I've spent $15 000 this month. Most of it isn't code, I'm vibe coding a K8s cluster from scratch and having endless discussions trying to debug network latency.
> Various antiproton-powered rocket systems have been proposed. All of which rely on the particles released to supply direct thrust or to heat a working fluid by interparticle collisions or by heating a solid core first [14]. There is also the possibility to use the heated working fluid to generate electricity for electric propulsion systems [14].
> Following Fig. 9, beam core and plasma core configurations can produce direct thrust by directing the charged particles produced into an exhaust beam using a magnetic nozzle. Gas core systems use the energy released from the reaction to heat a gas that is exhausted for thrust. Finally, solid core configuration heats a metal core like Tungsten that acts as a heat exchanger to a propellant that is then exhausted from a regular nozzle.
The USA has time and a half overtime above 40 hours as well under the FLSA. This applies to ATC.
Unfortunately, this is now priced into certain government jobs in the USA and people rely on it. Americans see the obscene amounts of money and hours as a challenge until they actually burn out.
ATC isn't even the worst offender. Law enforcement and prison guards can pull 100+ hours a week on a regular basis. This is how prison guards can pull $400k/year.
> ATC isn't even the worst offender. Law enforcement and prison guards can pull 100+ hours a week on a regular basis. This is how prison guards can pull $400k/year.
There's definitely elements of that - but part of that is that many pensions are based on the two highest earning years of your career, so it's "common" among cops when they are planning to retire to spend two years working every possible piece of OT available, to maximize their pension income.
Sounds like a weird incentivization for sure. Why not base the pension on the average over all the years worked as in many other countries? When you offer such incentives, people will naturally work in such a way.
Because you'll loose half a career's worth of inflationary salary rises that way. Also, women might work part time after having children which would skew the average annual salary down. Over a 40 year career, just from inflation alone, you'd be getting about half your final salary that way, even ignoring any increases later on from being better qualified or taking on more responsibility.
Mind you, in the UK, defined benefits pension schemes are very rare nowadays, but where they exist they are defined as a percentage of the final year salary with that company, so the highest 2 year thing seems a bit weird to me but for a different reason.
In the US, social security is based on the 35 highest paying years. If that system is good enough for social security, I don't see why we don't do the same for government pensions.
But wouldn't it be cheaper for them to just hire more people to do the same amount of hours so that no overtime was used? And they would get better work output as well, since people would be rested.
Yes, but it's a local maximum since hiring more people is going to be expensive/difficult until overtime is fixed.
Some state prisons have escaped the overtime pit by offering huge sign-on bonuses and doing a hiring surge. But it takes longer to train ATC than a CO.
It would, yes. There's large worker/union pressure in many of these fields to not take away overtime by reducing hours, though, since it is such a huge part of total compensation.
> Take a shower or wash with soap and water to remove fallout from any skin or hair that was not covered. If you cannot wash or shower, use a wipe or clean wet cloth to wipe any skin or hair that was not covered.
Do you want Gemini to shower for you or something?
A third runway for Heathrow was formally proposed in 2007 and is projected for completion in 2040. This is an airport so overburdened people are buying and trading slots.
This isn't a Kubernetes cluster where you can add VMs in 30 seconds.
It sounds like the more accurate framing, then, is "I'm not getting a tax break for having an EV". Which is disappointing sure, but not outrageous either.
That's the framing but it's also misleading. We are being charged more than a typical ICE driver would pay in gasoline tax. It's also listed as being for road maintenance, but in fact it goes into the general revenue, so it has nothing to do with road maintenance.
> But what do you do when the enterprise you are selling to asks you to show that pen-test report (which you never did despite paying for it, because Delve told you a pentest-tools.com vulnerability scan sufficed)? When they ask for your most recent risk assessment, do you just screenshot Delve’s pre-fabricated assessment and pray nobody will pay attention?
> It was that point where the realization sank in. We knew we messed up. We were unable to answer most questions honestly without jeopardizing the deals we were trying to land. We scrambled to get things done the proper way outside of Delve, in an effort to pretend to know what we were doing, but it ended up simply being too much work to get done quickly enough to save things.
