Two competing companies have 100 employees, and make 50 million per year. They each have 50 "computer people" each making 100k per year. Every day AI gets a little better and these people get more and more effective, if they are empowered, know how to, and choose to use it.
Their roles are slightly changing every day, as perhaps they don't take as much time on certain types of tasks, and the productivity seems to be slightly increasing. This boost may or may not result in increased sales or profit, but it is real.
Now let's say there is a breakthrough in AI, and it is clear that based on the exact actions that these people are doing right now, they can all be replaced with AI. And also let's say that one company chooses to do this, but the other company decides to keep all their workers and asks them to use the AI to do their current job and also push it to do what they always wished they could do but never had the time or could figure out how.
I can't see a world where the company that fires all their people and uses AI to do what they have been doing always comes out ahead.
Simply, for all jobs like this to be a real threat, it has to be the case that AI would have to be so good that a group og highly skilled and specialized humans working WITH an AI, would be no better than the AI by itself. And I think this is almost a paradox or impossible situation. How are its tasks defined, requirements met, priorities made?
So many of the successful companies are successful in spite of huge doubters to their strategies like Apple and Tesla. It is unlikely to me that an AI would spit out a controversial vision when asked to develop a new company, or a strategy within an existing company.
FWIW that applies to enterprise where the venture is ever evolving. Once a machine can sort apples visually, it’s good enough, and the job of apple sorting isn’t really changing.
I don't understand what "because" is referring to...
"explanations.app has visual forums where university grads will properly resolve all your questions for $10/week, because the video explanations also benefit other students."
I feel like I am at odds with the scheduling one so much. If I time box all these little things, I get so distracted and I hate switching. I would rather go all in on something for a few days and ignore everything else, then circle back around and clean up the damage. I feel like this leverages the hyperfocus aspect of ADHD some might have.
Agreed. I feel like I have 3 or more hyperfocus modes. At the furthest end of the scale, I can get into a multi-week (or month) obsessive hyperfocus on some topic. This is where I really shine at work and can develop whole componets, libraries, etc. in a very short period of time. Maybe that turns me into a "10x developer" in the negative sense. But without leveraging hyperfocus, I don't think I'd ever have made it beyond my first position.
I schedule things. I put nice long stretches of time (we are talking about 4-6 hours about) and it’s pretty much ONLY time I ever get anything done. I need long periods of time cause the start is all about building focus but not forcing it so YMMV. I think experimentation is super helpful.
Agreed. I have to schedule the "big" stuff, but for the rest the best I can do is work productively, following the connections between things.
I'll have a day doing the tasks using one sort of tech, and another doing something else - a python day, a sysadmin day, a writing day. I can't tell when a thing will get done, but by working this way as long as it's on a list I know I'll get to it. If I try to schedule it, my productivity plummets.
That's a pretty cynical take. Meta deployed Facebook at enormous scale as in many thousands of MySQL servers. The engineering team included a number of the best engineers in the MySQL community, who adapted MySQL extensively to meet the needs of Facebook applications. They used MySQL because it worked.
That's just some urban myth about promotion in big corp
Yes
There are a lot of vanity projects that get someone promoted for the wrong reasons
That only get broadcasted because that's the newsworthy. You won't get up voted when you share a small story about someone did hard problem and get promoted.
Overwhelmingly, people get promoted because they solve challenging problems with meaningful impact. That's how capitalism and modern corporation work.
But above the baseline there is a lot of errors, exceptions, and manipulations. Because that's how people do everyday: they want to game the system for their own gains. Human nature. There are just so many of them because big corps are big. And that's why big corps eventually lost their vigor.
The best way to combat promotion bullshit and other corporate bullshit, it's to recognize them, call them out in the right technique (being diplomatic and protect yourself) and don't practice yourself.
Yes, don't practice the bullshit. That's extraordinarily difficult.
I think it’s true both that most promotions are legit and not based on vanity projects, and yet still the vanity projects are common and causing major problems. Let’s say you have 10k engineers at your megacorp. Maybe the ideal number of execution platform workflow framework engines your business needs to add this year is 30, but instead 300 are created by 3% of your engineers who wants a promotion. Eventually you have thousands of these frameworks, maintaining them is a drag, everyone is suffering, although the vast majority are good actors.
Speaking from personal experience, the inverse of this is not necessary great either: the desire for the ever-growing scope leads to convincing everyone to switch to the "one true system" where previously multiple custom solutions were better fit for each individual problem.
