This gets near something I was thinking about. Most of the numbers seem to assume that injuries, injury severity, and deaths are all some fixed proportion of each other. But is that really true in the context of self-driving cars of all types?
It seems reasonable that the deaths and major injuries come highly disproportionally from excessively high speed, slow reaction times at such speeds, going much too fast for conditions even at lower absolute speeds. What if even the not very good self-driving cars are much better at avoiding the base conditions that result in accidents leading to deaths, even if they aren't so good at avoiding lower-speed fender-benders?
If that were true, what would that mean to our adoption of them? Maybe even the less-great ones are better overall. Especially if the cars are owned by the company, so the costs of any such minor fender-benders are all on them.
If that's the case, maybe Tesla's camera-only system is fairly good actually, especially if it saves enough money to make them more widespread. Or maybe Waymo will get the costs of their more advanced sensors down faster and they'll end up more economical overall first. They certainly seem to be doing better at getting bigger faster in any case.
The best way to understand why it isn't widespread is to spend 10 minutes attempting to use it to actually chat with some people you know. I don't know which issues you'll run into, but it's virtually guaranteed you'll run into a variety of incredibly dumb and inexplicable ones.
Have you checked whether the work laptop's bad battery life is due to the OS, or due to the mountain of crapware security and monitoring stuff that many corporations put on all their computers?
I currently have a M3 Pro for a work laptop. The performance is fine, but the battery life is not particularly impressive. It often hits low battery after just 2-3 hours without me doing anything particularly CPU-intensive, and sometimes drains the battery from full to flat while sitting closed in a backpack overnight. I'm pretty sure this is due to the corporate crapware, not any issues with Apple's OS, though it's difficult to prove.
I've tended to think lately that all of the OSes are basically fine when set up reasonably well, but can be brought to their knees by a sufficient amount of low-quality corporate crapware.
I think a VPN likely hurts more than it helps. Maybe they can't tell your IP address anymore, but they have a ton of ways of tracking through it anyways. It probably hurts more by marking you as someone willing to shell out too much money for snake-oil security products.
Lol. I use a vpn every day to access geofenced content abroad. It also provides extra layer of anonymity by giving you a different address which is the same for everyone going through that server. Which was what the question was about. Other types of tracking can be mitigated on your end.
It's only discussed in a similarly ambiguous way - like that they know noise is a potential problem that they're working on. Though to be fair, the designers probably have no idea themselves, since apparently nobody has built a prototype engine that could be run at the rated thrust level in a way they could check the real-world noise and vibration on.
I have a feeling it's too little, too late, even if it's completely true and sincere, which I doubt at this point.
I can't help but wonder if they're in the process of losing an entire generation of tech enthusiasts to Linux and maybe MacOS. And the rest of the world tends to slowly follow the tech enthusiasts.
I don't think I'd want to take much from such a statistical result yet. A sample size of 1 accident just isn't enough information to get a real rate from, not that I want to see more collisions with children. Though this is also muddied by the fact that Waymo will most likely adjust their software to make this less likely, and we won't know exactly how or how many miles each version has. I'd also like to see the data for human incidents over just the temperate suburban areas like Waymo operates in.
> More than 50% of roadway fatalities involve drugs or alcohol. If you want to spend your efforts improving safety _anywhere_ it's right here. Self driving cars do not stand a chance of improving outcomes as much as sensible policy does. Europe leads the US here by a wide margin.
Could you spell out exactly what "sensible" policy changes you were thinking of? Driving under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol is already illegal in every state. Are you advocating for drastically more severe enforcement, regardless of which race the person driving is, or what it does to the national prison population? Or perhaps for "improved transit access", which is a nice idea, but will take many decades to make a real difference?
>Driving under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol is already illegal in every state.
FWIW, your first OWI in Wisconsin, with no aggravating factors, is a civil offense, not a crime, and in most states it is rare to do any time or completely lose your license for the first offense. I'm not sure exactly what OP is getting at, but DUI/OWI limits and enforcement are pretty lax in the US compared to other countries. Our standard .08 BAC limit is a lot higher than many other countries.
