Have we learned nothing from GIMP? No, no we have not.

Git?

uh oh

yeah, that's dangerous for me, this is the ONE that got me started

I trust this is getting attention and votes for the same reason I'm paying attention here -- to highlight the absolute mediocrity and blah-ness of this whole thing.

Like this was some deep insightful journey and not your entirely typical cheerleader corpo-speak.

1. Still hard not to think that this is a huge waste of time as opposed to something that's a little more like a public transport train-ish thing, i.e. integrate with established infrastructure.

2. No seriously, is the filipino driver thing confirmed? It really feels like they're trying to bury that.

"The Filipino driver thing" is simply that there's a manual override ability when this profoundly complex and marvelously novel technology gets trapped in edge cases.

Once it gets unstuck, it runs autonomously.

(2) I really don't understand why people are surprised that Waymo has fallbacks? The fact that they had a team ready to take over as necessary was well known. I've seen a bunch of comments about this and it seems like people are confused.

I think they're surprised to learn it's being done by a bunch of people on the other side of the world because they don't want to pay American wages.

I think you sort of fundamentally misunderstand the whole "steak vs sizzle" thing in capitalism?

The technology "feels" way less cool knowing that there are human backups, which would absolutely in turn make its percieved value go down.

As someone who half-learned to drive in Manila, the idea that they would use Filipino drivers as backups is ironic.

For context, my "driver's test" was going to the back of the office, and driving some old car backwards and forwards a few meters.

2. Yes, a Waymo exec described it in a Congressional hearing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46918043

They are not trying to "bury" remote assistance at all. They wrote a white paper about it in 2020 and a blog post about it in 2024.

Anyway you can think it's a waste but they're wasting their money, not yours. If you want a train in your town, go get one. Waymo has only spent, cumulatively, about 4 months of the budgets of American transit agencies. If you had all that money it wouldn't amount to anything.

"At all?"

Oh come on -- of course they are. That's precisely why you put it in a "white paper" and not, you know, ads.

I am very pro public transit. But there is still a place for cars (ideally mostly taxis). Going to more rural areas or when you need to carry more stuff. I think an ideal society would have both urban transit, inter-city transit and taxis for the other trips and going out into the country.

Filipino driver is false. Filipino guidance person is true.

The difference being?

They’re like a back-seat driver instead of a driver. They can say “take that turn”, or “go over there”, but they can’t operate the controls.

Walking, bikes and scooters.

again, this is not europe. we don't ride bikes, and we certainly don't walk.

Yeah, that’s the root of a lot of problems in the US.

But pedestrian infrastructure is a very simple problem to solve, even in the US. Just look at how the market responds to public transit projects in the US —- developers trip over themselves to build projects in response to the induced demand.

Likewise they also responded to the reduced demand as a result of ripping out public transit infrastructure in the 20th century. Which is why doughnut-shaped cities are common in the US.

My view on Waymo and autonomous taxis in general is they will eventually make public transit obsolete. Once there is a robotaxi available to pick up and drop off every passenger directly from a to b, the whole system could be made to be super efficient. It will take time to get there though.

But eventually I think we will get there. Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicles that are very efficient drivers (we could totally remove stoplights, for example. Only pedestrian crossing signs would be needed. Robo-vehicles could plug into a city-wide network that optimizes the routing of every vehicle.) At that point, public transit becomes subsidized robotaxi rides. Why take a subway when a car can take you door to door with an optimized route?

So in terms of why it isn’t a waste of time, it’s a step along the path towards this vision. We can’t flip a switch and make this tech exist, it will happen in gradual steps.

Automated taxis would still be stuck in traffic. Automation gets couple times in capacity, but the induced demand and extra cars looking for rides and parking will mean traffic.

Automation makes public transit better. There will be automated minibuses that are more flexible and frequent than today's buses. Automation also means that buses get a virtual bus lane. Taxis solve the last mile problem, by taking taxi to the station, riding train with thousands of people, and then taking more transit.

Also, we might discover the advantage of human powered transit. Ebikes are more efficient than cars and give health benefits. They will be much safer than automated cars. Could use the extra capacity for bike and bus lanes.

> There will be automated minibuses that are more flexible and frequent than today's buses.

In my sleepy metro area that has at least mid-tier respectable public transit (by US standards only), otherwise known as Portland, I think a lot of the routes would be better served by minibuses than full size. I wonder how the economics work out on that. Maybe dominated by labor? Tri-met drivers have a reputation of being paid handsomely as they gain seniority.

I'm also in Portland. In the US, bus costs are dominated by labor. It makes sense to use full size buses if paying for driver. For main routes, more automated buses would be best option. But there are cross town routes that should be served with minibuses. Especially ones feeding MAX stops.

If everyone in NYC tried to commute in a single-occupancy vehicle, there would be gridlock -- AVs or no.

> Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicles

I basically agree with your premise that public transit as it exists today will be rendered obsolete, but I think this point here is where your prediction hits a wall. I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road in my lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone alive today. Waymo is amazing, but still just at the beginning of the long tail.

> I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road in my lifetime

It basically happened for horses.

