risk, it still loses.

Nothing is perfectly safe, but lots of things are lower risk and lower cost than nuclear.

I just don't get why some people are so in love with nuclear as a means of generating electricity. We don't need it, so what's the attraction?

Either that or it's a persistent urban legend.

Well, they've had a few accidents, but nothing really serious. The cost though... They did it thinking it would be cheap, and it turned out to be the opposite. And then they screwed up their environmental goals by promoting diesel cars, again not knowing that they were so bad when the decision was made.

In 2026 it's not just renewables that have changed the landscape, it's the EU. Energy independence isn't a big deal at the member level. Although arguably it never was for France, because if you recall the EU was formed out of coal agreements with Germany, that were designed to make the two countries so dependent on each other that war would be impossible.

No, you don't have to decide if you want access to electrical power or not. I was there when it happened, the lights did not go out. Japan shut down all nuclear reactors, unplanned, and the electricity stayed on. The electric trains kept running. The price went up and people were asked to save energy, but it proved beyond any doubt that nuclear was absolutely not necessary for Japan to keep power on.

These days we don't need nuclear at all, we have much better and cheaper alternatives. We can install them at scale too. China generated, not installed nameplate, not counting wasted energy because capacity was already met, actually generated and fed into the grid as much new renewable electricity in 2025 as the whole of Germany consumed in total. On top of what they already had. And they are on track to install even more new capacity this year, and the storage to go with it.

Most countries don't have nuclear weapons and seem to be doing okay.

Ukraine, for example. A nuclear state attacked them, and Ukraine is winning. Of course Russia didn't nuke Ukraine, because that would be suicide. Similarly, if Ukraine had kept and maintained its nuclear weapons, it wouldn't have used them, because that would have been suicide.

Is that true? I can't find any reference to it, and it seems like the kind of thing that would be documented, if only to make fun of it.