Realistically, open source software that has a decent number of maintainers means that the quality is good and bugs get fixed, including security bugs. But what that also means is that when problems get fixed in the open source repo, those changes have to be pulled into the source code that companies are building into their products. The more they diverge from the open source version, the harder that becomes. So while a company theoretically could do what you are describing, the reality tends to be tht companies contribute the vast majority of their changes, keeping private only the parts that are specific to their custom integrations with their product.

For example, LLVM is under a permissive license, and some of the biggest contributors are companies like Apple. They use it in their proprietary products (Xcode). But they are basically using it as a library and giving back their changes. What they're not doing is giving back the tools that they wrap around it. But the original core functionality is still out there, still open, and still being maintained.

The GPL doesn't actually prevent that from happening. It just means that the code gets rewritten instead of being copied. It makes the closed-source app ever so slightly more expensive to develop and ever so slightly later to hit the market. If the closed-source app is better than the Free Software app, it will still dominate the market unless someone is prepared to throw resources into making the Free Software app equally capable, and the market will still determine the winners and losers.

In all seriousness, though, if bankruptcy is a real possibility, the idea of a public buyout of some of these old companies isn't a terrible one. Maybe even have the government buy it and make it free for U.S. citizens, but continue to make money on the property abroad. :-)

Assuming M4A ends up being a single payer system, that would, in fact, make it very possible to force providers to lower costs.

Research should be funded directly, not by paying more for unrelated prescription drugs. That's the whole point of having grant programs from agencies like NIH.

One of the biggest problems, IMO, is healthcare consolidation. When most of the hospitals in an area are owned by big chains, it really doesn't matter if they are nonprofit. Big organizations just naturally tend to bloat and waste tons of money at every level of the system, because they don't have the same incentives to keep things lean. Consolidation has generally resulted in higher prices and lower quality of care, from what I've seen.

Every other entry? Try every entry. Something like 1% of my Facebook feed is actual organic content from friends. 14% or so is from groups. The other 85% is ads. And I'm being optimistic when I say that it is only 85%. When I see about the first or second ad, I close Facebook, because it's just going to be ads all the way down after that.

I'll make an offer right now to buy it for $1,000 with the intent to release the entire catalog into the public domain (CC0) 28 years after its creation.

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.