That's true, but note that getting much more severe on enforcement and punishment for DUI/OWI will result in an even higher prison population, more serious life consequences for poor and minorities, etc, when the US is constantly getting trashed for how bad those things are already.
To be a bit snarkier, and not directed at you, but I wish these supposedly superior Europeans would tell us what they actually want us to do. Should we enforce OWI laws more strictly, or lower the prison population? We can't do both!
I suspect you could step up enforcement in ways that don’t involve prison time simply by taking away people’s licenses, and then having a fast feedback loop to catch people driving without a license.
Taking away licenses is a bad way to enforce driving rules because so many people have to be able to drive or their life collapses. The problems of aggressive license revocation are similar to the problems of aggressive prison time.
I get where you're coming from, but it's pretty hard to be sympathetic given the crimes we're talking about and the impact they have on others.
Like that would sound nuts if we applied it to other things - e.g. "take away the professional license of a mid-career pilot/surgeon/schoolteacher/engineer because he was drinking on the job and his life collapses".
Various people can't drive because of e.g. visual impairments, age, poverty, etc. - I find it an ugly juxtaposition to be asserting that we must allow people with DUIs to drive because otherwise their lives would "collapse" to the same point as those other people who can't drive.
> Like that would sound nuts if we applied it to other things - e.g. "take away the professional license of a mid-career pilot/surgeon/schoolteacher/engineer because he was drinking on the job and his life collapses".
The analogy is closer to "take away their ability to get any job" and then it sounds even more harsh.
> Various people can't drive because of e.g. visual impairments, age, poverty, etc. - I find it an ugly juxtaposition to be asserting that we must allow people with DUIs to drive because otherwise their lives would "collapse" to the same point as those other people who can't drive.
If you can't see well enough to drive, then life was unfair to you, and you can often get help with transportation that isn't available to someone that violated the law. For age, if you're young then your parents are supposed to care for you, if you're too old to drive you're supposed to have figured out your retirement by now. For poverty, you kinda still need a car no matter what, that's just how the US is set up in most areas. And it's not ugly to make the comparison to extreme poverty, to say that kicking someone down to that level is a very severe punishment.
> must allow
I wasn't saying what we should do, just that turning up the aggressiveness has serious unwanted consequences.
> The analogy is closer to "take away their ability to get any job" and then it sounds even more harsh.
If you take away the license of a pilot mid-career, they may be able to pivot to something else, but have a huge sunk cost of education and seniority where they ground out poor pay/schedules and then never made it to the part of the career with better pay. For a substantial segment of them, the career impact would be comparable to taking away the ability to drive from a random person.
> For poverty, you kinda still need a car no matter what, that's just how the US is set up in most areas.
You really don't. If you don't already live somewhere with public transit, you'll probably have to move. You'll have to make some sacrifices. But it's workable, I lived without a car and relied on city busses for all my transportation for several years. (And while I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, prior to that, I lived in a small town of ~4k people without transit service. I walked everywhere, and took the inter-city bus when I needed to leave the town.)
In addition to what the sibling said regarding the impracticality of not driving in most of the US, which I completely agree with, I'd also ask exactly what you want to do with your "fast feedback loop to catch people driving without a license". What do you do with the people who drive anyways because not driving is so impractical and get caught?
We already took their license, we can't double-take it to show we really mean it. Fining them seems a bit rough when they need to drive to get to the job to make the money to pay those fines. Or we're right back to jail time and an even higher prison population.
> I'd also ask exactly what you want to do with your "fast feedback loop to catch people driving without a license".
Unless the vehicle is stolen, seize and impound the vehicle. If the driver is the owner, auction it off and give them back the proceeds, minus costs.
I feel like I'm living in some different world where drunk driving is a-okay when I face these types of objections to actually enforcing the rules around it.
It's more that you don't seem to engage much with the trade-offs of all of the possible options. This debate has been going on for decades and society has swung back and forth multiple times already. "Let's enforce things much more harshly" is not at all a new take. Enforcing things harshly enough to actually cut down on the rates of DWI will most definitely cause serious damage to a bunch of lives, including many poor and minorities, and there isn't going to be some clever way around that.
