Washington Is Quietly Repudiating Its Debts - <AUTHOR> http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9599 <comment><USER2> This title is pretty misleading. The author claims that inflation is "implicitly repudiating debt". This is really not how the phrase "repudiating debt" is used.

Nobody is too surprised when the dollar suffers inflation. But it would be shocking if the U.S. _actually_ refused to honor T-bills.

Also, the devaluation of the dollar is hardly new. The dollar has been weakening vs the euro since early 2006.

[http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=USD&to=EU...](http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=USD&to=EUR&amt=1&t=5y)

Don't get me wrong, inflation is bad, and it hurts the poor who are honestly trying to save the worst. But it isn't the end of the world. It's not even nearly as bad as the 70's, inflation-wise. The real danger is in the hard-to- predict "black swan" disasters that could still happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is anyone getting depressed by all this? I'm starting to feel physically sick whenever I read about the economy. I think maybe I need to stop reading the news for a while. I felt the same way after 9/11.

<comment><USER4> Yes. It is depressing. Just remember 3 things:

1) During an election year, everybody thinks the economy sucks. So there is a bias there to consider, even though there are honest-to-god issues here.

2) We still _make things people want_ , to put it in hacker terms. Movies, games, ideas, businesses. Yes, we've moved up from manufacturing to services and ideas, but we still make a lot of things a lot of people want. That's not changing.

3) Wall Street "blows up" about every ten years or so. Our system is not a magic forumula, so there are always loopholes. Smart people will always play into these loopholes until the system becomes unstable. At this point we fix the holes and keep going. The trick is to just fix the part that is broken and not try to outsmart the market, which you can't do. That's tough for politicians to do.

Long term? We live in a society where politicians get elected making promises (or wars) that nobody has to pay for. That keeps the voters voting, but it will cause our credit to self-destruct, probably in our lifetime.

But even then, life goes on. The fundamentals remain sound, ie, we're really good at making stuff other people will pay us for. As long as the fundamentals remain sound, and as long as your personal fundamentals remain sound (you are good at doing something people will pay you for) then we're just going to keep muddling through it all. The world is not ending.

<comment><USER2> It's not true that "during an election year, everybody thinks the economy sucks". Recent counterexamples are 2000 and 1996.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> inside the USA, treasury notes cannot default. by a 1982 law they can just create an account at a fed member bank and assign it to the payee.

the issue is whether these dollars are worth anything

i would argue that if the US debt hits $25 trillion, its over. the dollar will die and with it the US govt.

<comment><USER6> Not to be argumentative, but I would be curious about the the $25 trillion figure - where does it come from? It seems very big, and very round for me.

I'm far from an economic expert, so I'm interested in hearing about how you calculated the figure.

<comment><USER5> the $25 trillion point is pure speculation. i merely suggest this as a tipping point

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not unreasonable. Adam Smith said that no country had ever paid its debt after it had exceeded a certain threshold.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


EXist-db v3.1.0 available - <AUTHOR> http://exist-db.org/exist/apps/wiki/blogs/eXist//eXist310 <comment><AUTHOR>
      > Implemented the Arrow Operator (=>) from XQuery 3.1

I am unreasonably excited about this. On the whole I've found the introduction of xquery 3.1's arrays and maps to be a refreshing experience for XML processing.

</comment><comment><USER2> For myself I am unreasonably excited about the TEI Publisher module. I have an archive project that this should work very well for.</comment>


Photoshop Upgrade Is Overkill for Flickr - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/software/softwarereviews/news/2007/03/pshop_cs0327 <comment><USER2> There's always room for high-end processing software - avids instead of iMovie, photoshop instead of iPhoto or Aperature.

However, the incumbents always miss the boat when the market changes. You used to have to have PShop to do ANYTHING. Now you only need it to do the most sophisticated things.

But, snipshots, be aware: batch processing photos is where the market is!

<comment><AUTHOR> I tend to batch but have yet to write the code to do it, resize to 600x800, some rotation, rename. I could see the merit for an api I could program via controls or macro. Simply point, select, process, upload. But where is the real value for the user?

I'm thinking of predecessors to flickr who saw image storage sites as ways to make money off printing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Paint Shop Pro is very famous on <http://dpreview.com>

People already realized that "industry standard" is not the only and not necessarily the best value for money.</comment>


The Loop magazine for iPhone and iPad released - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/05/09/the-loop-magazine-for-iphone-and-ipad-released/ <comment><AUTHOR> So basically a one-to-one copy of Arment's The Magazine? Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER2> I'm waiting for The Daily Gruber.</comment></comment>


Game of Thrones author George RR Martin: 'Why I still use DOS' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27407502

<comment><USER2> As computers become normal and not 'new' I imagine the range of ages of machine/software we use will smear out. This chap might need an emulator soon, or DrDos!</comment>


Grey or Gray: What's the Difference? - <AUTHOR> https://writingexplained.org/grey-or-gray-difference <comment><USER2> Agreed; this is mainly what I have done. "Gray" is American and "grey" is English, although a proper name or title will use the specific form that it uses. I forgot about the scientific measurement "gray", although that is a good point too.

Although it mentions audience, also note that many things have international audience (such as documentation for protocols).

There is one further consideration though. I generally will use American spellings in computer codes (and Italian for musical notation). I am Canadian though, so I might write a program and the documentation might say, for example, "the COLOR command changes the colour of..."</comment>


Solitude and Leadership - <AUTHOR> http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/ <comment><USER2> Great piece. was already discussed here : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476425> .

<comment><USER3> I agree it's good, but it's been submitted at least twice before.</comment></comment>


Shaking Up the Dinosaur Family Tree - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/science/dinosaur-family-tree.html <comment><AUTHOR> Abstract: [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v543/n7646/full/nature2...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v543/n7646/full/nature21700.html)

This looks to be the software used to analyze the data and suggest the new tree: [http://www.lillo.org.ar/phylogeny/tnt/](http://www.lillo.org.ar/phylogeny/tnt/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Darren Naish has a great blog post about this news:

[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod- zoology/ornith...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod- zoology/ornithoscelida-rises-a-new-family-tree-for-dinosaurs)

</comment><comment><USER3> I always thought the entire classification of dinosaurs by one feature back when we had very little data about dinosaurs at all was kind of odd. I'm glad it is being revisited.

</comment><comment><USER4> According to the diagram all dinosaur branches died out before the cretaceous period. What's with that?

<comment><USER2> It isn't an exhaustive list of all the dinosaur branches.</comment></comment>


Microsoft tweaks aggressive Windows 10 upgrade prompt following complaints - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/28/12049876/microsoft-windows-10-upgrade-notification-change <comment><USER2> given they have probably "got" the majority of people who are easily "converted" to Windows 10, any reduction in agression now is just good PR</comment>


Ask HN: Which open-sourced mobile app codebase is the most insightful to study? - <AUTHOR> I am trying to learn how to build mobile apps and want to know which codebase you guys think are particularly clean/well-laid out. Preferably ones which have good architectural documentations (or bloggers explaining the architecture).
For example, this guy does a lot of code reviews for open sourced games/game engines: http://fabiensanglard.net. He has a very good code review of DOOM on iPhone: http://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/index.php.
Particularly insightful blogs on how to architect modern mobile apps (even if it is closed source) are also welcomed. For example Dropbox's tech blog on how they structured the code for their photos app: https://tech.dropbox.com/2014/04/building-carousel-part-i-how-we-made-our-networked-mobile-app-feel-fast-and-local/ <comment><USER2> I like Inkpad: [https://github.com/sprang/Inkpad](https://github.com/sprang/Inkpad)

It is a high quality and popular vector drawing app (4+ stars on app store) and the code is clean and simple to understand. I am not sure you will learn anything by just reading through it if you're not building a similar kind of app though.

Quick googling also yielded these lists:

[http://maniacdev.com/2010/06/35-open-source-iphone-app- store...](http://maniacdev.com/2010/06/35-open-source-iphone-app-store-apps- updated-with-10-new-apps)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open- source_iO...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open- source_iOS_applications)

How to architect your app really depends on what kind of app you're building.

</comment><comment><USER3> I quite like this post about Path's Android architecture and building REST clients that don't fall over if you have less-than-ideal network conditions: [http://birbit.com/a-recipe-for-writing-responsive-rest- clien...](http://birbit.com/a-recipe-for-writing-responsive-rest-clients-on- android/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends on if you're trying to write native apps, web apps or use something like phonegap.

If you're looking to write native apps, Android is open-source, and iOS closed source, but they've got a lot of documentation available, albeit verbose at times.

</comment><comment><USER5> Be sure to check out LiveCode.</comment>


Anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen and aspirin can battle major depression - <AUTHOR> https://uk.news.yahoo.com/anti-inflammatory-drugs-ibuprofen-aspirin-233000216.html <comment><USER2> Yahoo/Verizon throws up a relatively user-hostile blocker asking for full location access.

