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Bad news for backers and supporters of Ron DeSantis – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 11,685
edited January 8 in General
Bad news for backers and supporters of Ron DeSantis – politicalbetting.com

Yikes'Ryan Tyson, Mr. DeSantis’s longtime pollster and one of his closest advisers, has privately said to multiple people that they are now at the point in the campaign where they need to “make the patient comfortable,” a phrase evoking hospice care.' -The New York Times pic.twitter.com/4aQ9CgR07x

Read the full story here

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    IF you are Ron DeSantis, turns out it really IS a small world after all.
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    Oh dear. What a shame. Never mind.
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    OT I've run out of Christmas leftovers so it is back to Deliveroo.
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    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249
    Might be bad news for Haley, assuming most of his backers would probably switch to Trump rather than her.
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    The header links to a paywalled story which I cannot read. Obviously that will not stop me commenting on it, if only to say how remarkable has been RdS's fall in the past year since his 2022 landslide victory in Florida on a poor night for Republicans nationally.
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    ydoethur said:

    Might be bad news for Haley, assuming most of his backers would probably switch to Trump rather than her.

    I think her main problem is to become the "alternative to Trump" candidate and to do that she needs DeSantis out or at least marginalized. Presumably even if he drops out there will still be Ramaswamy in the race siphoning off some of the edgelord vote.
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    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249

    ydoethur said:

    Might be bad news for Haley, assuming most of his backers would probably switch to Trump rather than her.

    I think her main problem is to become the "alternative to Trump" candidate and to do that she needs DeSantis out or at least marginalized. Presumably even if he drops out there will still be Ramaswamy in the race siphoning off some of the edgelord vote.
    She needs to be reasonably close to him for that. The more votes other candidates siphon away from him so she can, the better for her.
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    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,658
    edited December 2023

    ydoethur said:

    Might be bad news for Haley, assuming most of his backers would probably switch to Trump rather than her.

    I think her main problem is to become the "alternative to Trump" candidate and to do that she needs DeSantis out or at least marginalized. Presumably even if he drops out there will still be Ramaswamy in the race siphoning off some of the edgelord vote.
    I thought Ramaswamy was close to giving up too.
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    SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,898
    edited December 2023
    I was amazed that he stood in the first place, when Trump was going to be so clearly the favourite. He could have run in 2028 and been a front-runner following a successful conclusion to his term-limited role in Florida.

    Having decided to stand, he then surrounded himself with a bunch of total idiots as advisors, allowed his own team to be very aggressive online against mild criticism from natural supporters, and let a nothing story about his funny shoes run for a fortnight. Quite the fall from grace.

    It will be interesting to see how the first few primaries run, with most of the money having already dried up apart from Trump and Haley.
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    Ron DeSantis is in a distant second place behind Donald Trump in Iowa, according to the polls, but only third or fourth in New Hampshire. If the DeSantis team now accepts it is all over, then RDS will want to maximise his chances in 2028 when neither Trump nor Biden can run again (whoever wins this time). To do that, he will presumably take second in Iowa, call that a win, and drop out before New Hampshire. If DeSantis endorses Trump, he can then expect to inherit MAGA support for 2028. Trump can then turn his fire onto Nikki Haley, hopefully taking out DeSantis' main rival next time.

    Hmm. Does this open a path for Vivek Ramaswamy if Trump is disqualified from standing?
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    Gerald Ronson awarded CBE for philanthropy despite past fraud conviction
    https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1850236/gerald-ronson-cbe-philanthropy-fraud-conviction

    Erm, I think the Express has misread the honours list and Ronson is being knighted. He already has a CBE.
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    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Might be bad news for Haley, assuming most of his backers would probably switch to Trump rather than her.

    I think her main problem is to become the "alternative to Trump" candidate and to do that she needs DeSantis out or at least marginalized. Presumably even if he drops out there will still be Ramaswamy in the race siphoning off some of the edgelord vote.
    I thought Ramaswamy was close to giving up too.
    Is he? I think the bid is mainly a book promotion tour, I don't see why he wouldn't take it all over the country. I think it's harder for DeSantis firstly because he has a reputation to lose, and secondly because he's done what Kamala Harris did and created a big campaign team with serious bills to pay on the assumption of a seriously competitive run, so if the money has dried up he's going to have to shut it down.
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    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 39,031
    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.
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    Tony Bloom has an MBE after Brighton tonked Spurs this week. The King must be another Arsenal fan like Jeremy Corbyn. For services to football betting in the murky Far East markets.
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    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It leaves them without mush room to manoeuvre.
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    SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,898
    edited December 2023

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
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    Sajid Javed has been knighted. Sir The Saj. It is perhaps an acknowledgement that his career at the top of politics is over. In truth, it probably died when Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson sacked him for standing up for his SpAds. He has already announced he will not seek re-election next year.
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    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,679
    Nice to see Shirley Bassey in the list. A remarkable voice, remarkable life.

    My father-in-law will be choking on his porridge this morning when he hears that neighbouring farmer* Michael Eavis has been knighted.

    (*Not a very good one according to FIL - 'never got the best value from his land'. I beg to differ.))
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    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,679
    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    Senior car execs have been duped by the techies - could it be they are too used to being chauffeured around to appreciate the complexities of driving?
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    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,679

    Sajid Javed has been knighted. Sir The Saj. It is perhaps an acknowledgement that his career at the top of politics is over. In truth, it probably died when Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson sacked him for standing up for his SpAds. He has already announced he will not seek re-election next year.

    Javed must wake up every day thinking 'I could have been PM if I hadn't flounced on a point of principle'.
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    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 39,031
    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    To give some context, the Airbus A380 program cost $25 billion over 15 years - and that developed the world's largest civil airliner. Boeing's troubled 787 program has cost $32 billion.

    The amount spent on self-driving cars has been staggering, with very little to show for it - especially for those (like Google) who went for the all-or-nothing approach.

    How long will investor's money continue to be thrown at it?
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    OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,997

    Sajid Javed has been knighted. Sir The Saj. It is perhaps an acknowledgement that his career at the top of politics is over. In truth, it probably died when Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson sacked him for standing up for his SpAds. He has already announced he will not seek re-election next year.

    Javed must wake up every day thinking 'I could have been PM if I hadn't flounced on a point of principle'.
    Having principles is why he got on in politics, but came to grief when high in the modern Conservative Party.
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    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 39,031

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    Senior car execs have been duped by the techies - could it be they are too used to being chauffeured around to appreciate the complexities of driving?
    I think that depends on the company. Musk has been lying about the capabilities of Tesla's system in order to ramp up Tesla's share price. Google went for an all-or-bust approach - which is to be commended IMO.

    Some other manufacturers have taken more iterative approaches; developing things like good and reliable adaptative cruise control, lane detection and other systems, as driver aids, rather than going for full autonomy out of the box.

    My belief has always been that the iterative approach would win over the big-bang approach of Tesla and Google.
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    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
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    DavidLDavidL Posts: 51,307
    edited December 2023
    Interesting piece on de Santis's campaign and the problems he is having: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/12/27/two_minute_warning_on_the_road_in_iowa_with_ron_desantis__150246.html#2

    One thing on which there seems to be a consensus is that rather than turning off supporters Trump is gaining from the various legal attacks on him. It is depriving everyone else on the GOP side of oxygen, it has allowed him to remain above the fray within the party rather than debating and it is making a lot of people angry that an "unelected official" thinks she can determine whether or not the choice of a major party is on the ballot or not.

    This has, ironically, created a surge for Trump which is more significant than any slow decline in Biden's numbers but Biden is particularly struggling with black males and Hispanics, both essential parts of his 2020 coalition.
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    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,679
    ydoethur said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It leaves them without mush room to manoeuvre.
    Have they no morels?
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    mwadamsmwadams Posts: 3,140

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    I hold my hands up and say I was completely wrong about autonomous vehicles. In my defence I had not yet realised the extent to which the Valley has been overrun by billionaire fantasists.
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    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249

    Sajid Javed has been knighted. Sir The Saj. It is perhaps an acknowledgement that his career at the top of politics is over. In truth, it probably died when Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson sacked him for standing up for his SpAds. He has already announced he will not seek re-election next year.