> Overwhelmingly, people get promoted because they solve challenging problems with meaningful impact. That's how capitalism and modern corporation work.
It's key to ask, does the promotion (or strong performance rating) happen before the impact or after?
You can deliver Project X that will save $YY Million dollars. Everyone agrees the impact is "there", the complexity is there. Launch a PoC to a handful of use cases, realize most of that impact, then move onto something else. PoC works for those use cases, never becomes a complete solution, and slowly develops issues. Once it has enough issues, someone else can solve the problem again for the even more impact assuming the problem space has grown since the initial launch.
Capitalism works when there's competition and cost for (long-term) failure. Neither are guaranteed to exist if you're at a Big Corp that's printing money.
》Capitalism works when there's competition and cost for (long-term) failure. Neither are guaranteed to exist if you're at a Big Corp that's printing money.
Disagree
Big Corp print money still squeeze employees.
See the record profit & revenue and 10k+ layoffs.
I feel like you are injecting facts with a lot of assumptions. How do we know a human driver would have taken longer? What if the human would have seen the bike 200 yards up the road 45 seconds ago, and since bikes don't disappear, waited a half second before proceeding into the intersection. Or what if a small portion of the bike was visible?
It could have been absolutely unavoidable but I don't think we know that now.
Let's be honest, anyone making any type of conclusion based off the information in the article is just giving in to their biases. None of us know enough to actually have any serious opinion on this specific collision.
I'm drawing the conclusion that this is a non-issue, or would be if autonomous vehicles hadn't got to be so political over the last year in San Fransisco. There are many people out for blood, they want a follow-up to the Cruise scandal.
One fact of the matter is that the cyclist wasn't seriously hurt, and Waymo has had many minor contact events in its 10 million+ miles of driving on public roads. We're hearing about this event because politics.
> We're hearing about this event because politics.
I think reporting on integrating autonomous driving into roads is a news worthy subject even outside of the agenda of a particular publisher. The good things are reported for autonomous driving as well. I don't live in SF but know that Waymo and Cruise both had fully autonomous vehicles in SF.
Having access to a comprehensive database of incidents and near misses would be informative. A single incident where only incomplete information is available doesn't tell us much.
> Having access to a comprehensive database of incidents and near misses would be informative. A single incident where only incomplete information is available doesn't tell us much.
Agreed!
I wasn't commenting from a safety perspective, but from a news perspective. Recently Cruise has had regulatory action taken against them from the California Department of Motor Vehicles due to an autonomous vehicle accident. Waymo, another company working on autonomous vehicles also has an accident! Sounds news worthy to me.
Of course reporting on a crash will always have some negative connotation for Waymo, and I hope the regulators look at more than individual incidents to evaluate the safety of Waymo's autonomous vehicles. I did learn that Waymo recently had an accident in a time period of scrutiny for autonomous vehicles as they further integrate into roads.
When Waymo was known as the Google Self-Driving car project they were cavalier about safety, but became much more conservative after spinning out as Waymo under John Krafcik in 2017.
Waymo has not had any serious incidents and these days it seems they're doing what they can to remain low-key and avoid attracting negative attention to themselves. Like you said, when Cruise, Uber or Tesla behave recklessly, it can't help but bode poorly upon Waymo in the eyes of the public.
We can't directly compare what these companies have going on under the hood because it's all quite proprietary. Waymo nonetheless has been chipping away at the problem for longer and with more resources at their disposal than any competitor. Waymo's 'Driver' is far and away the most experienced. While I'm fully confident making that claim, there's no easy way to measure it or make an emprirical comparison to other drivers.
If you want to play this game and you aren't very experienced, you can fake it by being reckless. You can make it seem to investors that you're better than you are by putting hundreds of vehicles on the road. Investors want results. You have to be able to point to a line on a graph that goes up and to the right and say "look at all these new benchmarks we hit! More cars! More miles!"
Waymo is effectively patronized and will run at a loss for as long as they need to without any pressure to fake it until they either make it or break it. It's Larry and Sergey's pet project. It's the one they won't let go of. A single scandal can really mess things up.
You are just proving my point. You are pro-autonomous vehicle so you are interpreting the few facts we know in way that benefits your side of the debate.
Referencing the cyclist not being seriously hurt is the most obvious example. It doesn't take much for a car to seriously injure a cyclist. It often just comes down to luck of the cyclists physical position and where they fall. Onto the hood of the car is safest, but they could have easily been caught under the vehicle, pushed into other traffic, or dangerously thrown down to the pavement. A cyclist walking away from this collision doesn't necessarily mean the next time a Waymo hits a cyclist will be just as safe. If there is some fault in the system that increases the odds of it hitting a cyclist (something that is impossible for us to know) it would be only a matter of time until an unlucky cyclist gets seriously hurt.
