I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving. Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime. Absolutely stupid for a city or state government to approve autonomous systems in their municipalities without first enacting very strict and very punitive laws around these systems. This goes for surveillance, sidewalk delivery bots, and especially driverless cars.
I only say this hoping Toronto is not like "The Wild West" and hopefully has protections around these tech companies stealing jobs and hording wealth in the interest of public efficiencies.
> I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving.
I also live in Denver, and while the quote is technically true, it is misleading. A Waymo did drive into a farmers market...before there were barricades up, when other cars were still driving through as well for set-up time. Nobody would have been charged with anything.
> “It entered through our food truck area,” said Nicole Jarman, the production director of the farmers market... there was a “Road Closed” sign on one side of the street, but the other side of the street was still open to vendor traffic during set up and the Waymo followed a vendor vehicle past the sign and then turned onto the 1400 block of South Pearl Street.
> “It’s still load-in, our barricades are moved to the side, so there’s vehicular access, and it followed that traffic, went slow, and then made its way on out at Arkansas and kept going” she said.
> “It was not anything that made us nervous,” Jarman said.
It wasn't luck though, the cars are incredibly cautious around people. Yes the car did the wrong thing here, but it wasn't driving at speed or endangering people.
This exactly. The car didn't drive into people: it followed a vendor truck into a place it shouldn't have gone, apparently slowly exited the area.
It's bad, and obviously shouldn't have happened, but the car is cautious around people and didn't hit anyone. It's a far better failure mode than the typical case of a human who drives into a crowd.
"Endangering" is an exaggeration based on what actually occurred it seems. What the car did was technically in violation of traffic regulations but it was careful to not hit anybody or cause significant damage to people's property as it did so. This is essentially no different than a careful driver ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) a sign restricting them from entering an area, but still driving through the area successfully without doing any harm. Technically, traffic rules were broken, by mistake (an algorithmic one most likely) in this case, but there were no lasting effects.
People make mistakes like that all the time, and sometimes they still get ticketed for that kind of thing, and other times they get a simple warning or don't get any form of rebuke at all. How many of us have never accidentally gone into a one-way traffic lane from the opposite side and managed to still drive through and get back on track without killing or maiming anybody? It's unlikely anybody would get charged with a crime for this, nor should they over a simple mistaken rule violation that did no harm.
Earlier this year a 92-year-old woman drove into our local Asian supermarket, killed three people and injured at least six. No criminal charges were filed. At least they pulled her driver license.
I don't say this to suggest excusing autonomous car companies from bearing liability, but just for context.
Perhaps we should not make the regulations too punitive on the AV companies as that would reduce the speed of replacing bad human drivers who currently cause 40,000 deaths a year in the US.
A human driver, mowed down and killed a family of four in my city [1]. They got six days in jail. With this context, what level of punitive laws are you think for autonomous car companies? Humans drive through these situations too [3].
When people point out "reckless" behavior of autonomous cars to me, the conversation simply isn't worth having unless you're comparing to current conditions. We're looking at 40,000 deaths per year so, endless community meetings and hand-wringing around regulations is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.
I happened to be in that area of West Portal on that fateful day (damn you, Noe Valley Bakery!) I did not see it happen, but went to see what that noise was all about. The images of that scene from that day still haunt me; they are very vivid. It was a terrible, terrible accident and may that old witch Mary Lau spend an eternity in hell.
> Two years ago, the family of four was on their way to the San Francisco Zoo with their two young children when they were killed by Lau, driving 70 miles an hour in the residential area of West Portal in San Francisco.
I'm sure per mile driven, there is an "acceptable death rate", but should we atleast wait till the autonomous cars are on the board to make that a priority?
I disagree with this. I'm okay with permissive permitting of self driving (it seems to be much safer according to their own studies, which I am willing to skeptically accept), but where I agree is being permitted should not give you any special rights when it comes to avoiding civil (criminal?) liability.
A taxi company that kept a drunk employed might be liable for damages that drunk causes, same rules should apply to your own self driving fleet.