When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.
In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over.
Most human drivers would've t-boned the car at 50+ km/h. Maybe they would've braked and reduced the impact, which would be the right move. A human swerving probably would've overshot into oncoming traffic. Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely.
Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
> Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
This detail sent me, it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.
That's around 44.64 (0.18831) per month, no wonder ads are preferrable to companies over subscriptions! That's actually a lot for people that listen to music all day every day at work.
Google was famously really resistant to ads at first. They wanted to do a subscription service of some kind, but honestly ads just brought in so much more revenue even back then that it was a nigh-inevitable decision. It produces a crazy amount of economy.
> it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.
Oh, the self driving car business will get there, believe me. This is just the first iteration. Designed to get everybody on board with the idea.
I wonder if Waymo gets a cut. I also wonder if riding in a Waymo at the time signals that you're in a demographic that can afford a Waymo and thus get more expensive ads.
> I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience.
You'll probably never forget that advertisement, which is an exciting business opportunity for Waymo.
They could partner with Spotify and other media content partners so that the Waymo can generate an adrenaline-rush near crash experience when a premium advertiser's ad is playing. /s (hopefully)
This is one of those comments that made me laugh nervously. It's straight out of Ubik or another PKD novel, which probably means it's less than 5 years away from being real.
How ironic that an Alphabet company, Waymo, only works with a competitor streaming music service, Spotify, and not their own, YouTube Music. I guess that shows how separate they are.
I think it's also a privacy thing; you have to go into the Waymo app and “connect” your YouTube Music account (even though both have the same @gmail.com address), because otherwise the terms of service of one do not allow sharing data with the other without user consent. (Contrary to popular perception Google is very finicky about privacy, at least privacy as defined as conforming to the terms of service.)
Because those are the same games I have available while not in a Waymo and I can play them anytime/anywhere. By having Waymo exclusive games that save state between rides that aren't available outside the Waymo, it builds the "only in Waymo" excitement.
That's good news, if I can't use the Youtube Music I've paid for in the Waymo then I'm not going to put up with Spotify Ads instead, better to sit in silence (or use my headphones and my own music)
Yeah I have done similar evasive maneuvers a bunch of times. Also people run stop signs constantly, a competent defensively driving human may have just not started driving forward yet when they saw the other car driving towards the stop sign with some speed. I’m not sure of the exact timing in the story but I’ve waited at a stop sign when I saw another car driving towards the intersection many, many times, and a small percent of the time they don’t stop.
Which isn’t to say that the average driver wouldn’t have hit it, it’s just not obviously superhuman.
In this case, the other car didn't run the stop sign.
It waited at the stop sign like it was making a turn, then suddenly entered the intersection when the Waymo was 5-10 meters away, despite not having the right of way.
Maybe they were trying to commit suicide-by-Waymo?
Thankfully they've now shipped their own product, YouTube Music.
And Google Pay, imagine my surprise back in 2021 when I signed up for Waymo and realized I had to manually type in my credit card. No Google Pay??? C'mon y'all, you're Alphabet!
Next thing you know, they're going to add Alexa support before Assistant/Gemini. The PMs at Alphabet are famously incompetent. Another example from the archives: Google wrote the original official Twitter app for Android instead of letting Twitter do it themselves. It wasn't to help the Android platform because multiple third party Twitter apps for Android already existed.
Its is corporate fiefdom. Everybody trying to one up other executives to show impact instead of working together towards a unified goal. The bigger the company the more we see this phenomena. Nobody gets promotion if you just used existing internal service.
I can almost guarantee, given the way no traffic laws are enforced anymore in LA and so many cars are breaking them that cutting off a waymo car in dangerous ways, because you know it has the attention and reflexes to yeild, will be a new thing.
If it becomes a new thing, it would be fairly trivial for Waymo to respond by sending footage of incidents involving reckless driving to local authorities.
To prevent over-reporting, they could even make a system which logs number plates and only reports it if (for example) the same car is involved in incidents 3+ times in a week.