    Javed must wake up every day thinking 'I could have been PM if I hadn't flounced on a point of principle'.
    And he might also think 'I would have achieved it only by being a tool of Dominic Cummings, a man so stupid he drives cars 60 miles to test his eyesight.'
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    DavidL said:

    Interesting piece on de Santis's campaign and the problems he is having: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/12/27/two_minute_warning_on_the_road_in_iowa_with_ron_desantis__150246.html#2

    One thing on which there seems to be a consensus is that rather than turning off supporters Trump is gaining from the various legal attacks on him. It is depriving everyone else on the GOP side of oxygen, it has allowed him to remain above the fray within the party rather than debating and it is making a lot of people angry that an "unelected official" thinks she can determine whether or not the choice of a major party is on the ballot or not.

    This has, ironically, created a surge for Trump which is more significant than any slow decline in Biden's numbers but Biden is particularly struggling with black males and Hispanics, both essential parts of his 2016 coalition.

    I feel like this kind of thing must make it hard to poll though. If you think your guy is being unfairly treated, and you're offered the chance to support him at no cost by naming him in an opinion poll, you'd probably take it. Does that same dynamic work in an actual caucus or primary? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, I have no idea.
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    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249

    ydoethur said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It leaves them without mush room to manoeuvre.
    Have they no morels?
    The key point is, they haven't cracked it.
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    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    Does that count all money spent to develop facilities we have in cars today to aid drivers or improve safety?

    Or just those that aren't yet deployed?

    Because the former really ought to be considered separately from the latter.

    My new car isn't "autonomous" but it has many features that would have been considered incredible when my prior car was purchased just over a decade ago. Adaptive cruise control is a great pleasure to drive with. Automatic braking (besides within adaptive cruise control) isn't something I've had to use yet but could potentially save someone's life.

    Other people's cars have more that mine lacks like self-parking, or lane control etc

    If you're counting all those developments within the £100bn then that's rather misleading. If you're counting the "all or nothing" research then its completely different.
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    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 39,031

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    Not all of it will have been badly spent. But they have vastly overspent for the tech they've got out of it, if the big-bang approach fails.

    The Waymo testing in Phoenix is interesting, although they operate in heavily geofenced areas, and it'd be interesting to know the unit costs of the cars, given the sensors on them.
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    DavidLDavidL Posts: 51,307

    DavidL said:

    Interesting piece on de Santis's campaign and the problems he is having: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/12/27/two_minute_warning_on_the_road_in_iowa_with_ron_desantis__150246.html#2

    One thing on which there seems to be a consensus is that rather than turning off supporters Trump is gaining from the various legal attacks on him. It is depriving everyone else on the GOP side of oxygen, it has allowed him to remain above the fray within the party rather than debating and it is making a lot of people angry that an "unelected official" thinks she can determine whether or not the choice of a major party is on the ballot or not.

    This has, ironically, created a surge for Trump which is more significant than any slow decline in Biden's numbers but Biden is particularly struggling with black males and Hispanics, both essential parts of his 2016 coalition.

    I feel like this kind of thing must make it hard to poll though. If you think your guy is being unfairly treated, and you're offered the chance to support him at no cost by naming him in an opinion poll, you'd probably take it. Does that same dynamic work in an actual caucus or primary? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, I have no idea.
    Yes, there is more uncertainty than normal. It's one thing to think that the people have the right to choose and another to choose Trump who is clearly not the man he was, for good or ill, in 2016.

    It's also something we have talked about quite a lot on here of late.
    Biden's record on the economy is world leading but most Americans think the economy is a mess.
    Biden's record on inflation is also very good but Americans think it isn't.
    Biden's record on crime is incredible but most Americans think law and order is breaking down.
    Even Biden's support for Israel and Ukraine is being questioned.

    The picture painted in the US media is overwhelmingly and unfairly negative and seems to be turning incumbency into a disadvantage rather than a strength. Can this continue to the election?
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    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    Not all of it will have been badly spent. But they have vastly overspent for the tech they've got out of it, if the big-bang approach fails.

    The Waymo testing in Phoenix is interesting, although they operate in heavily geofenced areas, and it'd be interesting to know the unit costs of the cars, given the sensors on them.
    I mean obviously if you spend money to try to do something and it turns out that you can't do it, that money was badly spent. But we don't really have a "they can't do it" result at this point, especially since they're actually doing it, albeit in the most favourable circumstances they could find.

    And I don't think the unit cost of those cars is a very interesting thing to know. You wouldn't expect it to be profitable until they scale it up, the costs will come down when if and they do that, and costs will come down on their own over time, which they have as they won't be scaling it up for a while.
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    SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,898

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    Senior car execs have been duped by the techies - could it be they are too used to being chauffeured around to appreciate the complexities of driving?
    It’s a combination of a decade of cheap money, and the (utopian tech bro) idea that one company would end up dominating the space, where in future millions of automated taxis would replace traditional private transport. The likes of Google, Apple, and Tesla, had access to plenty of VC money, and GM felt they had to get either involved or miss out.

    The most difficult bit, as we’ve discussed on here many times before, is where the technology can do most of the driving, but can and will disengage itself at short notice, meaning that the human needs to stay awake and alert at all times - something which humans find quite difficult, even the professional test drivers.

    Meanwhile, that old favourite of new car technology, the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, has what looks to be the best system deployed so far in the new 2024 model, with very little hype. It’s a “Level 3” system up to 40mph, meaning the car drives itself and Mercedes are insured for any damage it causes. https://carbuzz.com/news/mercedes-announces-first-level-3-self-driving-for-s-class-and-eqs-sedan You can’t use it to drop the kids at school or collect you from the pub yet though, which is what most people think a self-driving car should be able to do, a taxi without the human driver.
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    RattersRatters Posts: 780

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
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    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,679
    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    See also narrow country lanes with passing places, prone to flooding, tractors, escaped livestock, etc...
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    EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,906
    The schooner is the perfect volume of beer. Any party that puts schoonerification in a manifesto will have my vote.
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    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    For the sake of argument if it turned out that it was impossible to make a robot taxi work in London, but it did work in lots of other towns and cities around the world, that would still be a massive saver of money and lives. Even if you were limited to particular routes within those towns and cities, that would *still* be a massive saver of money and lives.
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    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,679
    ydoethur said:

    Sajid Javed has been knighted. Sir The Saj. It is perhaps an acknowledgement that his career at the top of politics is over. In truth, it probably died when Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson sacked him for standing up for his SpAds. He has already announced he will not seek re-election next year.

    Javed must wake up every day thinking 'I could have been PM if I hadn't flounced on a point of principle'.
    And he might also think 'I would have achieved it only by being a tool of Dominic Cummings, a man so stupid he drives cars 60 miles to test his eyesight.'
    Er... is Sunak a tool of Cummings?
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    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249

    ydoethur said:

    Sajid Javed has been knighted. Sir The Saj. It is perhaps an acknowledgement that his career at the top of politics is over. In truth, it probably died when Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson sacked him for standing up for his SpAds. He has already announced he will not seek re-election next year.

    Javed must wake up every day thinking 'I could have been PM if I hadn't flounced on a point of principle'.
    And he might also think 'I would have achieved it only by being a tool of Dominic Cummings, a man so stupid he drives cars 60 miles to test his eyesight.'
    Er... is Sunak a tool of Cummings?
    In some key respects it would seem yes.

    This may be why things keep going wrong for him. Even if Cummings is as bright as he believes (which I'm pretty sure he isn't) he has truly shocking judgement.
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,679
    Eabhal said:

    The schooner is the perfect volume of beer. Any party that puts schoonerification in a manifesto will have my vote.

