There was a project at Google Chicago to do something like that, around 15 years ago. For some reason, it was never launched.

What's this notorious backdoor?

There was a variant of this that occurred later. By that time there might not have been a dependency on Jeff's workstation anymore, but the DB, or at least one of its replicas, was getting copied to... /gfs/cg/home/sanjay/ — I don't believe it was Jeff this time. At some point, there was a very long PCR in the Oregon datacenter, perhaps even the same one that happened a few weeks after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. With the CG cluster powered off for multiple days, a bunch of stuff broke, but in this case the issue might have been solved by dumping the data and/or reading it from elsewhere.

Isn't HK under PRC control? The GFW might not be there right now, but who knows what happens over the seven years during which new Pixels are supported.

On the other hand, see the complete mess that are the IPU6/7 camera chipsets and their Linux support.

Good christ this is my current work laptop. It...mostly doesn't work. Plug in a USB camera and it'll just go. Several drivers, userspace utilities and other daemons and sometimes gstreamer works, but does Zoom work? Who knows!

We've been getting less and less of those, though. And even then, it's just for a few days. Last year was a bit worse, but two years ago it was very, very mild, I think. Yay global warming?

I think the problem in NYC will be getting medallions, assuming that's what self driving cars will need.

There are already so many (too many?) taxis and car sharing drivers, after TLC's massive increases of the last few years. You can play a game, based on something I read about last year: stand at a corner and count all cars/trucks/for-hire. The first two combined are barely outnumbered by the last group. And the few times I checked, half of taxis and car sharing vehicles were empty. (Of course that's different at peak times or when it rains.)

Will Waymo be allowed to add as many vehicles as they want, like a new class of cars, or will they need to buy out medallions from drivers? The former might undo all the progress in traffic relief that was brought by congestion pricing.

I saw one of these on Chambers Street just yesterday afternoon, but it must have been in manual mode, of course.

Downtown Manhattan is the hardest-to-navigate area of NYC. I thought they would start somewhere in Midtown, where the grid is regular, streets wide, and demand for taxis still pretty high.

We already know that Waymo can handle regular American cities quite well. I woul expect them to spend most of their expensive human-supervised training and testing budget in the most unique locations, like downtown Manhattan.

Midtown on a busy Saturday or Sunday afternoon with a driverless vehicle would be... amusing. No one-including busses-give af about traffic rules.

The Waymo’s I see in Austin just circle the same path to pump the number of miles their fleet is training on. Unless they are on an actual ride.

Is Chambers St busy during the afternoons?

No, especially after congestion pricing, it doesn't get very busy. I assume the car was mapping the area and collecting background truth in general. Downtown and the financial district have interesting peculiarities, like the highly irregular grid and the patches of open air construction that have been in the middle of Greenwich St for many years, exposing tens of pipes and cables carrying who knows what.

I saw them in downtown Jersey city right across the Holland tunnel. I guess that's where they are parked when the human operator is off duty.

I would expect an "automatic, but human ready to intervene" mode for development and testing.

Unlike CRT screens, LCD ones from that time had usually a fixed resolution and wouldn't resize the image on the fly.

Why gorilla arm? This doesn't necessarily require lifting it. There's an old video around with Zuck doing gestures while walking and he starts with his arm mostly at rest. Even in the worst case, how is it more tiring than a phone?

Gorilla arm is caused by briefly pointing at things in front of you in a repetitive manner. The problem is that this is such an easy to code, universal gesture that it creeps into every interface.