The least obnoxious version I found with a quick search was from _The Independent_ : [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/depression- painkil...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/depression-painkillers- ibuprofen-statins-fish-oils-study-university-science-technology-wuhan- china-a9175311.html)

And the study itself: [https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/early/2019/08/29/jnnp-2019-3209...](https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/early/2019/08/29/jnnp-2019-320912)

<comment><USER3> Jokes on them--my "location" is on the wrong continent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are multiple kinds of depression, and because of that there is never going to be a one pill cure all, until we start studying different kinds of depression.

However with that being said, there is a correlation between some depression and stomach inflammation. For many emotional feelings are tied to the stomach. Something as small as a stomach ache can sometimes leave a person in a cruddy mood. I wonder if this is why anti-inflammatories help.

(On a more cheerful note, anti-inflammatories got spell checked to anti- flamethrowers on my computer.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Ibuprofen shrinks testicles in regular twice-daily use.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29311296/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29311296/)

<comment><USER6> Testicular size isn't mentioned in that paper, only compensated hypogonadism, i.e. normal testosterone levels maintained through a higher drive from the pituitary gland.

The paper also mentions a link between acetaminophen (not ibuprofen) and longer time to pregnancy.

Chronic use of NSAID among which ibuprofen can ruin your stomach, and/or your cartilage.

Regardless, we are slowly getting out of the dark ages of psychiatry, whose models were until recently as worthy as humor or miasma theory. That's great.</comment></comment>


This Isn't a Recession, It's a Collapse - <AUTHOR> http://seekingalpha.com/article/148526-washington-s-dilemma-this-isn-t-a-recession-it-s-a-collapse

<comment><USER2> The author clearly cannot even define depression, recession, or collapse... Let alone comment on what state we are in...

Useless. Amateur Hour.

</comment><comment><USER3> Articles like this have me nodding 'yes, yes, yup, sure, yes' while I'm reading them. But by now it's just too easy to write them.

What I'd like in such articles is some root-cause analysis and at least a few pointers on how to proceed.

<comment><USER4> Not to be too dismissive of the causes of the problem, but I think when you get to problems of this size and complexity there's rarely "a" root cause -- you're either stuck with one phrase low intellectual effort summaries ("greed", "stupid people") or endless finger-pointing and circular reasoning (the crap the cable news channels and talk radio like to fill hour upon hour with).

I'm proceeding by living my life. I took a loss on my house when I sold it, not primarily because of economic concern, but largely because it was time to move elsewhere (having kids etc). I have a manageable debt, mitigation strategies if that debt becomes undesirable, am not against taking on more if it becomes more desirable. My intent is to diversify into markets that may go contrary to the general economy (particularly petroleum).

I don't think anybody _knows_ what to do. The events of the time remind me of yesteryear's disasters -- the pundits don't have anything to say, but the tape is rolling so they're talking.

<comment><USER5> I think that basically was the problem - there were so many things that _could_ go wrong that eventually a bunch of them _did_ , and then enough things went wrong at once that the economy couldn't hold up any more.

If you remember back to 2006, there were _lots_ of things wrong with the economy that everybody loved to point out. A housing bubble that was about to pop. A consumer debt bubble and usurious credit card rates. A Web 2.0 Startup bubble with a bunch of dumb ideas. Anemic wage & job growth since the last recession. A derivatives time-bomb. Massive government deficit spending to finance the war on Iraq. High oil prices, partially caused by demand from China and India and partially because of speculation. A large current account deficit, and fears of dollar overvaluation. A student loan bubble where many students take out expensive loans for college and then can't find jobs afterwards.

The majority of these doomsaying prophecies turned out to wrong - by my count, the housing bubble, high oil prices, and the derivatives time bomb were right, and everything else either hasn't happened yet (credit cards, student loans, dollar devaluation) or turned out to be quite minor (Web2.0 popping). But just those three were enough to put a serious dent in the economy.

The 1930s were similar: people like to blame it on the Fed constricting the money supply, but it was really that, plus the gold standard, plus Smoot- Hawley, plus the Dust Bowl, plus the bursting of the stock market bubble, plus the bursting of the Florida real estate bubble. Any one of those might've been shrugged off, but all of them together was cataclysmic.

<comment><USER6> We are experiencing a chain of events, all intertwined in the most fundamental way. The way of life we have assumed was sustainable is in fact not so. We can't ignore production. We have to consider balancing incoming and outgoing value.

I don't believe we have seen the bottom of the market, but I'm hopeful that the American economy that emerges from our original mess will be much more rational & sustainable.

We must collectively recognize the need for long term economic vision or else repeatedly suffer the fickle repercussions of short sighted greed, and delusion. Our nation, all of its industries, all of our people don't exist in a vacuum. Each of our actions and individual productivity in aggregate results in shifts in our economic strength and resiliency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To be clear, we just went through a Panic. This is what happens.

We recovered from the Panic and now we are going through a Recession. There's no collapse as far as I can see but like any panic, it sure felt like we were close to a collapse.

State governments were completely unable to cope with the sudden, significant decrease in funds: California and NY are in big trouble.

But it's not a collapse. People should start reading about the other major panics that the US experienced instead of just reacting to the current one. Turns out it's not as bad as what we went through before. But it is bad.

The Housing Bubble will unfortunately go down in history with Tulipmania, the South Sea Bubble, and the the Great Panic of 1873. We'll recover but unfortunately, it's going to be slow treading and state services will be cut significantly even while federal services will likely expand.

<comment><USER8> I wish I shared your optimism that we will recover.

As the saying goes, "We'll survive by doing each others laundry". That saying, of course, is meant to be a joke. The US can't just do it's own laundry to survive. We can't just sell latte's to each other, either. We have to actually produce more than we consume.

So, we either have to produce a lot more, or consume a lot less. I don't see us producing more, do you?

I used to comfort myself that we had evolved as a nation, from doers into investors, and that we still brought value to the world by providing the capital needed for the rest of the world to grow, and so we were indeed, earning our bread. My faith in this viewpoint has been shaken, however.

All is not bread and circuses for non-US folks either. If the US consumer quits buying, I think that's a big deal to everybody.

<comment><USER9> "We have to actually produce more than we consume."

You know that this is not sustainable if you look beyond US's borders. It's a big planet and someone will have to produce less than they consume or this won't really work.

"we had evolved as a nation, from doers into investors"

This is not what I would call evolution.

"If the US consumer quits buying, I think that's a big deal to everybody."

It is, but it's not as big a deal as it would be a couple decades ago.

We (as in "mankind" - I don't live in the US) will survive. In the end, this adjustment may even prove helpful. At least, that could be the viewpoint of those who survive us ;-)

<comment><USER8> Wow, that's quite a lot of one-liner rebuttals ya got there. I'm not sure what to do with such, ummm, condensed wisdom...

You say that it's a big planet, and someone will have to produce less than they consume. Sure, for an instant. That's why God invented Capacitors, Inductors, and Bank Ledgers. To smooth over the instantaneous fluctuations in the system. However, long term, the capacitor needs replenishing. Long term, a nation better produce more than it consumes, to make up for the times it produces less, and for the inefficiencies in the system. This is a conservation of energy mindset that I often apply to economics. Adam Smith tells me that it's not a zero sum game, and that you and I can trade, and both come out better for it. This does violate my conservation of energy model, to some degree. However, I still maintain that I better produce something, and what I produce, I better not use all of it, as I need some of it to trade with you.

You say evolution from doers to investors is not evolution. I say it is. I can bake a pie, or I can finance a 200 chef pastry kitchen. You're saying I've serviced humanity less by creating the kitchen than I did by baking the pie? If you think that, you can't be reasoned with.

You assure me that mankind will survive. Thanks. I never doubted it. What does that have to do with anything at all?

<comment><USER9> "Wow, that's quite a lot of one-liner rebuttals ya got there. I'm not sure what to do with such, ummm, condensed wisdom..."

Mobile phones work miracles on conciseness.

"I better not use all of it, as I need some of it to trade with you."

This is not what I meant. If you base your economy on producing more than you consume, you end up risking having nobody to buy your goods because everybody got somewhat self-sufficient or got their supplies someplace else. It's nothing but smart to be as self-sufficient as possible.

The strategic dilemma between being a doer and an investor is that, despite the illusion it's the other way around, the investor is actually serving the doer. You see - your kitchen is valuable as long as you have people wanting to cook, but absolutely useless if you have people who want to fix cars. Investment capital is a very useful tool, but it's only part of the machinery - it only smooths out some fluctuations that allow some companies to get started. Converting your whole economy from 100% doers into 100% investors is suicidal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think collapse is a _very_ strong term.

The way see it is that the recession is going to be long, very long. But it wont be a collapse. We will see state after state, company after company, country after country hit crisis and be bailed out.

The crucial thing is this will happen in sequence rather than all at once.

We survived a major banks crisis earlier this year and can probably survive another similar crisis without the world going to ruin.

Im predicting 10 years to recover from this myself. Any other predictions?

<comment><AUTHOR> "We will see state after state, company after company, country after country hit crisis and be bailed out."

Who's gonna pay back the bailout?