Waymo supporting music services at all is stupid to me. They should just let you bluetooth your phone and play your own music. I don't want any of those services. I want my own music.
There is a large group of people (maybe even the majority?) who, as soon as they get in a car, MUST immediately turn on the radio or some kind of extra noise source. Is this some kind of a Pavlovian reflex?
I'm always amazed by this, as my car is one of the few places where I have actual control over my environment (unlike on public transport, or at my workplace, or even in my home - neighbours can be noisy...). We are living in a sea of unwanted noise, bombarded by constant ads and "music", so it is nice to have a place of "quiet".
There are even people who listen to music at home! They even buy expensive speakers just for this purpose =) I listen to music pretty much all the time except when I talk to other people and sleep.
Nearly got T-boned in a Lyft in LA. I am lucky to still be alive as the driver was not aware and should not have been driving. Where available I've stopped using human driven rideshare.
Great reaction time from the Waymo. But a 50 km/h side impact in a 5 star crash-rated Jaguar with curtain airbags is not "saved my life" territory, more
like an insurance claim. The fact that you instinctively framed it as a near-death experience is Waymo most impressive engineering achievement.
I think you're over-playing how decisively a Waymo will move and under-playing how decent the average human is.
I've ridden in Waymos. They don't exactly slap on the blinker and move at the limit of traction like someone about to miss their exit. If cut off they absolutely will go full brake rather than perform any sort of spicy lane change or turn.
> If cut off they absolutely will go full brake rather than perform any sort of spicy lane change or turn.
Essentially, a meat driver was waiting at a stop sign to make a turn onto the main road. I was in a Waymo driving on the main road and did not have a stop sign.
When we were 10 meters away from the intersection, the meat driver suddenly started to enter the intersection. I have no idea why.
Full brake would've hit the other car in the driver's side door at 40 km/h.
> under-playing how decent the average human is.
I got to SMFC in CSGO which means I'm in the top 3% of players in clicking on heads within 500 ms of them appearing on my screen. I have never reacted as fast as that Waymo did.
If instant (<50ms) reaction would have lowered the speed only to 40km/h in 10m, Waymo was going too fast for the intersection IMO.
My experience is that for a human driver to react quickly in city driving conditions, style and prep are more important than reaction time: in the case you describe (entering an intersection with another car waiting on a stop sign perpendicular to your path), I'd have my foot hanging over the brake and off the gas pedal — this has helped me avoid hitting many other cars with inattentive/distracted/bad drivers, and even pedestrians running over the road or a red light on a crosswalk. When you are prepared and looking, you slam the brakes much faster!
>Waymo was going too fast for the intersection IMO.
This is literally impossible without slowing to single digit speeds for every intersections. At some point you just have to rely on the other traffic honoring signaling and signage or having some desire for self preservation.
Waymo uses new cars which probably have 100km/h (62mph) to zero stopping distance around 36m (120ft) — that's what my 2020 car quotes and tests at. As stopping distance grows quadratically, from 50km/h it would have stopped in 8m. Two lane street is usually at least 8m wide.
The claim was that after braking for 10m, it was still going at 40km/h. It'd take another 6-7m to come to a full stop. If it was a full 18m stopping distance (half the one from 100km/h), that'd mean a bit over 70km/h, so over 60km/h anyway for 16-17m.
I do not know of any country where there are intersections you can go through at 60+ km/h legally.
This does not mean that Waymo in question was going too fast, but something is off in the claim (maybe it did not react on time and really brake for 10m; maybe the collision speed was not a full 40km/h; or maybe it was going too fast...).
>I do not know of any country where there are intersections you can go through at 60+ km/h legally.
The US is dotted with "real highways" (i.e. designed as such, not a former main street that's seen a bunch of upgrades) with 50+mph speed limits and low traffic streets that tee into them with nothing more than a stop. And this isn't some middle america thing that can be dismissed as backwards flyover states. The rich coastal states have them too. Divided medians and T-junction type are fairly common. 2-way stops and cross type junctions less so in my experience but in more rural areas they're more common.
