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> To be honest I’m glad we are the ones getting out of that market first.

Who is "we" in that sentence?


The “YC/Now” timer starts (and sometimes flips) before the image actually loads.

Despite the abuse of quotation marks in the screenshot at the top of this link, Dario Amodei did not in fact say those words or any other words with the same meaning.


Yes, unfortunate that people keep perpetuating that misquote. What he actually said was "we are not far from the world—I think we’ll be there in three to six months—where AI is writing 90 percent of the code."

https://www.cfr.org/event/ceo-speaker-series-dario-amodei-an...


Design is about how it works (my phone went 100% —> 84% while reading this, almost certainly thanks to the snow)


It's a shame the author didn't test on mobile, but I think we should cut them some slack. It would be understandable for this particular article's audience to mostly be viewing on desktop.


And now my phone is hot


Would you protest someone who said “Ants want sugar”?


I always protest non sentients experiencing qualia /s


What’s your non-sarcastic answer?


I’m guessing the missing part probably ended with an internal rhyme for “man”. Maybe “missed the can” (she was aiming at)?


Could be, although not that particular completion. The second chorus was rare and I'm kind of unsure about "shot a man". Can't edit previous comment but should have just put it as:

  ? ? ?, ? ? ? ?, in nineteen thirty one. Hey!


I'm surprised that either:

1. Nobody at Waymo thought of this,

2. Somebody did think of it but it wasn't considered important enough to prioritize, or

3. They tried to prep the cars for this and yet they nonetheless failed so badly


Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.


What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a four-way stop.


In many versions of road rules (I don't know about California), having four vehicles stopped at an intersection without one of the four lanes having priority creates a dining philosophers deadlock, where all four vehicles are giving way to others.

Human drivers can use hand signals to resolve it, but self-driven vehicles may struggle, especially if all four lanes happens to have a self-driven vehicle arrive. Potentially if all vehicles are coordinated by the same company, they can centrally coordinate out-of-band to avoid the deadlock. It becomes even more complex if there are a mix of cars coordinated by different companies.


That only works if everyone else also treats it as a four way stop. Which they don't, unfortunately.


Yes, especially in a city like San Francisco where so many cultures come together: the Prius culture, the BMW culture, the Subaru culture, etc.


To be fair 'common sense' and 'many people have been shouting it' about technical matters have a long history of being hilariously wrong. Like claims that trains would cause organ damage to their riders from going at the blistering speed of either 35 or 50 mph, IIRC. Or about manned flight being impossible. Common sense would tell you that launching a bunch of broadcasting precise clocks into orbit wouldn't be usable to determine the distance, and yet here we are with GPS.


I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle something fits my criteria.

Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?


If you are driving a car on a public street and your solution to getting confused is stopping your car in the middle of the road wherever this confusion happens to arise, and sitting there for however long you are confused, you should not be driving a car in the first place. That includes AI cars.


In practice, no one treats it as a four-way stop, which makes it dangerous to treat it as one.


Drove through SF this evening. Most people treated it as a four-way stop! I was generally impressed.


But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.


> But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.

I think too many people talk past each other when they use the word common, especially when talking about car trips.

A blackout (doesn't have to be citywide) may not be periodic but it's certainly frequent with a frequency above 1 per year.

Many people say "common" meaning "frequent", and many people say "common" meaning "periodic".


Even among people who mean "common" as in "frequent", they aren't necessarily talking about the same frequency. That's why online communication is tricky!


I think your power company needs to be replaced if the frequency is above 1 per year.


It isn't? To me that's the main problem here, as this should be an exceptionally rare occurrence.


I think that statement is regional. I’ve never seen one.


Likely 2. Not something that will make it into in their kpis. No one is getting promoted for mitigating black swan events.


Actually that is specifically not true at Google, and I expect it applies to Waymo also.

People get promoted for running DiTR exercises and addressing the issues that are exposed.

Of course the problem is that you can't DiRT all the various Black Swans.


Clearly cars can navigate themselves, it's the lack of remote ops that halted everything


Exactly: When you're building software, it has lots of defects (and, thus, error logging). When it's mature, it should have few defects, and thus few error logs, and each one that remains is a bug that should be fixed.


I don't understand why you seem to think you're disagreeing with the article? If you're producing a lot of error logs because you have bugs that you need to fix then you aren't violating the rule that an error log should mean that something needs to be fixed.


I couldn’t agree more with the article. What made you think I disagreed?


You have an alert on what users actually care about, like the overall success rate. When it goes off, you check the WARNING log and metric dashboard and see that requests are timing out.


That is a lagging indicator. By the time you're alerted, you've already failed by letting users experience an issue.


Well, yes. If the cable falls out of the server (or there's a power outage, or a major DDoS attack, or whatever), your users are going to experience that before you are aware of it. Especially if it's in the middle of the night and you don't have an active night shift.

Expecting arbitrary services to be able to deal with absolutely any kind of failure in such a way that users never notice is deeply unrealistic.


It continues to become more realistic with the passing of time.


What alternative would you propose? Page the oncall whenever there's a single query timeout?


the alternative i propose is have deep understanding of your system before popping off with dumb one size fits all rules that don't make sense.


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