I hear this a lot, and I'm genuinely curious why you think it might take more energy to be on alert for tricky situations. Wouldn't you already be doing that for your own manual driving?
Think about a junior coworker you offloaded some of your tasks to. It turns out the coworker frequently makes mistakes. At some point you are going to say it is easier to just do this myself. Especially if a single mistake can cost you your life!
I’m guessing that predicting the failure modes of a computer is more taxing than your brain using pattern recognition of what it needs to react to.
If you’re driving, your brain can automatically prioritize the importance of things that you see. But since a computer fails in different ways than a human, you lose all automatic prioritization
I know my normal, non-self-driving car won't randomly slam on the brakes or swerve into a median. Even if I take my hands off the wheel, I know it will keep going straight-ish for a second or two.
A "self-driving" tesla is an adversary you need to supervise to make sure it doesn't take actions you wouldn't expect of a normal car.
As other posters have pointed out, it's like running an LLM with `--dangerously-skip-permissions`: I wouldn't `rm -rf /` my computer (or in the case of tesla, my life), but an AI might.
It's not just "tricky situations", sometimes FSD will do things that no normal driver would ever do, and it will do them inconsistently. Sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes it's drunk.
Because constantly switching between full attention and degraded attention (which the FSD promises) is more tiring that staying on full attention continuously.
This is a subject that has been studied quite a bit, as there are a bunch of jobs where people have to monitor for rare emergencies, and react fast if an emergency should arise. Things like pilots on flights with autopilot; lifeguards watching for swimmers in distress; CCTV monitoring; operating airport X-ray machines, and so on.
Previous studies had found that a human and a computer performed markedly better than either a human alone or a computer alone - but in those studies failures were quite common, so they didn't give the humans time to get bored or distracted.
When researchers got test subjects to perform a simulated flying task, monitoring a system with 99%+ reliability, they found the humans were proportionally much worse at stepping in than they were on less reliable systems.
Swimming pool lifeguards will often change posts every 15-20 minutes and and get a 10-15 minute break every hour, to keep things interesting enough that they can pay attention. Good luck getting drivers to do that.
Funny, I was going to mention exactly that. I'm a private pilot with a modern autopilot and flying is exhausting. Partly because the piston engine is rattling your brain the entire time but also because you're on high alert the entire time. You're always making sure the autopilot is keeping the plane on the blue (or green) line and is being predictable. And my smartwatch shows my heart rate is usually more elevated on autopilot than not.
There's no way to model what a "tricky situation" may be to an opaque and ever-changing piece of self-driving software. It may fail in random ways at random times — it's completely, 100% unpredictable.
Therefore, you have to be 100% ready at all times to react in case anything that's possible happens.
Sounds way more tiring than just driving yourself and only having to account for the known, relatively easy to model human failure modes.
The fundamental problem is that "staying alert for tricky situations" is essentially an exercise in prediction. FSD effectively hides a bunch of variables from you, making the prediction harder.
Have you ever been a passenger of an unpredictable driver? Was that stressful? Now, add not just the capacity but the responsibility to fix their mistakes.
This is the real trick about 95% accurate or 99% accurate, if you never know when that 1% incident will occur, you ALWAYS have to watch for it. And eventually we'll have to live with the fact it'll never hit 100% accuracy, just as we don't have 100% accuracy today with human driving.
Because where I live around 55th this winter we had five straight weeks below -15c / 5f daily average plus enough snowfall that it was infeasible to clean anything but the most major roads.
Solar is out of question in these conditions and when thermal pump fails you have to evacuate. When just grid electricity fails you have to either have some sort of stored fuel backup or evacuate.
The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics who can't even imagine how crazy they sound to most everyone else.
> The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics
To be fair, 90% of the population lives within 45 degrees of the equator. If we're talking about global energy solutions for CO2 reduction, we can go a long way just by focusing on what works in these areas of the globe.
The article does also point out that hydro/wind are going to be important at higher latitudes in winter, but they also acknowledge that they don't account for seasonal variation in demand. That's the biggest flaw I can find in the analysis.
FWIW: I'm down in a mild arid climate at 35N, and yeah, 90% of our winter days are nearly sunny, even when the lows are in the teens. It's a different world for sure.
Most space heating is in the Northern parts though, so those are the ones that need to be addressed. There are solutions that are a pareto improvement, but it's a coordination problem and the USA is sufficiently broken and unable to solve those.
handwavy argument. Yes, in the (sub)tropics the argument is even stronger pro-PV, not the least because it'll give you the opposite of heating - aircon - for free right when you need it. And considering summer heatwaves as have been seen the last few years "way north", that benefit will extend that way even if you wouldn't bother considering letting it "assist", if not fully replace, your heating. That said though, for 50° polewards and above, if you wanted to use PV in winter orient the panels vertically. If you can clad your too floor with shiplap larch so you can with PV panels. Given the price of timber ... there's a plan.
> The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics who can't even imagine how crazy they sound to most everyone else.
Most everyone else? Only about two percent of the Earths population live above the 55th parallel. There’s a big gulf between that and the ‘subtropics’.
I don’t disagree that solar/battery isn’t the answer for 100% of power needs, let alone 100% of heating needs, but if we got to even 50% we’d be in a lot better situation than we are now.
Yes, it's the standard in every legal doc I've ever seen too, but most companies have typically done some accelerated vesting as part of severance. Of course they don't have to, but it's a generally lower cost way of showing some good will.
If you trust Amazon, they were never storing images of your actual palm but instead creating and storing unique hashes from that data. Again, if you trust them, they did it in just about the most privacy protecting way possible.
It doesn't seem like a big deal, but this is just so much more annoying than using my palm that not only links my payment method but also prime membership.
Now I need to tap through a stupid app and scan a code.
We always stopped at whole foods on the way home from the gym, and I didn't always have my phone with me or readily accessible. This will definitely cause me to cut back on this quick stop in / impulse purchases.
If you have an iOS phone you can create a shortcut on your home screen that jumps directly to the code in the Amazon app. Whole Foods app may have the Shortcuts integration too, but I use the Amazon app.
The code both applies your Prime membership and links your preferred payment method.
I believe it’s even quicker to ask Siri to open the Whole Foods app. You don’t need to touch anything and Face ID will unlock the phone while you’re talking.
But you all realize that the OP did not even have to reach for his phone. He just waved his hand to get his Prime discounts, pay and get his rewards.
I get that it is fairly easy to use the app on the phone (although my WF has terrible reception, which is frustrating enough when I come to pick up packages), but waving your hand would still be faster.
If it’s sensitive enough, a compelling skydiving altimeter app could be developed. Considering most purpose built altis used worse screens and cost 350+, could be a quite compelling use case.
As someone with thousands of jumps from this altitude, I disagree. The VAST majority of 'first timers' I've taken on tandems don't feel much, if any, difference either going up.
Fair enough, I haven't jumped out of a plane, I was basing it on my climbing experience, which I realise now is not a valid comparison, I suspect that it's more noticeable in that context because of the high rate of respiration you tend to get when slogging it up big hills.
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