I think at the very least we can interpret the situation as car hits cyclist in a blind spot and the cyclist was not seriously injured. Sources say there were 49,000 vehicle-cyclist injuries and 846 fatalities [1] and there were 3.2 trillion vehicle miles traveled [2] in 2019. So my math comes to around .015 injuries and .00003 fatalities per 1 million vehicle miles traveled. Waymo’s traveled 20 millions miles by 2020, so more by now but Im not finding a more recent number. This is the first time I’ve heard of a Waymo-cyclist injury (maybe it’s not; I’m not able to google around this new headline) and would put their injury rate at .05 per million miles significantly higher than the other statistic but to get away with minor scratches is nonnegligible since it’s easy for injuries to be worse. At 20 million miles Waymos this rate doesn’t make them look good. I want to be optimistic about their injury rate getting better as they program around blind spots safer.
This is the same type of math that Tesla uses to suggest that their Autopilot is safer than humans, but the problem with this approach is that not all miles driven are equal. I guarantee that the injury rate per mile is much higher on the road in which this collision took place than the 0.015 national average. There are obviously roads in which collisions with cyclists are incredibly rare like interstate highways in which a cyclist even using the road is rare. That means there needs to be roads which greatly exceed the national average and those are often city streets with heavy cyclist traffic like this one where the collision occurred.
I'm not pro-autonomous vehicles. Under the hypothesis that they worked well enough that they proliferated widely and people came to rely on them, they would be the most enshittifiable service ever.
Also I ride a bicycle everywhere, I don't own a car. I've had many crashes while cycling, a handful of which involved another moving vehicle.
Speed is a good predictor of how much harm a moving vehicle can cause to a cyclist or pedestrian, and given that the Waymo was turning left off a 4-way stop, it couldn't have been going that fast, and even if it was, the waymo stopped soon enough to avoid doing serious damage. Maybe the cyclist veered into the Waymo, we don't know. Maybe we'll get video and then we can really pick it apart.
There is a battle going on right now between the Governor of California and SF city council over the city's inability to regulate the existence of autonomous vehicles on their streets after the fast proliferation of Cruise's AVs led to all kinds of traffic snarls and general irritation amongst the public.
Cruise has been operating in SF since 2019 and has had many incidents more severe than the one we're discussing now, but they got little attention because it wasn't so political then. Nowdays SF is looking for any excuse they can find to get AVs out of their city.
In legal terms I doubt the city will find what they need with this incident. With regards to public sentiment, the headline "Waymo hits cyclist in SF" is about as much as most people will read, and the details of the crash don't matter.
Maybe not, but you are clearly coming from an anti-anti-autonomous vehicle stance. That likely plays into why you are downplaying this collision despite admitting "we don't know" basic details about what happened here. You are able to recognize that this issue is politicized, but like everyone you are considering your own political bias as the neutral position when in actuality the neutral position here is to wait until we have more details on what actually happened.
This feels like the "no vehicles in the park" all over again.[0] We're all naturally inclined to have assumptions, but I think many are not aware of this. I think all have the capacity, just not the habit.
I've been fairly impressed at Waymo's defensive driving skills, down to it being able to tell when someone turns around towards the road with an eye to cross, & the car slowing-down/giving a wider berth.
We will need to wait and see (i.e. footage) for more facts on this one, but I would caution thinking that Waymo's don't have object permanence capabilities.
(Usual disclaimer around 1st-hand experience etc etc)
What we do know is that this incident will be analyzed with the level of attention we would give to a plane crash. If there was any way the incident could have been avoided, the engineers will probably figure it out. It’s likely that software will be updated to implement a fix as well, and this type of accident will become much less likely across Waymo’s entire fleet. That seems like a really good result.
Only the driving software will be updated, the intersection will not be redesigned to reduce the severity of driver mistakes. It’s not the best outcome, ideally someone will analyze the case and produce the changes that needed to made to the driving software, the intersection, and biking behavior (aka the Dutch approach).
Fair, but then again, this would be taking drastic measures for a single data point. A full redesign would be quite a stretch for a single accident and nearly impossible to scale. The least you'd need to do is check for a pattern of accidents.
