Aimed directly at the scammers? Probably not, unless the penalties for the scam are currently insufficient. Aimed at the ad networks who, currently, have zero to negative interest in ensuring that ad spend isn't overtly hostile before plunking it in front of you? Quite possibly more helpful.

I don't know if Google has been caught out as dramatically as ; but based on the sorts of ad impressions they deliver their standards are clearly pretty low or apathetically applied, and more or less the same perverse incentives exist.

Various news sites also reported that some people observed Waymo cars treating them as 4-way stops. So it probably isn't as simple as not being programmed to be able to fall back, but rather some combination of multiple factors, including the nonfunctional lights, that in combination spooked the cars.

Either way, though, requiring human verification of an outage once per traffic light is probably the right thing to do, if only to ensure that the non-detection isn't a bug. Multiply times a lot of cars at a lot of lights.

Tesla FSD beta relies on a human operator in the car. I don't know what it does when a light is out. It either treats it as a red light or as a green light. In the former, then it relies on the human driver to take over to get it going again. If the latter, then it relies on the human driver to avoid a fatal collision. Either way, it relies on a human driver in the car.

Tesla's robotaxis also have a human safety driver. And still reportedly crash 12.5x more often than human drivers. So my guess would be that they treat disabled lights like green lights and hope for the best. :-D

Everybody here is assuming that the cellular network went down completely, and that the cars couldn't communicate. While possible, I would assume that Waymo uses multiple cellular providers to ensure reliable service, particularly given how spotty service on any individual provider can be in SF. If they don't, I bet they do next week. :-D

I'm also pretty sure they don't use remote data to drive safely at all. From the various articles I've read, all true safety-related data, including map data and driving-related models, should be stored in the vehicles, along with a list of areas where they aren't allowed to drive, etc. They do use the network to find out where to go for the next pickup, of course, so without a network, they are likely to all end up parked in random spots waiting for a fare.

The problem, I suspect, is that they are designed to fail safe. Specifically, when they encounter a situation that is substantially unexpected, they stop and reach out to operators to ask how to resolve the unexpected situation. Traffic lights being out en masse throughout a big chunk of SF is substantially unexpected, and I would assume that they don't let the cars handle that fully autonomously, just because that could also be caused by some major regression in their image recognition models, and they would *not* want the cars to start treating red lights as stop signs just because of a software bug, because that would be catastrophic.

That said, failsafe stops are not a safety issue, per se; they are a reliability issue. After all, a non-moving car is pretty much guaranteed not to kill someone. And if there's only one light out in some random place, it wouldn't be a big deal. A remote operator would tell it that yes, the light really is out, and it should treat it like a stop sign, and all is well.

Now imagine up to 800 vehicles all dialing in at once asking, "What the h*** is happening? There are no street lights, so everything looks different to my cameras, and the traffic light is dark!" That kind of problem is highly likely to overload the remote operators, because normally, those sorts of assistance calls are not happening simultaneously across a large geographical area.

The irony, of course, is that if my theory is correct, the way to fix it is to get Waymo into more cities so that they would have more spare human capacity to absorb the impact of unexpected surges in vehicles calling home.

If only you could get wood by punching trees

I'm on Devuan. Most Debian packages work but not all. When one doesn't I use the appimage or flatpak, preferably the former. It gets me the software and I move on. Right now I am using OrcaSlicer from a flatpak.

Installed 2 houses (not mine) with Arlo motion-activated cameras. You get a cloud link for each camera with real-time vids. And also a week of storage. But after a year we can't connect anymore and the shit smell seem to imply that problems would stop with the 10$/mo subscription. Fuckers. I know bandwidth and storage ain't free, but that's what it says when you buy them.

