Yeah I'm not so sure this CTO is on the mark here, but to be fair, I do think some of this IRL long tail/edge case data is important for Waymo. The simulation software is super interesting to me - the real world can be so chaotic, and even if they could generate every possible real life case, there needs to be validation on whether the Waymo driver is responding in the optimal way. They certainly haven't solved this problem, you can see some of their growing pains in all of these articles - floods in Austin, more and more interactions with emergency vehicles that first responders seem to believe are getting worse, etc.
Tesla on the other hand has billions of miles of data, yet because there is a limit to camera-only techniques, that data isn't that useful is it? They have no ground truth data to evaluate their camera system on, which is why sometimes you see those Teslas driving around with lidar rigs mounted on them. Going camera-only is just asking for trouble.
I agree real world data is important for Waymo. I didn't mean to say it wasn't, so I've edited my comment to reflect that. It's just that data is not some magic bullet to achieve self driving like Tesla and others suggest.
Of course, Waymo still has much more room for improvement. But it's much more efficient to supplement less but higher quality IRL data with large amounts of synthetic data, than to run a million data collection vehicles 24x7 because most IRL data is boring and useless.
Waymo said 6 years ago they simulate 20 million miles every single day [1]. Clearly, it's working for them given their scale of deployment right now.
Although most of the real-world data is probably boring, collecting more of it likely makes discovering rare edge cases more likely. But since they happen rarely, I imagine that after discovering them, they would then need to figure out how to simulate them.
The current administration scoffs at laws. Nothing stopping them in that case from declaring war on Nauru and doing all the same. The solution is a sane, informed electorate, which is much more difficult in this age where a few disgustingly rich people have so much influence over news and media.
It would be untouchable irony for the US to cut all ties with Anthropic and replace them with models developed by Chinese labs. The Onion becomes more irrelevant with each passing day.
How many generations does it take before the historians/archeologists uncover old issues of The Onion and decide it was the authoritative news of the day?
You won't get rich with a $30,200 robotaxi, you won't even have a viable business. The game is the mass market and there the usual unit of currency is not cents, its tenth of cents.
All taxis are variants of mass produced cars, that will not be different for robotaxis. The mass market is the enabler and there every tenth of cent counts.
I don't particularly agree with Epic's victory in the Google/Epic case, but the one thing I hope it accomplishes is to convince those in charge of the Play Store that it's finally time to have developer-friendly policies (otherwise someone else will). Play Store policies constantly virtue signal about security and privacy while continually making it harder for developers to release high quality apps.
This makes sense though, right? Flash-Lite is intended to be weaker than Flash - the comparisons should be flash-2.0 vs flash-2.5 and flash-lite-2.0 to flash-lite-2.5.
That's only enabled by the difference in culture though, right? Japanese culture has a much higher emphasis on order and following the rules - I don't know that this "open-by-default" system would work in, for instance, the US.
Japanese transit-using society is old and middle-class; those are the kind of people who follow rules.
Americans are often more rule bound than Japanese people (we have HOAs and Nextdoor), but we just don't respect transit systems as much because we think of them as gifts we give to the poor/mentally ill/homeless.
And then a lot of Americans have an anti-gentrification ideology ("rent-lowering gunshots" or "neighborhood character") which says that anything made for poor people must be kept old and dirty or else rich people will show up and take it away from them.
I had never noticed it like that but now I’m dead.
When I moved to my current neighborhood I asked why there was no public transportation and someone said it was so poor people couldn’t be around and I hadn’t connected this to the wider culture.
I was talking to someone about some existing bicycle road infrastructure that ran through several neighborhoods, rich and poor, in a large city. They said when it first was built, some people in the rich neighborhood objected because they said criminals would use it to come to their neighborhood. (The city is mostly on a grid, including this neighborhood, making the whole idea absurd anyway.)
I had long ago pointed out to them that much of the bike infrastructure connects wealthy neighborhoods with wealthy neighborhoods.
Along the public transit line (ha!), the person primarily in charge of NYC’s road design and public transit planning back in the day made several anti-poor design choices, like ensuring overpasses crossing roads to less-poor (I.e. more-white) areas were just low enough that public busses couldn’t pass under them, as well as planning off-ramps that dumped a majority of the smog-ridden traffic into poorer neighborhoods, and let’s not forget how public parks in poorer neighborhoods had little monkeys adorning the fences. If you’ve ever wondered why a dangerously busy road with little in the way of safety measures for pedestrians cut between a neighborhood and a shopping district, you can thank Robert Moses.
