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Hmm. According to Indiana University, 5.4 million cats are killed by cars every year. https://blogs.iu.edu/sciu/2022/11/12/the-perils-of-outdoor-c... Normally none of these make national news.

Each story is probably a sad one, but hmm, an Instagram post about one of these being published on Hacker News because it involved a Waymo? Wow!

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Yes, it's pretty well understood at this point that news reports often greatly overstate the impact of an event compared to base rates. By playing to the "local neighborhood" and "cute kitty" angle while pointing at the "obvious cause" (self-driving car) that has many SF detractors, they can get a higher rate of readers, which increases their impact (and maybe ad revenue?).

At least the number of articles suggesting that trolley problems are highly relevant to self-driving car implementations have gone down.

As a Mission local, I loved routinely seeing KitKat while strolling down 16th. He was friendly and made everyone’s day a little brighter. Perhaps other SF residents on HN feel the same.

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