In theory yes, but in practice those drones would have to take a really long flight over enemy territory giving more opportunities to shoot them down. And it’s not like they are difficult to shoot down, they are cheap crap, their only advantage being that there’s a lot of them
You really haven’t been paying attention to Ukraine. You can launch them from trucks. from boats. You can make them so cheap defense becomes too costly. What people don’t seem to get is that you that much of modern infrastructure is not scalable to an age of war and chaos the US is unleashing in bid to shift power dynamics from economy (which China is winning) to military.
Pipelines have endless vulnerability surface as Ukraine showed and just do the math on trucks vs a super tanker.
> You can make them so cheap defense becomes too costly.
That's because the US chose to shoot them down with Patriot missles, like morons. Ukrainians have developed cheap interceptor drones for this very purpose.
As low tech as they are, they fly low, can’t really be detected by radar and you only need one to get through. Pipelines are long and can’t be protected.
Yeah buried pipelines are common but I can’t imagine Iran is going to let them be built without interference. Also, a 2000 mile buried pipeline can take 2-3 years to build and that’s without account for 2-5 years of planning, permitting and land acquisition phase. None of this is going to happen soon.
Someone once said that this is because Waymos are novelty, and they still behave a bit weird, like being slow and undecisive. Which leads to humans being super-careful around them. So the Waymo safety record is actually not their own achievement.
I guess we'll have to wait to one of the two things to happen to really assess Waymo's performance:
1. They need to lose their markings and easily distinguishable features (like a big lidar on top), so they don't get any special treatment from other drivers.
2. They need to be majority of vehicles on the road.
That would make sense a while ago, but definitely not in SF for locals who have lived here a while. For me as a pedestrian/bicyclist/motorcyclist I actually feel safer around them than any other car.
Someone also once said that the Azores are the remains of Atlantis. I simply didn't put any credence in it.
While behavioral changes around a self-driving car are plausible; they're common enough now that, at least where I live in San Francisco, regular human drivers should be pretty well acclimated to them.
That info is pretty outdated: they were slow and indecisive in 2024, but now they behave pretty much like any top-decile human driver. I don’t think they get special treatment from other drivers either, I can’t read anyone else’s mind but I treat them like just another car and it seems like everyone else does as well.
The other day a human driver in front of me was doing 30 km/h under the speed limit down the middle of two lanes.
On that same drive, another driver doing around 15 under clipped a roundabout on the way in and on the way out. Guess they couldn’t decide to turn the wheel fast enough.
I refuse to believe everybody is hammered all of the time, but I’m starting to wonder.
It is less than 10km round trip, in the ‘burbs. Driving with humans scares me anymore. Bring on the robots.
Ugh - either the commons is an unregulated 3D space or we actually tag and separate moving bodies regulated by size/weight, purpose, owner, occupant type, etc. I don't necessarily hate commercial vehicles utilizing the various rights-of-way but clearly there is a difference in momentum, agency, and general "value" between some human wandering around and a heavy robot.
recently (past couple of months) they've been much more aggressive in the ways that make a good driver a good driver - confident and assertive when they should be. for me this has anecdotally been a massive improvement
one of the things that i noticed in a recent trip to austin is that the waymo vehicles were far more assertive and quick than the human drivers so maybe that has been addressed.
US constitution says that starting a war must be authorized by Congress, president has no authority to do it on his own.
The problem is: over time the US grew so powerful, that the definition of "war" became blurry. "No, we are not at war, our soldiers are just dropping bombs on Iran for fun and profit".
EDIT: Another problem, of course, is that current member of Congress have no balls to stand up to Trump and reclaim their constitutional powers.
Congress made its mistake a long time ago. Power is very difficult to reclaim once it has been relinquished. And it didn't even take a Caesar crossing the Rubicon in our case.
I wonder if Godwins law and such did more harm than good in the end? I mean: yes, Hitler was a terrible person and Holocaust was horrible, but, by putting so much effort into convincing everyone that Hitler and Holocaust were so unique things in the history of mankind you’re basically creating a blind spot, where the resurgence of fascism goes unnoticed because everyone thinks “it can’t as bad as Hitler and the Nazis, right?”
It’s a communal thing. It’s more than just the sport it’s also about being out with other fans, showing support and usually friendly ribbing of the opposing teams fans from time to time.
That is how it was explained to me when I said something similar
Yes, it does cause huge inflation, but that's not even the biggest problem with it. That would be: people do not really like to share fruits of their labor with strangers, so UBI would significantly undermine the motivation to do anything other than bare minimum.
UBI is not possible until robots and AI take over most jobs (but then we risk that one day the AI decides to just get rid of "those useless humans")
I don't think we should worry about the advent of AGI deciding to get rid of us; I'm more worried about the people who own the AI current AI infrastructure, as well as the current US regime, who don't see the value in the pesky humans beyond revenue and votes, respectively.
There’s nothing complicated about roundabouts: entering it is like joining the traffic from a parking lot/your own driveway, exiting it is like exiting a highway.
You yield to traffic from the left, which mean someone from a leftward entrance has priority, but they can actually be blocked by other traffic. So you have to not only consider yielding to them, but also whether they are yielding to someone else, thus giving you space to go. I see this computation mess people up all the time.
Also, judging intentions is much harder. On a multi-lane highway, it's very clear when someone is cutting across lanes to exit. And there's only one place they can be exiting. On a multi-lane roundabout, they might be taking the exit before your entrance, or the one after. Often people won't be signalling, or even giving incorrect signals.
When joining as well, if I'm emerging onto a busy road with two lanes in the direction I'm going, I will probably accept joining when the nearest lane is clear, even if the next lane is not, as long as the cars there don't look to be moving into the nearest lane. On a roundabout people can peel off at any time, and you should really wait until there's a gap in all lanes.
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