How is that different from a malfunction of human-operated car?
There are drive-by-wire cars on the road.
ABS systems can disable breaks.
If a malfunction is caused by the control software of that car or a mechanical malfunction by bad design it seems to me like the same thing. Do you/we don't have a solution for that already?
Just to be clear: there are humans choosing to have the car operate. That's not just semantics. Responsibility lies with the people making the choice to cause a system to operate.
Certainly not unless they are personally responsible for a serious offense, that's more like corporate malfeasance, not an individual traffic incident.
But the company itself should be given a citation for the majority of ordinary traffic violations, and should be the one fined.
If people act with gross negligence, then yes, we should arrest them. How that is defined may depend on a variety of factors, though, and is something that already has relevant case law in related fields.
Immediately stop all Waymo's in the jurisdiction, start legal proceeding against the company. Someone signed off on software/hardware that lacked sufficient protections, find out who.
> nothing happened to the lead designer (Moisseiff) or engineer (Eldridge)
It's a joke–a riff on a Parks and Recs meme making fun of Venezuela at the time. We don't jail aircraft engineers when they make a mistake because just sending people to jail doesn't work as well as encouraging them to co-operate ex post facto so the root cause can be identified.
>It's a joke–a riff on a Parks and Recs meme making fun of Venezuela at the time.
Poe's law strikes again. Of course nobody thinks crashing prod should result in jail, or most software engineers would have spent some time behind bars by now. However it's entirely unclear whether @CountHackulus meant "of course autonomous car engineers should be jailed, just as if an engineer signed off on faulty plans" (which to be fair, also happens), or is just repeating my joke with bridges.
If the violation is serious enough the autonomous predatory tow trucks will hear it on the radio then show up promptly to whisk the vehicle away, as usual. Plus in this case the driver is detained and the vehicle is impounded in the same stroke :)
After that it would only be fair that they would have to not only pay bail to the court, but also towing & storage fees before being released, like for any normal driver.
And if they skip bail, they're going back in the slammer :0
Man I hate this argument. You're comparing cognition to reproduction. You're giving examples of duplication but comparing them to unique artifacts. It's not the same and you must understand this.
On top of this is the gross ethical concerns where all AI companies were allowed to steal all of this information/wisdom/art to train these models. At least with the power looms, a few skilled craftsmen were hired to help design them. This is blatant intellectual theft we're choosing to ignore because we're addicted to cheap products.
We choose temporary sensory pleasure over a healthy society.
I don't think the closest T-Shirt comparison is quite exactly either of those. E.g. you can get any image you like printed on a T-Shirt without hiring someone might be closer, though still not really the same. Thinking about that a bit more, everything seems like unique cognition until the technology to treat it as simple duplication exists. "Duplicate this project with this layout and style" has crossed that line now, just as taking a photo with a filter did long ago which itself long ago replaced a painter and so on. They technologies often produce something of lower quality than what the people they replaced would, few would say a photo filter is as good as a custom painting, but they tend to do the job well enough it replaces most of those kinds of workers.
I think the concern should be more on "you can't just extrapolate the same process forever and expect the same kind of outcome". Just because it was good in small amounts before doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently good to have an infinite capability to do that.
Regardless of all of that, I think it's important if we do have the AIs we're making we treat it as a common good in terms of wealth (regardless if people were paid) rather than a way to funnel a small amount of money to the companies who initially drive it as we are now. I.e. don't even mind if we "steal" (copy) everyone's available outputs as long as we all decide it should really benefit everyone rather than a handful.
> You're giving examples of duplication but comparing them to unique artifacts.
No, I definitely see the difference, but I'm acknowledging that many people probably never cared all that much about how a beautiful thing is made, or at least not as much as they care about being able to have it.
I think it's a net good for the world for more people to be able to afford the things they like (after accounting for all externalities), even though of course it sucks for the craftsmen that lose their economic basis in the process.
