People who think this is a "gotcha!" for Waymo are either not very well educated, not very smart, or both.
Why is that?
Readit Newstengbretson commented on Waymo exec reveals company uses remote workers in the Philippines people.com/waymo-exec-rev... · Posted by u/iancmceachern
I was once in a waymo stopped at a red light. Prior to the light turning green I felt a split second where the car's brake had been released, anticipating the change and then accelerating immediately when the light changed.
Since this experience I've just assumed all waymos have some warehoused human drone pilot actually controlling it.
tengbretson commented on How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post newyorker.com/news/annals... · Posted by u/thm
I don’t get why reasonable claims like this get downvoted. Are billionaires downvoting them? Do so many other ambitious people expect to become billionaires at some point in their lives?
My grandchildren will likely need to be billionaires just to retire.
tengbretson commented on Design Thinking Books (2024) designorate.com/design-th... · Posted by u/rrm1977
Design Thinking is the Data Science of UX: an attempt to gain influence in fields that you don't have expertise in.
Even though there might be universal design principle that can be applied in many fields, the Design Thinking people think that they can just come in and design user interfaces, etc. without really having an expertise in the particular field.
Design Thinking works for selling consulting and not much else. Nobody wants another Agile(TM) process imposed on software developers (in my particular case) that attempts to turn developers into factory line workers.
> "I like your design thinking, I do not like your design thinking people. Your design thinking people are so unlike your design thinking."
- Gandhi
tengbretson commented on Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/7777777phil
To me, this sounds like:
AI is helping me solve all the issues that using AI has caused.
Wordpress has a pretty good export and Markdown is widely supported. If you estimate 1 month of work to get that into NextJS, then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.
To me, this sounds like:
If AI was good at a certain task then it was a bad task in the first place.
Which is just run of the mill dogmatic thinking.
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tengbretson commented on Retreating from EVs could be hazardous for Western carmakers economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/smurda
Battery swap. Great for industry growth, but the manufacturers selling into US and Europe decided not to go there and disputable claims "it can't work" and false applications of Gresham's law are used to explain why.
The Gresham's law thing: money is just a transfer token. Batteries have a use value. The agents who could profit from hoarding good batteries, don't get to achieve the income of renting them.
It's working fine for scooters, and in China for cars and trucks.
Everyone is now betting on solid state getting both range and rapid charge.
The incentives for such a swapping system are completely busted.
Think of existing swap infrastructure out there, like propane tank swaps. People already use these systems to rinse defective or expired tanks all the time, and that overhead simply gets built into the price.
Now imagine if you could refill a propane tank at home by just plugging it in to your wall. The only reasons to use such a service are now exceptional cases like travel, or to move defective items.
For every new tank introduced to the supply, on average, how many good-for-good swaps will occur before the supplier gets a defective one? Take the cost of a new one and divide it by that average and that is the minimum overhead for a swap.
For batteries, that number is likely in the hundreds of dollars.
tengbretson commented on Lessons from the PG&E outage waymo.com/blog/2025/12/au... · Posted by u/scoofy
No one seems sufficiently outraged that a private company's equipment blocked the public roads during an emergency.
> No one seems sufficiently outraged
Harvesting outrage is about the only reliable function the internet seems to have at this point. You're not seeing enough of it?
tengbretson commented on Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades spectrum.ieee.org/ai-mode... · Posted by u/barqawiz
Outside of Apple laptops (and arguably the Ryzen AI MAX 390), an "AI ready" laptop is simply marketing speak for "is capable of making HTTP requests."
Why shouldn’t libraries log?
Any log produced directly by a library will just be a "what" detached from any semblance of a "why".