Are you young enough to have grown up in a house without a land line by chance?
I think land lines are where many current adults (who grew up before cell phones were ubiquitous) learned a lot of that common sense, because in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever picked up the phone first - chatty mothers, asshole brothers, mostly-deaf grandfathers, etc.
> Machine tools are not designed by extremely skilled machinists
But they're built by extremely skilled machinists. I've practiced engineering for decades but I wouldn't even want to be in the same room as any object I've personally made being spun up the first time.
Not really. Mostly they are built by machines. Extremely skilled machinists work in research or niche development, where they can solve new problems. Very skilled operators can tram a machine better, or eke out more repeatable clamping, and make slightly more accuracy out of an established process.
Their time is much better spent creating new processes or making low-run jigs and things.
I have a common enough name that about 2/3 of the info data brokers have on me is garbage.
If every data broker could be relied on to faithfully delete my info I would sign up for Optery or Incogni today. I don't, because if even one of those 2/3 is a bad actor I'm just expending effort to clean up their data.
It's weird that Tesla is being called out over the horn.
In driver's ed they tell you to not to use your horn when you're annoyed at other drivers - only use it if there's an imminent danger to avoid a crash.
But you better hope it works because if it doesn't, the airbag behind it explodes.
...
I'm not sure Tesla improved the situation, but it definitely seems like the situation has room for improvement.
> In driver's ed they tell you to not to use your horn when you're annoyed at other drivers
This is definitely not a cultural universal. Different countries have different practices. In some places the horn simply means “I’m here, check your mirrors”, in other places it means “You bastard!”, and in some other places it means “We are both stuck in traffic let’s make as much noise as possible to pass the time”
> only use it if there's an imminent danger to avoid a crash
Therefore the difference between the horn being readily accessible and being hidden away could be the difference between life and death.
> Therefore the difference between the horn being readily accessible and being hidden away could be the difference between life and death.
Being readily accessible is a must. The point I was trying to make (poorly; it was late) was that having the horn button in the middle of the wheel is about the worst place imaginable if you lay on the horn to avoid a crash and it happens anyway, because some portion of your arm is probably going to be broken when it gets crushed between an exploding airbag and your rapidly-decelerating body.
Exactly - you need to have quick access the horn in a safety critical use case, so it shouldn't be a small button you have to find among other small buttons. You should be able to mash the center of the steering wheel.
>But you better hope it works because if it doesn't, the airbag behind it explodes.
... what? I had a car who's horn stopped working and the airbag didn't explode or go off.
Because the lunatics who wrote the software turned it into a stupid contraption where the source files are mummified in xml and entombed in a zip file or some other proprietary binary container. PLC coding standards should be taken out back one by one and shot twice in the head.
Visual Basic as a language is just C# for people who want to type more to do the same thing.
Visual Basic as a tool for building Windows programs with GUIs was pretty hard to beat though.
Maybe there are tools that churn out fully-polished react just as easily nowadays, but I wrote a janky little data visualization app in 2 hours at my internship and they ended up using it for almost 15 years.
In the US natural gas is a byproduct of shale oil extraction and we have a limited capacity to move or export it so it's almost priced as a waste product.
It's unlikely that electricity will be any cheaper than gas soon either, since that's where 40% (and growing, as our coal and nuclear fleet are retired) of our electricity comes from.
Today solar electricity is already cheaper than natural gas and by 2030-31 solar and wind electricity cost will be 1/4 to 1/8 of today's prices looking at the avg 10% cost decline we are seeing. The advantage of natural gas being cheaper than solar was 4-5 years ago now it's no longer the case. Natural gas advantage now is of having being able to produce electricity when needed but as battery storage prices drop it will also be priced out from that market in many places with solar and wind availablity.
> solar electricity is already cheaper than natural gas
Does that include transmission? Most population centers already have the pipeline network needed to bring them gas but the getting power from giant solar projects in the desert (where it's sunny) to the eastern interconnection (where most people live) is still an unmet need.
> as battery storage prices drop
Eventually, but at present our grid-scale storage has a capacity of ~30GW on a grid of ~1200GW; it's going to take something like a trillion dollars and a generation to build out grid-scale storage to the point where we can even support a 100% renewable grid.