    You might as well say a glass is the perfect volume of wine, such is the range of schooner sizes.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schooner_(glass)
  • Options
    EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,906
    edited December 2023
    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    Dooring* is the number 1 cause of serious injuries for cyclists; any car AI that helps to prevent that is very welcome.

    *Why sensible cyclists ride at least a metre to the right of parked cars
  • Options
    EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,906

    Eabhal said:

    The schooner is the perfect volume of beer. Any party that puts schoonerification in a manifesto will have my vote.

    You might as well say a glass is the perfect volume of wine, such is the range of schooner sizes.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schooner_(glass)
    The Aussie one. That also varies...
  • Options
    dr_spyndr_spyn Posts: 11,288
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPVKOMZh2RY

    GCMG: Justin Welby would have had a shown HMK had a sense of humour.
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,679
    edited December 2023
    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    Sajid Javed has been knighted. Sir The Saj. It is perhaps an acknowledgement that his career at the top of politics is over. In truth, it probably died when Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson sacked him for standing up for his SpAds. He has already announced he will not seek re-election next year.

    Javed must wake up every day thinking 'I could have been PM if I hadn't flounced on a point of principle'.
    And he might also think 'I would have achieved it only by being a tool of Dominic Cummings, a man so stupid he drives cars 60 miles to test his eyesight.'
    Er... is Sunak a tool of Cummings?
    In some key respects it would seem yes.

    This may be why things keep going wrong for him. Even if Cummings is as bright as he believes (which I'm pretty sure he isn't) he has truly shocking judgement.
    Now you're beginning to convince me that Sunak is following Cummings' script.
  • Options
    NigelbNigelb Posts: 62,626
    .

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    Admitted it’s a highly constrained use case, but the data suggests quite a high level of safety for them.
    https://www.eetimes.com/studies-claim-software-drives-more-safely-than-humans/

    I haven’t seen any similarly robust studies for anyone else.
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,679

    Mr. Sandpit, I maintain that self-driving cars are far more challenging than they seem for psychological rather than technological reasons.

    Doing an activity, like driving, for an hour requires a mostly low level but persistent level of concentration. Doing nothing for an hour while maintaining the alertness to be ready to act within seconds to avert a dangerous, potentially life-threatening, situation is far harder.

    That may be why I find it so tiring being a passenger when Mrs P. is driving.

    (Joking obvs - just in case she's reading!)
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,679
    edited December 2023
    Eabhal said:

    Eabhal said:

    The schooner is the perfect volume of beer. Any party that puts schoonerification in a manifesto will have my vote.

    You might as well say a glass is the perfect volume of wine, such is the range of schooner sizes.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schooner_(glass)
    The Aussie one. That also varies...
    (size of glass): A schooner is one of the larger measures, except in South Australia, where it is smaller...

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schooner#
  • Options
    algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,541

    Sajid Javed has been knighted. Sir The Saj. It is perhaps an acknowledgement that his career at the top of politics is over. In truth, it probably died when Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson sacked him for standing up for his SpAds. He has already announced he will not seek re-election next year.

    Javed must wake up every day thinking 'I could have been PM if I hadn't flounced on a point of principle'.
    Having principles is why he got on in politics, but came to grief when high in the modern Conservative Party.
    Not quite. It's more general than the Tories. Starmer is likely to be the next PM. he has thrown principle out of the window and has played politics with brilliance. This includes a series of about turns done so well that several million Tories intend to vote for the man who not long ago was the key player in support of the 'friend of Hamas' and quite a few Brexit voters intend to vote for 'Ref2 man'.

    Thus far it is genius. It is how, in politics, to get things done.

    Compare his fate with principled people. Rory, Saj, Grieve, Gauke, and lots of others.
  • Options
    SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,898

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    It’s going to be much easier to get these things to work in cities with a 21st century layout, than in older, more random and more congested places. Phoenix, with long and straight roads, and most intersections under traffic light control, should be a lot more straightforward than San Francisco,
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249
    algarkirk said:

    Sajid Javed has been knighted. Sir The Saj. It is perhaps an acknowledgement that his career at the top of politics is over. In truth, it probably died when Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson sacked him for standing up for his SpAds. He has already announced he will not seek re-election next year.

    Javed must wake up every day thinking 'I could have been PM if I hadn't flounced on a point of principle'.
    Having principles is why he got on in politics, but came to grief when high in the modern Conservative Party.
    Not quite. It's more general than the Tories. Starmer is likely to be the next PM. he has thrown principle out of the window and has played politics with brilliance. This includes a series of about turns done so well that several million Tories intend to vote for the man who not long ago was the key player in support of the 'friend of Hamas' and quite a few Brexit voters intend to vote for 'Ref2 man'.

    Thus far it is genius. It is how, in politics, to get things done.

    Compare his fate with principled people. Rory, Saj, Grieve, Gauke, and lots of others.
    He was that rarest of things in politics - a man who put a point of principle above every other consideration, yet led his party in the House of Commons. George Lansbury was about as unlike him as one can conceive, but he is the only person whose career might suggest a parallel.

    Robert Blake on Lord George Bentinck.
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,679
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    It’s going to be much easier to get these things to work in cities with a 21st century layout, than in older, more random and more congested places. Phoenix, with long and straight roads, and most intersections under traffic light control, should be a lot more straightforward than San Francisco,
    ...99% of the towns and cities in the world.
  • Options
    Nigelb said:

    .

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    Admitted it’s a highly constrained use case, but the data suggests quite a high level of safety for them.
    https://www.eetimes.com/studies-claim-software-drives-more-safely-than-humans/

    I haven’t seen any similarly robust studies for anyone else.
    I don't see how this claim can be made by any firm yet. The idea that drivers aren't safe is one of the greatest myths in all of this.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-after-100-billion-self-driving-cars-are-going-nowhere (emphasis added)
    One of the industry’s favorite maxims is that humans are terrible drivers. This may seem intuitive to anyone who’s taken the Cross Bronx Expressway home during rush hour, but it’s not even close to true. Throw a top-of-the-line robot at any difficult driving task, and you’ll be lucky if the robot lasts a few seconds before crapping out.

    “Humans are really, really good drivers—absurdly good,” Hotz says. Traffic deaths are rare, amounting to one person for every 100 million miles or so driven in the US, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Even that number makes people seem less capable than they actually are. Fatal accidents are largely caused by reckless behavior—speeding, drunks, texters, and people who fall asleep at the wheel. As a group, school bus drivers are involved in one fatal crash roughly every 500 million miles. Although most of the accidents reported by self-driving cars have been minor, the data suggest that autonomous cars have been involved in accidents more frequently than human-driven ones, with rear-end collisions being especially common. “The problem is that there isn’t any test to know if a driverless car is safe to operate,” says Ramsey, the Gartner analyst. “It’s mostly just anecdotal.”

    Waymo, the market leader, said last year that it had driven more than 20 million miles over about a decade. That means its cars would have to drive an additional 25 times their total before we’d be able to say, with even a vague sense of certainty, that they cause fewer deaths than bus drivers. The comparison is likely skewed further because the company has done much of its testing in sunny California and Arizona.
  • Options
    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,787
    edited December 2023

    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    See also narrow country lanes with passing places, prone to flooding, tractors, escaped livestock, etc...
    Cattle herds in the Somerset levels being taken to pasture; the need to be careful when sheep (too often suicidally panic-prone) are grazing on the verge of unfenced southern Scottish hill roads; cattle grids on ditto (how does the robot open the gate?), ...
  • Options
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    It’s going to be much easier to get these things to work in cities with a 21st century layout, than in older, more random and more congested places. Phoenix, with long and straight roads, and most intersections under traffic light control, should be a lot more straightforward than San Francisco,
    Right, that's why Waymo started with Phoenix. (As opposed to Uber and Cruise who went with "let's just do it and be legends".) But they just started doing San Francisco, let's see how they get on.
  • Options
    PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,929
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    It’s going to be much easier to get these things to work in cities with a 21st century layout, than in older, more random and more congested places. Phoenix, with long and straight roads, and most intersections under traffic light control, should be a lot more straightforward than San Francisco,
    Why have they not chosen north Devon for autonomous car testing ?
  • Options
    isamisam Posts: 40,930
    edited December 2023
    Is the modern world how Alexandra Kollantai imagined because we have accepted a lot of communism’s ideas, or was it going to be like this anyway under capitalism?