>This does not mean that Waymo in question was going too fast, but something is off in the claim (maybe it did not react on time and really brake for 10m; maybe the collision speed was not a full 40km/h; or maybe it was going too fast...).
Seems like someone pulled out from a residential road onto a main road with no f's to give and the waymo went around and OP is messing up the numbers a little. No matter how fast you're going it always feels faster from the passenger seat.
It's a huge difference between someone merging into or crossing a high speed road.
In most of Europe at least (I did not drive enough in States to remember), non-highway intercity roads have a speed limit of around 50-55mph, but where there is any merge or crossing, this is reduced to 30-35mph.
To be honest, I don't know how to convert freedom units to km/h.
I based my estimate on the Waymo going slower than other cars and the city speed limit in Toronto being 50 km/h, and I took a stab at the numbers. I think it was Beverly Blvd which the internet says has a speed limit of 35 mph = 56 kph at the time?
I was in the back seat so I couldn't judge the distance that well. I passed the other car in a second so I guessed that's how much ground I covered.
Understood: I wasn't trying to nitpick the numbers, but simply showing that you were likely crediting Waymo a tad too much for what it has done.
Human drivers correct each others' mistakes every single day, and we don't hear about them because... well, nothing has happened. The argument could be made that Waymos will make fewer mistakes, so fewer evasive maneuvers will be needed, but it's great to hear that Waymo's performance is coming closer to bringing good human driver capability with faster reaction time enabled by tech.
I appreciate you converting to SI units, but I am ok with you keeping them as-is too: either side can do the conversion to whatever they need, and HN is very much a mixed audience.
Pulling out randomly, I see it all the time. I beat the computer by a) anticipating; and b) assuming other drivers are idiots who don't see me. I don't have to calculate trajectories and whatnot, people aren't computers, and they can do some things better than a computer can, especially a solely-reactive one.
To be fair, we are not provided with the sensors to swerve safely.
If we had some sort of 360 constant recording in the car (on screen?) it would be safer for humans to swerve. Instead we have to move our head, which is cheaper but lacks info.
That's why we now have rear cameras
We have rear cameras because people DONT move their head. And because regulations have made cars way taller than they need to be, meaning there is a big blind spot close to the ground
I mean, even in low cars you cannot see a small enough kid walking behind your car. That's why you back slowly.
Back when I just got my driver license, there is a big lesson many drivers go through (in Italy) which is you back off a parking and there is an obstacle that's so low that cannot be see through the back window and it's small enough that cannot be seen through the mirror. You hit it and if you followed the "go slow part" you only damaged the paint.
So I'm not opposing the ideas of rear cameras, but I'm totally against tall cars, because you cannot see kids IN FRONT either now.
Depends on how you define "average driver": what if 95% of the crashes are caused by 5% of the drivers?
My reading of all the human crash stats has been that majority of them happen when human drivers are impaired (drunk, drugged or too tired): as this is something we could (in theory, at least) control, I'd like to see and compare with stats for non-impaired human drivers too.
Then, I'd like to see it compared to attentive, non-distracted drivers too (but we won't have crash data for this, as they would avoid most potential crashes).
Note that I am only talking things under every human driver's control, and not things like skill, reaction time, etc.
Also, modern cars (like Waymos) will have a much lower braking distance compared to "average": eg. my Volvo has 35m braking distance from 100km/h or 62mph compared to 50m (45% more) listed as average (excluding reaction distance) — so from 50km/h, it should be around 8m!
It certainly matters: "average driver" does not exist, and 95% of the drivers beat the average.
So a claim how autonomous driving system beats the average would only tell us that it beats 5% of the human drivers.
Now, the way stats are massaged here is not even about "drivers", but miles driven, and this language is even worse. We'd need to make sure we are looking at human-driven miles in the same area, same roads, with similar cars.
>To be fair, if 5% of drivers cause 95% of crashes then the average driver is still terrible.
>The median one might be better, but does it even matter? The average driver is still wreaking havoc.
