boulos

We post updates on our blog or Twitter account from time to time. There isn't an explicit, public roadmap of "On this date, we will open in < CITY >", but we have announced LA [1] as our next city for Waymo One (the name of the ride hailing service):

> Los Angeles will be Waymo’s next ride-hailing city, joining Phoenix and San Francisco as we expand to more locations.

Beyond the official service, we also do testing in multiple locations. For example, we announced that returning to Austin for testing [2]. In that post, we mention other weather testing we've done in Miami, NYC, and Bellevue, WA.

Beyond ride hailing, we have separate testing for Waymo Via with our Class 8 trucks, that you might see in Arizona or Texas.

[1] https://blog.waymo.com/2022/10/next-stop-for-waymo-one-los-a...

[2] https://blog.waymo.com/2023/03/expanding-waymos-testing-to-A...

For folks that are interested, the discussion at /r/selfdrivingcars [1] picked out some of the salient numbers. Brad Templeton also did his own write up at [2].

I mainly hope that people take away that this service exists now. You can download the app and just use it in Phoenix. As mentioned in the post, we're doing thousands of trips per week of non-employee rides. There are some great (and not so great!) examples posted to /r/selfdrivingcars from time to time if you want to see them.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/137hr3l/wa...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/05/04/waymo-...

LA is employee only for now (https://twitter.com/Waymo/status/1630326911648841730?cxt=HHw...). We often do smaller announcements / updates only via Twitter, rather than a blog post on blog.waymo.com.

Sorry if that's unclear, if you set up the app, logged in, and are located in San Francisco when doing so, I think that's equivalent.

Disclosure: I used to work on GCE.

I don't understand where these power and cooling mantras came from, but large-scale cloud providers have very low PUE (Google publishes historical data at https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/). That means you can take the basic power from a thread, add some for memory, and multiply by just a bit to get Watts. Take that and plug in your favorite $/kWh guess and get a price.

Ignoring Graviton, which doesn't have published power data to my knowledge, you can look up the TDP for a bunch of chips and see that it's a a few Watts per thread [1]. Similar calculations can be done for RAM. You end up at 5ish Watts per thread with some RAM attached. Let's call it 10 all in with cooling or other stuff. Since 10W is 1% of a kW, we end up with .01 kWh per hour. The top hit for "us power commercial rates" [2] says that we should assume 7c per kWh or so. That means our instance with cooling and overheads, needs to include .01 x .07 => $.0007/hr of power and cooling costs.

A single core w/ 4 GiB of memory on GCP at 3yr commitment rates (so we're focused on the long-term depreciation price) is .009815 + 4x.001316 => $.015/hr or about 20x as much as the power.

tl;dr: Power costs add up, but they are not even close to dominating the costs of cloud pricing.

[1] https://wccftech.com/amd-epyc-7h12-cpu-64-core-zen-2-280w-td...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/190680/us-industrial-con...

The FBI discourages using their data for simplistic rankings [1]. The linked Wikipedia entry in the article [2] reiterates this in the section entitled "Criticism of ranking crime data". The simplest criticism is that crimes happen in San Francisco that involve people from outside San Francisco who are present there during a crime, but the denominator for per-capita data is the census data.

Ignoring all of that, I have to say that I continue to find it strange when people take total crime as a correlate of safety. Specifically, quotes like this from the article:

> So, what this tells us is that just by virtue of walking around San Francisco, you will witness and experience significantly more crime (235% the rate of Chicago and 266% the rate of Baltimore) than in any other city in the United States.

are pretty divorced from reality. If you instead sort the Wikipedia table by the violent crime rate, you have a totally different answer and conclusion.

Do people feel unsafe knowing that there are people shoplifting? 72% of the crime per capita in San Francisco is listed under Larceny/Theft. Only 8% is motor vehicle theft. And finally, another 8% is burglary, which involves actually forcibly entering a premises. Burglary is the primary form of theft that people usually associate with feeling unsafe. That's what Nat Friedman cited as his reason for leaving San Francisco [2]. Muggings are under violent crime, listed as Robbery, at 5% of total crime.

tl;dr: Total crime is a poor measure of safety. Simplistically using per-capita information is also explicitly discouraged for cross-location comparisons.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/ucr-statistics-their-proper-use

[2] https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1644736970139267072

Yeah, mandating rbp on amd64 would have saved years of headache. There are still cases like tail calls that wouldn't work, but the vast majority of code doesn't need to care about dedicating a register to having usable backtraces.

I think you're looking only at price and not total return. Because of dividends, assuming reinvestment, it would have been sooner.

> Top posting because there is a lot of mis/false information overwhelming the comments section and this needs to be known.

You posted this as a reply to a top comment. Perhaps re-post as a top-level comment? I think dang can move these, but likely won't see it for a while.

Hmm? Chia seems to be a clear failure.

The price and market cap both collapsed. https://www.coinbase.com/price/chia-network tells me the latest daily volume is less than $5M USD.

Sure, but when does that start? What set of small businesses have >$1M of operations per month and nobody to manage that? Or even just an owner who wants to "keep it all in cash" instead?

I'd be curious to know how much of the "overage" is from businesses that would be fine with narrow banking at the Fed.

The obvious downside is that you still need regular banks and financial institutions for loans, but for large operating accounts for many companies you just want something you can spend and won't disappear. And presumably this is why the Fed doesn't permit narrow banking: major deposits would dry up, loan rates would have to be much higher, and so on.