We'll get there eventually but until grid-scale storage is installed and ready, the gas plants (with their fast start/stop ability) are what's enabling the renewables to come online and replace our older coal and nuke plants.
We're probably going to have to lean even more on gas since the first ~500GW of renewables are replacing existing coal/nuclear we're losing, but once the grid storage tech catches up we can start installing that in lieu of new gas plants and replacing the ones we've already built.
Tl;dr: we'll get there but not in the lifetime of a furnace
I managed to collect a rather massive digital music collection when p2p was en vogue.
I still listen to it every day because it's highly curated and has tracks unavailable on any service, but quality-wise it definitely feels like I'm plumbing the depths of a DVD collection when everyone else is watching Netflix.
They're allowed to have limits like "local driverless taxis don't operate outside SF city limits or below 35 degrees with precip in the forecast" etc. at level 4, but to meet level 5 (per the bet) it has to be able to "drive everywhere and in all conditions," [0] which adds a lot of really difficult edge cases.
Situations that come immediately to mind:
- Driving in the hurricane lane on the shoulder during an evacuation
- Reversible lanes and streets
- Sizing up an icy hill and figuring out whether it's safe to keep going
- Ferries
- Knowing a baseball entering the road from behind a parked car will probably be followed by a child
- Understanding traffic police, sign turners, "follow me" trucks, etc.
I think each of these is already handled, or at least most. They say 99.4% of uptime in record inclement weather, which seems like it should satisfy "all".
https://waymo.com/blog/2023/08/the-waymo-drivers-rapid-learn... I don't think they really mean "all" (like it shouldn't need to handle a lava flood). Just "all a human might do". This feels superhuman already.
I actually see the main thing right now that would mean this bet is "not currently won by Carmack" is that they are not officially offering freeway access in its commercial product:
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freew...
But this seems minor, and I can't imagine it taking more than 2 years to allow freeway driving in multiple metros.
I can't fathom what would need to happen to derail this particular bet from being satisfied in Jan 2026 let alone Jan 2030.
(Note: if it wasn't for Waymo, I think this timeline would be much less clear. Tesla/Cruise feel much less predictable.)
Level 5 means there is no instance when Waymo intervenes from home base to tell the car what to do to get around an obstacle, and no instance where an emergency responder drives the car to move it out of the way. If the car is told to take the passengers to Arrowhead stadium, and it is directed verbally by stadium staff to go to parking lot 3, it goes to parking lot 3. Waymo will probably roll out level 4 robotaxis to a major city soon, but it's very hard to see them getting to level 5.
Emergencies are noted exceptions to Level 5, so the "A first responder insists on driving the car" case is still level 5.
Waymo has level 4 taxis in two US cities and is running tests elsewhere too. The usual reaction from the "This can't be done because somehow driving a motor vehicle is a uniquely human ability" people in those cities seems to be head-in-the-sand refusal to believe. The good news is that if they choose to believe a Waymo doesn't exist and step in front of it, it'll probably brake politely to a halt like they're any other asshole.
Level 5 mostly requires more range. I don't think this bet is a sure thing, but it's certainly possible that Waymo's reason you can't go from say New York City to Birmingham Alabama in 2030 is something that sounds like a taxi company reason rather than an "Our AI can't do that" reason.
>Understanding traffic police, sign turners, "follow me" trucks, etc.
I can confirm that in my experience, Waymo handles these kinds of situations fine. Better than many humans in SF seem to, ha! Compared to my past experiences with Cruise, where the car would become instantly paralyzed at the sight of flashing yellow lights, so it could phone home for human intervention.
Icy conditions seem like a big open question to me. As a human driver, there's a big difference between driving on a road slick with rain and a road slick with snow and ice..but maybe there is not much of a difference to a self driving car? Certainly, other humans on the road behave differently in snowy/icy conditions than in rainy conditions, and the self driving vehicle needs to share the road with them.
I think land lines are where many current adults (who grew up before cell phones were ubiquitous) learned a lot of that common sense, because in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever picked up the phone first - chatty mothers, asshole brothers, mostly-deaf grandfathers, etc.