I don’t know about laws, but Teslas automatically record and save everything in the event of a collision. My brother was hit by another car while driving a Tesla a few years ago and it was very easy to retrieve video from the Tesla’s cameras and show who was at fault.
There are very few (if any?) known deaths caused by FSD accidents.
Note: it’s important to distinguish between Autopilot and FSD here. “Autopilot” is Tesla’s old assisted driving stack that comes free in most vehicles and has had no significant updates in years. “FSD” is an entirely different software stack that only works with newer vehicles and that Tesla charges $$ for. It’s much more advanced and IMO a lot safer.
> There are very few (if any?) known deaths caused by FSD accidents
It’s tough to say given many data sources are aggregated. For what it’s worth, my parents’ car is a Tesla with FSD and I’ve stopped it from, off the top of my head, racing into a red-lit intersection, running over a small dog and running into a closing garage door.
I still use it. It mostly works. But I’m vigilantly monitoring it in a way that isn’t supported by Tesla’s marketing (which frequently shows drivers engaging it hands off).
The garage door I can certainly believe. Its AI brain just won’t be trained to look for that sort of thing.
I’m surprised about the red lights and animals, however: ours seems very cautious around any kind of live animal on the road, even braking and manoeuvring to avoid birds on the road. It’s not so good at avoiding the corpses of already dead ones, however (bump!).
I get the impression that it kind of comprehends the world as a horizontal plane. It’s focused on objects on the surface and isn’t looking for hazards coming from above. Could that be improved? Sure! Is it a priority for them? Maybe not…
At minimum it needs to pay attention to railroad crossing bars and bridges.
They show a 2D representation to the driver because that’s good enough for drivers, but I wouldn’t assume that represents how the system operates internally at every stage. Even navigating requires the concept of bridges crossing roads without intersecting them.
AFAIK, there's no issue with bridges that cross roads, however. It will just ignore a road that's above or below the one you're travelling on that doesn't intersect with yours. Just like a human driver would do.
> It is indeed known to have issues at railway crossings:
At scale you can “have issues” and still work 99% of the time. If it’s completely incapable of handling railroad crossings that’s relatively easy to verify.
> AFAIK, there's no issue with bridges that cross roads, however. It will just ignore a road that's above or below the one you're travelling on that doesn't intersect with yours. Just like a human driver would do.
As a user of the system that’s worked it all out it’s not an issue for you, but getting that behavior from raw sensor data is non trivial.
Both only happened once. But they were shocking when they did. (To be fair, my Subaru tried to push me into oncoming traffic because it was avoiding a “collision” from the guy in the other lane turning weirdly. Turned at collision-avoidance feature off.)
> “Autopilot” is Tesla’s old assisted driving stack that comes free in most vehicles and has had no significant updates in years. “FSD” is an entirely different software stack that only works with newer vehicles and that Tesla charges $$ for. It’s much more advanced and IMO a lot safer.
I'm not sure the point you're making here - that just sounds like "Tesla couldn't care less about updating their software and it's still "not good". People it hits are still dead. "Oh well, it's not like Tesla had updated the software, so you can't blame them".
Oh, I absolutely agree. Ideally Telsa would dump the old Autopilot stack and put all cars (that have the hardware to support it) on a free version of FSD, nerfed so that it's roughly feature-equivalent to Autopilot.
That way everyone would get the safety advantages of FSD, including the really important stuff like better driver attention monitoring. Unfortunately, Tesla keeps Autopilot bad because it forces more people to pay for FSD, and in this case they seem to care more about profits than safety.
> Unfortunately, Tesla keeps Autopilot bad because it forces more people to pay for FSD, and in this case they seem to care more about profits than safety.
Not saying you're wrong, but I think "it forces people to pay for FSD" is a poor decision if true.
More likely it creates market confusion (as we see in this thread) about exactly which of the two products that Tesla advertises as things which drive your car for you is the more dangerous one and which is "the good one" (though from their taxis, I think the scare quotes are still justified even then).