Mostly, I wasn't comfortable saying NYC when people mostly mean Manhattan and fancy parts of Brooklyn for this comparison :).

Sadly, I think this is true about a lot of the food in Manhattan: the middle got squeezed. There's low end, high volume and high-end, low volume. I'm always amazed Manhattan can support so many on the low end with the economics on the rent, but I think they end up with just truly amazing foot traffic and volume that other cities can't touch.

> My understanding is passive house comes from a German project. It shouldn't surprise anyone that strategies which work well in Germany differ from strategies that work in warmer climates.

It actually started in North America around the time of the oil embargo as a mechanism to reduce energy costs. (See the history section of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house). Once that shock passed, people went back to not caring.

Even at the time, and still today, most write ups are focused on harsh climates like New England or Canada in Winter, because it's harder. It's also the case that in milder climates, the cost to make your home passive has historically been higher than just paying the subsidized bills (and/or requires capital). So most of the US hasn't cared (again) until recently.

Yeah, it's too bad the author didn't choose the title "OKRs don't work for Sales targets" or "You need Sales KPIs separate from (Engineering) OKRs". We would have gotten different discussion.

> superior method to MCMC

Superior in what ways?

I could imagine simplicity for many problems. Roughly "here, replace your complex simulation with this magic function approximator". But for problems where you're calculating a physical quantity with a true answer, I don't see NNs being "much superior".

> if you looked at the cost for private offices vs. cubicles, they were about the same, and that must be the case because the market will equilibrate

... How? That is, through what mechanism?

Ahh, you mean the original Squatty Potty ads:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q

It's definitely bizarre. I assume they were going for memorable, but your report sounds like it failed at the basic goal: remembering the product.

At the beginning of a company, it's all hope anyway [1].

Investors are sophisticated enough to quickly reason about basic margin opportunity, and decide if the company could ever be profitable, even if the founders have no real business experience. The assumption is that by the second round or so, you can refine the estimate of "Could ever be profitable".

More importantly for venture capital, is that there are many profitable businesses in the world that have people with finance expertise. If you just wanted to invest in profitable companies, you wouldn't be doing venture capital. Instead, you're seeking companies that will have massive returns and become profitable some day.

If the founders still don't know how to do finance, but they're making a ton of money, you send them a CFO to tighten that up. Same way you send them names for VP of Sales, or whatever else they need.

Deciding to give up on a company that seems to be generating lots of money, and "just" needs to improve margins is hard. If you tighten too early, you've blunted growth. If you tighten too late, you've thrown away the money. For the last few years, the amount of money sloshing around meant you saw more of the latter. The firms "had" to keep investing their funds, so they were chasing more and more deals on hope. But $10M out of a $1B fund is still no big deal.

tl;dr: the rare thing is rocket ships, not financial sophistication.

[1] https://www.k9ventures.com/blog/2012/05/31/hope-and-numbers/

Disclosure: I work for Waymo.

> There was a collision on Geary Boulevard where a Waymo vehicle detected a speeding car during a left turn and stopped, rather than accelerating to escape. That's their worse accident so far, and the other driver was at fault.

You're thinking of Cruise.

Their write up is a little confusing, especially when combined with your statement.

> The imagery starts with panchromatic plus 4 color aerial imagery that was collected at a native GSD of 3.8 cm, which enables accurate removal of aerial sensor properties and resampling to the Albedo 10 cm resolution and camera properties.

Makes it sound like they have a spatial resolution of 3.8cm per pixel. This isn't panchromatic in a single pixel, but that's also true of things like Bayer mosaics in digital cameras.

Where do you see 30cm+?

> behind a bar with a clientele ranging from Nobel laureates to homeless people taking a shower in the bar toilet

Berkeley?

All that's true enough, but do you agree with the original statement:

> Google was born into an economy that was just starting to recover from being bad.

I don't think being grad students at Stanford and then incorporating in 1998 counts as "just starting to recover". The economy in 1996 wasn't bad. 1998 definitely wasn't.

Using unemployment as a reasonable signal, I don't think 1996 is that connected to the 1991 recession.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=YUZM

Sure, it was still above 5% in 96 nationally. But strongly down from the summer of 92 peak.

Additionally, Netscape's IPO was in August 1995. I wouldn't call that a bad environment for starting an internet company.

> while Google was born into an economy that was just starting to recover from being bad.

Huh? Google was started in the mid to late 90s (incorporated 1998 but started earlier at Stanford). It was quite literally during the peak years of the dot com bubble and the US economy was doing fantastically well. The Clinton administration was even trying to draw up plans for what to do if the national debt was paid off...

Are you thinking about when Google went public in 2004?

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey for others

> You can't open a 40GB scene entirely in GPU RAM on any single-GPU system, laptop or otherwise, because there aren't any 40GB+ GPUs.

The second revision of the A100 has 80 GiB of memory: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/a100/

> Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas. He wouldn't ask for bananas. So I grabbed a bunch and put them in the basket.

> "Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.

In multiple communist countries in Eastern Europe, bananas were special because they only came ~once a year from Cuba. Anyone having access to them outside that time and/or getting more than a few would fit the profiles he described.

By contrast, some people in Eastern Europe had fancy ski huts available to them. You or I might have asked the same questions if you'd gone skiing with them in the 80s only to find out that his father is a draftsman. "Don't all of you have ski houses?"