<comment><USER11> our great great grand children

<comment><AUTHOR> What makes you think they'll want to? :)

<comment><USER12> They'll have no choice but to. Do you have that choice today?

<comment><AUTHOR> I pay very little tax (both in income and spending) and my wealth is not in dollar

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In an economy, there is alway work to do since we live in a world of scarcity. So eventually, the economy should pick up in employment after reallocating resources.

However, if a market persists in unemployment rate long after a recession than there are forces preventing pricing changes and the reallocation of resources. Such forces are often government regulation or bailout, maybe perhaps stubborn unions or cartels.

<comment><AUTHOR> Incorrect. With global demand dropping sharply, there's actually _not_ enough work to do. We cranked up the credit machine the past few years to make sure there were enough work to do.

Again, too much supply, not enough demand.

<comment><USER14> Lower prices.

<comment><AUTHOR> What? no. You see more realtors after housing prices dropped? You see more car salespeople after car prices dropped?

<comment><USER14> I was replying primarily to

> Again, too much supply, not enough demand.

And adjusting prices is the orthodox mechanism to match supply and demand.

Anyway, in a physical sense there is enough work to do. We haven't reached Mars, yet. Diseases afflict the world's population. And where is my yacht?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At least the banks are back in business, which is unfortunately essential to recovery. First order of business is to force them to severely lower their margins. Mortgage rates need to be heavily regulated to prevent further disasters on the housing market. Wall street needs to be regulated into oblivion. As long as they can afford to give out a single bonus they can handle more regulation to stabilize the system.

To be honest, I think the recovery will be surprisingly fast. Economic cycles are not what they used to be. At this point in history our economic infrastructure has become so sophisticated that within no time you will have an dramatic amount of new business starting to carry the weight of the economy.

It's like a forest fire. First there is the pain, then there is the barren wasteland, but then you see the new light opens up the seeds and the ashes of the old forest feed the young trees. A new forest appears in no time.

<comment><AUTHOR> "To be honest, I think the recovery will be surprisingly fast"

How? Our manufacturing sector has been taken apart in the last 20 years. A large amount of baby boomers are retiring now, cashing out 401k/IRA/social security/medicare.

<comment><USER16> _Our manufacturing sector has been taken apart in the last 20 years._

I'm American, and I'll say that this is a typical American thing to say. We live in a world economy now. Certain parts of the world specialize in certain sectors. We can come out of a recession without depending on manufacturing. What you're saying is the equivalent of saying that a place like Silicon Valley can never escape a recession because they don't have a huge manufacturing base like, say, Pittsburgh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure I agree...we manufacture debt, and the other countries buy them. Until they don't, since the whole world's making less money.

Yes, we make game/tv/movie/porn/internet. But notice that Asia is notorious at pirating them.

<comment><USER16> Okay. I was trying to have a serious conversation, but I see that you've decided to take things elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> From a thread down: "Just to name a few of the things we are producing in Ohio..."

Yes, but in this worldwide recession, people only buy things that they need. Those things you mentioned are all advanced (want, not need) products, which has dropped severely in demand. Things we need (oil, cheap stuff, cheap services) are mostly manufactured by other countries.

<comment><USER16> _Things we need (oil, cheap stuff, cheap services) are all manufactured by other countries._

The middle part of the country grows a large portion of what we eat. I can't state everything everyone needs, but food is certainly one of those things. On top of that, I don't see how you can say medical advancements are something we don't need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The sawdust of debt, and the monetization of assets rather than the > production of goods, continually came to define the internal composition of > the system.

Ah, those lovely Americans. Always clamouring for the lost paradise of an industrial economy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Becuase we're proved that a economy based on financial engineering and construction and selling each other houses has worked so well?

<comment><USER14> Perhaps. But re-industrialization might not be the answer.

Looking at GDP figures, Germany was hit much harder by the global downturn so far than the US. And we do produce things you can touch with your hands here.

(Ironically, a few years ago Germans were worried about the heavy reliance on industry. Pundits worried about how Germany might close the gap to more modern service economies in the UK and US. They imagined a ladder of value adding that starts with agriculture, goes to industry, and then to services.)

<comment><AUTHOR> you got a point; I think a good mix of industrial/agriculture/service industry is a stable base for any economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't help that: State Tax Revenues at Record Low

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/us/18states.html?_r=1></comment>


Dear Interns - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/c5e6487a9d20

<comment><USER2> ... continuing, because what is a blog post list without a nice round number of items ...

8\. You will need to endure a never ending succession of clueless/condescending/abusive project managers.

9\. The company you work for, most probably, has MBA's who would gleefully flush your job and those of your co-workers and bosses down the the toilet for the sake of fleeting short-term profit. Adjust your loyalty accordingly.

10\. You will need to understand that just because someone is a grizzled industry veteran, it doesn't mean they know shit on any given topic.

<comment><USER3> 11\. It may feel like you're being respected by bring given an important project and maybe even being paid but, odds are your just cheap, possibly free labor.

12\. The first few places you work at don't always do things right and odds are you can teach them a lot (wait we can rar files and not use WinZip any more?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another important tip for interns: Never work for free. If a company respects you and your work, it will pay for your time.

</comment><comment><USER5> A simpler list:

1\. Show up early.

2\. 2 eyes, 2 ears, 1 mouth - use proportionally.

3\. Work hard and Learn hard.

4\. Be nice to everyone.

5\. Stay late.

I've found very few people who follow 1-5 that have disliked their internship. It's also the best way to an offer.

<comment><USER6> I doubt the causation runs the way you think it does; and an offer you can only get by constantly imposing long hours on yourself may not be an offer you want.

<comment><USER5> If it's a learning internship (as opposed to a "Get me coffee" internship) all you can trade for the teaching and money is enthusiasm. Many people treat interns like a burden from HR, and the way to win them over is enthusiasm. After you get the offer you can look around at how people work, and decide if it's worth staying long term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also, watch the movie Office Space and read lots of Dilbert cartoons to mentally prepare for your mind numbing career in IT.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is this addressed to the interns?

<comment><USER9> Because the author has likely overheard some interns complaining?

These points seem valid for any developer who hasn't been in the industry long though.

<comment><USER10> Especially in regards to the "customers are dumb this is dumb why are we being dumb" programming tasks, I think that a good cure is dealing with the business side of things. When you have to do sales and think about how your product stacks up in the marketplace and how people want to use it, you suddenly gain a greater appreciation for the necessity (if not reward) of such inane feature requests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "...(idiot, stupid, simpleton) customers"

Sounds like a great way to view the people you build products for.

<comment><USER10> Can we get past the myth that somehow every customer is a fantastic human being whose sole aim is to have their life completed by the presence of our products?

This same refrain--common whenever we bring up, say, gamers being bad customers--is getting as threadbare as the "privleged" stuff.

At the end of the day, our products serve to redress some shortcoming in our customer's toolbox. They don't want that shortcoming, or whatever problem that it represents, and our products are at their best subtle reminders of some lapse in happiness our customers have.

We don't _have_ to assume anything about our customers beyond what is needed to deliver product. We _might_ assume that they're nice, that they always give to charity, that they deeply and truly care about the lines of code we write to fix their inconvenience, and any number of other things.

Fact is, most customers do not a shit give. Most customers want the cheapest thing that makes their problem _go away_ and does so as unobtrusively as possible. Most customers don't understand or care to understand the causes underlying their current pain point, and most customers even with that knowledge wouldn't change because _reasons_.

And you know what? That's fine. Hell, that's human. It's our job as craftspeople to make the best products we can, _because that 's what makers do_. We don't need these outlandish assumptions about our target audience in order to kick ass and ship code.

~

Now, as far as the article is concerned, the tone of that is very much directed towards a young engineer who views (rightly or wrongly) customer complaints as absurd or moronic. And honestly? Most UI/UX things are clumsy wrappers over something that a line of commands would very easily solve, were we to provide our users with a CLI. Our drive is more and more to "don't make me think" about our interfaces, and honestly that is very much in support of customer-as-simpleton.

Part of the process of learning business is to realize that, while it is true that customers are lazy (don't want to spend effort solving their problem) and simpletons (don't want to think about what little effort they do expend), that is something that can be made a design constraint and used to make something that people will buy.

To a young engineer, yeah, people are simpletons when faced with their problem domain, but they need to learn to ship code for those folks anyway.

<comment><USER12> Also, 50% of people are below average intelligence...

<comment><USER10> That's got nothing to do with it--let's not be mean.

<comment><USER12> Maths is mean? How odd.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple has 5,000 people working on autonomous cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/10/ex-apple-employee-charged-with-stealing-autonomous-car-trade-secrets.html <comment><USER2> 5000 people are disclosed on the project: they're allowed to know about it. 2300 are directly working on it enough to have access to the databases.

</comment><comment><USER3> Holy Shit. I would have guessed 400 or so, following the news a couple years ago of Project Titan shuttering plans to manufacture their own vehicle and focus just on autonomy.