Old meaning not young. Pretty much all crimes or any other forms of messy behavior worldwide are committed by young men.
But the median age in NYC is 38 and Tokyo is 45. (source: two Google searches I just did). That means a lot!
It's true they don't jump the gates often and they don't have loud panhandlers. Instead the societal transit ills are passed out drunks, suicides and molesters. (Not meaning these actually happen all the time, it's just my impression of what people talk about.)
> it’s pretty much everyone who is not filthy rich isn’t it?
Hmm, it's more about what you're doing, I think? Rich people use transit all the time if it serves their purposes afaik. One thing that helps in Japan is the culture of wearing face masks means you won't be recognized in public. (Obviously this doesn't work if you're like a 7' NBA player.)
For going between cities the trains are actually the nice expensive option, and flying or taking a night bus is cheaper.
But trains are also basically only good at carrying yourself. If you're traveling in a group, or carrying equipment with you, or don't want to walk a lot then you'd still want to drive or take a taxi locally.
while it's not an apples:apples comparison, in contrast, only 5% of American workers commute by public transportation[1], which means >90% commute by car. From this, one can make educated guesses on the socioeconomic status slices that make use of public transit for each respective group - 5% vs 50%
> we just don't respect transit systems as much because we think of them as gifts we give to the poor/mentally ill/homeless.
> And then a lot of Americans have an anti-gentrification ideology ("rent-lowering gunshots"
I think the ideology is in the parent comment. I ride lots of public transit and don't hear or see these things. The largest American public transit system, in NYC, certainly isn't seen as a gift other than by New Yorkers to themselves.
FWIW, I've seen American transit systems that let people board without even being asked to pay. I've seen plenty of bus drivers wave through people who couldn't pay. On one bus a teen boarded and walked straight to their seat. The bus driver, in an authoritative parental voice, kept summoning them to the front. There they lectured them: It's ok, but you need to talk to me first.
Please don't read too much into it. Outside of the peak demand at least here, in Kansai area, gates will close when they sense you approaching to indicate that you actually need to touch the card or insert a ticket. They stay open only if there is a continuous flow of passengers going one after another.
Another interesting fact is that gates' actuators are not super rigid and it's completely possible to force enter not realizing in time your card has failed (you will be approached by station attendant though).
To summarize, culture may play a role but the main differentiator is the high traffic volume.
As I said in another comment, I've used US systems where you board the vehicle (bus/train) before paying, and bus drivers wave you past if you can't pay. On the train, you get a free ride to the next stop.
On the Phoenix area light rail the only way they (used to, at least) tell if you have a valid ticket is random security patrols checking everyone on the train. No gates, no nothing.
During covid they even stopped checking the validity of the tickets and all you needed was to be in possession of 'a ticket' -- I used the same one for a couple years and still have the thing in my wallet in case I ever go back there again.
Couldn't even begin to count the number of times I saw people get off the train as soon as they saw security get on and just wait for the next train.
They went to a stored value card in the last year or so. It's the ugliest one I've seen (big ugly UPC code on the front, I guess maybe for convenience to sell them at retailers outside the transit stations)
Oof. I actually really like the majority (with some notable exceptions) of what Material 3 Expressive does from a pure design perspective, but this article is the worst reflection of that.
"Big button easier to find" (let's think about whether "easy to find send button" is the top priority for an email composition screen, because these folks apparently didn't) and "We can make an existing UI less functional by taking up the entire screen" seem to be the writer's favorite parts of M3E.
It's ironic that they got rid of the tall bottom navigation bar and brought back the short one with less padding (likely after all of Google's own 1P properties decided it wasted too much space), because now it feels like that took that failed philosophy and applied it everywhere else.
People bringing up this site in this specific way is a pet peeve of mine. What's the largest product that they sunset with no replacement? Stadia? Given the number of products Google has, I wouldn't consider their track record below average.
Well their press releases indicate long term support and then they cancel the projects. This _has_ to have more serious consequences (on businesses mostly, but consumers too) than you are implying. This sort of thing naturally effects consumer/brand loyalty. With such a clear lack of focus on any one solution, why would anyone trust Google going forward with their new products/services?
This is the end result of trying to run your massive corporation like some kind of start-up incubator. No wisdom or strategy, just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
Tesla on the other hand has billions of miles of data, yet because there is a limit to camera-only techniques, that data isn't that useful is it? They have no ground truth data to evaluate their camera system on, which is why sometimes you see those Teslas driving around with lidar rigs mounted on them. Going camera-only is just asking for trouble.
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