    Labours plans for childcare, announced this week, reminded me of ‘The state is responsible for the upbringing of children’ section.

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249
    Pulpstar said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    It’s going to be much easier to get these things to work in cities with a 21st century layout, than in older, more random and more congested places. Phoenix, with long and straight roads, and most intersections under traffic light control, should be a lot more straightforward than San Francisco,
    Why have they not chosen north Devon for autonomous car testing ?
    I'll believe autonomous driving is a thing when one negotiates the M6 at 9.30 on a Monday morning.
  • Options
    EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,906
    Pulpstar said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    It’s going to be much easier to get these things to work in cities with a 21st century layout, than in older, more random and more congested places. Phoenix, with long and straight roads, and most intersections under traffic light control, should be a lot more straightforward than San Francisco,
    Why have they not chosen north Devon for autonomous car testing ?
    Or North Wales, adhering strictly to the 20mph limits.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249
    Eabhal said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    It’s going to be much easier to get these things to work in cities with a 21st century layout, than in older, more random and more congested places. Phoenix, with long and straight roads, and most intersections under traffic light control, should be a lot more straightforward than San Francisco,
    Why have they not chosen north Devon for autonomous car testing ?
    Or North Wales, adhering strictly to the 20mph limits.
    That would certainly cause many rear end accidents!
  • Options
    Carnyx said:

    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    See also narrow country lanes with passing places, prone to flooding, tractors, escaped livestock, etc...
    Cattle herds in the Somerset levels being taken to pasture; the need to be careful when sheep (too often suicidally panic-prone) are grazing on the verge of unfenced southern Scottish hill roads; cattle grids on ditto (how does the robot open the gate?), ...
    Erm. I thought the whole point of driverless cars was that they would carry passengers. There is no point having cars driving round with no one in them.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249
    Speaking of which, another underage motorcyclist killed in Wales:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-67833766
  • Options
    SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,625
    We'll have to teach these self driving cars a few expletives before they take to the streets of Bradford.

    Also worth noting that the same crowd who are pouring money into self driving cars are doing the same with Direct Air Capture.
  • Options
    pm215pm215 Posts: 936

    Carnyx said:

    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    See also narrow country lanes with passing places, prone to flooding, tractors, escaped livestock, etc...
    Cattle herds in the Somerset levels being taken to pasture; the need to be careful when sheep (too often suicidally panic-prone) are grazing on the verge of unfenced southern Scottish hill roads; cattle grids on ditto (how does the robot open the gate?), ...
    Erm. I thought the whole point of driverless cars was that they would carry passengers. There is no point having cars driving round with no one in them.
    Some use cases will involve driving empty sometimes -- for example a robo taxi driving out to pick up a fare, or the family car driving back to the house after dropping the kids off at school. Though how likely such trips are to involve remote Scottish rural cattle grid roads is less clear.
  • Options
    spudgfshspudgfsh Posts: 1,308
    pm215 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    See also narrow country lanes with passing places, prone to flooding, tractors, escaped livestock, etc...
    Cattle herds in the Somerset levels being taken to pasture; the need to be careful when sheep (too often suicidally panic-prone) are grazing on the verge of unfenced southern Scottish hill roads; cattle grids on ditto (how does the robot open the gate?), ...
    Erm. I thought the whole point of driverless cars was that they would carry passengers. There is no point having cars driving round with no one in them.
    Some use cases will involve driving empty sometimes -- for example a robo taxi driving out to pick up a fare, or the family car driving back to the house after dropping the kids off at school. Though how likely such trips are to involve remote Scottish rural cattle grid roads is less clear.
    those are the cases that need special attention to. driving across London empty would be one of the most common journeys but would also be one of the most tested so is less likely to go wrong. where you need to pay attention in testing are the scenarios which are less likely as they'll be tested a lot less. for example driving across the highlands in snow, in a white car, heading away from the sun at sunset while there's no-one in the car and someone is coming the other way.

    it's the corner cases which cause the worst accidents because the developers will generally reply with 'I didn't even conceive of you using it that way'
  • Options
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    Senior car execs have been duped by the techies - could it be they are too used to being chauffeured around to appreciate the complexities of driving?
    It’s a combination of a decade of cheap money, and the (utopian tech bro) idea that one company would end up dominating the space, where in future millions of automated taxis would replace traditional private transport. The likes of Google, Apple, and Tesla, had access to plenty of VC money, and GM felt they had to get either involved or miss out.

    The most difficult bit, as we’ve discussed on here many times before, is where the technology can do most of the driving, but can and will disengage itself at short notice, meaning that the human needs to stay awake and alert at all times - something which humans find quite difficult, even the professional test drivers.

    Meanwhile, that old favourite of new car technology, the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, has what looks to be the best system deployed so far in the new 2024 model, with very little hype. It’s a “Level 3” system up to 40mph, meaning the car drives itself and Mercedes are insured for any damage it causes. https://carbuzz.com/news/mercedes-announces-first-level-3-self-driving-for-s-class-and-eqs-sedan You can’t use it to drop the kids at school or collect you from the pub yet though, which is what most people think a self-driving car should be able to do, a taxi without the human driver.
    BIB: Mick Lynch just texted me to say that is why train drivers get paid so much. Their job is to maintain concentration through 99.999 per cent tedium so they can react instantly to obstructions.
  • Options
    SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,898
    edited December 2023
    spudgfsh said:

    pm215 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    See also narrow country lanes with passing places, prone to flooding, tractors, escaped livestock, etc...
    Cattle herds in the Somerset levels being taken to pasture; the need to be careful when sheep (too often suicidally panic-prone) are grazing on the verge of unfenced southern Scottish hill roads; cattle grids on ditto (how does the robot open the gate?), ...
    Erm. I thought the whole point of driverless cars was that they would carry passengers. There is no point having cars driving round with no one in them.
    Some use cases will involve driving empty sometimes -- for example a robo taxi driving out to pick up a fare, or the family car driving back to the house after dropping the kids off at school. Though how likely such trips are to involve remote Scottish rural cattle grid roads is less clear.
    those are the cases that need special attention to. driving across London empty would be one of the most common journeys but would also be one of the most tested so is less likely to go wrong. where you need to pay attention in testing are the scenarios which are less likely as they'll be tested a lot less. for example driving across the highlands in snow, in a white car, heading away from the sun at sunset while there's no-one in the car and someone is coming the other way.

    it's the corner cases which cause the worst accidents because the developers will generally reply with 'I didn't even conceive of you using it that way'
    Which is why we have the “99% there” problem in the first place. It turns out that there’s millions of these edge cases, and they all need to be programmed and tested individually.

    Humans do quite a remarkable job of dealing with many of these on a daily basis, as well as very non-standard things for a computer such as getting out of the way of an ambulance, or dealing with temporary roadworks or obstruction with a man signalling to traffic.

    The early driverless cars had to be programmed to identify a policeman in the road, and interpret what his or her signals might mean. And of course, police look and behave differently in different places, and even have multiple uniforms in the same place. To a human this is really easy, but not to a computer.
  • Options
    OT.

    Especially for @TheScreamingEagles

    Seen on FB.

    Die Hard is not a Christmas Movie just because it is set at Christmas. It is a Christmas Movie because it is about a social obligation with a family member that you didn't want to participate in but spirals more and more into an unending nightmare.

