Autopilots do a lot more than that because flying an aircraft safely is a lot more complicated than turning a steering wheel left and right and accelerating or breaking.
Tesla’s Autopilot being unable to swap from one road to another makes is way less capable than a decades old civilian autopilots which will get you to any arbitrary location as long as you have fuel. Calling the current FSD Autopilot would be overstating its capabilities, but reasonably fitting.
>"Autopilots do a lot more than that because flying an aircraft safely is a lot more complicated than turning a steering wheel left and right and accelerating or breaking."
Can you elaborate? My very limited knowledge but of very real airplane autopilots in little Cessna and Pipers is that they are in fact far easier than cars - they are a simple control feedback loop that maintains altitude and heading, that's it. You can crash into ground, mountain, or other traffic quite cheerfully. I would not be surprised to find adaptive cruise in cars is far more complex of a system than basic aircraft "autopilot".
Recover from upsets is the big thing. Maintaining flight level, speed, and heading while upside down isn’t acceptable.
Levels of safety are another consideration, car autopilot’s don’t use multiple levels of redundancy on everything because they can stop without falling out of the sky.
That's still massively simpler than making a self-driving car.
It's trivially easy to fly a plane in straight level flight, to the extent that you don't actually need any automation at all to do it. You simply trim the aircraft to fly in the attitude you want and over a reasonable timescale it will do just that.
> It's trivially easy to fly a plane in straight level flight, to the extent that you don't actually need any automation at all to do it. You simply trim the aircraft to fly in the attitude
That seemingly shifts the difficulty from the autopilot to the airframe. But that’s not actually good enough, it doesn’t keep an aircraft flying when it’s missing a large chunk of wing for example. https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/1983-negev-mid-air-c...
Instead, you’re talking about the happy path and if we accept the happy path as enough there’s the weekend equivalents of self driving cars built using minimal effort, however being production worthy is about more than being occasionally useful.
Autopilot is difficult because you need to do several things well or people will defiantly die. Self driving cars are far more forgiving of occasional mistakes but again it’s the or people die bits that makes it difficult. Tesla isn’t actually ahead of the game, they are just willing to take more risks with their customers and the general public’s lives.
> Self driving cars are far more forgiving of occasional mistakes
I would say not, no.
It's almost impossible to crash a plane. There's nothing to hit except the ground, and you stay away from that unless you really really mean to get close.
It's very easy to crash a car, and if you do that most of the time you'll kill people outside the car, often quite a lot of them.
There are no production aircraft fitted with autopilots that can correct for breaking a wing off.
The hiring freeze stops everyone not just that one specific person. A 4 year pause on new researchers is meaningful even if this specific person wasn’t going to start a lab.
Good insurance is one aspect including long term disability coverage if you haven’t retired.
That’s the thing medical expenses when young are unlikely enough insurance is a viable strategy. Long term it’s worthwhile to move to a country with a less expensive medical system. You can move basically anywhere in retirement and be better off.
Again like I have been saying, good insurance is predicated on the open market and ACA being around and not being killed by Republicans. Even if they don’t outright kill it, they are trying to put in a “death spiral” where only sick people use it and insurance companies don’t want to participate.
LTC not discriminating against pre-existing conditions is also post ACA.
In a hypothetical universe with different laws people would make different decisions, like abandoning the US. But you’re asking about medical conditions which rarely apply and laws that don’t exist. That’s not a failing of FIRE for the vast majority of people.
Further FIRE doesn’t mean crap if you get something serious and die at 23, that’s just the reality of human existence.
People didn’t abandoned the US before the ACA was the law in 2011-2012. And if there were an influx of US citizens to foreign countries, I can guarantee you other countries wouldn’t be as welcoming.
There are plenty of conditions where the difference between life and death is being able to get health care
Some did. The US expat community has been quite large for decades.
