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.

Boosters are risking their freedom and even their lives. If it was easier for them to find work then they'd do legitimate work instead of boosting. Selling at flea markets is a job itself, so they're clearly willing to work.

Because the website helpfully provides structured data with tags which make it clear what it is, it's very easy to just use old fashioned and cheap filters to exclude content like that from the training set without losing anything else.

Protesting something that doesn't happen is better PR for you than protesting something that does...

If you've got 1 bad cop, and 9 "good" cops who are covering for him, what you've actually got there is 10 bad cops.

You have it exactly right. I can see why you didn't post with an identity, you'd get punished by the reich wingers. Wage theft exceeds all other theft combined but maggots are still crying about shoplifters

The endless scroll is predatory at every moment.

It even reloads when you stop for a while. Switch to a different tab, do something else for five minutes, come back - it reloads and refreshes everything. Why? Because that activates a primal fear in your brain that you're losing something, missing something that might've been important, so your instinct is to NOT divert your attention elsewhere.

In theory I would agree, but the issue here is that social media platforms intentionally compromise your ability to make decisions. That's what the addictive pattern is all about. You could at any moment decide to stop scrolling and get back to work or life - but everything in there is designed so that the decision is made for you and bypasses any critical thinking paths in your brain.

And while I'm the first to agree the politicians are sleazebags and are the first ones that need much tougher regulation and laws, it's a fact that laws in this area actually do work. Anti-smoking laws have reduced smoking, for example.

Is that better or worse? I was under the impression that most people find the catching of a rocket booster like SpaceX does with those little arms to be more awesome than just landing the booster.

I also thought that outside of having to land on Mars it is the preferred approach because it is more efficient.

Finally: Caught it in a net conjures up the wrong image. If you look at the video the 'net' is much more like the mechazilla arms and not some fishing net they plop the booster into: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Someone hasn't flown in a while.

I don't click the cheapest price. What happened is that the major airlines have copied some (not all) of the budget airline shit. Luggage used to be included, now it's an extra - which causes people to bring carry-on to the max instead, which leads to the overhead compartments always being full.

Yeah, good point. No, wait, that's complete bullshit.

I've taken a number of trips on business class in the past years. What you get in business class today is what you got in economy class 20, 25 years ago.

You know what, you may actually be right if you compare multi-thousand halfway-around-the-world intercontinental flights. I've never flown to Australia, so I can't compare that. I'm talking about shorter flights (a few hours) which I do frequently and where I can compare. We might both be right.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

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*