    ;)
  • Options
    StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 7,053
    This is a fairly nothing article (man doesn’t pay his road tax, van gets impounded).

    But it did flag an interesting point. He is in his late 30s “establishing himself” on the comedy circuit.

    He survives on £300 per month and feeds himself with food provided by food banks.

    This is just an indication of why we need to be careful with statistics on food bank usage. He is clearly poor by any definition. However it’s a *lifestyle*choice - he is a trained electrician so could have a different job if he wanted.

    You can certainly make the argument that society is better off because an individual can pursue the career he wants (no matter how realistic or not) but it does suggest it’s wrong to simply say “good bank usage up, everyone is starving, government bad”

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12904033/Im-homeless-police-confiscated-campervan-INSIDE-going-auctioned-Ive-got-left.html
  • Options
    algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,541

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    Senior car execs have been duped by the techies - could it be they are too used to being chauffeured around to appreciate the complexities of driving?
    It’s a combination of a decade of cheap money, and the (utopian tech bro) idea that one company would end up dominating the space, where in future millions of automated taxis would replace traditional private transport. The likes of Google, Apple, and Tesla, had access to plenty of VC money, and GM felt they had to get either involved or miss out.

    The most difficult bit, as we’ve discussed on here many times before, is where the technology can do most of the driving, but can and will disengage itself at short notice, meaning that the human needs to stay awake and alert at all times - something which humans find quite difficult, even the professional test drivers.

    Meanwhile, that old favourite of new car technology, the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, has what looks to be the best system deployed so far in the new 2024 model, with very little hype. It’s a “Level 3” system up to 40mph, meaning the car drives itself and Mercedes are insured for any damage it causes. https://carbuzz.com/news/mercedes-announces-first-level-3-self-driving-for-s-class-and-eqs-sedan You can’t use it to drop the kids at school or collect you from the pub yet though, which is what most people think a self-driving car should be able to do, a taxi without the human driver.
    BIB: Mick Lynch just texted me to say that is why train drivers get paid so much. Their job is to maintain concentration through 99.999 per cent tedium so they can react instantly to obstructions.
    Whereas bus drivers can be paid about half train drivers because all they do is collect the fares, act as the police force, do social care for the elderly and drive the bus, 100% attention all the time, on roads full of drunks, druggies, under age bikers, boys showing off and delivery drivers double parking.
  • Options
    spudgfshspudgfsh Posts: 1,308
    Sandpit said:

    spudgfsh said:

    pm215 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    See also narrow country lanes with passing places, prone to flooding, tractors, escaped livestock, etc...
    Cattle herds in the Somerset levels being taken to pasture; the need to be careful when sheep (too often suicidally panic-prone) are grazing on the verge of unfenced southern Scottish hill roads; cattle grids on ditto (how does the robot open the gate?), ...
    Erm. I thought the whole point of driverless cars was that they would carry passengers. There is no point having cars driving round with no one in them.
    Some use cases will involve driving empty sometimes -- for example a robo taxi driving out to pick up a fare, or the family car driving back to the house after dropping the kids off at school. Though how likely such trips are to involve remote Scottish rural cattle grid roads is less clear.
    those are the cases that need special attention to. driving across London empty would be one of the most common journeys but would also be one of the most tested so is less likely to go wrong. where you need to pay attention in testing are the scenarios which are less likely as they'll be tested a lot less. for example driving across the highlands in snow, in a white car, heading away from the sun at sunset while there's no-one in the car and someone is coming the other way.

    it's the corner cases which cause the worst accidents because the developers will generally reply with 'I didn't even conceive of you using it that way'
    Which is why we have the “99% there” problem in the first place. It turns out that there’s millions of these edge cases, and they all need to be programmed and tested individually.

    Humans do quite a remarkable job of dealing with many of these on a daily basis, as well as very non-standard things for a computer such as getting out of the way of an ambulance, or dealing with temporary roadworks with a man signalling to traffic.

    The early driverless cars had to be programmed to identify a policeman in the road, and interpret what his or her signals might mean. And of course, police look and behave differently in different places, and even have multiple uniforms in the same place. To a human this is really easy, but not to a computer.
    not my industry but I have a background in testing software and systems. I would expect that the worst edge cases would involve (in order of difficulty):
    1. Other drivers
    2. poor road markings
    3. narrow roads where you have passing places

    I have 'radar cruise control' on my car and mostly it works brilliantly in keeping me to the correct speed and distance behind the cars in front. there are a couple of spots where it doesn't recognise lanes because of poor markings and/or road repairs.
  • Options

    Mr. Sandpit, I maintain that self-driving cars are far more challenging than they seem for psychological rather than technological reasons.

    Doing an activity, like driving, for an hour requires a mostly low level but persistent level of concentration. Doing nothing for an hour while maintaining the alertness to be ready to act within seconds to avert a dangerous, potentially life-threatening, situation is far harder.

    If the 'driver' is merely babysitting the car's driving, I don't see the point. Either it needs to do it all or it's better for the driver to make the judgments. As you say, you'd need to be completely alert as if driving, while not being in the comfort zone of actually doing the driving.
  • Options
    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    Interesting piece on de Santis's campaign and the problems he is having: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/12/27/two_minute_warning_on_the_road_in_iowa_with_ron_desantis__150246.html#2

    One thing on which there seems to be a consensus is that rather than turning off supporters Trump is gaining from the various legal attacks on him. It is depriving everyone else on the GOP side of oxygen, it has allowed him to remain above the fray within the party rather than debating and it is making a lot of people angry that an "unelected official" thinks she can determine whether or not the choice of a major party is on the ballot or not.

    This has, ironically, created a surge for Trump which is more significant than any slow decline in Biden's numbers but Biden is particularly struggling with black males and Hispanics, both essential parts of his 2016 coalition.

    I feel like this kind of thing must make it hard to poll though. If you think your guy is being unfairly treated, and you're offered the chance to support him at no cost by naming him in an opinion poll, you'd probably take it. Does that same dynamic work in an actual caucus or primary? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, I have no idea.
    Yes, there is more uncertainty than normal. It's one thing to think that the people have the right to choose and another to choose Trump who is clearly not the man he was, for good or ill, in 2016.

    It's also something we have talked about quite a lot on here of late.
    Biden's record on the economy is world leading but most Americans think the economy is a mess.
    Biden's record on inflation is also very good but Americans think it isn't.
    Biden's record on crime is incredible but most Americans think law and order is breaking down.
    Even Biden's support for Israel and Ukraine is being questioned.

    The picture painted in the US media is overwhelmingly and unfairly negative and seems to be turning incumbency into a disadvantage rather than a strength. Can this continue to the election?
    It is fascinating to behold. We all know that there can be a difference between the statistical economy and the real experienced economy. In the UK we have a wazzock government trying to claim people's lived experience is wrong, and also increasingly simply lying about the statistics to even have a case that the economy is good.

    Yet in America, it really IS good. So what is happening? Are people who's lived experience is good being constantly gaslit to persuade them to ignore their senses? Is the good performance very spiky so that certain groups do amazingly well and others amazingly badly? What is going on?
  • Options
    Just changed a light bulb and noticed that the packet had two seperate energy efficiency ratings on it - one for GB only rating it A++ and one for the EU and NI rating it E. I wonder what I'm supposed to deduce from this, other than (a) we have obviously already diverged from the EU on these standards, and ours are - what a surprise - less stringent; and (b) the seperate GB rating (whose sole purpose is to mislead me about the product's environmental credentials) will have imposed an extra cost that I will have paid. Another Brexit dividend!
  • Options
    Pulpstar said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    It’s going to be much easier to get these things to work in cities with a 21st century layout, than in older, more random and more congested places. Phoenix, with long and straight roads, and most intersections under traffic light control, should be a lot more straightforward than San Francisco,
    Why have they not chosen north Devon for autonomous car testing ?
    I'm there right now.