> In the Netherlands, accidents like these are followed by intense investigations, street redesign, and criminal prosecution on a level wholly different from Boston, where a slew of bike fatalities in recent years have prompted modest on-street changes and police crackdowns on bicyclists running red lights. But there have been few street design overhauls and no criminal convictions of motorists in those fatal accidents.
I’m pretty sure there is an HN discussion on this article somewhere.
Ah, the highest level of scrutiny is limited to and mandatory for fatalities, which makes sense.
Journalists swarm all over it. Waymo engineers will take their learnings. But honest question: is there an official, scrutinous authority also coming into this that would be able to hold Waymo to account? Maybe like the NTSB?
The thing is, human drivers do not and will never have such scrutiny. In this case, there is some hope that it will happen before these cars are widely deployed, even if said authority is the court of public opinion.
Cyclists are supposed to stop at stop signs, if not stop at least yield. At least in this case (if true), the cyclist followed the truck through a 4 way intersection (assuming it's a 4-way stop), that would put them in the wrong.
There’s rules as written and then rules as followed — I’d much prefer a system that recognizes the rules that people tend to follow/bend/break — as a cyclist I too will often “convoy” with a bigger vehicle as it provides some additional protection most of the time (though obviously not here)
As a bicyclist in San Francisco, if I follow the rules as written, I cause traffic. Cars expect me to blow through four-way stop-sign intersections, and if I stop and wait for the cars, the drivers get confused & don't want to go (afraid of hitting me, I suspect).
In terms of right of way, the rules as followed seem to be pedestrian > bike > car.
I sometimes give way to bicyclists at four-way stops because I can't be sure they didn't get there before I did and I didn't see them because they're small.
And of course, if a vehicle, be it a bicyclist or car, enters an intersection when I have right-of-way, it's not like I'm going to start crossing and intentionally run into them.
Where bicyclists really risk their lives if they start assuming cars will give way to them is when they blow through two-way stops, especially at night or at one of the many intersections with poor visibility.
> The felony conviction was the first of its kind in the nation involving a bicyclist.
The list of things that have killed one person in the last several hundred years is long. Everything is potentially deadly by that standard.
Here's a case mentioned in Law's Order:
"The plaintiff was about 14 years of age, and the defendant about 11 years of age. On the 20th day of February, 1889, they were sitting opposite to each other across an aisle in the high school of the village of Waukesha. The defendant reached across the aisle with his foot, and hit with his toe the shin of the right leg of the plaintiff. The touch was slight. ... In a few moments he felt a violent pain in that place, which caused him to cry out loudly. ... He will never recover the use of his limb."
(Vosburg v Putney, 80 Wis. 523, 50 N.W. 403 (1891))
Note that there are bike lanes on the likely street where this occurred. The cyclist was not necessarily following the truck but could have been parallel (and overtaken).
As a cyclist, I'm invisible to drivers quite often even when I'm not hiding behind a truck. Many drivers also immediately forget you after overtaking you just seconds ago and attempt a right-hook. It is of course possible that a human's advanced reasoning could have avoided the situation as described, but imo that would've been sheer luck or a very unusual driver.
I feel frequent data leaks, credit card number leaks, difficulty in un-subscribing or stopping payments after subscribing, etc... makes me appreciate and want to use consolidated sign in / subscription management / payment management options almost exclusively.
It's a bit like keeping money... You can stash it under your mattress, hoping you'll never suffer a burglary; or you can give it to a bank, and let them spend money on security and insurance.
This said, banks have specific fiduciary responsibilities and the above-mentioned insurance, which compensate for the big target they're painting on their own backs; whereas most tech services, even massive ones, tend to hide behind service agreements boiling down to "eh, if it happens it happens, nothing we can do, sucks to be you". Unless they're in healthcare, they're barely required to disclose whether they've been breached, let alone compensate us for the loss of privacy and increased risk of identity fraud that we endure.
Maybe it's time for the legislator to define "personal data providers" a bit more rigorously.
>and increased risk of identity fraud that we endure.
The problem is even worse than that. The whole framing of the issue of identity theft as a thing that happens to a person rather than a bank is problematic. That the bank issued credit in my name to someone other than me really should be entirely their problem, not one that probably messes up my life for years.
That doesn't do much to protect you against a website storing government mandated passport information. The only protection there would be if authorities stop demanding that everyone takes copies of personal IDs.
Yeah, when did that become acceptable?! I've had a bunch of sites request a photo or scan of my state-issued driver's license, like that's just OK to ask people to send to them.