It is a possible position at the end of the day though. You may come across as more honest and experienced if you just explicitly say that you think it's worth that damage to cut down on DWI related accidents. I would even agree that we should probably swing that pendulum a bit more towards enforcement. It seems kind of silly and naive to me though to pretend that you can just hand-wave the resulting damage away,
I don’t think the pendulum has ever really swung towards high-effectiveness interventions, only, as you call them, harsh ones.
As far as DUIs are concerned I’m specifically not in favour of harsh jail time and fines due to their lack of effectiveness and collateral damage.
Interventions to allow a short feedback loop to stop the crimes being prevented simply haven’t been tried at scale for DUIs - think efforts like NYC’s anti-idling laws where you can collect a portion of the fine for reporting idling trucks.
Based on, among other things, my experience living for years without a car in both a medium-sized city and a small town, I find it unpersuasive to claim that anyone, including poor and minorities are better served by having community members drive drunk rather than not driving at all. We’ve quantified the costs of drunk driving (hundreds of billions of $) - I’d welcome anyone to quantify the economic benefits we get from allowing those with DUIs to continue to drive.
I haven't seen any web apps that seem to be intentionally unusable, or any belonging to banks, personally at least. I don't think anybody is doing this as a publicly announced policy. But I have seen several websites for major institutions with major features totally unusable on their website, that should be found in a matter of minutes if they had even one QA person actually trying to use the website after updates. It's not announced, but it's hard to imagine it's not intentional.
For my most recent personal example, go onto State Farm's website and try to create an account. Goes to a blank page. It only seems to work right on their mobile app.
I don't think it's the same. On older Apple hardware, it just keeps on running on the older OS version. You don't get some new features or styling of the new OS, but nothing else changes. On Windows, it periodically brings up full-screen notifications that your hardware is obsolete and you need to upgrade, with the only options being to upgrade or "remind me again later".
Note: Because of dependency on architecture and system changes to any current version of Apple operating systems (for example, macOS 26, iOS 26 and so on), not all known security issues are addressed in previous versions (for example, macOS 15, iOS 18 and so on).
macOS receives 1 year of full support and 2 additional years for security updates for each version with 6-8 years of upgrade eligibility. Windows 10 received 10 years of support (on top of a free upgrade from Windows 7/8.1 for most users).
I'm not sure why you're counting the years of support for a version of the OS and not the years of support for a computer. The interesting thing is: if you bought a computer at year X, does it still receive updates at X+Y?
There's loads of relatively young computers which can't upgrade to Windows 11 and therefore aren't supported anymore. That's the problem, not how long Windows 10 was supported.
That's great, but it's no silver bullet. We have a 4th Gen iPad that was used mostly for consumption. Only one of the streaming apps works with its ios version.
There are a lot of Android devices that look temping until one discovers how out-of-date the firmware is.
With no option to install your own, of course. Boot loaders should be exclusively for running the manufacturer's lone security update from 5 years ago.
I just installed Opencore and run the newer OSs anyway. It will eventually not be an option when they come up with an ARM-only OS, but at the moment it seems to work ok.
Software in much more tied to the OS though. For example, Chrome is still compatible with Windows 10 which is more than 10 years old, while on macOS you cannot install it past Monterey (2021). Not to mention that also system applications are updated with the OS, so forget about using Safari
It seems reasonable that the deaths and major injuries come highly disproportionally from excessively high speed, slow reaction times at such speeds, going much too fast for conditions even at lower absolute speeds. What if even the not very good self-driving cars are much better at avoiding the base conditions that result in accidents leading to deaths, even if they aren't so good at avoiding lower-speed fender-benders?
If that were true, what would that mean to our adoption of them? Maybe even the less-great ones are better overall. Especially if the cars are owned by the company, so the costs of any such minor fender-benders are all on them.
If that's the case, maybe Tesla's camera-only system is fairly good actually, especially if it saves enough money to make them more widespread. Or maybe Waymo will get the costs of their more advanced sensors down faster and they'll end up more economical overall first. They certainly seem to be doing better at getting bigger faster in any case.
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