I'm also not even sure if they do care about profits (or safety), given Musk's made about as much from selling Tesla shares as the company has made in lifetime profit, before getting shareholder approval for a deal to give him more shares. (Conditionally give, yes, but the nature of it all suggests share price is more important than profit or safety, and if you don't care about such things that makes it much easier for them to sell a million robots or whatever).
That the reporting is so tortured sort of shows this works. It’s irrelevant in a broad or legal context. But for the narrow audience of his fans, it carries merit.
That’s right. Because at some point, the volume of AI-generated posts and comments on sites like Hacker News or Reddit will overwhelm the ability of humans to read them all. So the only reasonable way for humans to participate will be to have our own AI readers summarising them, and posting furiously on our behalf!
> ”it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.”
The cost of labour varies hugely in different parts of the world. The cost of hiring someone in Switzerland is on the order of 100X more expensive compared to Bangladesh, for example.
With many countries currently in an anti-immigration political mindset and with birth rates declining globally, labour costs are likely to continue to increase in the future.
But once a technology like general-purpose humanoid robotics exists, it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time.
> it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time
What is this based on? We're well past a 50-ish year deflationary period in the cost of major appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, etc). We're pretty clearly at or near the end of the deflationary era for computers and computation. Automotive... speaks for itself. We're still there for televisions, surprisingly; but it looks like these technologies tend to have a handful of decades of rapid cost decrease, followed by a never-ending cost increase over time as the manufacturers consolidate and claim an ever-increasing margin.
The computer of 10 years ago is still a lot cheaper than a modern model. Deflation stops basically only if hardware advancement stops.
EVs are a great example: they keep getting cheaper for what they provide, even if the price stays the same. 200 miles of range 5 years ago is now 400+ miles of range today. Compared to ICEs, where advancement has stalled for the last 20 years, which seem like a worse deal every year.
> Compared to ICEs, where advancement has stalled for the last 20 years,
It hasn't really stalled: VVT, VCR, Cylinder deactivation that works properly, and start-stop becoming commonplace are all meaningful improvements (though smaller than the ones seen in EVs over the same time frame, which makes sense given the relative maturity).
ICE advancements haven’t materially affected car performance like EV advancements have. Start-stop is considered an annoyance to most car owners, for example, not a feature.
It is mostly because ICE tech is mature and has no real place to go for improvements beyond incremental refinement. EVs can ride the wave of battery tech advancements for another decade or two.
Crazy take: this only appears to be the case because industry incumbents tend to start applying mechanisms of gambling addiction to products; providing gratifications right on the lower threshold of expectations promotes dependency. New entrants to the car industry have no reason to adopt such a strategy, and so EV owners always look happier than ICE owners, but not crucially so, mysteriously trapping ICE owners in their thing despite EVs appearing massively better by joy as subjective proxy measurement for actual progress.
Even crazier take: Japanese companies always do this. Like knocking out features in an alternating fashion, so that you never get features A and B together, and such.
Honestly I think the biggest advancements in ICE cars recently have been the development and maturation of hybrid cars. Imagine telling someone in 2006 that your minivan got 36 miles per gallon!
Those are all tech that almost everyone owns. Makes sense that mass production would reduce costs and then the cost reductions would go towards zero. For new technology that hasn't been mass produced, it's a completely different story.
But that's my point. If you're basing your society shape around adopting a technology based on it continually decreasing in price, but you only get a few decades of that behavior before saturation and then you're at the mercy of the consolidated winners... generally adoptions like this aren't reversible at the societal level. You're locking in a long-term structural change based on a short-term pricing trend.
Still doesn't make sense. You were criticizing: "But once a technology like general-purpose humanoid robotics exists, it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time."
But the point was currently general-purpose humanoid robots is not affordable by the average person like say cars or washing machines currently are, but it will be because the costs will decrease. There was no argument that the price will forever keep going down, just like the price of cars or washing machines are not expected to constantly go down.
