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preston4tw commented on Waymo Was on a Roll in San Francisco. Then One of Its Cars Killed a Cat   nytimes.com/2025/11/15/us... · Posted by u/donohoe
gruez · a month ago
>“A human driver can be held accountable, can hop out, say sorry, can be tracked down by police if it’s a hit-and-run,” Ms. Fielder said in an interview. “Here, there is no one to hold accountable.”

But would a human even suffer consequences in this case? Else in the article mentions:

>The city does not track how many animals are killed by cars each year, but the number is in the hundreds, according to Deb Campbell, a spokeswoman for Animal Care and Control in San Francisco.

and

>Waymo does not dispute that one of its cars killed Kit Kat. The company released a statement saying that when one of its vehicles was picking up passengers, a cat “darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away.”

In other words, it could have easily happened to a human driver, and all the uproar in this case is only because people are being selectively angry against Waymo for... other reasons:

>Still, Kit Kat’s death has given new fuel to detractors. They argue that robot taxis steal riders from public transit, eliminate jobs for people, enrich Silicon Valley executives — and are just plain creepy.

>...

>Ms. Fielder has strong ties to labor unions, including the Teamsters, which has fought for more regulation of autonomous vehicles, largely out of concern for members who could eventually lose their own driving jobs in other sectors.

preston4tw · a month ago
It's obviously sad that an animal was killed in an accident, but the outrage towards Waymo and media coverage definitely seems disproportionate given statistical context, and I was pleasantly surprised that the article made efforts to point that out rather than dogpiling on Waymo.
preston4tw commented on Steam Machine   store.steampowered.com/sa... · Posted by u/davikr
TheCoreh · a month ago
Very weird USB-C port placement choices...

- 2 USB3-A on the front

- 2 USB2-A on the back

- 1 USB-C on the back

If you want to plug an external USB hard drive or SSD at full speed, you'll need to plug it at the front? Or use up the only USB-C port...

I suspect most joysticks sold today come with a USB-C to USB-C cable, so if you want to charge your controller you either need to plug on the back, use an adapter, or get a USB-A to USB-C cable?

Also the single USB-C port isn't Thunderbolt/USB4, and they're only including gigabit ethernet, which is disappointing but perhaps understandable if they're trying to keep it at a low price.

preston4tw · a month ago
Valve / Steam presumably has good data on what controllers and peripherals people are using, so I'd imagine their port choices are based around that. Here's a June 2024 post talking about Steam Input and controller market share: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail... . At the time of the post they say "59% of sessions are using Xbox controllers, 26% are using PlayStation controllers, 10% are on Steam Decks"
preston4tw commented on Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist   research.google/blog/acce... · Posted by u/Jimmc414
crypto420 · 10 months ago
I'm not sure if people here even read the entirety of the article. From the article:

> We applied the AI co-scientist to assist with the prediction of drug repurposing opportunities and, with our partners, validated predictions through computational biology, expert clinician feedback, and in vitro experiments.

> Notably, the AI co-scientist proposed novel repurposing candidates for acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Subsequent experiments validated these proposals, confirming that the suggested drugs inhibit tumor viability at clinically relevant concentrations in multiple AML cell lines.

and,

> For this test, expert researchers instructed the AI co-scientist to explore a topic that had already been subject to novel discovery in their group, but had not yet been revealed in the public domain, namely, to explain how capsid-forming phage-inducible chromosomal islands (cf-PICIs) exist across multiple bacterial species. The AI co-scientist system independently proposed that cf-PICIs interact with diverse phage tails to expand their host range. This in silico discovery, which had been experimentally validated in the original novel laboratory experiments performed prior to use of the AI co-scientist system, are described in co-timed manuscripts (1, 2) with our collaborators at the Fleming Initiative and Imperial College London. This illustrates the value of the AI co-scientist system as an assistive technology, as it was able to leverage decades of research comprising all prior open access literature on this topic.

The model was able to come up with new scientific hypotheses that were tested to be correct in the lab, which is quite significant.

preston4tw · 10 months ago
This is one thing I've been wondering about AI: will its broad training enable it to uncover previously covered connections between areas the way multi-disciplinary people tend to, or will it still miss them because it's still limited to its training corpus and can't really infer.

If it ends up being more the case that AI can help us discover new stuff, that's very optimistic.

preston4tw commented on Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab   amoses.dev/blog/upl-peopl... · Posted by u/nicosalm
preston4tw · a year ago
room presence detection has been a long standing challenge in the smart home / home assistant community. it's cool to see home assistant used and adapted for this use case.
preston4tw commented on     · Posted by u/preston4tw
dinvlad · 2 years ago
The CEO has probably fired so many SREs that he needs to go into the server room to restart it :D
preston4tw · 2 years ago
It's been somewhat surprising Twitter has remained as highly available as it has been despite all the firings. It makes me wonder what the cause of this outage was, for being a relatively short one. Is it a sign of things to come, or just unusually high activity related to the ongoing Israel/Palestine crisis?

Dead Comment

u/preston4tw

KarmaCake day161September 13, 2014View Original