Hey, thanks! Another interesting piece of fiction to read, I appreciate the pointer!

Are you sure it's Stanislaw Lem? The story you're describing feels very similar to the story of the film Colossus: The Forbin Project, which is based on the book Colossus, by DF Jones.

dafuq's wrong with you, friendo?

[ Disclaimer: I'm a Tesla driver, since 2018, and have FSD on my car ]

Tesla's FSD and Waymo's approach are wildly different, enough so that you can't really compare them. The biggest two differences are: 1) Musk's cheap, so Teslas only use cameras to figure out what's going on around them; Waymos use cameras, ultrasonic sensors, radar, and lidar; 2) Waymos are only deployed on specific roads and streets that have been very heavily surveyed and Waymos have been trained on.

I trust Tesla's FSD about as far as I can throw it, and while it's been helpful and prevented an accident or two for me when I've been distracted, it's basically a glorified lane assist and cruise control. I'd not hesitate to fall asleep in the back of a driverless Waymo.

"But yeah like you said, never gonna happen. In most of the world there's a Caste system. And the Untouchables are at the top."

Boy howdy, have I got news for you!

Latest estimate I could find is that in San Francisco alone, Lyft gives something like 170,000 rides. Every day.

People forget that California is a huge market. There's a reason why when California changes its emission standards for vehicles, large automakers don't just go "well, fuck you, I'm not going to sell cars in California." It's a market that is extremely painful to walk away from, and virtually no major company has done that (two exceptions, before someone "well actually"s me: Firearms companies and insurance companies. But those market segments are meaningfully different -- insurance companies were simply seeing a bad market given fires and earthquakes, and California wants firearm companies to not do business in the state).

I'll acknowledge that Uber and Lyft did threaten to leave the state right before Proposition 22 was passed, giving them legal cover to continue to treat their employees unfairly. I suspect they'll threaten to do that again. They will not. I ain't losing sleep over that.

Yeah, that's true. And as a Lyft customer, that's a huge concern of mine. I live in the San Francisco area, so deep in California, and I worry that at some point Lyft will respond to this by moving all the cars and drivers they use to give people like me rides to Nevada.

The wait time for a driver to come from Nevada is going to suck

(generic gender) dude, have you even worked at a company before?

It's incredibly common to have people work at a place despite despising the CEO. I suspect that's actually the default. In the last 20 years, I've worked in exactly one place where I liked or admired the CEO, and a bunch of places, including my current employer, where I was fairly allergic to the CEO.

I hope tomorrow is a much better day to be you! You deserve a great day!

Oh man, this is so great. I saw the story title and I came here specifically to get the "I was into trek before it was woke" stupidity. I had not expected it to literally be the first post!

Agreed, I use scala almost exclusively, the same things that make a language great for humans also make it great for AI, a compiled, type safe secure language gives you guarantees that python/javascript crap cannot.

Dude, Robert, drink some raw milk, relax, and go back to filming the Real Food Show. Everything will be fine, friend. And if it's not, why not try to eat some roadkill bear? It'll undoubtedly make you feel better.

I like your perspective overall, but you're fundamentally wrong about the use of a driver's license during a traffic stop -- it's used to identify you, so they can also run you for warrants. It's not just about whether or not you're currently licensed to drive.

Nice, so now... I can sleep well with the confidence that my home directory can will get corrupted and my entire os might become useless just because. And that I'll have no warning about any of it until my entire os catches fire, because there aren't any meaningful logs anywhere.

Here for it.
This is the change we needed.

Okay, but, and I'm trying to read this charitably... aren't you just verifying the presence of a file in your photo directory?
What about the existence of any given file gives you the provenance you need to prove "reality?"