I'm not exactly sure how one would keep 5,000 people busy. They've only got 50-something vehicles actively testing on California's roads, thought they could very well have more somewhere else.

It's hard to figure out how many people Waymo currently employs, but but they had around 600 in 2015. I also know they subcontract out remote guidance, data annotation, and map-making to third parties.

But 5000? Wow. They must still be serious about making their own car. wow.

<comment> King-Aaron Consider the scale of an automotive manufacturer - General Motors has a technical centre that can house over 21,000 employees [1] which goes to show the scale of people involved in vehicle R&D. For a company that's effectively just dipping it's toes into the industry, 5,000 is understandable

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Technical_Cente...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Technical_Center)

<comment><USER3> For sure. It's just that I was previously under the assumption Apple had opted not to manufacture a vehicle. So little information gets outside the walls of Apple's forbidden palace.

I follow the self driving car race pretty close, and with Apple there are just so many question marks as to how serious, and capable they are, and as to what their strategy might be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> now if only they had someone working on itunes and the app store

<comment><USER5> ...and keyboards that actually work!

<comment><USER6> I won't be a fan of an icar. It will be too long and thin and to fill up the tank you will need to go to a special gas station.

<comment><USER7> And in order to fill up at a regular gas station, don't forget or lose your icar special dongle or else the regular gas pump won't fit into your gas tank.

<comment><USER8> And every once in a while they will just decide to remove a piece of the car and force drivers to adopt new habits - "The iCar 2 will no longer have a steering wheel and all drivers will now steer with their tongues."

<comment><USER7> And whenever you upgrade the car's OS, everything you are used to totally changes.

Congratulations, your iCar's new OS is successfully installed! Your blinker is now where the washer fluid bar used to be and we reversed your shifter so Park is now Reverse and 1st gear is now 4th. You're welcome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was, once, excited about the prospects of an iCar...back when I still was a believer in the cult of Apple. Then I watched this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8)

I would never trust my life to an Apple product, even if it has rounded corners (OMG!!) and they offer avocado, mauve, ecru, and navajo (m___f__ing!!!) white color options... I think different(ly?) now.

<comment><USER9> after watching that video make sure to read some of the comment section...the anti-apple sentiment is strong and growing, to be sure.</comment></comment>


Automakers Are Rethinking the Timetable for Fully Autonomous Cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/automakers-are-rethinking-timetable-fully-autonomous-cars/93993798360804 <comment><USER2> Colour me not surprised in the least.

Speaking as someone in tech talking to others in tech I'm constantly surprised how optimistic people are about the timetable for fully self-driving cars. Honestly, I think we're still 20+ years away.

Here's another thing to consider: people act differently when its a machine vs a person they're affecting. There are countless examples of this eg:

\- I live in a building with a doorman. The main purpose of a doorman is to be a person to prevent criminal action from starting. After all a person can be fooled, distracted or bribed but people seem less inclined to mess with an unpredictable person vs, say, an unmanned security system on a similar building.

\- Forget humans, this applies to animals. It's well-documented that just having a dog (or even saying you do) reduces the likelihood you'll get burgled. Thieves will generally pick easier, more predictable prey.

\- ... and this brings us back to cars. Reading some of the coverage of Waymo, Uber, Tesla, etc you see that other drivers act in ways around a car they realize has no human driver than they would if it were a human-driven car. Cutting it off, messing with it, etc.

How exactly does an autonomous car deal with that aspect of human nature?

<comment><USER3> Add country to the equation, and you can easily add another 20-50 years into the already 20+ you mention.

Take India, for example.

\-- The infrastructure is poor.

\-- Drivers ignore rules to suit their convenience.

\-- A lot of people depend on driving for their livelihood. Union minister, Nitin Gadkari, has already made it clear that they will not let tech that affects the livelihood of so many people come in and take jobs. Most governments that rely on the vote bank of poorer sections of the society will not dare to move against this mandate.

\-- The preferred and most popular mode of transportation is still two- wheelers. I don't see anyone building self-driving two bikes. That rules out almost half of the Indian population's transportation

I don't think India will be ready for another 50 years to have fully self- driving vehicles.

<comment><USER4> The poor infrastructure could work to their advantage, they could build it to suit new applications. In the West we have a huge legacy infrastructure that is hard to deal with. It's somewhat similar to the way Africa skipped traditional telecommunications and went straight to mobile.

<comment><USER3> Might be possible on less dense cities.

Conjusted cities like Bangalore and reeling under bad city planning. Adding a self-driving vehicle is not going to be of much help.

The govt does not have money to spend on road repairs. Corruption at the contract level is rampant. Putting 1+1, I doubt India will use it to their advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> "It's really, really hard," Krafcik said during a live-streamed tech conference. "You don't know what you don't know until you're actually in there and trying to do things."

Now, where was that Rodney Brooks interview? Ah, here it is:

[https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2018/06/2nd-P...](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2018/06/2nd-Part-RB-for-Ars-Transcript-2.pdf)

 _> > Rob Reid: (...) Why do you think these people and others are overestimating the rate of development in this field?

>> Rodney Brooks: I think they're making a bunch of mistakes. I asked them when did the first car drive down a freeway for 10 miles at 50 miles an hour. They know that the Google cars did that in 2004 or 2005. It was actually done in Germany in 1987.

>> Rob Reid: Wow.

>> Rodney Brooks: When are we going to get the first car, hands off the steering wheel, feet off the pedals, drive coast to coast in the US? Yeah, well, it actually happened in 1995 with the Navlab Project from Carnegie Mellon University. My point is, everyone thinks, oh this is just a [inaudible 00:44:50], this is going to happen quickly. It's been around a long time to get to where we are. I have now demonstrated to them that their scale is wrong, their start point is wrong. It has taken a lot longer to get to where we are now._

So, to anyone who had any understanding of the technology it must have been obvious for a long, long time that "it's really, really hard" and that it wouldn't just take a few years after the time that Google announced the Google car. I struggle to believe that Krafcik is not one of those people, or that major automotive company CEOs are not.

Basically, those people have been bullshitting everyone and they're still bullshitting everyone, and they were probably not even interested in developing self-driving cars in the first place, it was all just some stupid marketing game supported by a very excitable tech press and a gullible public.

<comment><USER6> Rodney Brooks is misleading. He says things like, "It was actually done in Germany in 1987." but neglects to mention that the road had no other cars on it.[1] He also claims that the first autonomous coast to coast drive happened in 1995, but actually the project was autonomously controlling steering, not gas or brakes, and 150 miles of the trip were driven by humans.[2]

Modern autonomous vehicles are much more impressive. They were successfully navigating urban environments 12 years ago.[3] Waymo's cars have driven over 10 million miles and disengagement rate is once every 11,000 miles.[4] We're at the point where no major breakthroughs are needed, just incremental improvements. That's what's different from earlier eras of autonomous vehicles.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self- driving_cars#1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self- driving_cars#1980s) has this quote:

> In the 1980s, a vision-guided Mercedes-Benz robotic van, designed by Ernst > Dickmanns and his team at the Bundeswehr University Munich in Munich, > Germany, achieved a speed of 39 miles per hour (63 km/h) on streets without > traffic.

2\. [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/tjochem/www/nhaa/nhaa_home_...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/tjochem/www/nhaa/nhaa_home_page.html)

3\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2007)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_\(2007\))

4\. [https://medium.com/waymo/an-update-on-waymo- disengagements-i...](https://medium.com/waymo/an-update-on-waymo- disengagements-in-california-d671fd31c3e2)

<comment><USER7> Think about what that means. Waymo has been doing this for many years, drives in basically ideal conditions (Phoenix rather than Philadelphia), and still disengages at a rate that amounts to once a year for a typical personal vehicle. That's not enough for "real self driving" because at that disengagement rate the human must be actively engaged the whole time. Human drivers go about 500,000 miles between crashes. (And that's not 500,000 miles driving through Phoenix. That includes miles driven through places like DC where freeways have no acceleration lanes. That includes drunk drivers and teen drivers. You can't control the other people on the road, but if you don't yourself drive distracted, drunk, speed, etc., I'd bet you can expect to go at least a million miles between crashes.) Disengagement rates would have to improve by a factor of 50 to allow a human to not be paying attention at all times while achieving an acceptable level of safety.

<comment><USER6> A disengagement doesn't necessarily mean that the car would have crashed. There are amusing disengagement stories such as a cyclist doing a track stand, causing the car to get stuck.[1] Many disengagements are false positives. Think of how often you've had to do the equivalent to human drivers by telling them to slow down or watch out. For me it's certainly more often than every 11,000 miles.

Given that humans aren't great drivers, you'd think that after 10 million miles Waymo would be at fault for some crashes. But only one of Waymo's crashes was even partially their fault. One of their cars was moving at 2mph to get around some sandbags in the road and hit a muni bus that was trying to squeeze by at 15mph.[2] Waymo has since tweaked their software to account for aggressive bus drivers. That's over 10 million miles and only one collision that was even partially their fault. That sounds pretty safe to me.