Sounds like a program perfectly suited to kicking welfare in the direction of preferred corporate allies(both in terms of what tech gets adopted for federal use; and who gets to use the government payroll as an internship/evaluation program) and for ensuring that none of the departments with significant technical requirements who had their own internal expertise DOGEd to ribbons will get to regain it; instead periodically getting the Accenture Experience from a free-floating layer of loyalists who don't give a fuck because they'll be off to the private sector in 18 months anyway.

When that predictably turns out well; we can presumably grab some folksy Reagan line about how the government can't do anything right; and just directly farm out the contract to palantir or whoever.

I have exactly the same problem copying code I have found on the web and now AI. Typing it in instead of copy pasting is a huge help, especially if I change variable and function names and reformat on the fly.

In my mind you'd be buying a car without a battery and simultaneously subscribing to a battery service, but if you ever wanted to own a battery you could buy one. You'd get the battery delivered to the dealer (and/or they would work with one or more services directly and keep some on site) before you picked up the vehicle so it would be all the same to you as if it had come with it, and it would also come charged.

Moving them around without a battery at scrapping time is not a detriment, as vehicles to be scrapped are usually moved around with a fork lift anyway.

If you think theater is a 'sacred space' perhaps you should get on theater management about that. Outside of some very atypical or heavily stage-managed cases the movie theatre experience is typically fucking dire. Paid admittance to a half hour of commercials; seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

It certainly remains very possible for a proper large scale theatre install to handily outgun anything you'd get at home, and definitely the 'whatever is cheap and 65in' best buy experience; but there doesn't appear to be much interest in making the overall experience a compelling sell.

If all you do is attend directorial release screenings with your colleagues I assume that isn't a you problem; but if you genuinely care about the viability, and survival, of the theater experience maybe you should care more; because it's not like people are staying away from theaters just because they are philistines who hate art and desire aggressively mediocre experiences; it's because the theater is an aggressively mediocre experience that squanders much of its remaining technical edge to apathy and cost cutting that can definitely make it more miserable than staying home; but will never make it a better value.

I came across some Emacs elisp code I'd written about 25 years ago, and it looked pretty useful. Emacs didn't like it. I researched the functions and variables and they apparently had been rejiggered about 5 years later. I said to myself, Self, sez I, this could be an interesting AI test. I could probably make this do what I want in a few minutes now if I did it from scratch, but that wouldn't help me understand why it was written that way 25 years ago.

So I asked Grok. I was pleasantly surprised to find it understood 25 year old elisp code just fine, explained when and how they had been rejiggered, and rewrite it for the current standards. That was more than I had expected and well worth the time invested.

One other time Grok surprised me was asking how much of FDR's New Deal legislation would have passed if it had required 2/3 passage instead of just 1/2. Not only did it name the legislation which would not have passed, it also named all the legislation which had passed by voice vote and there was no way to know if 2/3 had voted for it. The couple of bills I checked did match and were not hallucinations. The voice vote business was a nice surprise.

I program now for fun, not professionally. The idea of "offshoring" the fun to AI doesn't interest me. But trying to find 25-year-old documentation and when it changed doesn't sound like fun, and I'm glad to know I can offshore at least some of the dreary parts.

You could do battery swaps for NEVs in a scheme where you didn't own a battery at all, and instead just subscribed to one. You could also do it for heavy diesel truck equivalents, as big diesels typically have the fuel tanks hanging on the outside of the frame where they're nice and accessible anyway. But it doesn't make any sense for the vehicles in between that, i.e. the bulk of them...

MATE is outdated (but good for resource constrained systems) and GNOME is dumbed down and hard to get good results from, you need a whole bunch of add-ins just to get where KDE is. KDE was very bad in the past, but it's really come quite a long way. GNOME was really quite good in the past, but it's really gone the wrong way. I'm not against having a simple mode but I don't want oversimplification to infest everything.

Because the USA doesn't have the concept of absolute power, Donnie Dipshit's pet Catholic Court notwithstanding, and those files were sealed by a judge at the time. There are a lot of fundamental ways in which the two parties are up to the same bullshit, but Democrats tend to obey court orders.