Even though the gulf between Waymo and the next runner up is huge, it too isn't quite ready for primetime IMO. Waymos still suffer from erratic behavior at pickup/dropoff, around pedestrians, badly marked roads and generally jam on the brakes at the first sign of any ambiguity. As much as I appreciate the safety-first approach (table stakes really, they'd get their license pulled if they ever caused a fatality) I am frequently frustrated as both a cyclist and driver whenever I have to share a lane with a Waymo. The equivalent of a Waymo radiologist would be a model that has a high false-positive and infinitesimal false-negative rate which would act as a first line of screening and reduce the burden on humans.
I've seen a lot of young people (teens especially) cross active streets or cross in front of Waymos on scooters knowing that they'll stop. I try not to do anything too egregious, but I myself have begun using Waymo's conservative behavior as a good way to merge into ultra high density traffic when I'm in a car, or to cross busy streets when they only have a "yield to pedestrian" crosswalk rather than a full crosswalk. The way you blip a Waymo to pay attention and yield is beginning to move into the intersection, lol.
I always wonder if honking at a Waymo does anything. A Waymo stopped for a (very slow) pickup on a very busy one lane street near me, and it could have pulled out of traffic if it had gone about 100 feet further. The 50-ish year old lady behind it laid on her horn for about 30 seconds. Surreal experience, and I'm still not sure if her honking made a difference.
Simultaneously, Waymo is adopting more human-like behavior like creeping at red lights and cutting in front of timid drivers as it jockeys for position.
I still think that Google isn't capable of scaling a rideshare program because it sucks at interfacing with customers. I suspect that Uber's long-term strategy of "take the money out of investors' and drivers' pockets to capture the market until automation gets there" might still come to fruition (see Austin and Atlanta), just perhaps not with Uber's ownership of the technology.
On the other hand Google has been hard at work trying to make its way into cars via Android automotive so I totally see it resigning to just providing a reference sensor-suite and a car "Operating System" to manufacturers who want a turnkey smart-car with L3 self-driving
>Simultaneously, Waymo is adopting more human-like behavior like creeping at red lights and cutting in front of timid drivers as it jockeys for position.
So before it was a 16yo in a driver's ed car. Now it's an 18yo with a license.
I'm gonna be so proud of them when it does something flagrantly illegal but any "decent driver who gets it" would have done in context.
I honestly don't think we will have a clear answer to this question anytime soon. People will be in their camps and thats that.
Just to clarify, have you ridden in a Waymo? It didn't seem entirely clear if you just experienced living with Waymo or have ridden in it.
I tried it a few times in LA. What an amazing magical experience. I do agree with most of your assertions. It is just a super careful driver but it does not have the full common sense that a driver in a hectic city like LA has. Sometimes you gotta be more 'human' and that means having the intuition to discard the rules in the heat of the moment (ex. being conscious of how cyclists think instead of just blindly following the rules carefully, this is cultural and computers dont do 'culture').
Waymo has replaced my (infrequent) use of Uber/Lyft in 80% of cases ever since they opened to the public via waitlist. The product is pretty good most of the time, I just think the odd long-tail behaviors become a guarantee as you scale up.
> Waymos still suffer from erratic behavior at pickup/dropoff, around pedestrians, badly marked roads and generally jam on the brakes at the first sign of any ambiguity.
As do most of the ridesharing drivers I interact with nowadays, sadly.
The difference is that Waymo has a trajectory that is getting better while human rideshare drivers have a trajectory that is getting worse.
Society accepts that humans make mistakes and considers it unavoidable, but there exists a much higher bar expected of computers/automation/etc. even if a waymo is objectively safer in terms of incidents per miles driven, one fatality makes headlines and adds scrutiny about “was it avoidable?”, whereas humans we just shrug.
I think the theme of this extends to all areas where we are placing technology to make decisions, but also where no human is accountable for the decision.
> there exists a much higher bar expected of computers/automation/etc. even if a waymo is objectively safer in terms of incidents per miles driven, one fatality makes headlines and adds scrutiny about “was it avoidable?”
This doesn’t seem to be happening. One, there are shockingly few fatalities. Two, we’ve sort of accepted the tradeoff.
Society only cares about the individual and no one else. If Uber/Lyft continue to enshittify with drivers driving garbage broken down cars, drivers with no standards (ie. having just smoked weed) and ever rising rates, eventually people will prefer the Waymos.
Very little of that anywhere in the country, especially when it's the rights of drivers vs other road users. San Francisco is a bit better but gets bad when it goes through its boom cycles that bring lots of people in.
between HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/2+ interoperability issues, HTTP/2+ configuration, TLS configuration, HTTPS is hardly boring and does what it says on the tin every time.