    Ideal.
  • Options
    As for autonomous driving, as a Tesla owner I am not interested in that. But *augmented* driving? Yes please. Inattention / Fatigue / Idiocy are the causes of so many crashes. We can remove most of that with augmented systems.

    As an example, a traffic jam on the motorway. I let the car drive. It has more cameras facing in more directions than I have eyeballs, and an AI algorithm constantly reading traffic. It doesn't get tired or distracted or risks anything stupid. Much safer than having me drive.

    Around town? To start off with the UNECE regulations need to be heavily amended. Cars in Europe are heavily restricted about what they can do - as an example the radius of steering input they can make.

    American Teslas practically drive themselves through urban environments. Ours have the same capability but can't use it. I don't want the car driving itself, but again the safety improvements from augmented drive could be significant.
  • Options
    LDLFLDLF Posts: 144
    edited December 2023
    If Nikki Haley is the Republican Party's Liz Kendall (appealing perhaps to the broader electorate but unlikely to get the nomination by her own party), then Ron DeSantis is its Andy Burnham (not bad at local government, but hopeless on a national level, where he desperately panders to his party's prejudices). The party is again likely to elect its Corbyn as presidential nominee, if the law will allow it to.
  • Options

    Mr. Sandpit, I maintain that self-driving cars are far more challenging than they seem for psychological rather than technological reasons.

    Doing an activity, like driving, for an hour requires a mostly low level but persistent level of concentration. Doing nothing for an hour while maintaining the alertness to be ready to act within seconds to avert a dangerous, potentially life-threatening, situation is far harder.

    If the 'driver' is merely babysitting the car's driving, I don't see the point. Either it needs to do it all or it's better for the driver to make the judgments. As you say, you'd need to be completely alert as if driving, while not being in the comfort zone of actually doing the driving.
    My litmus test: will you be allowed to let it take you home after the pub, like a taxi?

    I bet the answer is no.
  • Options
    bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,635

    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    Interesting piece on de Santis's campaign and the problems he is having: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/12/27/two_minute_warning_on_the_road_in_iowa_with_ron_desantis__150246.html#2

    One thing on which there seems to be a consensus is that rather than turning off supporters Trump is gaining from the various legal attacks on him. It is depriving everyone else on the GOP side of oxygen, it has allowed him to remain above the fray within the party rather than debating and it is making a lot of people angry that an "unelected official" thinks she can determine whether or not the choice of a major party is on the ballot or not.

    This has, ironically, created a surge for Trump which is more significant than any slow decline in Biden's numbers but Biden is particularly struggling with black males and Hispanics, both essential parts of his 2016 coalition.

    I feel like this kind of thing must make it hard to poll though. If you think your guy is being unfairly treated, and you're offered the chance to support him at no cost by naming him in an opinion poll, you'd probably take it. Does that same dynamic work in an actual caucus or primary? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, I have no idea.
    Yes, there is more uncertainty than normal. It's one thing to think that the people have the right to choose and another to choose Trump who is clearly not the man he was, for good or ill, in 2016.

    It's also something we have talked about quite a lot on here of late.
    Biden's record on the economy is world leading but most Americans think the economy is a mess.
    Biden's record on inflation is also very good but Americans think it isn't.
    Biden's record on crime is incredible but most Americans think law and order is breaking down.
    Even Biden's support for Israel and Ukraine is being questioned.

    The picture painted in the US media is overwhelmingly and unfairly negative and seems to be turning incumbency into a disadvantage rather than a strength. Can this continue to the election?
    It is fascinating to behold. We all know that there can be a difference between the statistical economy and the real experienced economy. In the UK we have a wazzock government trying to claim people's lived experience is wrong, and also increasingly simply lying about the statistics to even have a case that the economy is good.

    Yet in America, it really IS good. So what is happening? Are people who's lived experience is good being constantly gaslit to persuade them to ignore their senses? Is the good performance very spiky so that certain groups do amazingly well and others amazingly badly? What is going on?
    The MAGA right in the US — politicians, social media and media — output a torrent of lies every day.
  • Options
    isamisam Posts: 40,930

    Carnyx said:

    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    See also narrow country lanes with passing places, prone to flooding, tractors, escaped livestock, etc...
    Cattle herds in the Somerset levels being taken to pasture; the need to be careful when sheep (too often suicidally panic-prone) are grazing on the verge of unfenced southern Scottish hill roads; cattle grids on ditto (how does the robot open the gate?), ...
    Erm. I thought the whole point of driverless cars was that they would carry passengers. There is no point having cars driving round with no one in them.
    I said the other day that, until this week, whenever I thought of driverless cars the image I had was an empty car driving around. Ridiculous!
  • Options
    david_herdsondavid_herdson Posts: 17,419
    edited December 2023

    ydoethur said:

    Might be bad news for Haley, assuming most of his backers would probably switch to Trump rather than her.

    I think her main problem is to become the "alternative to Trump" candidate and to do that she needs DeSantis out or at least marginalized. Presumably even if he drops out there will still be Ramaswamy in the race siphoning off some of the edgelord vote.
    In 2016, pretty much each time a candidate dropped out, Trump got an uptick.

    Granted, this time's contest has a different dynamic, where there's a clearer divide between Trump and The Rest - but yes, it's still not the case that as candidate Not Trump A drops out, the support will redistribute to Not Trumps B-E; some will go to Trump himself, others may simply drift to abstentions.

    That said, de Santis is still polling second in Iowa (a notoriously difficult state to poll, mind), and also second in national GOP primary polls. We shouldn't write him off just yet.

    On the other hand, Trump remains top-side of 60% nationally, over 50% in Iowa, and less clearly-ahead in NH - but still clearly ahead. Unless something genuinely major (a heart attack, being locked up, SCOTUS actually 14th Amendmenting him) happens, he's cruising to the nomination.
  • Options
    algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,541
    Sandpit said:

    spudgfsh said:

    pm215 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    See also narrow country lanes with passing places, prone to flooding, tractors, escaped livestock, etc...
    Cattle herds in the Somerset levels being taken to pasture; the need to be careful when sheep (too often suicidally panic-prone) are grazing on the verge of unfenced southern Scottish hill roads; cattle grids on ditto (how does the robot open the gate?), ...
    Erm. I thought the whole point of driverless cars was that they would carry passengers. There is no point having cars driving round with no one in them.
    Some use cases will involve driving empty sometimes -- for example a robo taxi driving out to pick up a fare, or the family car driving back to the house after dropping the kids off at school. Though how likely such trips are to involve remote Scottish rural cattle grid roads is less clear.
    those are the cases that need special attention to. driving across London empty would be one of the most common journeys but would also be one of the most tested so is less likely to go wrong. where you need to pay attention in testing are the scenarios which are less likely as they'll be tested a lot less. for example driving across the highlands in snow, in a white car, heading away from the sun at sunset while there's no-one in the car and someone is coming the other way.

    it's the corner cases which cause the worst accidents because the developers will generally reply with 'I didn't even conceive of you using it that way'
    Which is why we have the “99% there” problem in the first place. It turns out that there’s millions of these edge cases, and they all need to be programmed and tested individually.

    Humans do quite a remarkable job of dealing with many of these on a daily basis, as well as very non-standard things for a computer such as getting out of the way of an ambulance, or dealing with temporary roadworks or obstruction with a man signalling to traffic.

    The early driverless cars had to be programmed to identify a policeman in the road, and interpret what his or her signals might mean. And of course, police look and behave differently in different places, and even have multiple uniforms in the same place. To a human this is really easy, but not to a computer.
    Maths. Suppose you are driving all day in urban driving, 10 hours in all. That is 600 minutes and 36000 seconds. You are attending to stuff all the time you are moving, and to a lesser extent all the time you are stopped. Mostly humans do this without accident.