And regarding weather: Though their pilot program is in Phoenix, Waymo doesn't just drive in places with nice weather. They've been testing in Michigan for the past 2 winters.

1\. [https://forums.roadbikereview.com/general-cycling- discussion...](https://forums.roadbikereview.com/general-cycling- discussion/encounter-google-car-today-349240.html)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo#Crashes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo#Crashes)

<comment><USER7> A disengagement generally measures when a human test driver had to take control. It's not just telling a human driver to watch out—it's taking the wheel from them. They wouldn't necessarily lead to a crash, but there is a pretty good chance they would. If even 10% of disengagement's would've led to a collision, you're still not close to a good human driver.

One crash in 10 million miles isn't as great as it sounds. First, it's a meaningless number because a human is intervening every 11,000 miles. It's not a true measurement of what a purely autonomous collision rate would be. Second, humans crash once in every 500,000 miles, and that's under the full gamut of circumstances (drunk drivers, unfamiliar roads, teenagers, etc). Waymo is running with trained drivers on thoroughly mapped test areas in a place with easy traffic and weather. You'd expect humans doing nothing but running the same routes over and over in that carefully geofenced area to do better than one collision per 500,000 miles. (Especially with someone looking over their shoulder, like the self driving car is doing!)

If you look at the improvement in disengagement rates it's not particularly compelling: [https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*oX- ykZtxiMiuguSow...](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*oX- ykZtxiMiuguSowQgGwg.png).

They've improved by a factor of 6-7 since 2015, but most of that was 2015-2016. That suggests the pace of improvement is getting slower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the things the article names is the challenges caused by snow, ice, etc. I realize I'm in the minority, but I actually think there's lots of conditions that we shouldn't be driving in -- conditions where the obscured lines of sight, slipperiness of the road, etc, actually mean that we should either be off the road entirely, or traveling at speeds far far below normal. I know this happens, but I honestly believe that it should be far more common -- so common that it would likely take a chunk out of the economy.

For instance you're driving on the freeway and it starts to rain -- can you really reduce your speed, and/or leave an extra "car length" between the car in front of you, so that you'll still have time to stop if needed? In my experience, no one else wants to slow down, so it's safer for me to keep up with the slowest traffic than to go what I would now deem a safe speed.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely agree. People don't realize how long it takes to stop your car when the roads are wet, and they keep going at high speed. I think the digital speed limit signs that are adjustable should be used more often to greatly reduce speed limits and discourage the standard 55mph+ since the coefficient of friction can be half or less then during dry conditions (not to mention loss of visibility). [http://hyperphysics.phy- astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/frictir...](http://hyperphysics.phy- astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/frictire.html)

<comment><USER10> As a Norwegian who drives in snow at least a few times a year, it's funny and tragic to see videos of pileups in the US when there's 5cm of snow on the road. It's easy to drive safely in snow, assuming you have snow tires, but you do need to slow down a lot. Even here, the first snow of the year results in multiple accidents every year, before people learn to adjust.

<comment><USER11> > As a Norwegian

I think, Scandinavia is a different story. A closed snow cover at say -5 degrees Celsius is quite safe compared to muddling zero degree conditions with continuous freezing and thawing, producing ice surfaces or slush. The US have this in some states the same way we have it in Central Europe (I am from Germany).

<comment><USER10> We've got this on the west coast where I'm from though :) The coastal climates are normally just a few degrees below zero. Granted, our snow-clearing teams are very effective, so there is rarely deep snow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Based on what I hear from those in the know, the perception is that it's decades away instead of years. And an even more complicated problem isn't whether or not they can make it work with considerable constraints (geofence, no highways, avoid several spots that are hard to handle, weather, assistance via remote operation when stuck), but how to do it profitably. The cars are expensive. The maintenance is expensive. The ongoing cleaning, charging, and prepping of vehicles is expensive. Constantly updating HD maps is expensive. Of course the engineers to keep everything running smoothly are expensive. And the small army of people you need to actually talk to and help customers - something Google has basically never done before - is expensive.

I love the idea of self-driving cars and I really can't wait until they're ready. But I'd say that's going to happen about as quickly as changing the infrastructure in this country. Personally I'd rather have better public transit anyway.

<comment><USER13> > I love the idea of self-driving cars and I really can't wait until they're > ready.

What if I were to tell you that you can buy a self driving car right now, and that there are 100s of thousands them in consumer hands, right now?

Tesla sells them. And they aren't _that_ expensive.

If you can press a button, and take your hands off the wheel, that is a self driving car. And you can buy them today.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, nope. If your car crashes after you press that button and take your hands off the wheel, Tesla will point to the line in their terms of service which says, "keep hands on the wheel, driver must pay attention at all times."

Tesla (and Elon Musk in particular) are of course happy to encourage the _misconception_ that they already sell a self-driving car.

<comment><USER13> You can call it whatever you want. But at the end of the day, this definitely fits the vast majority of people's definition of "self driving".

You press a button, and it stays in lane, at the right speed. Most people are happy with that feature set.

That is the MVP, that provides most of the benefits to most people, even if it isn't perfect.

<comment><USER14> It kills people... it's not ready.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Einstein's annus mirabilis was 1905 and it took decades of determined, international promotion of the Einstein brand, World War 2, a letter from Einstein to Roosevelt, plus another 6 years and 33 billion 1945 dollars (473B USD today), and a staggering collective of the smartest minds to ever walk the Earth in an existential race against a mortal enemy to develop nuclear weapons.

NASA's shuttle project started in 1969, cost $200B, was shut down in 2011 and never got close to it's planned 50 launches per year.

This stuff is hard.

<comment><USER16> But both of these were mostly science problems. Self driving cars are about making machines interact with humans. That has never been solved before.

Self driving in itself wouldn't be an issue, it's the other humans on the road that make it so hard to solve.

One of the main problems for manufacturers is that we have never before solved a similar problem, so there's nothing to compare it to.

<comment><USER17> >it's the other humans on the road that make it so hard to solve.

Humans, cats and dogs, deer, tumbling rocks, low flying seagulls, tumbling trashbags or a toppled trashbin bin, palm fronds, drunk people jaywalking, drunk guy in a jeter jersey directing traffic after a yankees game, edgy teenagers pulling the invisible rope trick (or just yanking a sheet on a string), puddles reflecting humans on the sidewalk, blind turns and hidden driveways, competitors self driving tech, the metawars that will result by trying to raise a competitors accident rates (and not doing that would be leaving money on the table).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Geo-fencing counts, IMO. "Driver assist" does not.

Full autonomy respresents an economic paradigm, geo fenced or not. When private cars went mainstream, the economic cascade was so broad that no one could have predicted it. Supermarkets, for example, and the subsequent impact on food industry was a side effect of private cars. Suburbs. Disneyland...

Self driving is such a change. Starting from geo-fencing is just a constraint on how fast the change happens. Private cars were limited by affordability instead. There's always something.

Once these cars are on (geo-fenced) roads, infrastructure (eg signs) and vehicle can start adapting to eachother. There will be real economic pressures to "open up" roads and highways to autonomous driving.

The tech problems in the space are so interesting, we forget about other aspects. Ultimately though, geo-fencing or any other hack could get us to the point where product problems get solved without a 1:1 relationship to solving tech problems.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hmm. I was driving a rental Hyundai that has auto-lane steering. I constantly wondered if it would follow the wrong path at choice decision opportunities (exits and forks) or side-swipe another vehicle trying to follow a lane. It's quite aggressive in basically overriding the driver's input without significant force and not notifying audibly when it disables itself (except for a visual indicator, a small icon in the cluster turns from green to white, but it requires "polling" behavior of constantly looking down).

<comment><USER20> You can feel if it's on or off from the resistance. It requires you to apply force to the wheel anyway, otherwise there is an no-hands-on-the-wheel alert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We might have to contemplate that we need to change our roads if we want automomous cars.

We have lanes for carpooling - why not lanes for autonomous vehicles? The road surface could have special markers to centre the vehicle, and to position it in the correct lane for a certain destination. This could be a single lane in a highway, with shorter distances between cars (relying on the quicker reaction speeds of computers and the modern, well-maintained brakes of the cars themselves), allowing humans to overtake and recognise them easily.

Then we need a standard method of communication between vehicles - braking, movement etc. - rather than relying on cameras and radar.

Remove as many variables as possible and the task becomes much easier.

Heck, we'll need a new method of charging road users for road use, without gas taxes, so we might as well introduce a standardised road pricing scheme as well (that takes into account vehicle size, weight, time, and location to calculate the price/km - and can communicate that to the end-user to allow them to optimise their travel).

<comment><USER22> You can't rely on what other cars are telling you because a bad actor could create a device that sends out false information that leads to crashes (send out "I'm now accelerating from 50mph to 60mph" then brake immediately, or even just not accelerate and continue to go 50mph). You could of course solve this by verifying all the information sent by cars, but then you have negated any benefits because you have to be able to detect anything they could send in a message.