Did it? I did a cursory search and it seems like many places still permit horse-drawn carriages, just not on limited access highways. Sometimes with fairly onerous licensing and operational requirements (speed limits, poo management, etc), but still allowed.

I think that will be how human-driven cars are in 30(?) years. Rare, but allowed with restrictions.

Horses don't vote.

Neither do cars?

Drivers, however, absolutely do. And I do not see enough drivers voting away their own ability to drive any time soon.

A few years ago I would have (and did) considered the notion that manually programming was about to turn into a quaint relic and computers would be writing 90%+ of code preposterous. Once an alternative becomes obviously superior things can change very fast.

Right, I was pointing out that at some point there was probably a horse-rider constituency as there is a driver constituency today.

Is that:

- I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers from 100% of roads in the lifetime of anyone alive today.

or

- I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers from 10% of roads...

...or is there some other percentage to qualify this? I guess I wouldn't expect there to be a decree that makes it happen all at once for a country. Especially a large country like the U.S.. More like, some really dense city will decide to make a tiny core autonomous vehicles only, and then some other cities also do years later. And then maybe it expands to something larger than just the core after 5 or 10 years. And so on...

That is a fair point, since it is fairly safe to make "this absolute claim will never happen." And the person I replied to did say 'exclusively', which implies 100% elimination of human drivers. But still, I appreciate your nuance.

And in the spirit of that nuance, I will revise my statement slightly. I think it is entirely possible we will eliminate drivers on 10% of roads. We have rules that are analogous to that already with limited access highways. Though I would rate this still as unlikely, since such roads only make up just over 1% of all the roads in the US as it is. Not sure what the % is for other countries, probably less.

> some really dense city will decide to make a tiny core autonomous vehicles only

Agree 100%, this kind of thing I do expect to see happen. We already have exclusions for cars altogether in favor of pedestrians, so the precedent is set.

Only in lower density areas.

In high density regions, vehicles on surface roads can’t meet the passenger demand required. Even if you banned human drivers, the other human users introduce too much variability and delay (passengers loading and unloading, errant objects, cyclists and pedestrians, etc). Roll a dumpster in the street, and have a couple of jaywalkers, and the entire system crawls to a stop.

Controlled access is required to get even medium-high throughput. But these systems already exist, they are called personal rapid transit systems.

> Once there is a robotaxi available to pick up and drop off every passenger directly from a to b, the whole system could be made to be super efficient.

Fundamentally impossible. You're moving some 2 tons of mass in a 2x5m box on polluting rubber tires to move a single 100kg human.

I can always take whatever efficiency gain you've thought up and simply make the vehicle bigger, decreasing the cost and space used per passenger, and maybe even put it on rails, making it less polluting, and more energy efficient.

You can't engineer your way out of the laws of physics.

And don't even get me started on e-bikes.

Given, you know, Microsoft, I'd demand proof even if they said they did.

College instructor here. One thing I'm seeing here that's kind of funny is how badly so many of you are misunderstanding the value of "friction."

You see a policy, and your clever brains come up with a way to get around it, "proving" that the new methodology is not perfect and therefore not valuable.

So wrong. Come on people, think about it -- to an extent ALL WE DO is "friction." Any shift towards difficulty can be gained, but also nearly all of the time it provides a valuable differentiator in terms of motivation, etc.

You fundamentally misunderstand the value of friction. The digital hoop-jumping, as you call it, is a very very useful signal for motivation.

As a college instructor, one issue I find fascinating is the idea that I'm supposed to care strongly about this.

I do not. This is your problem, companies. Now, I am aware that I have to give out grades and so I walk through the motions of doing this to the extent expected. But my goal is to instruct and teach all students to the best of my abilities to try to get them all to be as educated/useful to society as possible. Sure, you can have my little assessment at the end if you like, but I work for the students, not for the companies.

>Sure, you can have my little assessment at the end if you like, but I work for the students, not for the companies.

Most of the students are here because they want to be in the companies, not for the joy of learning.

I didn't suggest you should care about company selection processes.

But I would have been pretty angry to have been educated in topics that did not turn out to be useful in industry. I deliberately selected courses that I figured would be the most useful in my career.

If I could go back in time and change what courses I took for my CS degree, it would be the exact opposite.

I wish I'd gone more into theoretical computer science, quantum computing, cryptography, and in general just hard math and proofs.

I took a few such courses and some things have genuinely been useful to know about at work but were also mind-expanding new concepts. I would never ever have picked up those on the job.

Not to say the practical stuff hasn't been useful too (it has) but I feel confident I could pick up a new language easily anytime. Not so sure about formal proofs.

Right, but that is the thing I pay attention to. Again, I want to hear from former students that I did right by them, not current companies asking for free screening.

As someone who interviews students for internships and grad programs I mostly agree, however I think you should listen to the best, hardest working students to hear if they're getting picked OK. I suspect the students with the best jobs are the ones who do the minimum classwork and spend their time doing leetcode and applying for jobs - I would think that is sub optimal for everyone including yourself.

The GPA and course schedule should be sufficient.