NHTSA closed their year+ investigation of Waymo. Waymo's 2 recalls re to this investigation were for crashing into a utility pole and roadway barriers. Evidently, robots repeatedly driving on the wrong side of the road into traffic and disobeying traffic control devices is ok in USA. Scale that.
It has happened so many times their California regulator, CPUC, now requires them to report each "Stoppage Incident."
If a Waymo robot is stopped, then the passengers can get out. If it's not stopped they can request a stop, but not force a stop or pick a stop location.
Also, the idea bsky is going to pioneer a new social media signaling semantics is probably a very unwise investment of execs time, given how deeply and widely and long that rut has been carved by massively larger social media sites and how they are currently in a bit of a mgmt crisis themselves.
The "follow" button confounds "I'm looking at your content" and "I endorse this content." We need two different ways to signal the difference between the two.
ICE is not only chasing down every random brown person in Chicago, they have a cameraman following them to film this for social media. Cruelty and inhumanity as content.
ADS will naturally/natively have different factors. It is key to understand that they are regulated as systems which in all cases and by law include large, complex, 24x7 human support staff. Without those people, Waymo's robots would all fail in hours to days.
Waymo got a permit to sell/lease/rent their robots to the public in California in 2021. Nuro got one in 2020 & GM Cruise in 2021, but it was suspended in 2023.
Waymo's telops and field rescue are required for operation in California, ie Waymo must package them w the robot. They are not separable.
Each (~20 or so) US state law allowing uncrewed robots (ADS) on public roads requires the operator, who in all cases so far has also been the ADS mfg, to have insurance. AFAIK, the biggest payout so far was ~$10 million to a woman run over & dragged ~20 ft underneath a GM Cruise robot in 2023 in SF.
Legislatures and regulators are lagging, eg both California and Georgia permit ADS (pseudo-self-driving) like Waymo, but haven't figured out how to cite them for moving violations and in Texas the process is so onerous they often don't bother:
"authorities have often seen Waymo vehicles ignore officers’ hand signals and drive into dangerous situations, said Austin Police Lieutenant William White...the process for citing a driverless vehicle is so time-consuming that they often avoid it" Reuters
No, Waymo routinely violates many traffic laws and averages multiple tickets a day. They also have many other issues/problems, including being ~~100x less reliable than human drivers average causing them to stop in traffic frequently for no good/apparent reason. bsky.app/profile/anic...
They can't even handle Austin winters. Waymo has been testing, always with safety drivers, in snow for many years and in a variety of very snowy places, yet:
Evidently, Waymo was knocked out by the Austin blizzard of... Unreliable robots, but at least they know how to minimize their insurance claims and turn that into their top safety claims. Lemons, lemonade.
Data centers are becoming so large and/or numerous they are killing the goose that lays their eggs: cheap electricity.
DCs are essentially sheds w high to extreme per sqft power, cooling, bandwidth, security, and resilience (eg seismic in SF/SV & LA). Usually, power is their #1 operating cost.
This is what happened in the dotcom and telecom bubbles, later cost ~$2 trillion (2002 dollars) and 500k jobs.
It has gotten much bigger inflation-adjusted and more sophisticated/complex/dangerous in structure. And it is all leveraged by the stock prices, so once it gets going wrong...Margin Call.
Also, not to pick on the admittedly unknown details of all of this, but Waymo has published misleading info regarding how they operate. So, the idea 'you can look it up on their site' and trust it is just naive. Lots of what they and other tech companies say publicly is what they aspire to, ie PR.
FWIW, since Waymo's simulated ~~1000X VMT as they've driven, ie as much driving in SF as all drivers combined for a ~decade, if they wanted to they could have a huge set of preset routes cached and indexed for search/lookup. I would even if only to compare/QA w on-demand routes picked by robots.
No, they were not called to burn them in LA. That is an urban legend. That day during the protest, Waymo restricted their routes between to Chinatown and DTLA until there was only the route that went down that block, according to the Waymo customer who ordered the 5th and last Waymo to arrive.
Impossible to know without access to Waymo's internals how, when, or even where (robot or cloud) they plan routes.
Their app certainly indicates they have a very reduced, preset, & finite set of stops for pickup & drop off (<100k in SF) & PAX can't make them stop elsewhere or use a different route.
'heavily engineered preset routes' is only false in the strictest sense. because i live in sf and there are feats that waymo is unable to perform. i live in a building on a road that it has decided only has one side, because of a certain warehouse business. so it cannot bring me closer than a block>
"The technology works by analyzing changes in electrical fields that occur when conductive objects like human faces come near the touchscreen sensors."
False positives when your leg, arm, dog, etc conductivity matches whatever model they build. Tech bros doing $$$$ magic to avoid a button tap.