Yes it matters. To be acceptable this technology needs to be at least in the same ballpark as a median-ish person on a median-ish day. Not some nonexistent average that is pulled down by the 1/X people who are drunk and the 1/Y who are from Socal and driving in Maine in a blizzard.
The fact that you basically never hear of "average non criminal driver" or "median law abiding driver" and that there is no real attempt at even standardizing a concept of normal drivers not engaged in bad behavior just reeks.
It's like the door is intentionally being left open for the same slight of hand as when people peddle some policy goal having to do with school shootings and back it up with statistics that are mostly normal crime. Or they are peddling some devious tax that will screw a whole lot of people, and they justify it with an average that's dragged way up by a few oddballs, or dragged way down by a bunch of zeros. Seems like the safety crowd and and self-interested industry are setting up to play off each other in a "recyclable plastic" sort of way.
Second off, what are you talking about that the "average driver is wreaking havoc"? The average driver is filing a collision claim every 15-20yr depending on who's numbers you believe. While I don't know the distance between average and median, either is a fairly high bar that Waymo and friends have to meet.
But the point is if we get all the median and better drivers off the road and replace them with autonomous vehicles, yet keep the worst 5% on the roads too, we are potentially worse off.
In Houston the stats suggest that every driver should get into a crash at least once every. But many ppl haven’t been an crash all their lives and more have been in multiple
> when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.
I vaguely recall reading at some point that this is something human drivers learn to do around robot cars because the robots are so timid. Is that still the case, was it never the case, or has it stopped being the case?
If it's still the case, one could argue that if you were not in a robot, the situation would never have occurred in the first place! (On the other hand, if you were both in robots, maybe it also wouldn't have...)
I hope you are misremembering. Swerving is most often the wrong choice, and I would be disappointed if Waymo were opting for that. By far the best option is to panic stop. Human or robot, physics is a harsh mistress and swerving is more likely to make you lose control and end up in a much more unforgiving wreck.
It wasn't possible to stop at the speed the Waymo was moving at.
The Waymo didn't have the stop sign, the other driver did, at a three way intersection.
The other driver decided to suddenly enter the intersection, when the Waymo was like 5-10 meters away. This was after having stopped at the stop sign.
Either they weren't looking or intentionally trying to cause an accident. Swerving prevented the Waymo from crashing at 40 km/h into the driver's door.
This depends a huge amount on car, driver and situation. It was the right advice for a learner driver in the 90s with no stability control, no experience and no side airbags, because if you’re going to hit something, hitting it front on is the least risky way. I’m not convinced it’s the right advice for a competent driver in a modern vehicle.
It is still standard advice today, as far as I know. Tires are better, stability control is better, but all else being equal you are still much more dynamically stable and have a lot more friction with the road when the car is stopping in a straight line than when swerving.
Also, in the case of someone running a stop sign, it is far from a sure bet they are going to hit their brakes at all, so by swerving you increase the odds that you will still hit them, but now it will be while you have exhausted all your adhesion on lateral control. So now instead of a front end collision with all the benefits of airbags and crumple zones, you are at a significant risk of rolling the car or spinning off the road and hitting something immovable with a part of your car lacking crumple zones.
The common mistake is people swerve and brake, which is a terrible combination - you should accelerate through a sudden manoeuvre, as it maintains control through it, much as you should accelerate through corners in general.
Wunibald Kamm begs to differ. For his circle, it doesn't matter if the additional force that causes the friction to be insufficient is forward or backwards on top of the side force. In critical situations either use your friction for lateral xor longitudinal action, never both at the same time. Brake hard, but then sail through the curve. You want that vector to move along the circle and never leave it. As that is very difficult for an untrained driver, better switch hard between both modes.
True if we all drove unicycles - but in the real world, tyre wear is uneven, brake wear is uneven, loading is uneven, the surface is uneven, and those differential forces are what modern ABS seeks to control.
The key difference between braking and accelerating is that in the former case, independent, potentially differentially worn brakes, apply force unevenly, making the chance of a loss of traction on one or more wheels higher. With acceleration, that force is applied through a differential, meaning it will be far more likely to be appropriately distributed.