    If my maths is right with 99.9% reliability there will be 36 seconds out of the 36000 in which the system is unreliable. Imagine a million cars in city driving with 36 seconds of unreliability per X unit of time. That's 36,000,000 seconds. That's a lot of opportunities for trouble.
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    isamisam Posts: 40,930
    isam said:

    Is the modern world how Alexandra Kollantai imagined because we have accepted a lot of communism’s ideas, or was it going to be like this anyway under capitalism?

    Labours plans for childcare, announced this week, reminded me of ‘The state is responsible for the upbringing of children’ section.

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm

    “ Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility. Under capitalism children were frequently, too frequently, a heavy and unbearable burden on the proletarian family. Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia the Commissariats of Public Education and of Social Welfare are already doing much to assist the family. We already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children. restaurants, free lunches at school and free distribution of text books, warm clothing and shoes to schoolchildren. All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective.”
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    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,787

    Just changed a light bulb and noticed that the packet had two seperate energy efficiency ratings on it - one for GB only rating it A++ and one for the EU and NI rating it E. I wonder what I'm supposed to deduce from this, other than (a) we have obviously already diverged from the EU on these standards, and ours are - what a surprise - less stringent; and (b) the seperate GB rating (whose sole purpose is to mislead me about the product's environmental credentials) will have imposed an extra cost that I will have paid. Another Brexit dividend!

    Just to check the obvious query that comes to mind: is it possible that the GB rating scale is the 'wrong way round' - different polarity from the EU one?
  • Options

    Just changed a light bulb and noticed that the packet had two seperate energy efficiency ratings on it - one for GB only rating it A++ and one for the EU and NI rating it E. I wonder what I'm supposed to deduce from this, other than (a) we have obviously already diverged from the EU on these standards, and ours are - what a surprise - less stringent; and (b) the seperate GB rating (whose sole purpose is to mislead me about the product's environmental credentials) will have imposed an extra cost that I will have paid. Another Brexit dividend!

    Are you suggesting Brexiteers are not very bright? How many would it take to change a lightbulb?
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    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    spudgfsh said:

    pm215 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    See also narrow country lanes with passing places, prone to flooding, tractors, escaped livestock, etc...
    Cattle herds in the Somerset levels being taken to pasture; the need to be careful when sheep (too often suicidally panic-prone) are grazing on the verge of unfenced southern Scottish hill roads; cattle grids on ditto (how does the robot open the gate?), ...
    Erm. I thought the whole point of driverless cars was that they would carry passengers. There is no point having cars driving round with no one in them.
    Some use cases will involve driving empty sometimes -- for example a robo taxi driving out to pick up a fare, or the family car driving back to the house after dropping the kids off at school. Though how likely such trips are to involve remote Scottish rural cattle grid roads is less clear.
    those are the cases that need special attention to. driving across London empty would be one of the most common journeys but would also be one of the most tested so is less likely to go wrong. where you need to pay attention in testing are the scenarios which are less likely as they'll be tested a lot less. for example driving across the highlands in snow, in a white car, heading away from the sun at sunset while there's no-one in the car and someone is coming the other way.

    it's the corner cases which cause the worst accidents because the developers will generally reply with 'I didn't even conceive of you using it that way'
    Which is why we have the “99% there” problem in the first place. It turns out that there’s millions of these edge cases, and they all need to be programmed and tested individually.

    Humans do quite a remarkable job of dealing with many of these on a daily basis, as well as very non-standard things for a computer such as getting out of the way of an ambulance, or dealing with temporary roadworks or obstruction with a man signalling to traffic.

    The early driverless cars had to be programmed to identify a policeman in the road, and interpret what his or her signals might mean. And of course, police look and behave differently in different places, and even have multiple uniforms in the same place. To a human this is really easy, but not to a computer.
    Maths. Suppose you are driving all day in urban driving, 10 hours in all. That is 600 minutes and 36000 seconds. You are attending to stuff all the time you are moving, and to a lesser extent all the time you are stopped. Mostly humans do this without accident.

    If my maths is right with 99.9% reliability there will be 36 seconds out of the 36000 in which the system is unreliable. Imagine a million cars in city driving with 36 seconds of unreliability per X unit of time. That's 36,000,000 seconds. That's a lot of opportunities for trouble.
    In the real world your human doing 10 hours of driving will have more than 36 seconds of "unreliability". We all have spells where we are sat there connected to the controls but our thoughts or attention are elsewhere.
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    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,658
    A good night for Leicester and Southampton last night in the Championship, but looks like Sunaks photo op was snubbed.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2023/12/29/russell-martin-rishi-sunak-prime-minister-southampton/
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    isamisam Posts: 40,930

    Just changed a light bulb and noticed that the packet had two seperate energy efficiency ratings on it - one for GB only rating it A++ and one for the EU and NI rating it E. I wonder what I'm supposed to deduce from this, other than (a) we have obviously already diverged from the EU on these standards, and ours are - what a surprise - less stringent; and (b) the seperate GB rating (whose sole purpose is to mislead me about the product's environmental credentials) will have imposed an extra cost that I will have paid. Another Brexit dividend!

    Doesn’t this say the EU & UK have the same new ratings?

    https://www.sparksdirect.co.uk/blog/new-energy-label-led-lamps-you-need-to-know
  • Options

    Just changed a light bulb and noticed that the packet had two seperate energy efficiency ratings on it - one for GB only rating it A++ and one for the EU and NI rating it E. I wonder what I'm supposed to deduce from this, other than (a) we have obviously already diverged from the EU on these standards, and ours are - what a surprise - less stringent; and (b) the seperate GB rating (whose sole purpose is to mislead me about the product's environmental credentials) will have imposed an extra cost that I will have paid. Another Brexit dividend!

    The GB grades are the old grades. The EU updated theirs in 2021, which meant NI had to follow.

    The reason is one of those quiet successes- light bulbs are unimaginably efficient compared to the old days, thanks to the invention of blue LEDs. That was being managed by adding A+, A++ and so on to the original scale. But as with GCSE A* grades, that was tipping into madness.

    You can make a reasonable case for changing the scale, or for leaving it as it was. But running two parallel systems in what is still basically the same economic space isn't sensible.

    There are going to be a lot of things like this for a while yet.
  • Options
    algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,541

    ydoethur said:

    Might be bad news for Haley, assuming most of his backers would probably switch to Trump rather than her.

    I think her main problem is to become the "alternative to Trump" candidate and to do that she needs DeSantis

    out or at least marginalized. Presumably even if he drops out there will still be Ramaswamy in the race siphoning off some of the edgelord vote.
    In 2016, pretty much each time a candidate dropped out, Trump got an uptick.

    Granted, this time's contest has a different dynamic, where there's a clearer divide between Trump and The Rest - but yes, it's still not the case that as candidate Not Trump A drops out, the support will redistribute to Not Trumps B-E; some will go to Trump himself, others may simply drift to abstentions.

    That said, de Santis is still polling second in Iowa (a notoriously difficult state to poll, mind), and also second in national GOP primary polls. We shouldn't write him off just yet.

    On the other hand, Trump remains top-side of 60% nationally, over 50% in Iowa, and less clearly-ahead in NH - but still clearly ahead. Unless something genuinely major (a heart attack, being locked up, SCOTUS actually 14th Amendmenting him) happens, he's cruising to the nomination.
    Agree. Nor can I see a route to him losing the POTUS election. This is why, with all the hurdles he has to jump, he is at 40% probability with Smarkets. There are an awful lot of hurdles, personal, medical, electoral and legal, but no single one of them looks like a fatal blow. This is astonishing.

