This seems dubious at multiple levels.

Solar panels: The roof of a trailer is about 450 square feet. In the northeastern U.S., you would average only 3.5 hours of full sun, so you'd get only a little over 13 kW per day.

Tesla semis are pretty efficient, and they use about 1.7 kWh per mile. So in an entire day, covering the entire roof of a trailer with solar panels would add a whopping 7 miles of range, or 15 minutes of extra driving — the equivalent of plugging into a Tesla Megacharger for maybe 30 seconds or so.

Let's optimistically assume that the vehicle can carry 48,000 pounds. If those panels occupy the full roof area, then at about 3 pounds of weight per square foot, those solar panels would weigh 1500 pounds, or about 3% of your cargo, all to reduce your fuel usage by as little as 1% if you're doing long haul at 65 MPH. And that weight number may be wildly optimistic. Trailers like that aren't designed to have weight on the roof, and would require additional structure to hold that extra weight. The real losses could be significantly higher. Unless you're driving less than a couple of hundred miles in a day, the solar panels won't break even. And if you're driving less than a couple of hundred miles per day, there's no reason you can't go electric.

Battery and motor on the trailer: I would expect most trucks to be used primarily for either short-haul or long-haul purposes, not both. If you're doing long-haul, you'd probably be better off with an actual hybrid tractor so that you get the benefit no matter whose trailer you're hauling. If you're doing short-haul, there's likely no reason not to go full electric.

I just don't get it.

Facebook doesn't have a separate C-suite (CEO, CFO, etc.) from its parent company. Waymo does. So while Waymo is considered part of Alphabet because it is a majority shareholder, you're kidding yourself if you think it is at all like Meta and Facebook. There may not be a hard line between them, but there's a definite line.

Tell me you don't know how model training works without telling me you don't know how model training works.

Autonomous vehicles (probably not including Tesla) already handle first responders correctly probably 99.99% of the time. They already handle school buses correctly probably 99.99% of the time. So what remains are, by definition, edge cases that for whatever reason require additional handling beyond the basic "Is this an emergency vehicle/school bus? If so, pull over and stop" rule.

For example, one edge case is figuring out how to clear a path for an emergency vehicle when there is no obvious place to pull over because of other cars stopped nearby. Sometimes the correct answer is to actually drive in the direction the emergency vehicle is going until you find a spot to pull over and get out of its way. This isn't intuitively obvious, and a lot of human drivers will struggle with it as well.

For another example, at least one case of Waymo vehicles illegally passing a school bus was caused by a remote operator not noticing that the vehicle had flagged the presence of a school bus and telling the car to proceed anyway. Sometimes, having a human in the loop actually ends up making things worse. :-)

At that point, what's the point of them being autonomous? At some point, you have to cut them loose and see what mistakes they make, because it is precisely through detecting those mistakes that you figure out what edge cases remain inadequately handled in the model. And understanding how the vehicle attempts to extricate itself from problem situations is critically important in figuring out what additional training needs to be added to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

So basically, your approach likely leads to a future where the models never learn to handle emergency vehicles, because safety drivers keep having to intervene before they can gather adequate data. That approach just doesn't work.

I don't recall the actual driving part of the driver test having a part where you drive onto a street that's barely wide enough for one vehicle to pass, let out a passenger, and then have an ambulance suddenly approach from the other direction while you're trying to turn around.

To get to the point of having a license, you have to answer a written question that proves you know to yield to emergency vehicles, prove that you can stay in lanes, stop for stop signs and maybe pedestrians, handle traffic lights correctly, and possibly parallel park, depending on where you took the exam. Autonomous vehicles could do those things reliably 15+ years ago.

In other words, you're greatly overestimating the competence of the average human driver.

Citation needed.

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.

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*

There are a couple of alternatives. The problem is that there are only a couple.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sure.

It becomes successful, and you sell your house brands at a price lower than your competitors can sell their brands, because you don't have to pay yourself the retail markup. Okay, supermarket analogy still applies so far, except that your customers also live in a town (operating system) that has only your supermarket, and you use technological means to prevent those customers from going to another supermarket unless they buy a new house (phone).

False. None of the competitors are demanding that. They are demanding that either A. you level the playing field so that you don't have an unfair competitive advantage from being the only supermarket or B. you stop using technological and legal means to prevent other supermarkets from existing.

Not remotely.