>> There was no argument that the price will forever keep going down
It's very hard for me to read the first quote as anything other than a continuing decrease in expected value of cost as a function of time. This directly contradicts the second quote.
That’s only if you look at the final price without understanding the makeup of that price.
The components of computation have been getting cheaper every year… it hasn’t lately because the demand for memory suddenly massively started outstripping supply.
With joblessness on the rise and no signs of a reversal, there will always be people desperate for work, even at minimum wages. And there will be those so desperate, that they will willing to be exploited by agencies that will underpay them, for instance to get visa sponsorships. Humanoid robots won't be able to compete with that, at least, not in the near future.
Even in Switzerland, unemployment is on the rise - it's up by a massive 12.2% compared to last year[1].
The only way I see humanoid robots becoming a threat is a company with deep pockets mass manufactures them and subsidises them heavily that they can compete with desperate humans.
However, I doubt an actual competent robot could ever be that cheap in the near future. I mean, I still haven't come across a Roomba-style robot that's actually smart enough to detect which obstacles it can go over, or have a small robotic arm or something that can move light things that's in the way. Like say there's a sock on the floor, it should be able to simply move it out of the way and continue vacuuming; or say there's a wire, it should be able to determine whether or not it's safe to go over the wire instead of going around it. So until I see some real advancements in roombas, I remain skeptical about humanoid robots. And when we do get a humanoid robot that's clever enough to make sense of all the chaos in common households - and take care of it intelligently - you can bet that it won't come cheap.
My 15-year old niece who recently visited her cousins in Australia assured me that the recently enacted Aussie law did not affect her ability to access socials while in Australia, nor has it affected her U16 cousins, who still have their accounts. Apparently the age checking there only applies to newly created accounts.
>> Aussie law did not affect her ability to access socials while in Australia
I think that's expected.
>> Apparently the age checking there only applies to newly created accounts
Social media companies had to try and identify existing accounts owned by < 16 year olds and start removing them at the start of this year. I'd guess that process is slow and they don't do it unless they're certain. But if they stop new accounts effectively then within a few years the ban would be pretty effective.
It depended on how long the account had been active - one or two of my cousin's kids were pretty sad they lost access to some of their accounts but had new ones the same day with an older sibling or friend's face scan to bypass the age check.
Reportedly more than 3/4 of under-16s who were using social media before the ban still are.
Is there a plan to start fining the social media companies themselves? Or raise their liability thresholds?
This is sort of like the illegal-immigration debate. If you’re serious about fixing it, go after employers. Same for underage social media users. If you want to actually solve it, you have to penalize the platforms.
<s there a plan to start fining the social media companies themselves? Or raise their liability thresholds?>
they will apparently be fined around AUD$50M if they fail to do due diligence (not sure how the legislation phrases. I am not sure if any social media company has at this stage. Unfortunately we have a dictator as a so-called e-safety commissioner backed up by an equally useless PM who seem to think all parents are unable to monitor themselves or their kids online behaviour
Seems like a drop in the bucket for these corporations. If anything, it'll just entrench the existing social media sites further and be another operating cost for them.
Was just doing this literally the other day! But with a hydraulic log splitter which made it pretty easy and fun. The hardest part was lifting and stacking all the logs!
There is no evidence for that. Boars are presumably native to Azeroth, and part of its delicately balanced ecosystem. Other species rely the the boars in various ways, either because they prey on the boars themselves or because they keep other species in check that would become problematic and invasive otherwise.
> ”If you don't steer them, they'll hit a circular dependency issue sooner than you think. Will duplicate code. Add unnecessary comments. Mix up pure functions and side-effects. Disregard the principles of SOLID.”
This is one thing I worry about with AI-driven development on large projects. Every time someone comes along to add a feature it’s likely to lead to wheel-reinvention: dropping in a new bunch of AI-generated code rather than specialising, refining, and reusing some existing code. As the years go by this is going to lead to complex, hugely bloated code bases that are only maintainable by AI tools…
reply