You're missing the point here. You can always go from ordered to randomness. You cannot go from randomness to ordered. So by intentionally removing the useful properties of UUIDv7, you're taking away some external API consumers' hypothetical possibility to leverage benefits. If I know (as an API consumer) that I have a database that for whatever reason prefers evenly distributed primary keys or something similar, I can always accomplish that by hashing. I just can never go the other way.
Never use someone else's synthetic key as your primary key. If you want ordered keys, even if the API is giving out sequential integers, you should still use your own sequential IDs.
I take your point, but I think your hypothetical is a wonderful example of Hyrum's Law. And for that reason, if I was going to go to the trouble of mapping my internal v7 uuids into something more random for public consumption, then I'd be sure generate something that doesn't look like a uuid at all so nobody gets any funny ideas about what they can do with it.
I'm not saying anything about better or worse. I'm saying that UUID v4 by definition has high entropy and UUID v7 does not. You can always go from low to high entropy, but not the other way around.
He went to jail because his autism wouldn't allow him to be duplicitous like a CEO doing evil things has to be and he attracted too much negative attention.
I don't think it's that, I think they just want people to onboard onto these things before understanding what the actual cost might be once they're not subsidized by megacorps anymore. Something similar to loss-leading endeavors like Uber and Lyft in the 2010s, I suspect that that showing the actual cost of inference would raise questions about the cost effectiveness of these things for a lot of applications. Internally, Google's data query surface tell you cost in terms of SWE-time (e.g. this query cost 1 SWE hour) since the incentives are different.
That doesn't make much sense, driving a gas car from Jersey is gonna eat up a couple of gallons of fuel ($10x20=$200/mo), insuring it will be $200/mo, if it's not paid off it'll cost at least $500-600, parking will run easily $500 but likely more. Why is that $180 the straw that broke the camel's back?
The Jersey thing isn’t the issue. Car commuters still commute. Most of the traffic volume are whiny Long Islanders who’d rather cut through Manhattan than navigate the belt parkway and bridges to New Jersey. Also poorly served Queens and Brooklyn residents — I grew up in Queens… my dads public transit time to Lower Manhattan or my mom’s time to Manhattan hospitals was about 2 hours — similar to taking Metro North from Dutchess county or LIRR.
The downside of this stuff that we don’t have data on is how it affects big employers who benefit from car transit and benefit the city as a whole? How many patients are going to avoid NYU, Cornell or MSK in favor of a satellite site not in the city proper, for example?
NYC chased most of the big industries away already in my lifetime, I wonder if this will impact commercial business in the city in the long run.
When I lived in the area, I used to regularly drive in to lower Manhattan after 6PM for free parking because it was cheaper, faster, and more convenient than taking the train from right in front of my NJ apartment. The congestion charge would change that equation.
The parking should've never been free in the first place, that's always a mistake. Even a single parking spot costs many thousands of dollars a year to maintain and own.
> Even a single parking spot costs many thousands of dollars a year to maintain
In what universe is this true?
There are 3 million parking spots in NYC. If each cost $3000/year to maintain (presumably that's "many thousands"), that would be $9 billion/year - considerably more than what's spend on the entire Department of Transportation.
I'd be shocked if a single spot cost even $100/year to maintain.
It's the opportunity cost of the land being used as parking.
Manhattan is one of the few parts of the US where we don't indirectly mandate seven parking spots per car on average. A surface lot ends up costing about $7,000/spot to pave. But at >$1,000,000 per acre garages are used instead. But then that's tens of thousands per spot in construction cost. Underground parking is the most expensive type due to excavation cost. Meanwhile the most convenient parking curbside is offered by the government for free or <$1. Is there something wrong with this picture?
> Treating curbside parking like it was exactly the same as large rectangular lots is nonsense.
Yeah because the parking is already built. But obviously before you build the parking you have a choice - and building "free" parking is a really stupid choice you should never make. You can give that space to building or the road, either will be more productive.
Opportunity cost of not having protected bike lanes or dedicated transit right of way. Especially in a place like Manhattan improving cycling safety and getting busses out of traffic would be a huge net gain for the city compared with huge amounts of space dedicated to large private vehicles.
You can buy a used car that gets 30 mpg city for $7,000. Even with a loan, that's closer to $200/month at today's (rather high) rates, not $500-600/month.
Insurance on that will be on the order of $60/month for an adult safe driver, not $200/month.
Driving from say, Jersey City to the East Village and back every day is going to use about 10 gallons of gas per month @ $3.20/gallon that's $32/month, not $200/month.
Parking is bad though it depends on how long you park for, but that's because that has also been jacked up to only allow the wealthy to drive.