> At least with the power looms, a few skilled craftsmen were hired to help design them. This is blatant intellectual theft we're choosing to ignore because we're addicted to cheap products.
I'm pretty sure this was little consolation to e.g. the Swing Rioters [1]. I suspect that this only seems less bad in hindsight. For many people whose livelihood was destroyed by mechanized agriculture, the power loom and other advances of technology during industrialization, I'm pretty sure it seemed equally catastrophic, if not more (18th century government welfare programs were somewhat lacking compared to modern standards).
All that said, while I do believe in human rights, I don't think there should be something like a "right for everyone to continue living like they are used to", which ultimately always means something like economic protectionism, artificial/subsidized demand etc. I'd much rather we find dignified ways to manage the transition for everybody than to engage in some elaborate pretense of economic necessity when there isn't one. If we only grant value or even basic human rights to economically productive workers, maybe that's something worth addressing anyway?
sorry I think this is a false equivalency. This isn't the career path of programming getting replaced by a new technology. This is technology replacing career paths.
We're all familiar with the term "knowledge worker." What happens when that field is broadly removed? It will be a reverse-trend of telling all ex-coal miners to become software engineers. Except here's the rub: going from a software engineer to something requiring a human only for their dexterity is typically a massive earnings decrease. So, in effect, as Brian Merchant and others put it, this is not just a shift but a massive plan of wage theft.
Looking at it from the optimistic side as my bosses frame it: we're all moving up in the ranks! Well, my team already has a PM. She's already trying to vibe code her PRDs. Thankfully, right now, they suck. But they won't forever because all of us engineers are being forced to train our replacement. There can only be so many strategists, project managers, designers, etc. This isn't simply the technology changing and us adapting, this is a massive reduction in workforce requirements ACROSS industries. Hype bros thinking we'll all have jobs once the AI is good enough to replace us are simply hallucinating as bad as the frontier models of 2024.
There’s no demand for human dexterity anyway, and it’s not about money. I like doing intellectual work.
They are spending 1T to ruin the quality of work we do, also probably ruining our chances of securing a livelihood and then they want us to for some reason welcome it with open arms and openly say look how great this is and marvel at human obsolescence. Yeah no thanks.
You would think if the general public actually wanted this, lobbying wouldn't be necessary. Call your reps. Let them know how you feel about intellectual property theft, wage theft, ecological impacts, and the intentional erosion of the voting power of the majority in modern democracy.
It is hard to find actual data that supports the claim that calling your congressperson matters, mostly the internet is full of anecdata and wishful thinking.
Effective altruism has some data that suggests it works marginally for state leglislators but works quite well for undecided federal officials.
At this point in my life I have zero patience or sympathy for the story of a man selling his company to a massive conglomerate and then feeling betrayed or somehow sad/regretful when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.
There's value in making more people aware of something, even if it appears obvious to you. It's possible that someone who doesn't share your views on Disney, or corporations more broadly, might have been familiar with FiveThirtyEight and will have their views changed by Nate Silver's account of the situation. There's also nothing wrong with someone reflecting on something they worked on for over a decade and identifying things they could have done differently.
Ironically, your comment adds nothing to the discussion other than virtue signaling that you're "in the know" on this subject.
I'll disagree. As an open forum, all responses are allowed, even telling someone to sleep in the bed they made.
But it does bring up a good point. That too many people are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Any reasonable person does, or ought to know, the cycle 538 went through. And we need to stop giving the benefit of the doubt to reasonable people who say "well I'm the one who didn't"
"While this perceived inauthenticity is viewed with scorn and contempt by members of the subculture, the definition of the term and to whom it should be applied is subjective. While the term is most associated with the 1970s- and 1980s-era punk and hardcore subculture, English use of the term originates in the late 19th century."
As GenX and to bring the usual generation discussion, it appears the more recent ones are too fluffy, like expecting everything nice, do no harm, feel betrayed when it was already obvious from the start how it would end up, and so on.