If you want to decelerate while swerving it can be done, but it should be done through engine braking - and the tricky bit there is matching revs as you drop the clutch back in, otherwise you have too much retarding force and overcome the coefficient of friction, resulting in a skid.
Easier for those of us who grew up with double de-clutching and no synchromeshes, but when you’re in a critical situation, it’s still an awful lot easier to apply acceleration.
Absolutely. I was recently driving on a motorway in Portugal when a boulder (giant chunk of granite, 10+ tonnes) fell off the back of a truck - right in front of us, in a heavily laden (7 pax and luggage) car. Immediate massive cloud of dust, I checked my blind spot, veered across two lanes, and continued our journey, unscathed. I looked in the rear view, to see the car behind us jump on the brakes instead of evading. They caught the boulder.
Nobody killed, according to the news, but several taken to hospital in critical condition.
Oh, I say unscathed but our tyre exploded the next day, as apparently we caught a fragment, and again, that’s not a “slam on the brakes” moment, but rather “trundle to a stop on the shoulder and walk to the conveniently nearby tyre shop”.
In theory, it depends. In practice, slamming on your brakes is the correct call 99% of the time. To a large extent that is because of the "competent driver" part. I'd expect 80%+ of drivers to consider themselves just that, whereas the truth is of course the opposite.
So, the correct advice is to say "brake, don't swerve", so that drivers internalize that their first thought and reaction in any emergency should be to brake. Teach them to actually brake—fully press on the pedal—while you're at it.
A slightly more nuanced advice would be "brake first, swerve as needed as a follow-up".
But I would never in good conscience be able to give anyone advice to swerve instead of braking.
The optimally regulated system doesn't know the road conditions that well. When the road surface is more slippery, it has the most profound effect on lateral friction, way more than braking.
The Waymo driver can measure the speed and the acceleration of the offending car and calculate, within at most tens of ms, its range of likely future trajectories. And it can calculate its own likely trajectories under maximum braking. And it can track exactly where all obstacles are that would matter if it swerves. All at once. And it can execute that emergency lane change with the control input that is least likely to cause a loss of control and most likely to successfully avoid the other car. It even has processing power to spare to keep playing that Spotify ad!
For a human this advice is true. But what if a computer can near-instantly calculate a perfect swerve within the performance envelope of the car and driving conditions?
There are many cases where swerving will avoid an accident that braking cannot and cars unexpectedly pulling out from the side are often among these. It’s not a majority, but it’s not at all rare.
> Waymo saved my life in LA.
When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.
> ...
> Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
Here is a photo I took inside of the Waymo outside of an Erewhon. Going to Erewhon and experiencing the $20 Hailey Bieber smoothie was on my brother's bucket list and riding in a Waymo was on mine.
He said it was overpriced but bought it again from a different Erewhon so I assumed he liked it (Canadian understatement).
There's apparently a quality gap between locations. The pre-Waymo one was from Erewhon Grove and was freshly blended. Erewhon Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive premade a bunch of them and left them lying around for a while before selling.
My brother's theory is that Erewhon Grove customers are people who legitimately wanted a smoothie and Erewhon Beverly Hills customers just want photos with the smoothie since it was very popular on Instagram at the time.
Most surprising fact was despite being a licensed product, it was better than the best non-licensed smoothie (coconut cloud).
Licensing deals should make the product worse because the royalties cut into the product margin. The company cuts costs or doesn't take creative risks as a result. But somehow Erewhon resisted these pressures when designing the Hailey Bieber smoothie. We had a discussion about why that was the case but couldn't come up with an answer.
I think they have rotating specials. These are pre-made, cheaper, and smaller. When you have a membership this is the one you get for free (once a month).
They used to have a “Dr. Paul's Raw Animal-Based Smoothie” that I looooved, but unfortunately they stopped making it. Still sad about that one :(
Mixing saving one's life with rating for a drink in the same comment makes feel very weird. Not funny, TBH, but actually it reads like a millions of generated bad review comments on amazon, expedia etc.
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