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"Saving regret" ought to also refer to when you have saved too much. The shocks in that case would be things like "inflation ate away all my savings before I got to use them" or "the government confiscated my savings via wealth taxes" or just generally "the government made me spend 37% of my income on saving when I wanted to use it to raise kids."

> "the government made me spend 37% of my income on saving when I wanted to use it to raise kids."

This is a particularly funny one tbh. A nation's kids _are_ the retirement plan. It doesn't matter how many numbers you put in spreadsheets dated for 20-40 years into the future, if in said future, there isn't actually anyone to accept those numbers in exchange for labor.


Raising kids in a society where people hate their community and don't want to contribute through things like taxes generally isn't a society that is good for kids and their development.

You do realize that in the US most of your taxes are going to direct transfers to rich people right? The average recipient of social security has on average 9x the net worth of the average payer. What about that is about community? birth rates have collapsed and we are still shoveling money into the pockets of old rich people. Children live in poverty while the old live in decadence. No shit I don't want to contribute so that some old degenerate can spend my hard earned cash on another round of slots at the casino.

That seems like it causes a different category of problems than "I wish I had saved more but I didn't and now I have nothing"

What is their claim about latency here?

> Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad.

That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?


>That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?

Their earlier blog post has screenshots (?) of the UI that the "fleet response" people have access to. It seems to be a video feed combined with yes/no questions, along with some top-down UI to direct where the vehicle should go.

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response


Their claim is talking about latency, not bandwidth. What you're talking about is throughput, which can usually be solved by throwing more money at the problem.

They had to throw something in about speed even though the gating factor is the RA's ability to interpret the situation and decide a course of action.

I wouldn't be surprised if actions required agreement between decisions by two independent RAs.


They could get rid of that latency by hiring Americans.

Any American within a good distance of a large city to mitigate latency issues can make about 4-5x driving for Uber or delivering food.

And latency to small towns in the middle of nowhere is not significantly better than latency to Philippines.

You can expect something in the ballpark of 70ms in both cases.


Not realistic but a remote work Uber driver is kinda an interesting (if dystopian) concept.

I'm semi-seriously expecting remote-work Optimus driving to be a thing in the near future.

Well, more so than it already is.

A factory in the US* staffed entirely by humanoid robots has the same impact on US employment opportunities regardless of if the robots are controlled by AI in the sense of software or in case where the "Actually Indians" meme still applies.

It's just that in the latter case your "illegal aliens" who are "stealing our jobs" are managing to do so without actually crossing the border, making it very difficult to deport them, and denying them access suddenly becomes a freedom of speech issue.

* I'm in Europe, I don't think we'll be tolerating "new" "exciting" "opportunities" from Musk any time soon. I don't think China or Russia will be either. Or indeed more than half of the G20 nations. He'll be told to prove it, and get told "no" a lot because experiments based on his rhetoric and vision are no longer worth the downsides without solid proof both that it works as advertised and that he won't cut things off when he has a hissy fit.


People don't like to work in the middle of the night.

You can stream video with milliseconds of latency, provided you have enough bandwidth for the video stream. Videoconferencing and cloud gaming both work on this principle.

That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.


They don’t do human in the loop at highway speeds.

Further the cars need to safely stop in an emergency without human intervention. There’s no way for the car to first notice a problem, then send a message to a call center which then routes to a human, and for that human to understand the situation, all fast enough to avoid a collision. Even 50ms is significant here let alone several seconds.


That's not an achievement. Even a non intelligent low to mid end compact SUV such as a 2024 Mazda CX30 has cruise control that can detect cars stopped ahead to slow down, stop if necessary, and continue when the car in front starts moving.

I'm just saying that "it avoids a collision" by not ramming into people or cars is table stakes and it makes us look incompetent if we tout it as a flagship feature.


You say that but we’ve had cars that can do what you describe for a decade and yet actual autonomous driving is still waiting.

Not failing due to a software or hardware issue is way more complicated than just usually working.

Avoids a collision is similarly way more difficult than just detecting a stopped car. What needs to happen when a car blows out a tire at speed isn’t just slam on the breaks for example. At scale cars need to adapt to the conditions and drive defensively not just watch what’s directly in front of them.


>That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.

Right, which is why the blog post is titled "Advice, not control ..." and goes to explain that they're not relying on the "remote assistance" people to make split second judgements.


Papers are not just physical objects. The issuing agency records your details and the date of issuance. This is why cops don't boost their citation numbers by shredding your driver's license.

> This is why cops don't boost their citation numbers by shredding your driver's license.

The cops are issuing a citation, which you can contest in a court with a reference to that agency record. ICE has a habit of snatching people off the streets and stashing them in not-quite-black sites in Texas or Florida until they can book them on a private airplane to Guatemala.


I have had a hard time getting copies of my documents when I am -not- incarcerated in a concentration camp... good luck with that.

On the other hand, there were surely memos like "our facility will be using electric power now. Steam is out". Sometimes execs do set a company's direction.

AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the level of the individual worker. Converting an entire factory is a top-down decision. No single worker can individually decide to start using electricity instead of steam power, but individuals can choose whether/how to use AI or any other individual-level tool.

> AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the level of the individual worker.

Ah, but that is the question, isn't it. Is it bottom up or top down?