This comment is maybe a little too aggressive but I kind of share the sentiment. Mostly, after reading this long article, I'm surprised he never quite explains why he never tried to go at it independently? He says
> I’ve always had a fairly entrepreneurial spirit
but that doesn't square well with being a cog in the huge Disney machine.
> I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling.
Virtue signalling is a funny term. What, exactly, does it mean here? In what way is reminiscing about a venture that lasted 15 years of your life "virtue signalling"? It seems to be that word is trotted out as a meaningless cliche, something in the sense of "I don't like this thing, but I'll sound more sophisticated if I accuse it of this nebulous bad thing rather than just saying I don't like it".
The man is allowed to write a blog post about the final conclusion of a huge phase of his life. You don't have to give him your sympathy, but there's nothing wrong with writing about it.
The "virtue signaling" is signaling being a scrappy creative type who regrets/disliked the path he followed when he actually sold out to a big conglomerate at the first possible opportunity. The virtues being signaled are things like independence and grit.
Perhaps you read a different blog post than I did, but that's not what he signalled at all. He regrets getting involved with ESPN specifically because it was a poor fit for him as a television network that didn't have a suitable business model for 538, and would have preferred if he had taken the competing offers from NYT or Bloomberg in 2013 and then wanted to move to The Athletic in 2018. At no point did he say anything like "I wish I didn't sell 538 and stuck it out alone".
It kind of ended up being a funny dance between 538, the NYT and The Athletic. The original sale to The Athletic probably would've made the most sense for 538 (in hindsight). Then the NYT obviously realised what they'd lost with 538 departing, and end up buying The Athletic a few years later.
I don't understand the use of the word "actually" in this sentence. The second half does not stand in contrast to the first half. In fact, it explains the first half.
And portraying oneself as having independence and grit when one doesn't actually (which I don't concede happened here) is not what virtue signaling is. "Virtue" here more closely means "morality" than "admirable or sympathetic qualities". Virtue signaling is disingenuously behaving like you are a moral person because it is advantageous, when in fact you lack such morals.
I feel the need to belabor this because accusations of virtue signaling are too often unfounded and amount to a cheap trick to shut down more thoughtful discussion.
“Virtue signaling” has become a thought-terminating cliche.
All it really amounts to is an accusation of insincerity motivated by vanity, which is a two-for-one ad hominem attack that allows the accuser to avoid responding to the actual point.
It is a statement on a culture that values insincere "feelgoodery" over truth. We can decry the downfall of common sense even if it comes at the expense of pointing out the obvious. Imo this is a good trend.
This has literally nothing to do with the article, and really nothing to do with almost any usage of the term I've seen. I pretty much always see it as a kind of incoherent insult that, like this usage here, isn't based in any kind of reality but instead just makes the person writing it feel good about themselves for some reason.
Easy phrase for rude folks to trot out when someone raises ethical/moral/legal concerns. Quick little rationalization:
_other person says they care about thing I don't that admittedly does sound good, so it has to be wrong to have mentioned it - I can't just say I don't care about the good-sounding thing_
(Of course, on the internet, people will end up playing make believe with their values, but it shouldn't be the first assumption. Or maybe it should, but with a hard second look.)
But I could accuse you (to be clear, I'm not) of making that statement out of a desire to "virtue signal."
You are stating your opposition to feelgoodery, thereby currying favor with those in your anti-feelgoodery camp by showing how anti-feelgoodery you are. But secretly of course I'm saying you don't really believe that. You are not that opposed to feelgoodery, you're just trying to get brownie points and make yourself feel good (ironically).
Again, that's not what I think, but IMO that's what the use of the phrase has mostly become.
Moreover, under Silver's deal with Disney for 2013-8 he "retained ownership of his proprietary models.... Disney owned the brand, the IP, and the archive" [0]. Then apparently in 2018 that arrangement expired and Silver decided to leave. Now in 2026 Disney deleted the archive without announcement.