<comment><USER23> We have a justice system that would prevent this. Same reason why I don't worry that a gunman is going to kill me every time I go out into public.

<comment><USER24> This argument doesn't hold though because a single bad actor who figures out how to spoof the interface has tremendous leverage to hurt a lot of people at once. And it's likely they could leave a device at night and trigger it days or weeks later. One instance of this could literally cause enough public fear to get AVs banned for years.

I agree with OP that each car managing its own cameras and radar makes the most sense. Cooperation by way of individual optimization is the cornerstone of modern society and something we should absolutely imbue our autonomous vehicles with.

<comment> ux-app >And it's likely they could leave a device at night and trigger it days or weeks later.

same could be said about leaving a bomb on a bus, and yet there aren't bombs going off on busses every day, and even when it does happen, it's not enough to scare people away from busses for good.

Society kinda works because the vast majority of people are not homicidal.

<comment><USER25> When you think about it, it's amazing there isn't more terrorism.

<comment><USER26> True, and that is certainly not due to impotent efforts to increase security in basically every facet of life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's awesome watching the race play out. It very much does look like at this point that Tesla are on a spint to the finish line while everyone else took a wrong turn near the start following Google.

<comment><USER7> What on _earth_ makes you say that? Tesla's whole model seems like a bust—unlikely to evolve beyond cruise control+.

<comment><USER28> If you watch the presentation at the Tesla Autonomy Day, the dude in charge of their deep neural network explained that they think basing the whole system upon cameras is necessary since HD maps and LIDAR are too limiting. Basically, the network needs to be able to see what people are doing to drive safely.

They've devised a method of upon training data for their network and is basically iterating through the problems, finding training data and counter- training data, as far as I understood the presentation.

Whether this is going to work or not, we shall see.

<comment><USER29> Have they solved the world model problem, or mentioned anything about that? If not, they are lost in noise.

Video streams are so full of maybe signals, and ML loves that. As long as they don't have a fundamental (sub)system that knows how much space it needs to safely proceed at the current speed, how the 99.99% of the roads of the world work geometrically, and how to infer this from visual data, they are in trouble.

(That said, I guess Karpathy is perfectly aware of this.)

<comment><USER27> I highly recommend watching the presentation. It's quite a deep dive into their entire plan including solving the world model problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would be 99% happy regarding autonomous driving if I got a platooning hardware kit installed into my car so that on highway I could connect behind another car/truck that is going to same direction than me and take a nap or watch a movie. This should be easier problem than full self driving car by orders of magnitude, and I do not quite understand why platooning gets so small share of the self-driving hype.

<comment><USER31> The first driver ("platoon commander") would still need to be human. I'm not sure people would sign up for this, as your error could result in deaths of people in cars following you.

<comment><USER30> The we should have problems finding bus drivers?

Anyway, I am more thinking the platoon commanders would be truck drivers that already have legal requirements for rest and no capability for speeding in highway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> After reading this I'm thinking Tesla claims of being close to achieving level 5 autonomy aren't pure hot air. Toyota's requirement of "8.8 billion test miles for safe deployment of self-driving vehicles", puts Tesla well on the path to this. I found articles online stating Autopilot has driven 1 - 1.2 billion miles. Assuming that they've gathered many more miles of test data of human driving, then at least they have the raw data on which to iterate their platform. Whilst I'm still skeptical I've gained a new appreciation of how pushing the autopilot package allowed them to gain a big advantage in terms of raw data.

<comment><USER33> I personally think Tesla simply doesn't have the sensors for self-driving.

I imagine the huge amount of data they've collected is largely useless because they aren't collecting the right data (e.g. LIDAR, radar, higher definition video)

<comment><USER29> They probably have the right data for safe disengagement. If they can solve that, the rest truly can be incrementally added.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved."

\- Marvin Minsky, 1967, _Computation_

</comment><comment><USER35> >Krafcik went on to say that the auto industry might never produce a car capable of driving at any time of year, in any weather, under any conditions. "Autonomy will always have some constraints," he added.

This is an out-of-context quote. Right before that, the linked CNET article said "John Krafcik, head of the self-driving car unit of Google parent company Alphabet, said that though driverless cars are "truly here," they aren't ubiquitous yet. ".

There is a big jump between L4 & L5 autonomy which is what Krafcik was discussing. But even achieving L4 (which is what Waymo has in its Phoenix tests) at mass scale will revolutionize the industry since it means cheap robocabs for large portions of the US for much of the year.

The other companies are still struggling with L2 & L3, but Waymo's lead appears to be getting larger based on the public results they are showing. Tesla is the only one that's close since it has a public L2 system.

</comment><comment> ux-app Yeah full autonomy that matches or exceeds human driving is a loooong way away for sure. Closing the gap is not just about sensing the environment, but also _understanding_ it. That's (probably) a Hard AI problem.

Why is no one looking at retrofitting existing roads with markers that the car can use to follow? I've read suggestions of using magnetic markers which would have the added benefit of working through snow.

Roads get new lines marked all the time, seems like embedding a magnetic marker at the same time would be quite feasible. This would basically be a tram line on every street.

Who cares if the car needs to hand off to the human in the event of road works or missing markers? Those are fairly rare events on my commute at least.

<comment><USER36> Winter driving in cold regions is hard. Knowing where the middle of the road is and the car's position relative to it is only the very start of the problem.

In regions that have roads not cleared of snow for multiple days the lane positions change. The evolution of the position of the lanes _is not_ strongly defined by where the previous lines were. The obvious spot to drive for a human would contradict the magnetic, ground penetrating radar database, or whatever marker is used.

Markers of any type would be useful for awareness of car self position but not sufficient for what the lane has become. Even as a human you have to guess sometimes because it's not possible to sense it. You just have to know what humans would do. Machines aren't great at heuteristics and guessing what humans might do.

<comment> frosted-flakes > In regions that have roads not cleared of snow for multiple days the lane > positions change.

Or even in the same day. I've seen major freeways shrink from three to two lanes after heavy snowsqualls blanketed the road completely in less than an hour. Yet, traffic still flowed smoothly and quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have made this prediction multiple times throughout the last 8 years based on my knowledge of robotics. I have argued with family members who are VCs as well as enthusiastic technical observers based on simple first principles reasoning.

It is highly unlikely that completely autonomous vehicles will be present on the streets - interacting with humans, cars, and random events in real-time - within the next decade. What is more feasible and likely to occur is that large chunks of trucking may become "automated" in the form of a hyper- advanced cruise control, but these vehicles will lack Level 5 autonomy for their whole route. To understand why, requires a deeper examination of where this technology came from; Stanley, Thrun's robotic car that was acquired by Google and is the basis for Waymo's tech. Thrun notes;

> "In the last Grand Challenge, it didn't really matter whether an obstacle > was a rock or a bush, because either way you'd just drive around it," says > Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science and electrical > engineering. "The current challenge is to move from just sensing the > environment to understanding the environment."

[http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2007/pr- junior-021407.html](http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2007/pr-junior-021407.html)

More precisely, to interact and function in the wild, the robot needs to understand, distinguish, and model the properties of wildly different entities. And these entities aren't just other people - they are _everything_ in its environment. And this includes random events like; people walking into traffic, objects falling onto the road, sudden rain and hail, or just potholes.

This is not a problem that can be trivially solved with better sensors or cheaper LIDAR. It is a conceptual problem that can not be trivially brute forced nor simulated in advance as each unique permutation is just different enough to confound existing models. Even if such different and confounding events are six sigma in nature and have a probability of occurring 0.00034% for every mile driven, then at 3.22 trillion miles/year ([https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2017/02/21/516512439...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2017/02/21/516512439/record-number-of-miles-driven-in-u-s-last-year)) Americans will experience 10,948,000 anomalies per year. Or, about 20.8 events per _minute_.

20.8 anomalies per minute is a pretty big number. That's a potential accident every 3 seconds or so. And that's a six sigma estimate. It is hard to emphasize how hard six sigma performance is for the current generation of autonomous vehicle hardware.

You might dispute the numbers, but they are meant to be an illustration and an intuitive explanation for why this problem is Hard with a capital H. Unlike some professionals, I don't believe Strong AI is necessary to solve this problem, but Weak AI is still a form of AI. Technology that's just out of reach today.

At this point, people counter with Google's cars. After all, seeing is believing, and haven't they been seen to run successfully for millions of miles at this point?

Yes, but... Waymo/Google's success is hard to replicate. No one else can bend the rules far enough to achieve their headway.

Most of us forget that before starting the project, Google used LIDAR to create highly detailed maps of every environment their cars will ever be in. Engineers then captured standard human driving on that route over and over across different hours. These elements were then combined within their model to pre-compute routes _before_ any real world driving happened.

Google was able to achieve its miraculous results because of its ownership of GMaps, Street View and the resources to deploy a fleet to map everything in advance. No one else has these resources. No one else can acquire them cheaply. And even Alphabet, a trillion-ish dollar corporation can't replicate this package for the entire world. Maybe someone will figure out a way to create precise sub-eighth-of-an-inch level 3D models of environments using drones and satellite images, but until that time this technology is too expensive to deploy.