I think they're saying it should logically be a bottoms-uo initiative, since it's the rank and file that use it day in, day out, but instead it's top-down because we're in a massive bubble

That's a choice individual employees couldn't make. Or, at least, one management wouldn't let them make. It'd require a huge amount of spending.

That transition took 40-50 years. Electrical power in manufacturing was infeasible for lot of reasons for a longtime.

Any company issuing such an edict early on would have bankrupted themselves. And by the time it became practical, no such edict was needed.


The only evidence provided for any of the videos being fake is that one house they visited had legal residents renting the property. But it's not fake that many London neighborhoods like Earl's Court provide 65% of their social housing to people born outside the UK, of whom 40% are in employment (source: migrationfacts.com), so one error doesn't mean much. Thus it's unclear to me (never having seen any of the videos) whether the misinformation was on TikTok or in this article.

My current project got rid of everyone with less than ten years of experience and I thought that was weird because there are usually tasks that you can give juniors. Is Valve unusual in not having any positions for people under seven years of experience?

Based upon everything we know from Valve's corporate structure, they're basically their own self-contained YCombinator. They have a ton of internal 'startup' groups that are constantly trying new and boundary pushing ideas. Looking at it through this lens, it's not really a good company fit for any junior. Having juniors detracts from your seniors work, but the point is that you're supposed to get value from that when they eventually become mid-level or senior engineers themselves. But if you're constantly working in new complex environments it's hard to bring a junior up to speed and teach them the requisite skills to thrive, especially if that project they just spent 3 months getting up to speed on gets canned because the idea didn't actually pan out.

I'm guessing that with the flat structure of the company, there are more engineers that have a deeper responsibility with regards to ownership of a product. The guy responsible for maintaining a game does everything from project management to low level patches. Kind of a fun way to run things but you do end up needing to wear many hats which can be a bad thing if you would prefer sticking to one area.

The adaptive cruise control in my Subaru rarely coasts. It isn't smart enough to see a gap slowly narrowing and start coasting, and it isn't confident enough to temporarily allow the gap to be smaller than the setpoint while it coasts to recover the gap. So it brakes and wastes energy, and I don't use it.

For your commute to take 4/3 the time, you would have to be averaging 3/4 the speed -- going 45 in a 60. That doesn't make sense because even going 55 would mean traffic pulled away from you rather than you having to drop back from it. Going 55/60ths the speed means you arrive in 60/55ths the time, or an extra 4 minutes on a 45 minute commute.

I always wonder why so many people observe this when I never have. It makes no sense logically; it's the speed of the car in front of you that determines whether they should switch lanes, not the size of the gap behind it. There is no reason for them to cut in when your lane is no faster. Perhaps you are just the sole person leaving enough room for people to execute needed lane changes.

At any rate, even if people are continuously going around you like water going around a rock in a stream, you only have to drive 2 mph slower than traffic to constantly rebuild your following distance from the infinite stream of cutoffs. But my experience is the majority of following distance is eaten up by people randomly slowing down, not cutting in.


In the auto cruise example, it’s leaving perhaps 2 - 2.5 car distances. In close traffic the average human I would bet is leaving 1 or less then 1.

The issue is not that I can’t rebuild the following distance, the point I’m trying to make is that even if I constantly rebuild the following distance it sets off a cascading effect.

I’m following at set speed, car cuts in front, hits brakes, I now slow down, car behind me slows down, I rebuild following distance and car perhaps 7-8-9 cars behind me repeats because at some point the cascade magnifies to a larger slowdown behind.

Can I mitigate this by manually letting my distance be closer for a time, and slowly easing to larger ? Yes.

But if I allow the car to do it automatically, it will increase the follow distance at a rate that causes a cascade in tight traffic.

Though - I do think with these discussions on HN- it does depend on where you’re driving.

My experiences are centered on East Coast, thinking of route 80, 81, 83, etc. or Philly / New York City.

The driving experience is radically different in California, Florida , or the mid west.

I would say when driving in California people seem to navigate traffic better. (SF, LA) then on drivers on 80/81/83. (Or perhaps it’s due to better designed roads ).


> In the auto cruise example, it’s leaving perhaps 2 - 2.5 car distances. In close traffic the average human I would bet is leaving 1 or less then 1.

At 60 kph (16.7 m/s) 1 car distance (about 5 m) is less than one third of a second. Even 2.5 car lengths is less than a second. I use traffic aware cruise control on my Tesla set to the maximum separation which is about three seconds, so 50 m at 60 kph.

Three seconds separation is in fact the recommended following separation in most European countries and in Germany in particular 0.9 seconds or less can result in a hefty fine, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-second_rule

In the UK some stretches of motorway have chevrons marked on the road indicating the required spacing at the speed limit.


3 Seconds is also the recommended following distance in the US. This is a change from when I took drivers training when 2 was recommended.

Almost nobody follows it, but that is what the rule is.


What the TikTok algorithm does for me: surfaces exercises for all my joint problems, finds people exploring local sites and reporting on local issues, helps me discover new music, reveals how we treat prisoners, shows me what it's like to do jobs from sitcom writer to oil rig tech

What Europe does for me: Makes me click "Accept cookies"


> What Europe does for me: Makes me click "Accept cookies"

that's only because the implementation of the law is poor and advertisers drag their heels in having it as a brower-level setting. Not helped by the fact that advertisers run one of the biggest browsers and fund one of the next biggest.


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