Most people didn’t do FIRE style early retirement while dealing with pre existing medical conditions. There however was plenty of expats pre ACA who very much left the country for early retirement.
US healthcare is ruinously expensive but on average it’s not particularly good if you’re in the income bracket where 1/4 million over a few years is a serious issue.
There is absolutely no significant number of Americans who left without ties to other countries. I find it rich that Americans who leave the US call themselves “ex-pats” instead of “immigrants”
There’s over 1/2 million former Americans living in Canada or the UK which doesn’t require learning a foreign language. You really can’t make those kinds of sweeping statements about populations that large. Many Americans without any prior connections fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam war for example and then made a home there.
There's a difference in intention between ex-pat and immigrant. Ex-pat's tend to think of themselves as being wherever they are temporarily, but intending to return to their home country. Immigrants desire is to make wherever they are their new home country.
If you're saying that people who have permanently left the US call themselves ex-pats, that is news to me, and I can understand the confusion.
Because 100,000 years is rather extreme to have any kind of myth survive. Instead the ultra long spiral horn likely comes from narwhal as in people could hold and sell “unicorn” horns.
Woolly rhinoceroses (related to the Sumatran rhinoceros and a different species from the one from the link in the posting above) have continued to live in Europe and Asia until much more recently, i.e. until around ten thousand years ago (i.e. around the same time when humans were forced to switch from hunting to eating seeds, presumably because of the depletion of the big animals that made hunting profitable).
That is certainly recent enough for their memory to persist in myths.
As you say, the narwhal tooth is indeed the source used for most medieval illustrations of unicorns, but not the source of the legends about them.
That’s more plausible especially when you consider people would find skeletal remains long after the animal went extinct. However, Occam's razor points to African rhinos as a more reasonable source for keeping this myth alive vs thousands of years of oral tradition.
Even just goats seem useful here to explain the often depicted medieval unicorns beards compared to earlier sources.
Jobs you don’t notice or understand often look pointless. HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc.
In the end when jobs are done right they seem to disappear. We notice crappy software or a poorly done HVAC system not clean carpets.
Moving some function to the government doesn’t eliminate the need for it. Something would still need to tell the government what you’re paid unless you’re advocating for anarchy or communism.
Also, part of that etc is doing payroll so there’s some reason for you to show up at work every day.
I emailed HR and asked what to do to best ask for leave in case of a future event (serious illness with a family member, I just wanted to be one step ahead and make sure I did everything right even in the state of grief).
HR wouldn't tell me what would be the best and most correct course of action, the only thing that they said was that it was my responsibility as an employee to find out. Well, what did they think I was doing.
Side effect seems like an odd way to describe what’s going on when these functions are required for a company to operate.
Companies don’t survive if nobody is paid to show up every day or if they keep paying every single ex employee that ever worked for the company. It’s harder to attract new employees if you don’t offer competitive salaries or benefits. HR is a tiny part of most companies, but without that work being done the company would absolutely fail.
Similarly a specific ratio of flight attendants to passengers are required by the FAA in case of an emergency. Airlines use them for other stuff but they wouldn’t have nearly as many if the job was just passing out food.
> HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc.
Interesting on how the very example you give for "oh this job isn't really bullshit" ultimately ends up being useless for the business itself, and exists only as a result of regulation.
No, health insurance being provided by employers, or tax withholding aren't useful things for anyone, except for the state who now offloads its costs onto private businesses.
Months where you’re still required to be paying attention. Meanwhile 2 years ago Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot a level 3 system let you sit and watch a movie without paying attention to the road.
Personally that’s way more useful for me even if they didn’t let you turn it on at highway speeds.
They canceled it because of poor adoption rather than any technical issues.
Which if anything looks worse for Tesla long term. If luxury car owners aren’t willing to pay 200$/month for self driving then trying to up charge people buying used model 3 and Y’s after canceling the S and X looks dubious. Which means that 100$/month subscription likely loses them money vs an 8k purchase.