It is hard to emphasize how important a distinction this is. The "only" thing a Google/Waymo robot does in real-time is that it checks the difference between the recorded dataset and whatever the real-time LIDAR + camera feed is saying. Or in other words, for every point of the route, Google has generated an expected set of values, and any deviations from these are used by the car to make real-time decisions. [https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial- inte...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial- intelligence/how-google-self-driving-car-works)

However, even this partial solution is tempting. Because it works. But, sadly, that's not the whole story. What gets lost in the re-telling of this story is that this technique means that the cars can't work in unstructured environments. They are unsafe for most roads, especially uncontrollable, unpredictable and narrow residential roads. It's why these cars exist inside strict geo-fences even when they're ferrying passangers around, like in Phoenix. Where the car seems to mostly serve the downtown area with very little residential coverage (caveats apply, I couldn't find a map).

But, even getting this far is a huge technical achievement, even if it's not the fundamental breakthrough we've been looking for.

We should be prudent, but optimistic. There are a lot of smart people out there who are working on this problem right now. They are figuring out really clever ways to deal with these edge cases and they will solve this problem. Even if it's not on the hype cycle's schedule.

With that in mind, I'd like to suggest a better model for thinking about Driverless Vehicles is another Google service, Translate. It's quite good, but when was the last time someone translated an entire book with it (and it came out to be readable/sensible)? The system's performance - due to its statistical roots - seems to be fundamentally asymptotic w.r.t. the data presented to it. It can't be improved beyond a certain point even if you throw more data at it. I suspect that the current generation of driverless vehicles will be the same. [http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf](http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf) [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00289.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00289.pdf)

Before the needed breakthrough happens, it is likely that the cutting edge won't advance beyond Level 3 in the next decade;

> I would guess Tesla's position on this would be that most of the time, yes, > you can rely on it, but because Tesla has no idea when you won't be able to > rely on it, you can't really rely on it.

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/sel...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/self-driving/fatal-tesla-autopilot-crash-reminds-us-that- robots-arent-perfect)

And that's okay. We might not have driverless cars by 2020, but we probably will by the mid 2030's and that sounds pretty darn fantastic to me.

<comment><USER38> > Americans will experience 10,948,000 anomalies per year. Or, about 20.8 > events per minute.

One possibility is that _driving_ is simply too challenging in the general case.

Note one of the problems discussed in the article, that self-driving algorithms can't cope with bad weather such as snow when road markings are invisible. Humans also can't cope with this situation. We don't drive with strict adherence to the rules of the road, and for example the tracks left by the car in front of you are far more important than any buried lane marking.

If we demand (for example) that autonomous vehicles cause less than one accident per 1 million km driven, then some situations that humans brave on a daily basis (thunderstorms, blizzards, icy roads, residential streets with children around) may never meet that standard even with a "perfect" autonomous system. Thus far, we've papered over the contradiction because we have human drivers to blame.

<comment><USER7> > Humans also can't cope with this situation.

What exactly does that mean? People will happily drive on I85/95 in Atlanta in torrential downpours where the lane markings are almost impossible to see. For the most part they don't crash, because they know where the lanes should be. Humans are unmatched at filling in missing information like that. People drive in rain, sleet, snow. And they still manage to go 500,000 miles between crashes on average.

<comment><USER17> In Atlanta people are coped to that situation, but in places like Los Angeles people come to a crawl in a drizzle with otherwise zero traffic. In places with snowstorms, people still regularly loose traction and spin off the roads or start sliding backwards down a hill.

I remember a picture a couple years ago from a snowstorm that hit the south, could have been Georgia even, that looked like a scene from an apocalyptic movie complete with a flipped over car burning in the distance.

Some people crash, some people do fine with skill. Will a self driving car be able to counter steer an ice induced drift into safely regaining traction like an experienced human car driver could? All up in the air right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> From a marketing/business perspective for the automotive industry, my hypothesis is that it's in their interest to favor publicizing the 'best-case scenario' earliest dates over realistic target dates for these kinds of milestones to hype the public up and make a company look like they are ahead of the pack in innovation.

This is the sentiment I gathered from also looking back at previous announcements in various industries (see r/retrofuturism on reddit) where a CEO will say that something is 5 years away when in practicality it's at least 5 years away from being 5 years away.

</comment><comment><USER40> Uber is screwed. They clearly stated in their SEC filing that the possibility of deploying full autonomous cars will significantly impact their future earnings.

<comment><USER41> That would be true even if they believed the chance that autonomous cars would succeed was 1%. If it happens, it will still significantly impact their earnings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Related article:

> Tesla Will Have Full Autonomy in 2020, Musk Says

<comment><USER43> Reminds me of Uber ex CEO saying he'd buy every single autonomous car Tesla will build by 2020.

The dream is slowly fading away, Tesla, or any car really, won't be fully autonomous for a long time, Uber economic model doesn't make sense anymore because 90% of it was base don removing drivers entirely. It's like a dream built on top of a dream...

[https://www.businessinsider.com/top-vc-claims-uber-ceo- said-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/top-vc-claims-uber-ceo-said-he- wants-to-buy-500000-self-driving-cars-from-tesla-2015-7?IR=T)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> If safe, reliable, autonomous driving is a decade away that's half a million lives lost. If it's two decades away then a million.

The incentives are there to make this work. The funding is there to make this work. The technology is actually there to make this work, _if_ you can change some of the rules to get there.

It's worth over a trillion dollars annually to make this work. It's the great infrastructure product of the 2020s and we should get fucking started already.

<comment><USER17> Are self driving cars going to eliminate traffic deaths? Tesla already has a body count.

<comment><USER44> Eliminate totally? Of course not.

But we have a long way to go before 1 fatality per 1 billion miles would be a bad thing. That would be an order of magnitude improvement. I think we can get two orders of magnitude in 10 years.

Autonomy absolutely _will_ have a body count. It cannot save every single driver. And so if we want to be able to enjoy the benefits of autonomy that saves _almost_ every single driver, we better get comfortable with the notion that some people will die in self driving cars.

If we can't accept that the technology will never be _perfect_ we will just keep dooming 30,000 people (in the US alone) to die each year, not to mention countless maimings (2 million actually) and property damage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> It was always clear to me that to accelerate the arrival of autonomous driving providing more consistent and controlled roadways would be key. That is why freeway driving will come well before any autonomous city street driving.Even the freeway is not consistent enough, but could more easily be adapted to some standard much more easily than, say, the roads in NYC.

</comment><comment><USER46> If we are rethinking the timetable of the self-driving car, is it safe to rethink the whole future path of transportation? Do cars have to be it?

</comment><comment><USER47> > Krafcik went on to say that the auto industry might never produce a car > capable of driving at any time of year, in any weather, under any > conditions.

What's the likely business model for Waymo if level 5 autonomy is unattainable?

Also, what did he mean by "never"? Did he mean "within our lifetimes" or something? A strangely confusing statement for a CEO of a self driving company.

<comment><USER48> There are areas of the country with relatively stable weather and mild conditions (no snow, no storms, etc). Could work reasonably well there.

<comment><USER47> I thought the conditions he is concerned about are not merely bad weather. Doesn't his statement hint at giving up on self driving in SF/NYC/London urban traffic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I don't understand the obsession or even the belief that fully autonomous driving is around the corner.

When has anyone, much less Google, released a product that worked at such advanced levels from day 1 and starting from no product in the market?

They should deploy autonomous cars at limited production scales in specific environments, and build it out from there—but we haven't even seen that yet.

<comment><USER50> That's exactly what you're seeing Waymo do, they've been operating a paid taxi service at scale outside Phoenix for 6+ months

<comment><USER49> Yes so the logical conclusion would be to scale that up, in whatever limited capacity it is currently serving.

<comment><USER17> How many places in the U.S. have the weather and traffic level of a region outside of phoenix? Maybe a region outside of scottsdale? They would scale if they could but that adds more variables that they haven't felt confident enough to tackle yet, otherwise you would see them scale this up and around the U.S.

<comment><USER50> Great example of no true scotsmen - we went from them not existing to "well they're not everywhere, so do they really exist?" in 3 comments

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I think there's another thing going on here and we've seen a similar pattern before with electrical cars about 10 years ago.

Ten years ago was when most of the car industry believed it had decades to adapt to full EV. It turns out that they had much less than a decade. By 2017 most manufacturers were scrambling to accelerate timelines for internal R&D when they realized competitors had other timelines and were about to grab some serious market share. This is now playing out in the market. Several ICE production lines have been shut down (GM, Ford, etc). Most manufacturers have launched or are about to launch full EVs. At this point several manufacturers are putting billions in making mass production happen in the next few years.

I predict the same will happen with autonomous driving. Most manufacturers are completely unprepared for it and behind with their R&D. They are actively looking to buy as much time as they can get because they know they won't be there. However, some manufacturers are ahead of the curve here and it's not just Tesla. When this stuff gets good enough, it means some manufacturers will have a huge competitive advantage over basically everything else. Everything you read about this needs to be put in this context.