Erroneously in my opinion. Verifying someone's identity does not require making a copy. Nor is a copy sufficient.
The one thing making a copy is supposed to achieve is prove that someone saw the original. But what's important is not what was on it, but who saw it, where and when and whether it was valid. This doesn't require knowing what exactly is on the document, and a mere copy achieves none of these.
What grinds my gears is idiots in the Dutch government who should know better and decided to write into law that a copy or transcript is sufficient proof. So now everyone is storing lots of sensitive information to prove something the information does not show.
I have no problem showing ID to my local bank though. They at most photocopy it and put it in a paper file, which maybe goes into Docstar or something. I don't trust $big_tech_site to actually a) do a good job securing it and b) not just sell the information to someone anyway.
It's silly. AT&T wanted it from me to add a phone on a business account that was shipping to our physical address, which has not ever changed since the account was opened. eBay wanted it (and my SSN! and my wife's!) despite our account being a business account registered with an EIN and connected to a business bank account. Instagram/Facebook/Meta/whatever wanted it to reactivate a dormant account that talked to a still-valid email address to which I had access.
> I have no problem showing ID to my local bank though
Me neither. But they normalized this behavior when moving to mobile apps for netbanks by requiring people to photograph their IDs and take selfies for KYC.
After all this KYC stuff, photographing personal documents became normal and then many other big tech companies started requiring this stuff. I think even Facebook started asking people to send pictures of IDs to verify accounts.
I know phone companies in EU started doing this.
I still refuse doing it for all these trivial services and it has a real cost in that it prevents me from using several services. At some point I will probably have to do it.
In my country, we recently had a real estate agency who got hacked and had all their KYC stuff exposed and sold for ID theft. It is a huge mess.
The company then reached out to all the persons that were affected by mail telling them that this happened and that they should contact them immediately.
So I contacted them. First step when contacting them was them requiring to prove my identity by sending photo of my personal ID again. Yeah, fool me once....
Not clear I guess, but I meant small claims for anyone facing the same issue. Over and over we get bullied by these big companies looking to solve their problems at the expense of the little guy. And have no recourse.
Is my passport information really that precious? It doesn’t contain much that isn’t on my birth certificate, apart from my ugly mug. And quite literally anyone can get an officially certified copy of my birth certificate, because that’s a matter of public record.
I have taken to using a single card in person, and a single card online. The Card on use online is also a Capital One account so I make use of their Eno service to make virtual cards for every vendor
If some company does not want to unsub me, I just turn off that virtual card.
I mean you can put regulations on anything to make it sure it is doing what it is supposed to be, right?
The spirit of the regulation is to make sure it is not emitting ozone like this ozone filter-less purifier: GreenTech GT-50.
It may be "painless" but if it costs $X per unit to certify and they make $x-.01 per unit, the company isn't going to sell that in CA.
The harm caused by the lack of a super cheap and effective air filter, especially in CA where we can get smoked out for weeks due to fires could be greater than the harm reduced by the regulation. Especially when it is obvious that this in now way could emit ozone since it is just a fan and a filter.
> I mean you can put regulations on anything to make it sure it is doing what it is supposed to be, right?
Yes, and when it comes to selling health-related products, the standards are higher than, say, entertainment devices. For very good reason.
> The harm caused by the lack of a super cheap and effective air filter, especially in CA where we can get smoked out for weeks due to fires could be greater than the harm reduced by the regulation.
That's not clear to me. I know lots of people with air filters, and they all chose them based on aesthetic judgements. I doubt any of them would've acted differently if it was $5 cheaper (from certification)
Also, you can still just buy a box fan ($30) and tape a filter ($10) to it and hope for the best in terms of air purification. You just can't pay someone else $70 to sell you that, unless they run a test to prove it works. Doesn't seem like a big deal.
I live in CA. I can go to the store and buy a box fan, and I can buy them online and cheaply. I can buy little clips for holding filters on box fans. I can buy MERV 13 filters at any hardware store or online, and the ones in store are sold at competitive prices and are from real brands that aren’t making up the specs. I can buy actual air purifiers from many vendors, including IKEA, which sells genuinely excellent purifiers.
So what if I can’t buy that hilariously overpriced LASKO kit? I dislike nonsensical CA regulations about as much as anyone else, but this example is silly. I can spend less money to buy a LASKO box fan, a nice set of clips to hold a filter on, and a better filter. Although Amazon is really not a fantastic place to buy just one or two filters — Home Depot or ACE is better.
