Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this - this one was a bit late, I got distracted)
currently in vc delusion, the public just doesnāt understand how to move about efficiently
the levels of not-even-wrong from these dipshits continue to be astounding
Also, this plan has a very much a fuck disabled people and old people factor. And what a lonely world they live in.
If you asked people what they wanted, they would say a car that drives itself
Is that a Henry Ford reference? Very clever lol
If I mathed right thatād be one waymo every 350 feet of road on average. Is that a lot? It sounds like it might be a lot. Especially since self-driving cars greatest weakness appears to be driving in the vicinity of other self-driving cars.
I think the idea is to solve that by networking all the self-driving cars together. Iām sure the long history of trying to get vendors to agree on a standard when they all benefit individually from the lock-in of proprietary systems has nothing to teach us about this prospect.
other than interop, the big problem I have with this is security. car modding for performance is already a big thing, and a car mod that makes other cars slow down, stop, get out of your way, or otherwise malfunction would be incredibly popular with assholes of all varieties, and car modding has many. the current state of automotive is that security is a fucking shitshow, but I canāt figure out any kind of security model for this that isnāt vulnerable to a wide variety of obvious attacks. even a perfect inter-vendor attestation chain (good fucking luck) is vulnerable to hooking an ECU (or whatever the ruggedized monitoring microcontroller unit for a magic self-driving EV is) and radio up to a variety of fake sensors and crafting inputs such that the thing starts transmitting āwait no stop hereā signals to all the surrounding cars
but then again, all of this is probably intentional because it creates a privileged class of people who can afford to fuck with self-driving car networking and not worry about any associated fines, and an unprivileged class who just have to put up with everything being so much worse. in a world where you can roll smoke into a Subway with relatively few consequences (not to mention all the other horseshit Truck Guys get away with), itās not a hard outcome to imagine.
Im sure theyāll try to incorporate an LLM into the stack somewhere, leading to at least one car thatās exposed to the āpretend to be a fire truckā attack.
Complexity theoretical, security and latency wise this sounds like a great plan. Can wait for people being stuck in cars for days because the freeway offramps are causing livelocks. (Like the example of the waymo cars all honking at each other at the parking lots).
Wonder if they are going to use the routing solutions used in tcp and then discover that cars are heavier and slower than data and suddenly waste a lot of peoples time and money.
E: small little detail which I donāt know if other countries also have it, but in the dutch traffic system, emergency services and busses (and perhaps a few hackers who really want to be in trouble with the law (but I always heard this described as a āthis exist, but we donāt mess with itā system)) have a system where you can get priority at traffic lights, so they turn green faster. Wonder if other countries have this, and how much they realize this will not work for waymo systems.
the US has this too (you can watch the stoplights suddenly reprioritize as an ambulance or cop car with their lightbars and sirens running approaches) and Iām honestly not sure why I havenāt ever seen it abused by some shithead with a HackRF or similar. maybe the penalties make it safer to just willingly run a red light?
There recently was a bit of a āhackers can/are abusing this scare hereā and well, I think most people donāt want to abuse the system like this and understand the risks/and consequences of this. And there is also a factor of, how would you get caught? So I assume a few people who know how this would work donāt actually advertise it. They might have also updated it to actually use some form of encryption. However it used to (from what I heard) not be encrypted (no idea about logging either). There is also the whole thing that messing with traffic lights vs messing with speed traps feels like a very different thing.
That kind of reminds me of medical implant hacks. I think theyāre in a similar spot where weāre just hoping no one is enough of an asshole to try it in public.
Like pacemaker vulnerabilities: https://www.engadget.com/2017-04-21-pacemaker-security-is-terrifying.html
hereās a thought. what if we just stacked every building on top of each other and had the cars drive vertically along the outside. then you wouldnāt need roads at all
I have a stanford degree just like this guy btw. so you have to take my idea seriously
Well, if my math is right, on a 50km/hr road youād see one about every 8 seconds.