Very true. But you forgot to add that it's a good thing they'll refuse any currency that doesn't provide an easy way to expand (and contract) the money supply. If the money supply can't expand and contract with the needs of the economy it will return us to the boom and bust business cycle that we had before we ditched precious metals. If you think the economy is cyclical and unstable now, you need to read about what it was like before we wised up and switched to debt-based fiat currency.

Oh, no question that it's a hard problem. The difference is that self-driving can be broken down easily into a bunch of smaller hard problems, and each problem has, to some extent, a right answer, or at least relatively straightforward ways to objectively verify that an answer is not wrong. For example, you can fairly objectively define what constitutes a reasonable driving path, and provide guard rails in running your tests against newly trained models that fail if it goes outside of those parameters. So this is more in the NP-complete level of complexity, where computing it is hard, but verifying the solution is of polynomial complexity.

What constitutes a reasonable architecture for piece of software is either entirely subjective or an intractably large set of objective constraints or some combination thereof, because maintainability considerations play a role, along with data backwards/forwards compatibility, etc. I'm not even sure where you would begin trying to define adequate guard rails. This is more like the broader NP-hard level of complexity, where computing it is hard, and verifying it may well be even harder.

No disagreement on any of those points. The tolerances for self-driving car tech are indeed higher than the tolerances for tools that write software. But part of the reason for that is that there's a human in the loop in the latter situation. You aren't trying to write software that can design a word processor from scratch. You're writing software that can design a single function or maybe a small class that performs a specific behavior from scratch, and all of the hard work happened before you even asked — specifically, coming up with the specifications.

I know that's true for self-driving as well, but the difference is that the specifications for working self-driving behavior are largely consistent across platforms, with the exception of some specific rules of the road being different in different countries, whereas the specifications for a word processor are entirely unrelated to the specifications for an image editor or a web server.

So at that general level, being able to drive a car is at best like AI being able to write a word processor, and AI being able to write any arbitrary piece of software is by definition a much broader problem.

Probably not. The robotic vacs can be used entirely offline; you just lose the ability to control it remotely if you do. And if you believe their privacy policy, no data is stored remotely except for aggregated data.

I mean, that's the very definition of AI.

That would be Cruise, I suspect. The general perception of Waymo in SF seems to be pretty positive.

I wouldn't call it "highly confined". The biggest constraint was lack of support for driving on the freeway. They just started testing that in early 2024, and got regulatory approval in California in mid-2024. Without freeway driving, self-driving cars wouldn't be feasible in a lot of cities. Now that they've started doing freeway driving, I suspect you'll find that the number of situations and environments that they can't handle is remarkably small, bounded largely by the need to do high-definition mapping drives first.

I agree that it is imperfect, particularly when construction is involved, but the difference between the modern Waymo cars and the hesitant Waymo cars from a decade ago is night and day, speaking as someone who periodically ends up driving near one.

I disagree on the first part, but I agree with the second. I have little faith in any mass-manufactured humanoid robots being usable right now. But if they bring the cost of the hardware down enough through mass manufacturing, then as long as they run some sufficiently open operating system, other folks will find interesting ways to use them, and will figure out how to make the software work.

For example, electronics PCB manufacturing is already highly automated, with human workers loading tape reels of components into pick-and-place machines, and the machines doing all the rest. It would be hard to replace all of that hardware with new hardware designed for any sort of automated loading, but it seems obvious that a humanoid robot with the right programming could fully automate the loading of components. That's well within the realm of what robotics can do today.

Similarly, Amazon warehouses have non-humanoid robots that can already pick a lot of things off of warehouse shelves. A humanoid robot could probably do a better job, and they actually have the software engineering resources to make that happen. Whether any of that software would ever become available outside of Amazon is, of course, a different question.

Slightly over half of states have usury laws that limit credit card interest rates, BUT federal law specifies that the rates a bank can charge are limited by the state where the bank's headquarters is located, not where its customers are. This is why most credit card issuers are incorporated in a small number of states (e.g. Delaware) that don't have any limits. As a result, credit card rates are limited by competitive and similar factors, not regulations.

I notice that Microsoft's "Purview" also provides encrypted email for Outlook, but also only to entities with a subscription. So... this is really just Gmail catching up with Outlook.

I doubt there's any technology to license here. I'm sure it's just leveraging ownership of a widely-used platform to provide a feature on that platform. Any other email platform with both servers and clients could provide the same, within its garden. Crossing those garden boundaries is where this problem gets impossible to solve.

So, nothing to do with email encryption, i.e. just confirmation bias.

You did say "biggest", and it can't be bigger than existential threats with even moderate probability.

Also, I disagree that climate change might collapse Western societies. Western societies are actually the ones best equipped to protect themselves from it... and from the waves of refugees from regions that aren't so well off.

Agreed. However, I think nuclear war is less likely to end humanity than AI, though civilization probably wouldn't survive. Einstein's quote about WW IV comes to mind.

AI has a roadmap, we just don't know the timeframe (could be months, is more likely at least a few years, almost certainly isn't more than a decade or three), and don't know if some deus ex machina might save us. Though I think that last possibility is very unlikely.