Mercedes system was pretty useless because you could only use it in very limited conditions (specific freeways, only following another car). Nobody wants to pay $200/month to use it for 5% of their driving. Tesla FSD drives for you end-to-end.
Most people have a rather consistent commute, so the Mercedes was a more like a 0% or 80% kind of thing. The issue was adding more roads wasn’t going to help, the underlying benefit to attention free driving just wasn’t that valuable even to customers who could use the system regularly.
They are looking to reintroduce it with a much higher top of 81MPH which might help, but agin my issue isn’t with the particular system but the underlying assumption of how much people value attention free driving.
They don’t do human in the loop at highway speeds.
Further the cars need to safely stop in an emergency without human intervention. There’s no way for the car to first notice a problem, then send a message to a call center which then routes to a human, and for that human to understand the situation, all fast enough to avoid a collision. Even 50ms is significant here let alone several seconds.
That's not an achievement. Even a non intelligent low to mid end compact SUV such as a 2024 Mazda CX30 has cruise control that can detect cars stopped ahead to slow down, stop if necessary, and continue when the car in front starts moving.
I'm just saying that "it avoids a collision" by not ramming into people or cars is table stakes and it makes us look incompetent if we tout it as a flagship feature.
You say that but we’ve had cars that can do what you describe for a decade and yet actual autonomous driving is still waiting.
Not failing due to a software or hardware issue is way more complicated than just usually working.
Avoids a collision is similarly way more difficult than just detecting a stopped car. What needs to happen when a car blows out a tire at speed isn’t just slam on the breaks for example. At scale cars need to adapt to the conditions and drive defensively not just watch what’s directly in front of them.
Where grok is at risk is not responding after they are notified of the issue. It’s trivial for grock to ban some keywords here and they aren’t, that’s a legal issue.
Sure Bob is instigating the harassment, then X.com is actually doing the harassment. Or at least, that's the case plaintiff's attorneys are surely going to be arguing.
I don't see how it's fundamentally any different to mailing someone harassing messages or distressing objects.
Sure, in this context the person who mails the item is the one instigating the harassment but it's the postal network that's facilitating it and actually performing the "last mile" of harassment.
The very first time it happened X is likely off the hook.
However notification plays a role here, there’s a bunch of things the post office does if someone tries to use them to do this regularly and you ask the post office to do something. The issue therefore is if people complain and then X does absolutely nothing while having a plethora of reasonable options to stop this harassment.
You may file PS Form 1500 at a local Post Office to prevent receipt of unwanted obscene materials in the mail or to stop receipt of "obscene" materials in the mail. The Post Office offers two programs to help you protect yourself (and your eligible minor children).
if grok never existed and X instead ran a black-box-implementation "press button receive CP" webapp, X would be legally culpable and liable each time a user pressed the button, for production plus distribution
the same is true if the webapp has a blank "type what you want I'll make it for you" field and the user types "CP" and the webapp makes it.
100 years ago, people with mental illness were assumed to be "possessed by demons" and were either institutionalized against their will, lobotomized, or both. Or just left to die.
People are still institutionalized against their will others are left to die on the streets, but not all mental illness is particularly severe.
Psychoanalysis while mostly quackery is ~135 years old providing an example where talking was considered a viable therapy not just locking people up or tossing out lobotomies left and right to anyone slightly abnormal.
So sure, 100 years ago there was quackery just as today, but “possessed by demons” wasn’t considered mainstream back then any more than it is today.
I think a lot of people still grow out of that phase. Like wanting to be like the Joker or taking a 'am I a sociopath' test online and finding your new edgelord persona only to find it deeply cringeworthy later.
Tesla’s Autopilot being unable to swap from one road to another makes is way less capable than a decades old civilian autopilots which will get you to any arbitrary location as long as you have fuel. Calling the current FSD Autopilot would be overstating its capabilities, but reasonably fitting.
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