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  • People have been hit and killed by human drivers at much, much higher rates than SDCs. Those aren't hiccups, and those are deaths that shouldn't have happened, as well. The miles driven per collision ratio between humans and SDCs aren't even comparable. Human drivers are an order of magnitude more dangerous, and there's an order of magnitude more human drivers than SDCs in the cities where these fleets are deployed.

    By your logic, you should agree that we should be revoking licenses and removing human drivers from the equation, because people are far more dangerous than SDCs are. If we can't drive safely without killing people, then we shouldn't be licensing people to drive, right?

  • Instacart is being miserly by not paying their workers a fair wage.

    Instacart is paying their workers fairly. It's just that the driver is not an Instacart worker.

    They're not employees, they're contractors. And when you, the customer, place an order, they are now your worker as you've entered into a contract with this person. They aren't working for Instacart or the store, they're working for you. And you're the one who pays for their time and labor, that all comes out of the service charges on your order.

    That's how all these apps work. They don't get paid anything by the app, they get paid by you through the app.

  • 2009 was the date the article was posted.

  • The fleet of cars is summoned back to the HQ to have the update installed, so it causes a temporary service shutdown until cars are able to start leaving the garage with the new software. They can't do major updates over the air due to the file size; pushing out a mutli-gigabyte update to a few hundred cars at once isn't great on the cellular network.

  • It's pretty handy for things like being able to just say "hey Google, unlock the door" when I'm carrying a dozen bags of groceries.

    I use automations as well, but sometimes I need something done outside of my otherwise-considered parameters. And it's easier to just yell your wish into being than to take out your phone, open an app, select the device, then pick your command.

  • They've already been testing on private tracks for years. There comes a point where, eventually, something new is used for the first time on a public road. Regardless, even despite even idiotic crashes like this one, they're still safer than human drivers.

    I say my tax dollar funded DMV should put forth a significantly more stringent driving test and auto-revoke the licenses of anybody who doesn't pass, before I'd want SDCs off the roads. Inattentive drivers are one of the most lethal things in the world, and we all just kinda shrug our shoulders and ignore that problem, but then we somehow take issue when a literal supercomputer on wheels with an audited safety history far exceeding any human driver has two hiccups over the course of hundreds of millions of driven miles. It's just a weird outlook, imo.

  • After an investigation, Waymo found that its software had incorrectly predicted the future movements of the pickup truck due to “persistent orientation mismatch” between the towed vehicle and the one towing it.

    Having worked at Waymo for a year troubleshooting daily builds of the software, this sounds to me like they may be trying to test riskier, "human" behaviors. Normally, the cars won't accelerate at all if the lidar detects an object in front of it, no matter what it thinks the object is or what direction it's moving in. So the fact that this failsafe was overridden somehow makes me think they're trying to add more "What would a human driver do in this situation?" options to the car's decision-making process. I'm guessing somebody added something along the lines of "assume the object will have started moving by the time you're closer to that position" and forgot to set a backup safety mechanism for the event that the object doesn't start moving.

    I'm pretty sure the dev team also has safety checklists that they go through before pushing out any build, to make sure that every failsafe is accounted for, so that's a pretty major fuckup to have slipped through the cracks (if my theory is even close to accurate). But luckily, a very easily-fixed fuckup. They're lucky this situation was just "comically stupid" instead of "harrowing tragedy".

  • I wasn't asking about the car's logic algorithm; we all know that the SDC made an error, since it [checks notes] hit another car. We already know it didn't do the correct thing. I was asking how else you think the developers should be working on the software other than one thing at a time. That seemed like a weird criticism.

  • I think that's because the current gen is just "last gen, but more powerful". Nothing really got innovated this time around, and the architectures for the current platforms are almost identical to the last ones (which is part of the reason cross-gen has been so popular with developers, as it's very easy to implement).

    I do feel that catering to cross-gen is creating a situation where a lot of games just aren't taking advantage of the capabilities of the current gen properly, in order to maintain parity with the "weaker" versions of the same titles.

  • They're not getting older faster. You're older, so time feels faster now.

    Also, the scarcity of current gen consoles for the first couple years kinda made it seem like the current generation only barely started since most people only barely got their current-gen hardware in the last year or so, but keep in mind we're currently in the 4th year of the 9th gen at this point. This gen started in 2020. We're past the halfway point for most generations by now.

  • So their plan is to fix one accident at a time…

    Well how else would you do it?

  • I still want to go some day. Even if it is overly expensive, Akiba seems like such a cool town to experience.

  • I've heard Akihabara is a bit of an overpriced tech/gamer tourist trap, and that if you want to actually shop there are neighboring cities that are far cheaper.

  • The device connects to a Game Boy or portable CD player (yup, not a Nintendo DS or iPod — apparently the Pedisedate also transports you to 1996)

    I wonder if the writer realized that he would be transporting future readers to 2009 by referencing a DS and an iPod.

  • I kinda want to see this as a new speedrun category.

  • This is a really awesome article that explains the technical aspects in a way that makes sense to non-coders, without having to over simplify. I feel like this sort of writing should be much more appreciated. Also, the graphic at the top has no business being that good, this whole piece is a banger.

  • Keep in mind, the drivers for these apps often take these jobs because they can't hold down a normal job. Either due to disability, mental health, or just plain unemployable personality traits keep them from maintaining a normal 9-5. Many of these people can't find other work. They sign up for these apps because they don't have any boss to answer to, they don't have a schedule to follow, and they don't have any real rules that they need to adhere to.

  • Been playing a lot of The Finals lately. Normally my time would be spent in Destiny 2, but the current D2 season is gonna last for a looooong time, so I'm not in any hurry to grind it out just yet. But The Finals has absolutely blown me away so far. It can be buggy and unbalanced at times, but it's so damn fun. Demolishing an entire building to bury the cashout station in rubble and prevent a steal is so satisfying.

    Embark has also recently said that they've got a lot of updates in the works, so I'm really excited to see how Season 2 plays out.

  • Ahh, this is their "discredit the media" phase of fascism, I see.