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dawg idk how you have a car that's "electric" and also "basic." everything in an electric car is _necessarily_ mediated by software. if you want a simple car, you want combustion.

Basic does not mean "no software" it means "no cellular modem" and "no 15 inch tablet" and "no subscription based features"

There is functionally no difference between the powertrain of an electric road car and a brushless drill. How much software is there in your brushless drill? More than zero, far less than an electric road car.


Interesting that this should come out right as lawmakers are beginning to understand that Waymos have overseas operators making major decisions.

[*] https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-wo...


Completely false: https://x.com/i/status/2019213765506670738

Listen to the statement.

The operators help when the Waymo is in a "difficult situation".

Car drives itself 99% of the time, long tail of issues not yet fixed have a human intervene.

Everyone is making out like it's an RC car, completely false.


Whenever something like this comes out, it's a good moment to find people with no critical thinking skills who can safely be ignored. Driving a waymo like an RC car from the philippines? you can barely talk over zoom with someone in the philippines without bitrate and lag issues.

Hacker News has had some of the dumbest Tesla takes of all time. People should be embarrassed about some of the claims that were made here.

And apparently some people still haven't caught on.

Have a look if you don't believe me:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=custom&page=0&prefix=false...


Seems to be some ketamine on that boot.

Except that's not what the original posters said, rather 'operators making major decisions.' Don't strawman here, it wastes everyone's time.

I didn't mean to insult the original poster. But I have seen people who think that waymos are being driven remotely by filipinos

I haven't read anything about this but I would also suppose long distance human intervention cannot be done for truly critical situations where you need a very quick reaction, whereas it would be more appropriate in situations where the car has stopped and is stuck not knowing what to do. Probably just stating the obvious here but indeed this seems like something very different from an RC car kind of situation.

It’s not for that. It’s for things like the car drove into a protest area and people are surrounding the car. Or police blocked off an intersection and the car is stuck temporarily with people doing otherwise illegal u-turns or driving the wrong way on a one way road to get out of it.

Why is this relevant at all?

Having humans in the loop at some level is necessary for handling rare edge cases safely.


The word "loop" here has multiple meanings. Only one is what you mean and the other person responding to you has understood another.

The first is the DDT control loop, what a human driver does. Waymo's remote assistants aren't involved in that. The computer always has responsibility for the safety of the vehicle and decisionmaking while operating, which is why Waymo's humans are remote assistants and not remote drivers. Their safety drivers do participate in the DDT loop, hence the name.

But there's also another "loop" of human involvement. Sometimes the vehicle doesn't understand the scene and asks humans for advice about the appropriate action to take. It's vaguely similar to captchas. The human will usually confirm the computer's proposed actions, but they can also suggest different actions. The computer the advice as a prior to continue operating instead of giving up the DDT responsibility. There's very likely a closely monitored SLA between a few seconds to a few minutes on how long it takes humans to start looking at the scene.

If something causes the computer to believe the advice isn't safe, it will ignore it. There have been cases where Waymos have erroneously detected collisions and remote assistants were unable to override that decisionmaking. When that happens, a vehicle recovery team is physically sent out to the location. The SLA here is likely between tens of minutes and a couple hours.


If that’s true the system isn’t finished. That’s what reasoning is for.

Who ever said they were finished? You think the laid off the team since everything is “done”?

who is downvoting this? you can just go read about this. it's not a lie.

People that don’t believe it’s that “horrible”.

No its because the emails were not written by Bill. They were written by Epstein to himself and were drafts that were never sent see above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867505

They were drafted by Epstein on behalf of Bill's (former) doctor; there's no knowing whether the doctor actually sent it or not.

Let's be real here it is all part of the culture wars. Gates is politically left, gives money to charities, believes in climate change etc.

He's also an excellent lightning rod for Trump.

It reminds me of how we get memes about transsexuals abusing children but absolute silence about all the church members who are caught daily.


> believes in climate change etc.

He "evolved" on this after the election..


It's either non-criminal or way less criminal than the new gold standard of billionaire horrible.

ah, good. another heap of "exaggerations" (lies) to investors so that the creditors don't take elon out back just yet. hooray.

If the only way to advance my career was to talk into a chatbox that makes shit up and encourages people to kill themselves i would stop using computers to spend my days picking oranges. i guess some people feel differently.

Anger stage

no, i simply have a job that requires me to be good at it. tenths of a millisecond matter. every bit in a structure is carefully considered.

Makes sense. Sounds like HFT or embedded/RTOS stuff? I don't know for sure, but I have to imagine coding agents aren't terribly helpful in those domains.

Do you think this is a useful comment?

People do those 2 bad things too. We did it first, and we did it more. Slop too, we invented slop and SEO.

the current united states government is staffed mostly with unserious people, or people who are serious about doing crimes against humanity. there's very little in between.


The vast majority of government staff are career professionals who know what they are doing, not political appointees who showed up in the past year.


Right, if we change parent-poster's "staffed mostly with" to "controlled mostly by", I think that's an adequate fix.


And who've been subjected to a firing spree I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. It's the political appointees that are, frankly, there because of the connections and their willingness to, say, "work towards the ultimate leader".


this is true of many fields.


There was never any money in making tools that allow people to make their own applications. There is only money in walling people into your garden, forcing them to use all of the decaying or enshittified tools in your ecosystem.

There actually still isn't any money in LLM, but we're in the "cheap ubers" era where everything is subsidized by capital that has congealed thanks to economic deregulation in the 80s. Yay, capitalism.


ah, the thing every person does when searching for a calculator: verify that it can actually do the math, a thing computers were historically good at from about the 1960s until within the past few years.

do you understand how bad it is when you search for software and you cannot trust it to do what you ask of it? it's bad!


choosing to build an application on top of bluetooth is like saying, "we've constructed a highway over the most stable terrain known to man: volcanic marshes prone to seasonal flooding."

how do you know when the messaging app is broken, and how do you know when bluetooth is just exercising its ability to hate mankind?


What else would they use? This is for when your government has turned off all sensible networks.


Funny, but I think you're missing the point here.

This is not meant to be an efficient, every day messaging platform.

It's for people who are afraid of the government turning off the internet/cell network (kinda justified if you live in Iran or Uganda), or those networks going offline due to natural disasters (see Jamaica)


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