Frankly, in that scenario, I'd want my phone to be that system.
I'd rather the computing be separate from everything else. Once you don't have to build around a screen it frees up a lot of design constraints. I definitely could see it running a phone-like OS and being able to connect a phone-sized touchscreen to it though.
From here in my comfortable chair it's hard to judge how bad the situation is, vs. to what extent it might be a form of protest by somebody who just doesn't like self-driving cars.
There's lots of video of one of the lots in question. Here's a good one where you can see one car backing up causing a chain reaction honk on all the others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Even if they legally can't disable the horns while in that lot, there's at least two simple things I can think of off the top of my head they could do to help mitigate it: The first would be redesigning that lot to be pull-through so that the cars don't ever have to back up. The second would be tweaking the algorithm (and they should be able to easily do it specifically for that geolocation since Waymo considers mapping data to be another sensor just as important as the lidar) so that the cars don't creep up on each other like that and trigger a chain reaction when one backs up.
But even if they were able to make those change, I'd say that Waymo probably shouldn't be operating out of a lot that's directly underneath a big apartment building. Particularly not during the quiet hours.
For example; A manager in charge of a project arranges for all the plans and details about who is in charge of what to get destroyed or lost and become unfindable by their replacement should they be removed by management.
This almost works, except instead imagine that the manager has been begging for another manager or three to help take over some of their workload because they're completely swamped, and their repeated requests for backups and redundancy have been being dismissed for years due to budget constraints.
to enable people to ask questions like "what are the coverage limits for the gold star plus plan" and have the thing summarize and cite the documentation. That's a pretty inoffensive use of LLMs, and not one I really take issue with
I take issue with it just because the kind of answer you'll get from an LLM is going to be high on word count, short on information, and likely to be inaccurate to boot. Remember the people who got in trouble because they used chatGPT to write court docs for them and it started citing non-existent cases? I've even seen LLMs that were specifically trained on a dataset (e.g. a medium sized codebase) give confidently incorrect answers, even citing references to the codebase it was trained on, that didn't exist.
Sure you can say "well just check the work then" or "well humans could get it wrong too", except that the issue is just how confidently incorrect LLMs can be. If a human states "this thing is this way, here's the source", we can often take it for granted that the source supports it (or at least exists and is relevant). When a human is wrong, they're usually wrong in a way that looks wrong. When an LLM is wrong, it tends to be wrong in a way that looks plausibly correct at first glance. The latter is a nightmare to sort through.
Blocking easy roads is a useful strategy: the bad actors must then use the hard roads, increasing their exposure, and the exposure of whomever is responsible for the roads that remain.
You're skipping over a whole lot of nuance there. Blocking the easy roads always has a cost, and it has to be worth the benefits. How much harder is it to circumvent? How much is the exposure increased? What's the cost to blocking and enforcing that block?
I'm no expert, but I'm pretty certain that blocking off a country from the internet would be trivially easy to circumvent for state level actors. Especially if they've got access to space. If space was out for some reason, there are plenty of other ways to sneak a data pipe (and even a really fat pipe) out of the border. Hell, even if we could project some kind of faraday cage over the entire country they could just dump a truckload of state agents into some other country and set up a troll-farm over there.
All you'd end up achieving is cutting off all of the "normal" people from the rest of the world while the state agents and well connected oligarchs ignore the ban. At that point you're ensuring that the people trapped in the country can only access whatever info their government feeds them, they can't publish anything to the open internet about the internal goings on, and you're still having to deal with all the shitheads in power causing problems.
I've never looked at Spirit before....were they THAT much cheaper than say Southwest Airlines?
Yes, but only if you show up with only the clothes on your back and expect to arrive at your destination dehydrated and miserable. Once you start adding on extra luxuries like a carry-on bag, being allowed a few sips of water in-flight, or not being stuffed in between the family on their way to be hosted on an episode of jerry springer, it starts to become comparable with any of the major carriers.
Now everybody hollers if they put them anywhere but school zones. Because everybody needs to be able to break the law in their deadly weapons all the time.
Hardly. People would do a whole lot less "hollering" if there wasn't well documented abuse of red light cameras as revenue generators, e.g. the duration of the yellow being shortened (sometimes to an illegal/unsafe level) shortly after the cameras were installed. They should also be required to have a wide angle shot (or better yet, video clip showing a few seconds before/after) of the intersection and surrounding traffic to give context, and have an actual human looking at it and deciding "yes, this is actually something this person should receive a ticket for"
The larger problem is, as you say, it's regional. What region should be programmed in?
The region it's operating in. Waymo cars are already locked in to their specific region. They see "hyper accurate map" as just another one of the cars sensors, i.e. as it is currently, if you moved one away from the heavily mapped parts of the bay area it was currently designed to operate in, its functionality and reliability would be severely degraded.
not how actual humans drive
Like assholes?
Judgemental language aside, human drivers exhibit a "body language" in how they drive. For example, if somebody is planning to change lanes, they'll often drift a bit as they check over their shoulder. If somebody is getting ready to stop in a city/downtown kind of environment, you'll often notice their speed reduce as their attention shifts and they scan for a place to stop.
My personal theory is that part of the reason that everybody thinks every other locales drivers are assholes is because different areas have different driving body language, and people misinterpret that. In rural areas, people following closer than 1 second per 10mph are seen as asshole tailgaters. In places with more crowded freeways, you're seen as the asshole for not using that space efficiently if you tried to keep that following distance (plus you'd constantly have people cutting in front of you until you were doing 30 in a 65). There are plenty of other unspoken things like usage and duration of turn signals, when and how violently brakes are applied, etc.
Programming in this kind of body language would make the waymos safer around the other human drivers, but since we're talking silicon valley software developers, half of which probably don't even drive and all of whom are probably on the spectrum, I'd be surprised if they're even aware of it.
While people hate the idea of "surge pricing" for groceries, there are examples where it might not always be bad. Remember the great toilet paper shortage of 2020? A lot of that was people all rushing out to buy toilet paper for fear of scarcity. If there had been surge pricing, a lot of the panic buying might have been eliminated and there would never have been a shortage.
What you describe is called price gouging, not surge pricing. It's a shitty thing to do, and it's explicitly illegal in quite a few states. The proper way to handle that kind of panic buying would be to set purchase limits.
The corollary to "people don't quite bad jobs, they quit bad bosses" is "people don't quite good bosses, and good bosses don't fire good employees."
I don't think you quite understand how to spell quit.
The only reason to raise this ridiculous claim is because Disney is the conservative boogeyman
With the way disney treats their artists and park workers, and how predatory their pricing models are, I'm honestly surprised they're not the liberal boogeyman also.
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions. - Robert Bly
