Radar & camera can be degraded by snow/ice buildup. A grate that lets wet snow in is also going to be big enough to let rocks and other debris in.

Like snow or ice buildup causing issues with the camera, radar, etc.

I use an older version of Calibre that has a fairly robust plug-in to remove DRM. I use it to remove DRM from all my ebook purchases. That plug-in isn’t supported in newer versions of Calibre so I don’t upgrade.

BD is far from bullshit. I used to work across the street from them and saw them testing robots countless times in the parking lot and surrounding area. They were also nice enough to give me & a bunch of coworkers a tour of their labs. It’s pretty darned impressive what they’ve achieved in 3 decades of research. This recent news story shows a lot of the capabilities of their current generation Atlas robot.

You should check out this news story. It gives a lot more detail about their Atlas robot.

You should see just how far Boston Dynamics has progressed. They’ve been working on it for literally decades, and it shows. They may have humanoid AI robots working in automotive assembly lines within a year or two:

All the black hats are going to have a field day uncovering all manner of zero-day exploits…

I’m so glad my wife & I never got sucked into using things like Alexa.

I can recognize when a police officer is directing traffic at a dead traffic light. I can also recognize the intent of other drivers who may wave, flash their headlights, etc. I doubt any current self driving cars can accurately recognize any of those.

Exactly. Any such remote control would have to be trivial for a cop to use, and also need to directly control only the car(s) the cop is currently interacting with. Think of a situation like this where a traffic light is disabled and a cop is there directing traffic. If driverless cars are approaching from multiple directions then how does the cop direct his commands to only the one he’s focusing on at the given moment? Not all that easy when you think about it…

It wasn’t a cloud failure. The self driving cars are highly dependent on traffic lights being red/yellow/green. With the signals inoperative the cars don’t know what to do. Even if there were police officers directing traffic at intersections, the cars aren’t programmed to recognize & respond to them.

This is one of the many edge cases that I’ve been convinced will keep self driving cars from becoming mainstream unless/until true AGI is achieved.

A few years ago I stopped at a red light next to a construction site. I was watching the traffic light, so at first I didn’t notice a cop at the construction site trying to wave me through the red light. He finally took a few steps towards me and yelled to get my attention. Only then did I realize he was waving me through, so I did just that. I seriously doubt any current self driving car would recognize a police officer (and not just a random pedestrian) that’s overriding the traffic signal like that.

Another edge case, coincidentally at the same intersection a few years earlier was when there was a car fully engulfed in flames as I drove up. I could hear sirens in the distance, and the cars in every direction were making sure to safely get out of the way of the approaching fire trucks. At least one or two cars cautiously crossed on the red to get out of the way. Again, I doubt any current self driving car would have navigated that situation anywhere nearly as well as a human.

Clearly some techbro wants to monetize buzzwords plus laptop.

Just wait until buggy malware worms its way into these things and the screen just shows kernel panics in an infinite loop.

Edit: or worse, somebody hacks it to play random hardcore porn videos.

It’s free at Costco, covered by the warranty on the tires they sell. I also just knew the tire had a slow leak, and didn’t know it was a nail until they finished the repair. If they weren’t so busy they would have finished before I finished my shopping.

I recently had a freaking reserved appointment time at a Costco tire center to fix a nail I picked up. I still had to wait 2 hours, despite the appointment.

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Reminds me a bit of Theranos. “Pay no attention to the man (or woman) behind the curtain”…

How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?

I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?