kevinchen

I believe the MTBF argument still applies to Starlink.

Regarding the minimal risk condition / fallback behavior, a central point of the article was that slowing or stopping are almost always unacceptable on freeways because of the speeds involved

Cell networks are even longer lead time and more capital intensive than autonomous driving ;) even if we only consider the fcc + local permitting time, it already makes this option difficult.

Author here. At the mean time between failures needed to exceed human performance, the uptime of the network connection quickly becomes a limiting factor. It’s possible to pick only routes that have great cell coverage but this limits commercial viability.

Most high end sensors, especially lidars, are targeted at L4 applications. Otherwise the price cannot be justified. It’s a safe bet that sensor makers are including AV developers in their market research.

For lidar, the range is also limited by power limits + physics, which cannot be overcome by increasing money/power/device size. Some dependencies on semiconductor manufacturing tech or better signal processing might be possible to solve with more money.

The cab, sensors, and compute are also expensive, not to mention other variable costs like staff for remote assistance, maintenance, and first/last mile

I agree achieving human safety equivalent is the minimum bar. Ex: We can all agree that if your system is below human safety, it is definitely unacceptable.

That’s not the argument being presented though. For example Waymo claims to exceed human performance by a large margin: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...

(Again, one may disagree about the methodology or the conclusions of the study. Just want to point out it’s not the argument being presented.)

Thst video looks fairly sparse and well structured by SF standards? eg interactions starting at 9:00 https://youtu.be/TOV0ndPr0Dk

Many examples of high pedestrian density in https://youtu.be/P6sw4EKegp4

Author here. the shorter reaction times you mentioned are collected under ideal conditions, like the person knows they are being tested and only needs to push a button or whatever. In driving, the reaction time is end to end, including perception, decision-making, and actuation (moving your foot, pressing pedal all the way, shifting, etc.)

Also recommend checking out the citation. It is an accepted value used in American highway design.

"checksums of file and photo data are used to help Apple de-duplicate and optimize your iCloud and device storage"

This is likely describing content-addressable storage. It is the underpinning of many iCloud services that store user files / blobs. It is also a commonly used pattern in backend services generally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage

I don’t think this is true. iMessage works in China (they can’t block all of Apple)

I guess this post is a little bit different, because VMs are designed to be portable across different hosts. Even hypervisor software without live migration still lets you freeze the VM’s state to a file which can be copied to a new host. However, an already running process is not designed to be portable in the same way.

I don’t think this is accurate. Within a single region, S3 stores in multiple availability zones by default.

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/

I’m a Backblaze customer of many years & respect their team a lot. But seriously, “out-Googling Google” because they have cheaper storage is a meme that needs to die.

GCP and AWS both store full copies of your data in multiple locations by default (Availability Zones in AWS-speak). So it’s not an apples to apples comparison. The reduced redundancy is priced in, for people who can tolerate it.

I’m sure Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc collect their own stats on drive failure. It would be almost negligent if they were just guessing in the dark every time they buy drives.

Main difference is probably Backblaze is small enough to publish these stats without hurting their supplier relationships. (pure speculation)

When I clicked the PoC link in Safari, it launched the Zoom app using a URL scheme. ("open in ...?" dialog put up by Safari)

This is an unusually large open source project, especially for NSA. I wonder whether they were motivated to release this tool because of their recent brain drain / hiring problems.

Tesla Autopilot should be recalled via the next OTA update.

The “Autopilot” branding implies that users need not pay attention, when in reality, the system needs interventions at infrequent but hard-to-predict times. If an engineer at Apple can’t figure it out, then the average person has no chance. Their software sets users up to fail. (Where failure means permanent disability or death.)

Inevitably, Musk fans will claim that recalling Autopilot actually makes Tesla drivers less safe. But here's the problem with Musk’s framing of Autopilot.

Sure, maybe it fails less often than humans. (We don't know whether we can trust his numbers.) But we do know that when it fails, it fails in different ways — Autopilot crashes are noteworthy because they happen in situations where human drivers would have no problem. That’s what people can’t get over. And it is why Autopilot is such a dangerous feature.

An automaker with more humility would’ve disabled this feature years ago. (Even Uber suspended testing after the Arizona crash!) With Musk, my fear is that more people will have to die before there is enough pressure from regulators / the public to pull the plug.

"Late January" is 1 month from now

Consider setting up a small monthly donation, as this helps nonprofits plan better and be more sustainable

Apple Maps, OSM, etc are needed because even weak competition forces Google Maps to keep improving

I assume that's where "arresting anyone who gets in the way" comes in

Under American copyright law, no, the manufacturer probably cannot get anything. Are you asking philosophically whether they should?

direct link to source: https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/7f779z/l...

Lack of competition often comes from municipal governments granting local monopolies. Good luck fighting that out city by city.

If someone is able to authenticate as your phone number, they can set up iMessage and receive a copy of your future messages.

Along with the reasons others mentioned, 2 cells means higher voltage, so the battery can deliver the same power using less current.

Cheaper, more portable, battery powered ultrasound would make the technology more accessible to developing countries. This will save lives eg from childbirth complications.

Service looks awesome, but I wish you guys would use HTTPS on the checkout page (or even better, the entire site!). Let's Encrypt can give you a certificate for free: https://letsencrypt.org/getting-started/

Been said many times before but I’ll say it again:

If money could buy great products, Microsoft would still be relevant.

Yes but it’s slow. While your Bluetooth is transferring the data slowly, the entire rest of the system is burning power while it waits.