So it sounds messy, but I don't understand Silver's complaint: what did he lose now in 2026, if he had 5 years to back things up starting in 2013? Is he complaining that he lost legal rights to use his IP? or never retained a license to his IP? surely not that Disney physically deleted the archive, 8-13 years later in 2026, why would that even affect him? NYT still has archives of his work from 2010-3. (or was it the SEO effect of the backlinks from the 2013-8 archive?)
Also, he had a choice whether to sell to sports website The Athletic or Disney (The Atlantic was a third interested party but didn't bid). In [0] he says:
> We came quite close to securing a deal with The Athletic... the potential deal with The Athletic hit a last-minute snafu, which there might have been time to work around if there hadn’t been a hard deadline imposed by Disney, but Disney needed a decision from us.
(Well who's responsible for that negotiation, if not him? Anyway how do we know The Athletic deal wouldn't have gone south eventually too, after a decade?)
In any case it's quite possible that with media consolidation, the archives of his models (for 2014, 2016, 2018 elections) would or will go away eventually. In which case, what's the lesson learned about licensing or retaining non-exclusive rights to his own past work? I only see his complaint, no lesson-learned about what he should have done. And even if he sold/relinquished all rights to it back in 2018, I don't see why he couldn't have had someone else clean-code and replicate that work. (Like the days of x86 licenses, or other blackbox reverse-engineering.)
(I try to avoid the term "virtue signaling" on HN regardless when it is/isn't merited, it seems to raise the temperature of the resulting discussion and move it away from the facts, it tends to get read as an ad-hominem).
I wrote this exact comment elsewhere on the thread and got downvoted for it. Business is business! It sucks for Nate but he's acting like a sore loser, when this is a totally normal and expected outcome. Businesses acquire other businesses and sunset them all the time. Zero sympathy from me.
they do since Substack was invented because it turns out a digital rehabilitation facility for whiny and overly wordy sore losers is a fantastic subscription business.
Might want to think about selling that one to Disney as well and then writing about your great regrets of selling your substack on substack v2 in ten years, that's gotta be amazing content for another ten posts
What are your criteria for recognizing a useful insightful blog into a poster's previous business ventures?
Few tellers are neutral and objective, many writers get accused of selectively editing things:
Philip Greenspun's account of the demise of Ars Digita springs to mind. Or Jerry Kaplan on Go (mobile startup). Or Joel Spolsky on the last decade of StackOverflow.
Maybe it's just a stylistic choice, but if this happened to me, I wouldn't write a long post about it. I'd tweet, "They deleted the archive; what a sad end to this chapter of my life" (or something like that to let the world know what happened & that I was disappointed), but I wouldn't write a long rant. Maybe a short blog post, maybe.
I don't view his post as useful or insightful, but instead view it as demonstrating a lack of understanding of normal business practices. It's like he didn't anticipate that this could happen, whereas it's always a risk when you sell out. The exact same thing has happened to lots of other small blog/media outlets, like Kara Swisher's Re/code. This isn't an unexpected situation, but he's acting like it is. And that simply demonstrates a lack of maturity.
Sore losers absolutely complain. It's one of the biggest traits of being a sore loser.
A mature person would be disappointed, vent to their close friends/spouse, and then shut up about it. They wouldn't publish a long blog post to air their grievances.
This is where I've been directed to offer feedback. Higher votes get attention, that's the idea. I've had Microsoft account reps for previous company's enterprise agreements direct me there so I assume they watch it.
Whenever a msft PM encourages me to post on github/feedback/whatever I know there's a 99.9% chance that its going to be posted, get a few upvotes, and then be closed in 2 years when they change platforms again.
fwiw, we went from in-memory to sqlite and had massive performance gains for a language model trie we were working with in an app. Best part: cross-platform! I just find this so odd, the gall of the forker who literally started with someone else's code then, after asking about a collab, told them "sorry, I think better." So weird. Ah well, 7 years old, I'm sure they've both gotten over it.
I only say this hoping Toronto is not like "The Wild West" and hopefully has protections around these tech companies stealing jobs and hording wealth in the interest of public efficiencies.