Waymo works in specific areas only though. As soon as you get out of San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Austin, the car wouldn't have self-driving capabilities.
I suspect it'll be some kind of AI-powered assistant that will take self-driving vehicles to people, like [1]. You retrofit a device onto your car, which'll hook to the car's sensors (as well as bring it's own sensors, like camera) and get a better experience in self-driving. Still nowhere near reliable to just stop paying attention though.
Hopefully, they'll make reliable self-driving vehicles within the next 10 years or so...
Any taxi service will rely on several elements which limit their service area:
1. Availability. How many vehicles are in an area, that can respond to dispatch?
2. Demand. Can't have too many idle vehicles scooting around and taking up space.
3. Service. Must establish depots where the vehicles can return for charging, cleaning and maintenance.
4. Support. Waymo Support is a tap away, and if a vehicle gets particularly jammed up, they will dispatch a technician in their own vehicle. Support can also monitor telemetry and push commands to give nudges (but cannot remotely drive a car).
So with the current model, I do not envision Waymo service areas expanding beyond the reach of their depots, or offering long-haul trips between urban centers.
Even then... I happen to live in Phoenix, and locally wouldn't mind self-driving, but I like to drive on road trips as well. So electric first and limited self-driving as an option for my home area would be really nice, at least for me specifically.
Of course, I don't have enough trust in self-driving to even use the things. I know a lot of people love them, and have a couple acquaintances working on self-driving stuff. Just me being a bit hesitant with new tech in general.
I have similar feelings on a lot of the smart home stuff, well justified after companies dropping, deprecating hardware or outright dying. Maybe in another decade we might see better options all around.
Self-driving being affordable enough for people to own a self-driving car is going to rely on either massive price reductions on LiDAR sensors (an order of magnitude or 2) or a Tesla-style approach without LiDAR working out.
I worked in the space 5ish years ago, and the LiDAR sensors were monstrously expensive. They were the most expensive component we put in the car; if I'm remembering right, a single LiDAR sensor cost more than the car itself and there were half a dozen or so of them on the car. I want to say it was ballpark $500k to build out one of the cars, with the majority of that being LiDAR sensors followed by the servers in the car.
Comma doesn't appear terribly close to cracking that based on their features. It's certainly a neat project, but I wouldn't put them much closer to cracking self-driving than someone just starting out today.
Your numbers are way off. Waymo reported 5 years ago their Jaguars cost between $120k-$150k. That was after reducing their LiDAR cost by 90% from $75,000 to ~$7500. Their newly announced 6th gen sensors are even cheaper.
LiDAR sensors are no longer expensive. We are seeing automakers including sub $1000 LiDARs. Granted they only offer L2 ADAS, but the rapid price cratering means it's only a matter of time for consumer-owned self driving cars.
That's likely still too expensive; sub-$1,000 would probably work. The currently deployed Waymos have 5 $7,500 (at cost) LiDAR sensors in them. That's $37.5k, almost exactly $10k short of the average new car sale price.
To be clear, I'm talking about the point where normal people get new cars that have self-driving. It's affordable for wealthy people now, and was available to the super wealthy before that. I think the whole package is going to have to get somewhere in the $5k-$10k range before it's "normal" to have a self-driving car and be able to afford the maintenance.
Even those super cheap LiDARs may be over $10k installed by the time you add the other sensors, compute, labor, etc. I have no idea what the lifetime of a LiDAR sensor is, so maintenance is a concern too.
I think we'll get there, but it'll be a while after robotaxis become a thing. The news seems to think LiDAR sensors will settle around $200, which would definitely be affordable.
> They were the most expensive component we put in the car; if I'm remembering right, a single LiDAR sensor cost more than the car itself and there were half a dozen or so of them on the car.
Some of that was Tesla/Elon propaganda when he was talking about being camera-only.
The posts around this regarding Kia are right that they are under the same "group" with Hyundai having a significant ownership stake.
The uptake is both have these problems and to be extremely wary of either either until they concretely show they can be trusted again. Having worked in several different software shops my experience has been software culture and security culture are extremely hard to change. It absolutely requires major restructuring in people and often major investments in reworking of software with the right priorities.
I won't be holding my breath. The most common solution (practically the only solution I've ever seen happen) is to put bandaids on and just keep reworking the big ball of mud.
Kia and Hyundai aren't actually the same company, but they're very closely related. Hyundai group (Hyundai automotive's parent company) acquired a significant stake in Kia when they went bankrupt during the Asian financial crisis. In exchange, Kia received significant percentages of many Hyundai group companies, including automotive. They share components and designs, but they're separate companies with their own teams, factories and marketing.
Seems like Hyundai own 33% of Kia, rather than it just being a brand under the same company like Lexus/Toyota. They share some things and compete on others.
It's a lot more complicated than that. They also have some common owners, and Kia owns parts of some Hyundai subsidiaries. Chaebol's are complicated beasts.
Hyundai and Kia were two separate companies that merged in 1998. Genesis is their premium brand, their Lexus equivalent. They claim to differentiate the three brands with: Hyundai: bold, Kia: sporty, Genesis: premium. Your guess is as good as mine what the difference between bold and sporty is.
Hyundai and Kia from some recent models years were missing the engine immobilizer resulting in many thefts. Maybe you're thinking of the vulnerability on Kia's web portal.
