but the scooters function in large part as as a replacement for cars. so it's replacing something with lots of problems with something with fewer problems. it's a net win.
i do agree having regs to dissuade people from blocking & riding on the sidewalk with scooters seems very reasonable.
once you have that i think scooters are basically problem free (except for maybe aesthetic concerns).
even w/o that, i still don't see how anyone reasonable could think scooters were anywhere near the top of the list of hazards of sf streets.
(perhaps they are a major inconvenience for wheelchair users?; i'd be interested in any first-hand accounts.)
You've hit upon one of the most obvious ways to improve the safety of these systems. Deploy the systems more broadly, without giving them active control.
Then, you can start to identify situations where the driver's actions were outside of a predicted acceptable range, and investigate what happened.
Additionally, if you have a large pool of equipped vehicles you can identify every crash (or even more minor events, like hitting potholes or road debris) and see what the self-driving system would have done.
The realistic problem is that Uber doesn't give a shit. As such, deployment will never be optimized for public safety. It will be optimized for Uber's speed to market.
HN was a great place back then. I made many useful professional contacts, and had a lot of interesting and deep conversations. It was like (site that shall not be named) is today, except with a bit more focus on turning the tech into a business.
There were some subtle shifts, as front page posts started being more for people who think startups are cool, and less for people who want to figure out how to make their startup win. Then there was a big shift, as diggers fled to reddit, and redditors came to HN.
or he had it as an LLC, but made a mistake along the way that pierced the corporate veil. Or as a small business, he was just straight-up forced to pierce the corporate veil. (banks do this to small biz all the time).
If you mean what you say: buy this thing, install it on your car, and use it daily.
I dare you.
Oh right, you'd never do that, because some tiny part of you knows that George Hotz was lying his ass off about his tech, and that you'd have to be a crazy person to trust such a flagrant liar with your life.
Yeah you're right. I want to buy it though, and then wait a couple of months before plugging it into my own car. I'm just saying you can't just dismiss the guy's ability because he comes across arrogant. He's proven he's a hacker, and now he's trying to prove he's a maker as well.
Maybe this Panda thing is engineered really well, and the money and reputation will get him to a point where he can run a nice company. Maybe not and this things get some people killed and he will be thrown in jail for building a recklessly unsafe product, I don't know. I don't own a car right now so all I can do is talk big.
The issue is that he was obviously lying. He claimed he was weeks away from autonomous cars. If this was true, he would've sold the tech for a staggering pile of cash.
Instead, all the evidence looks like he thought he could solve the problem on his own, in record time. Then he made a pretty basic POC (able to handle a small number of very simple conditions). Then he realized he couldn't do it. And so he pretended that he'd solved a problem nobody else had, but wasn't going to share or sell the answer with anybody else because the government is bad.
Unfortunately, some people hate the government enough that they want to believe this. But it's a dumb story and an obvious lie. George Hotz does not have autonomous driving technology. He never did, and he never fucking will. He's a snake oil salesman.
That's nonsense. if his claims were true, he could've sold the lot for nine or ten figures to somebody who was willing to deal with NHTSA.
It is exceedingly foolish to believe George Hotz's extremely obvious lies. George Hotz is a smart guy who made some big mistakes, and isn't man enough to admit that he was lying.
This is a snarky but accurate restatement of your (commonly professed) belief.