Vivarium didn’t get great reviews but I’m watching it and the thought of being around Jesse Eisenberg without being able to leave is truly terrifying to me
And then you add the suburbs in the mix? Girl I’m killing myself on night one
Cuckoo baby is a good idea but cuckoos are evil in a social context. I want to see that kid in school pushing classmates out of the window
The headline and above chart look alarming, but aren’t particularly useful. There’s no comparison either to total number of miles driven by driverless cars (the companies have that data but aren’t giving it up) or to accidents caused by humans. My best guess is that the uptick here is related in some way to the pending approval of driverless cars for 24-hour taxi service; if I ran Cruise or Waymo and knew that kind of make-or-break moment was coming for my business I’d be getting every bit of testing in I could before the deadline.
The more interesting throughline in the article is that maybe it’s the wrong question to be asking whether driverless cars get in more or fewer accidents than humans. Maybe robots just get into different accidents. Take these examples:
Two Cruise robotaxis drove up Nob Hill after a severe rainstorm in March when one of them got caught on a low-hanging Muni wire.
The driverless cars moved east on steep Clay Street, amid several downed trees and power lines, and drove through caution tape on Hyde Street. A Cruise car then got snarled in the overhead wire, dragging it upward the rest of the block. The cars stopped at Clay and Leavenworth after driving through another set of caution tape and sandwich boards.
Cruise personnel who retrieved the entangled car had to manually back it up a half block “to release the tension on the wire,” according to a San Francisco Fire Department report. […]
The Fire Department has tallied 44 incidents so far this year in which robotaxis entered active fire scenes, ran over fire hoses or blocked fire trucks from responding to emergency calls. That count is double the figure from last year’s informal count, which Nicholson said does not include all incidents.
Most humans will likely see and avoid a downed overhead line. Most humans, if they do get their car tangled in one, will not keep driving another whole block. There are exceptions, of course, but unusual and unpredictable road hazards like this are ideal robot traps, on top of being hard to perceive with the standard electronic sensor suite. Even barring the presence of caution tape, mushy-brained humans can just go “that looks weird” → “I’m going to go around the block,” or “something seems off” → “I’m going to get out of my car and figure out what’s going on.” That’s not how a robot thinks.
Similarly, humans probably enter active fire scenes on a semi-regular basis due to distracted driving or just plain obduracy. They certainly don’t do it 44 times in a single city in six months, or however many thousand times that number would be if you scaled it to the number of miles driven by humans. Anywhere a ladder truck tried to park would turn instantly into a demolition derby! It’s not just that humans are trained to see and avoid fire trucks; again, you can near-instantly recognise and assess that something is going on here without needing to make a clear identification.
So maybe Cruise and Waymo aren’t lying when they say driverless cars are safer than humans - so long as they define “safe” to mean avoiding a specific type of incident, which is pedestrian and vehicle collisions. That’s exactly what they’ve done in their PR and media outreach:
Their driverless taxis, the companies say, have lower collision rates than human drivers and public transit. Their self-driving cars, they argue, help improve traffic safety in San Francisco because their cars are programmed to follow posted speed limits.
And look, following the speed limit is great - even if someone does get hit, they’re less likely to die. Avoiding collisions is great, even when it snarls up traffic (a person getting hit by a car has a tendency to snarl up traffic regardless). But what kinds of mischief can a robot automobile get up to without hitting anybody and while traveling under 25 mph? We may be only scratching the surface of the answers to that question.
found out one of my friends had been using some obscure rar opening program for years and i googled it and it looks like something off of law and order
