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What do you mean "My TV"?

Same way that people refer to a house under mortgage as “their” home.

Edit: How about a rental in a building with ads in the elevators?


They do own the house. The mortgage holder has a security interest in the property.

Your idea of ownership is simplistic. Around me, the local government owns the home as can be easily found out if you don't pay your annual rent called "property tax".

Even if you are not a homeower, you still are not free and clear...


I would say that _your_ idea of ownership is simplistic. You seem to be implying that ownership is only possible if you can own something in perpetuity without any related responsibilities. It's the same idea as "taxation is theft" and other libertarian nonsense.

> and other libertarian nonsense

Hacker News subtitle


You mortgage your TV?

in the UK people used to rent TVs, a company called "Radio Rentals", and in the days when TVs were unreliable it made sense - you paid a fixed amount per month and got a working TV in return. A service like any other.

That was more akin to renting a house though, rather than borrowing money to buy a house.


My stepfather did this and paid for his ancient TV many, many times over. You'll do this with a mortgage too, of course, but to a much lesser degree.

Not really with a mortgage, as you're not looking at the fact $1 today is more valuable than $1 tomorrow.

Very very different, and something which lets the advertising industry of the hook

"He is holding it wrong"

How would a malfunctioning AI decide it's safe to stop?

It wouldn't decide whether it's safe to stop. A separate E-stop processor would have a preprogrammed stop routine that stops the vehicle as fast as it can stop safely, which is to say, without skidding and without making rear-end collisions inevitable if you're on the freeway.

> and without making rear-end collisions inevitable if you're on the freeway.

That means it has to decide whether it's safe to stop.

Stopping safely is no less complicated than the self-driving software in general. Sure you can have backup driver software, but it's just going to be the same software.


> but it's just going to be the same software

It does not have to be the same software. Its task is much simpler, and many situations where the normal software has to look for an optimal resolution can be handled by activating the hazard lights, stopping the car, and telling the passengers that the emergency stop is complete.


People talk a bunch of stuff about malfunctioning, bugged software and so on. We can assume, the car was just trapped in some infinite loop so it'll never reach it's goal for some reason but also wasn't able to realize that and call the routine for that. Fine.

It's not a dangerous situation for the passenger but it definitely something that makes you feel very uncomfortable which could lead to panic because you're trapped. The doors are locked and even if they weren't you cannot simply exit the car. That's okay. Trains don't allow this either to open the doors on a track section. You need a supervisor to do that. In case of an emergency you can still unlock the doors mechanically. So after pulling the emergency brake you can still do that. It would be interesting how these cars behave in case of a fire inside or something which leads me to my final thought:

In case of issues on or with a ride in a theme park, there are usually operators. So in case of a technical malfunction there's an emergency stop which should make disarm systems in a safe manner and bring the ride into a safe position or at least make sure it stops safely. Of course it's not possible to trigger an e-stop as passenger but an operator can do that in case you can somehow make clear that it's needed right now.

The situation in the video is a very bad experience because a phone call from the passengers device is needed and he was asked to do something in the app. Probably to identify the car and enable the remote control. Elevators handle this much better. There's an emergency system in the cabin which transmits all important information to the service center, so it's immediately clear where the emergency call originated from. An app on a smartphone should never replace this installation!


It happened not to be a dangerous situation for this passenger, but that is not always the case. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42646148 for a list of examples.

When I pulled the emergency stop cord on the train, I also pulled the emergency door opening lever. The doors opened, on a track section. I've used an emergency door opening lever more recently when the train had already stopped and we were being instructed to exit because of a mechanical problem (possibly a fire), but that was at a station.

Elevators, in my experience, also universally have E-stop buttons or switches.


No, it doesn't. It just needs to brake slightly less hard than the antilock braking system is capable of. There is no complexity there. The only complexity is in ensuring that the E-stop processor can reliably override the rest of the car's control systems.

"Best Viewed With Internet Explorer"


One huge problem is you then have to deal with IBM.


...and you can check-out, but you can never leave (aka vendor lock-in).


LinuxONE is just one big Linux machine. There's very little to lock you in.


Not many manage to get off AWS once they start either…


It is not fast but very interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/@DrMattRegan/


Cool channel, much of it over my head, thanks.


Funny how not enforced laws push to more laws.


How do you suggest they enforce the existing law?


Honeypots; sting operations.

Almost all crime is committed by an incredibly small number of people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969807/


I would imagine that would be illegal in Belgium.


By actually investigating thefts. Me and my friends had several bikes stolen in a Belgian train station's bike park and police do not check cameras, even if you can timebox the theft within 3 hours. "No resources to investigate".


I mean, they really don't have resources. You need to significantly expand the police force (and spending) if you want this of thing.

And arguably, maybe that's not worth it? Or maybe it is. Either way, this is really a political problem, not a problem with the police.


You're right, I'd rather have them hiring dedicated detectives on this to enforce existing laws than making new laws and state infrastructure. Of course this is a political discussion.


Non violent theft and most violent thefts aren't even investigated, that's probably what they meant. They're illegal and punished but the sheer amount of them mean the law is ignored in most cases


You mean that they can make the corn unavailable in the middle of my dinner?


Serverless and cloud servers can both do that.


Let's stop pretending "peer-reviewed" means anything, please.


Means a lot more than a comment on Hacker News.


I will leave it here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/19/stanford-pre...

I guess someone "peer reviewed" all his papers


your comment has been peer-reviewed.

it was found to be subjective and unsupported.


Peer review raises the bar, but that bar is quite low, and not high enough to ensure anything like scientific truth.


This is a bad faith and ignorant take. As with anything at the edge of our knowledge, it’s not bulletproof, but peer review certainly does mean plenty. It is one of the most rigorous standards we have for the validity of observation and theories.


Is it? If I'm not mistaken this is exactly what journal editors, and reviewers, claim each and every time a new scandal blows up.


I think reproducibility is the gold standard. It’s hard to call peer review as practiced today “rigorous” when it comes to discerning truth.


Yes, a comment on a website that just says “no” is way more truthy and should be taken at face value. Anything published and peer reviewed can just be assumed to be false.

Great call. Thanks for really bringing up the level of discourse.


I believe the real reason for its survivability is the fact that you can pull a tape from the seventies and those binaries will run without any modification. It's not only that you can easily recompile your COBOL from the '70s, the binary is still compatible. You've never been pushed to migrate to another technology. Imagine the effort and 'knowledge' included in those evolved programs. The banks don't even know, and are conscious of it, how many laws and regulations they have encoded in there.

As someone stated in another comment, the software is the impressive part.


This is both good and bad. You have to consider bugs a kind of feature like anything else. One of my coworkers showed me a bug report he'd opened 30 years prior that IBM still refused to fix because people depended on the broken behavior. So porting off the mainframe also means bringing along those quirks or rewriting to specs that provably don't regress performance and behavior. Writing or rewriting software is easy, but migrations despite how they first appear are not really "green field" development.


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