Nuclear war, sadly, is looking dramatically more likely. With Trump making threatening noises against NATO allies, it's clear that Europe can no longer count on the US nuclear umbrella, which means that France and the UK will need to change the strategic focus of their nuclear forces from invasion deterrence to regional defense, which means increasing their weapons stockpiles and developing their own delivery systems. It also means they'll begin helping other EU states to acquire nuclear weapons. That will break the non-proliferation detente that has mostly held, almost certainly encouraging lots of non-NATO countries to acquire and build up their own nuclear forces.

That argument would be more compelling if they were displacing some existing widely-used email encryption standard, or if the idea of standardized email encryption were new and easy to build and deploy. The fact is that the last few decades have thoroughly demonstrated that open, easy to use and secure email is a "pick any two" case: You can have open and secure but hard to use (e.g. PGP, S/MIME), open and easy to use but not secure (normal email) or easy to use and secure but not open (what Gmail is launching).

If you think it's really feasible to get all three characteristics, by all means please build and launch it! The world needs it.

Also, it's worth noting that Gmail has attempted encrypted email at least twice before, once based on PGP and once based on S/MIME, neither of which have been successful. Actually, ISTR there were two different PGP-based attempts, one that decrypted messages in the cloud and one that did it in the web client.

This project isn't an attempt to co-opt open standards, it's admission that Google can't make open standards work in this case, so it's better to deploy something that Google's corporate customers need even if it's not everything we would all want.

Because easy-to-use secure email offends you? Or because you already think that independent of this announcement and your confirmation bias is kicking in?

I have no idea how this is implemented, but to a first approximation that doesn't need to be the case. Google already has infrastructure in place to enable securely syncing secrets between end-user browsers without making those secrets available to Google, so Gmail could enable encrypted email that Google itself cannot decrypt or read.

That said, since all of the code to do the encryption and decryption will be served to the clients by Gmail, Google will always have the power to subvert the security if it wants. Depending on the details it's not completely impossible that it could be structured so that the relevant code all has to be pre-published on a transparency log, so that Google couldn't push code that compromises the security without possibly getting caught.

Or it's possible that Google just has all the keys. I think Google's business goals would be better served by being able to prove that they don't have the keys, though.

It's not. Climate change is a threat to our wealth and has the potential to reduce human population by a non-trivial percentage, but it doesn't really threaten us with extinction, unlike some other threats. For a good overview of existential threats to humanity (including climate change) I recommend The Precipice.

Although they're doing a lot of damage, they really don't rate on the scale of threats to humanity. They're part of a global ongoing decline in democracy which is very harmful but not existential -- and far easier to reverse than climate change.

Just maintaining progress and not having to waste a lot of money on climate mitigation would kind of naturally take care of that. If you look at first Lamborghini, in 1964, and compare its performance to what you can get for a middling new car price now... other than status, I'll bet you'd rather have the modern middling-priced new car.

Exactly my point.

But your "anecdotes" are about on par with "airplanes sometimes crash so I should never get on one".

Getting accurate information, with appropriate understanding of what is and isn't likely, and how likely, is essential.

That was exactly my other point. You should perhaps gain better understanding of EV travel before commenting about it.

FWIW, I've driven EVs since 2011 and have done around 20k miles of long-distance road trips in one.

At least with current charger density, by the time you see a sign telling you that there are no chargers available, it's probably too late. Perhaps as charger density increases that will become untrue... but the signs will become less valuable then, too.

Do you own an EV? Have you made any long distance trips with it?

At present, long-distance EV travel requires some planning. This isn't actually onerous, because humans don't need to do the planning. You just put your destination into your car's navigation system and it tells you when and where to stop to charge. If its choices aren't conveniently-timed for you, with a few taps you pick better options... but you need to pick those options sooner rather than later, lest you find yourself with 20 miles of range remaining and 40 miles to the nearest charging station.

I don't think your proposed signs would ever be useful. Integration of charger availability with navigation is both cheaper and far more effective.

By that logic you should never get on an airplane.

I don't think so. If you're traveling on an interstate and stopping at a restaurant, you're probably traveling long distance, in which case L2 is too slow. You need to be able to add 200-300 miles of range in less than an hour when road-tripping. Restaurants near interstates should have L3 chargers.

L2 chargers make sense at locations where cars are parked for hours, or perhaps at locations where consumers will find it nice to add a handful of miles of range, just as a convenience. So hotels, where cars park overnight, or at businesses that deploy them for employee use, or for customers where the customers typically spend hours. Grocery stores, etc., might deploy them just as a nice bonus for customers, but realistically it's rare that anyone will spend enough time at them to really make a big difference.

BTW, there are also cases where public L1 chargers make sense, in cases where cars are parked for days. Airport long-term parking is an obvious example.

But restaurants near interstates should put in L3 chargers if they want to attract people passing through. Or, alternatively, restauranteurs should find a big charging station and build a restaurant next to it.

Given that everyone has smartphones and most cars have Internet connections, I think it makes more sense to distribute this data over the Internet rather than adding lots of physical infrastructure.

For users of Tesla's supercharger network, the car's navigation system displays the charging speeds (various levels of L3, from 72 kW to 350 kW) of the superchargers and the current number of unoccupied stalls. This is much better, and cheaper to deploy, than electronic highway signs.