    I would be delighted to be wrong.
  • Options
    Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 30,951
    edited December 2023

    Just changed a light bulb and noticed that the packet had two seperate energy efficiency ratings on it - one for GB only rating it A++ and one for the EU and NI rating it E. I wonder what I'm supposed to deduce from this, other than (a) we have obviously already diverged from the EU on these standards, and ours are - what a surprise - less stringent; and (b) the seperate GB rating (whose sole purpose is to mislead me about the product's environmental credentials) will have imposed an extra cost that I will have paid. Another Brexit dividend!

    I am not an expert on this but I think (from looking at the information from various organisations working on energy saving) that you have this the wrong way round.

    The A++ system is the old system that existed in both the UK and EU for many years. The A to G system is the new system that is being introduced both in the UK and the EU.

    https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-energy-labelling-of-products
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,658
    isam said:

    isam said:

    Is the modern world how Alexandra Kollantai imagined because we have accepted a lot of communism’s ideas, or was it going to be like this anyway under capitalism?

    Labours plans for childcare, announced this week, reminded me of ‘The state is responsible for the upbringing of children’ section.

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm

    “ Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility. Under capitalism children were frequently, too frequently, a heavy and unbearable burden on the proletarian family. Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia the Commissariats of Public Education and of Social Welfare are already doing much to assist the family. We already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children. restaurants, free lunches at school and free distribution of text books, warm clothing and shoes to schoolchildren. All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective.”
    Except the Labour scheme is purely voluntary, for parents who actually desire that help.
  • Options

    Just changed a light bulb and noticed that the packet had two seperate energy efficiency ratings on it - one for GB only rating it A++ and one for the EU and NI rating it E. I wonder what I'm supposed to deduce from this, other than (a) we have obviously already diverged from the EU on these standards, and ours are - what a surprise - less stringent; and (b) the seperate GB rating (whose sole purpose is to mislead me about the product's environmental credentials) will have imposed an extra cost that I will have paid. Another Brexit dividend!

    Are you suggesting Brexiteers are not very bright? How many would it take to change a lightbulb?
    Doesn’t matter how many there are, they would blame the non operating lightbulb situation on Remoaners and demand they change the lightbulb. When that didn’t work they’d decide being in the dark was quite nice actually.
  • Options
    spudgfshspudgfsh Posts: 1,308
    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    spudgfsh said:

    pm215 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Ratters said:

    Sandpit said:

    Apparently over $100 billion has been spent on autonomous car development.

    No wonder the companies are so keen to persuade the gullible they've developed some magic sauce.

    It’s a classic example of something that turned out to be way more difficult than imagined, a “99% there” problem, where most of the money is yet to be spent.

    The solution is now much more likely to involve reconstruction of the existing roads, or building new towns around autonomous transport with grade separations and traffic lights.

    The recent testing by GM in California was halted by regulators, after a number of incidents involving both pedestrians and emergency vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/24/driverless-car-self-driving-california-cruise-gm
    It seems like the Waymo testing in Phoenix is going OK? I know they picked the easiest place to do it, but it seems to be a working thing, it's not vapourware. If they can make it good enough the potential cost savings are immense, so I don't think it's at all clear that the $100 billion was badly spent.
    For self-driving cars to be ubiquitous, with humans as merely passengers as imagined, the cars would need to be able to navigate a city like London with all its complexity. That is a long way from where any of the manufacturers are right now.

    Autonomous motorway driving is much more viable and will make life easier on long journeys, but we're not getting robo taxis anytime soon.
    See also narrow country lanes with passing places, prone to flooding, tractors, escaped livestock, etc...
    Cattle herds in the Somerset levels being taken to pasture; the need to be careful when sheep (too often suicidally panic-prone) are grazing on the verge of unfenced southern Scottish hill roads; cattle grids on ditto (how does the robot open the gate?), ...
    Erm. I thought the whole point of driverless cars was that they would carry passengers. There is no point having cars driving round with no one in them.
    Some use cases will involve driving empty sometimes -- for example a robo taxi driving out to pick up a fare, or the family car driving back to the house after dropping the kids off at school. Though how likely such trips are to involve remote Scottish rural cattle grid roads is less clear.
    those are the cases that need special attention to. driving across London empty would be one of the most common journeys but would also be one of the most tested so is less likely to go wrong. where you need to pay attention in testing are the scenarios which are less likely as they'll be tested a lot less. for example driving across the highlands in snow, in a white car, heading away from the sun at sunset while there's no-one in the car and someone is coming the other way.

    it's the corner cases which cause the worst accidents because the developers will generally reply with 'I didn't even conceive of you using it that way'
    Which is why we have the “99% there” problem in the first place. It turns out that there’s millions of these edge cases, and they all need to be programmed and tested individually.

    Humans do quite a remarkable job of dealing with many of these on a daily basis, as well as very non-standard things for a computer such as getting out of the way of an ambulance, or dealing with temporary roadworks or obstruction with a man signalling to traffic.

    The early driverless cars had to be programmed to identify a policeman in the road, and interpret what his or her signals might mean. And of course, police look and behave differently in different places, and even have multiple uniforms in the same place. To a human this is really easy, but not to a computer.
    Maths. Suppose you are driving all day in urban driving, 10 hours in all. That is 600 minutes and 36000 seconds. You are attending to stuff all the time you are moving, and to a lesser extent all the time you are stopped. Mostly humans do this without accident.

    If my maths is right with 99.9% reliability there will be 36 seconds out of the 36000 in which the system is unreliable. Imagine a million cars in city driving with 36 seconds of unreliability per X unit of time. That's 36,000,000 seconds. That's a lot of opportunities for trouble.
    from a probabilistic point of view that is correct. but from a software and systems point of view it's not. software works 100% of the time when it is correct, it fails 100% of the time when it is not. whereas human control is never 100% correct or 100% incorrect.

    for example, if you have a piece of road where the road markings are unclear or misleading, most human drivers will compensate but every one of the driverless cars would misinterpret it and potentially cause a crash.

    if that bit of road is very busy it'd fail the 99.9% because of the inputs to the system rather than the car itself.
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    Foxy said:
    Absolutely no argument about these gongs. It's what the honours system should be all about.
  • Options

    Just changed a light bulb and noticed that the packet had two seperate energy efficiency ratings on it - one for GB only rating it A++ and one for the EU and NI rating it E. I wonder what I'm supposed to deduce from this, other than (a) we have obviously already diverged from the EU on these standards, and ours are - what a surprise - less stringent; and (b) the seperate GB rating (whose sole purpose is to mislead me about the product's environmental credentials) will have imposed an extra cost that I will have paid. Another Brexit dividend!

    The GB grades are the old grades. The EU updated theirs in 2021, which meant NI had to follow.

    The reason is one of those quiet successes- light bulbs are unimaginably efficient compared to the old days, thanks to the invention of blue LEDs. That was being managed by adding A+, A++ and so on to the original scale. But as with GCSE A* grades, that was tipping into madness.

    You can make a reasonable case for changing the scale, or for leaving it as it was. But running two parallel systems in what is still basically the same economic space isn't sensible.

    There are going to be a lot of things like this for a while yet.
    The UK also upgraded in 2021. I assume the dual labelling is simply to allow for a transition period to get people used to it.
  • Options
    isamisam Posts: 40,930

    Just changed a light bulb and noticed that the packet had two seperate energy efficiency ratings on it - one for GB only rating it A++ and one for the EU and NI rating it E. I wonder what I'm supposed to deduce from this, other than (a) we have obviously already diverged from the EU on these standards, and ours are - what a surprise - less stringent; and (b) the seperate GB rating (whose sole purpose is to mislead me about the product's environmental credentials) will have imposed an extra cost that I will have paid. Another Brexit dividend!

    I am not an expert on this but I think (from looking at the information from various organisations working on energy saving) that you have this the wrong way round.

    The A++ system is the old system that existed in both the UK and EU for many years. The A to G system is the new system that is being introduced both in the UK and the EU.

    https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-energy-labelling-of-products
    Quite a nice example of jumping to the wrong conclusion then letting the inbuilt biases flow though
This discussion has been closed.