Why do we need a "programmer's perspective"? Exercise has nothing to do with programming or engineering specifically. Exercise (ideally, some form of exercise that strengthens muscles that atrophy while sitting) should be a thing for everyone who sits behind for 40+ hours a week.
You're overthinking it. It's a "programmer's perspective" because the author is a programmer. There isn't anything more to it, and as far as I can tell there's no insinuation that it is particularly special.
A cleaner walking 5 hours a day, and a programmer sitting 8 hours a day: that's 2 different perspectives to exercising.
Actually all forms of sports are always a personal perspective. Why ? Because we are all unique biologically and psychologically.
Your own perspective to sports changes over age and other factors (sickness, weight, private life ...etc). That's why you won't run 15 km tomorrow the way you did today.
Actually that’s a common misconception too - you will not get fit from having a physical job like cleaning you will just be tired. So I really appreciate that I can exercise both the brain at work and muscles at the gym. I see some people in the gym who do physical work or night shifts and it’s much harder for them to manage fatigue immunity and make gains (you need proper rest time to rejuvenate).
most people who sit at the desk don't have hours at a time sitting all tensed up and in a bad position because stuff is not going well and they get hyperfocused on running the code again and again, not that that happens often - but sometimes.
Its worse, they have to sit there using the half arsed buggy software that some programmer shat out in order to get promoted to L5 in the 2021 summer of CV driven development and hasn't been updated or fixed since.
I've used half-assed buggy software before, I've worked for the government and cases had to be logged, also I've worked as a data entry worker - and of course I live in Denmark, one of the most digitized countries in the world, where the government gets away with making you use the solutions they had developed with awful UX that - really, one time I got fined 5000 dollars and had a company closed down because I thought what a program was telling me was an obvious bug - but it wasn't - when I complained to the workers and the ministry that required this solution be used they said "Oh yeah, everyone has that problem"
In short I have used just as buggy crappy software as anyone, and I'm a programmer who has been hyperfocused for a day in all sorts of uncomfortable positions, for bonus points I have also worked intense physical labor in jobs where people died, just in case someone was going to play the manual labor card.
I have as yet encountered nothing worse than programming when it is going very badly. When it's going easy it's a piece of cake of course.
You might disagree, but the most important skill of a programmer is problem-solving skills/mindset and a rational approach. A programmer's perspective of many things will be different than the average person perspective that doesn't use those skills to make decisions.
He even wrote about that if you had the time to read the article before commenting:
As a software engineer I though, If I should "pick boring tech", maybe I should also "pick boring sports". So I decided to pick something boring. Something old, 1000s of years old. My rationale being that for older sports there would be more easily available knowledge, failure modes would be better known, and I would be able to better understand if I was doing it wrong.
Well, it might be useful because programmers are likely to spend even more time in front of a screen than the average person, and thus examples from other programmers might encourage them to exercise more. Other who sit for work find computers a necessary evil and prefer to do other things instead of working with them.
well we people just do all kind of stuff and that stuff never ends.. we feel like just few minutes but the reality is the time keep ticking and our eyes just stick to screens... and at that moment we dont even think about the health and body .
you’re more likely to click through if it applies to you “I usually don’t care about strength training but I am a programmer so this interests me! Let’s click through”
Which is much easier than fiddling around with crontab, in my experience.
Yes, you need a systemd service file and a systemd timer file. Creating both is a matter of ~30m. Then, you do `systemctl start` and you're good... As a great benefit, you can see the status of each timer, which is great for debugging quick problems, like permission issues/runtime errors/... when setting the timer up.
Well, it takes 30m the first time, when learning from scratch. When learning the arcane cron entry system, I'd guess it takes even longer than 30m, unless you have a simple time in mind (like "every minute" or something similar - "every second Monday" is definitely more complex to reason about in cron). Again, comparing not knowing systemd timer vs not knowing cron.
Sure, not saying you can just sit down and do it straight away. But the additional complexity of systemd, I think, makes it even more daunting. It’s much like how modern frontend has a million components. I understand there are or were reasons for all of it, but not everyone needs it, and it’s intimidating to a newcomer.
In comparison, cron (and *nix tooling in general) asks you to learn a small bit of that tool’s syntax, and that’s it. You can add complexity if you’d like – read the man pages – but for the most part, you can be productive very quickly.
> Regardless what’s going on, have at least one day per week when I don’t work at all (usually Saturday) and never pull all-nighters (no work after midnight);
Why are you working during the weekend and after work hours?
I've never used Ubuntu, but on Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed, I've never run into this issue (and I've had like 50+ tabs open for weeks since i don't really reboot my work laptop unless I have to)
Given a million years, I'd say the human race ending is more likely than the human race figuring out how to run Bloodborne 4 on a Steam Deck, given that in a couple years, Steam Deck 2 will outperform the original SD.
I suspect it'll be some kind of AI-powered assistant that will take self-driving vehicles to people, like [1]. You retrofit a device onto your car, which'll hook to the car's sensors (as well as bring it's own sensors, like camera) and get a better experience in self-driving. Still nowhere near reliable to just stop paying attention though.
Hopefully, they'll make reliable self-driving vehicles within the next 10 years or so...
[1] https://comma.ai/
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