In other words, some manufacturers are dragging their heels here and it's the same manufacturers that are also struggling to adapt to full EV. And they are using the same strategies to manipulate the timelines. Think futuristic looking concept cars that will never drive, lots of lobbying about how cool their R&D is, and a distinct lack of commitment to any timelines, combined with regular reports on serious safety issues that are obviously going to delay everything by decades. That's what this article says. What it translates to is: several manufacturers are getting to level 5 autonomy in the next few years and it is going to take decades for everybody else to catch up and mass produce this stuff.

Tesla is probably over confident about the timelines but well on track to making lots of progress in the next few years nevertheless. Waymo looks like they are making progress as well. However, they are held back by the notion that they are more of a pure tech play and less of manufacturing/logistics play. In other words, they are dependent on the before mentioned manufacturers dragging their heels.

IMHO several manufacturers are close enough to solving most of the issues here that there are going to be a few leaps forward in the next few years. These leaps are going to force the agenda for the rest of the industry. Mostly the timelines for autonomous and a switch to full EV are actually aligned.

By the time most cars will be EVs, most of them will also be fully autonomous. That's roughly 15-20 years from now. Plenty of time to tackle any remaining issues with sensors, snow, and other edge cases. Yes, that's hard but people are throwing billions at these problems and making rapid progress. The first level 5 cars might be on the market within as little as 2-5 years. The biggest hurdle here is non technical: legislation. Tesla is being ambitious here (obviously) but even in 5 years they'd have the market largely to themselves.

</comment><comment><USER52> AI Winter is coming.

(Sorry to riff on GoT, but I couldn't resist)

</comment><comment><USER53> Having 5+ companies each pouring billions into trying to make this technology a reality separately is ridiculous. All these companies should come together and work on a standardized single solution that can be shared between them. It will come much faster and be less expensive if they are pooling their resources.

<comment><USER54> But what if they standardized on some compromise, as they tend to? That alone would set progress back, not foreward. Think if there are multiple orgs with billions to throw at it, the more the merrier. If there were just a few with a few million each, your plan makes much better sense. At some point the beuracracy of collectivism overshadows its usefulness.

<comment><USER17> I dare you to name a good technology that came about due to a race of proprietary competition and not in close collaboration with the best talent in the field. It really is a waste to bin all this engineering talent apart just because their free backpacks have a different logo embroidered. You could have two engineers struggling with the exact same problem sitting in the same uber pool ride to work and they wouldn't be able to speak a word of it to each other due to shortsightedness by shareholders. There will be a point where a clear winner emerges, 5 competing companies turns to 3 and turns to 1, and all those hours and hours of engineering effort by the failures becomes a moot point. It's not like the 1 company that emerges will hire another 5 companies worth of engineering either, this is redundant work. You wouldn't even be able to learn from these failures until decades after the fact in a blog post from a retired engineer no longer bound to an NDA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Multiple companies are currently testing level 5 autonomous fleets in some European cities.

I think the article misses that you can't reach 5 without efficient and secure v2x.

<comment> frosted-flakes V2X?

<comment><USER56> Apparently vehicle to everything [1].

The car industry seems to love V2* terminology. V2H is connecting an electric vehicle to a home to provide power in an emergency.

[1] [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/v2x-vehicletovehicle- or...](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/v2x-vehicletovehicle-or- vehicletoinfrastructure.asp) [2] [https://thedriven.io/2018/10/19/v2g-whats- the-state-of-play-...](https://thedriven.io/2018/10/19/v2g-whats-the-state-of- play-with-vehicle-to-grid-vehicle-to-home-technology/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> After seeing some autonomous cars in action, I believe they are 20 years away. In that sense I mean a fully automated driverless car that you can command to do what you want.

It would be great if you could buy a car, have it bring you to work while you read or slept, then after dropping you off, go earn money while it was ubering people around until it was time to pick you up. But I highly doubt this will happen in less than 20 years at this point. There's just too much lacking. It needs real artificial intelligence, not just machine learning and pattern matching. The car needs to know "that's a paper bag flying in the wind I'm about to hit", or "that truck in front of me is stopped."

<comment><USER58> Considering that we have made ~0 progress toward true AGI, I'm skeptical that level 5 autonomous driving will arrive even within 20 years.

<comment><USER59> We certainly don't have true AGI but there has been progress in that general direction eg Deepmind's AlphaZero, StarCraft and this thing [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937)

<comment><USER58> No those aren't progress toward AGI at all. They are tremendously impressive technical achievements, but from an AGI perspective they're basically just parlor tricks.

The reality is that for AGI we don't even know which direction to go yet so it's literally impossible to determine whether we're making forward progress toward the goal. Show me a computer as smart as mouse and then I'll believe we're making progress toward AGI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> How much of this delay is just perfectionism and excess risk aversion? In pretty much any pursuit, demanding perfection ensures that you'll never be finished. Based on what I'm seen, autonomous vehicles already work. Waymo's cars have driven millions of miles. Other companies have working systems too. The technology is already at the point where it's useful.

I understand wanting to keep people safe, but the benefits of this technology so are enormous that I'd rather companies launch now and iterate than spend decades wringing every last disengagement out of the system while the carnage on our highways continues.

I feel like we're in one of those situations where everyone is just afraid to be first. Meanwhile, people die every day.

<comment><USER61> That you are willing to let other people die for the sake of increasing your convenience isn't very compelling.

And I think that's also unnecessary. From what I can tell about Waymo's approach, they are launching with something well below level 5, but where they cut over to a remote driver whenever the car is unsure. It's a smart approach, in that they can offer a level-5 service with level-3 technology. They've turned the technology cliff into a cost-optimization problem, which they can chip away at over time.

<comment><USER62> 1.25 million people die in human driven traffic per year, 37,000 of those in the US.

SDCs should only need to beat that safety level, not be perfect.

<comment><USER61> I understand the theory, but good luck selling a car on the basis of "probably as safe as the average driver!" And good luck convincing the parents of some kid run over by Google that it's just one of those things.

Note also that for many of those 37,000 deaths, a human is found culpable, often doing time. Who do you propose should do the time for autonomous cars? An engineer? Their manager? The CEO?

In practice, our corporate accountability is such that nobody will pay any penalty. Maybe that's fine when, as with the 2008 financial crisis, the losses are abstract and distributed. But when it's the life of somebody's kid, somebody's mom, somebody's sister? That at best will be an extremely volatile situation. Especially if Google or Uber captures 20% of the self-driving car market and is now responsible for 37,000 * 0.20 = 7400 deaths per year, or about 20 per day.

<comment><USER62> I wonder how many of those deaths anyone is punished for? My guess is under 10%. Mostly it's just considered an "accidental death" and life goes on, as I understand it.

But I (fortunately) don't have much experience with this.

The only possible solution is that the SDC and/or software manufacturer is legally responsible for any accidents the SDC causes. I think that coverage _has_ to be part of the legal package for these things to ever be sold in the US. But that would be money, not jail time, of course.

Fortunately the car(s) should have video and data logs from the event, so the evidence situation should typically be very clear.

<comment><USER61> > The only possible solution is that the SDC and/or software manufacturer is > legally responsible for any accidents the SDC causes. [...] But that would > be money, not jail time, of course.

I don't think there's any "of course" there. As we see with the 2008 crash and the financial industry generally, corporate financial liability for the high- risk decisions of individual managers and execs doesn't do much to reduce systemic risk. For the managers, it's a "heads I win, tails you lose" play.

The difference between banks and robot cars is that a banking failure just means slightly higher prices for the customers and/or slightly lower dividends for investors. Whereas with robot cars, in comes in funerals. Especially given the endemic low quality in the software industry, there's little doubt in my mind that unless "disruptors" face actual jail time, we'll see what is in effect scaled-up negligent homicide.

<comment><USER62> I mean, we have a century of settled tradition/law for how to handle deaths and injuries from badly designed cars. It's far from a new issue.

I think that system can keep working.

I don't really see the analog with the banks.

Software has endemic low quality where it doesn't much matter. In mission critical systems, it is usually reliably as solid as it needs to be.

<comment><USER61> > I mean, we have a century of settled tradition/law for how to handle deaths > and injuries from badly designed cars.

It's settled for cars with human drivers, because the drivers bear most of the responsibility. For cars without drivers, who's to blame for bad driving? "Somebody's bank account" is not a compelling answer.

> I don't really see the analog with the banks.

What part is unclear for you? I'm saying that with banks for the last 10+ years, we see that financial penalties don't solve problems of risk or accountability.

> Software has endemic low quality where it doesn't much matter. In mission > critical systems, it is usually reliably as solid as it needs to be.

I don't think either of those statements is correct, unless you mean the first one tautologically. But the latter is definitely untrue. Look at the way Toyota was building their software. Or the recent Boeing fiasco. Or Volkswagen's emissions scandal, which is responsible for circa dozens of deaths.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>