foxtr0t

>Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it.

This is extremely problematic. Power going out for periods of time less than 48 hours is one thing, losing water from the utility is a problem 3rd world countries have. You sure these people's pipes didn't simply freeze.

If its the utility, shame on Texas.

I have a similar but slightly different take. Though it was announced with tons of media hype and attention, this project seemed doomed to fail from the outset. Amazon, JP Morgan, BH may be giants in their own industries, but they're relative outsiders to the healthcare industry. We aren't used to seeing Amazon flop like this, so when it was announced, I think people expected that it would succeed. I think they're finding the limits of their long term strategy. Ultimately, Amazon is a supply chain, logistics, and tech company. JP Morgan Chase is an investment bank and services co, and BH is a holding company. IMO if they're really keen on upending the healthcare industry, they'd need to involve an industry player like Kaiser, who have existing infrastructure stood up and tons of relevant expertise.

I keep coming back to this in my head, thinking about how superficial this counterpoint is. Sure, if your requirement is that you pass regulatory muster, then lighting is "simple" in that you can buy an off the shelf bulb, socket, and housing. But those aren't the requirements. In reality, table stakes are LED DRLs, high beams and lowbeams. Matrix LEDs or laser lights that can mask out other vehicles using onboard IR sensors are becoming more common. Additionally there are styling requirements, such as computationally driven welcome and farewell patterns for lock/unlock, and trends to follow like light bars, super thin OLED strips etc.

A phone light is just a little LED you could buy for a dollar and put on your keychain.

Audi, BMW, GM, Ford dedicate entire teams to lighting, so no, a random engineer could not handle it solo.

Let me help you. I offered "Lights" as a design requirement unique to vehicles with respect to phones. Without any explanation it leaves the door open to a surface level counter point "Phones also have lights" that requires a functioning brain and the most basic level of reasoning. Lights on modern vehicles (high beams, low beams, DRLs, blinkers, brake lights) are certainly not simple components, especially those on vehicles sold in the EU where the regulatory body has taken up new technology much faster than in the US. This wasn't a dumb point, cell phone lighting requirements are child's play compared with the requirements of a vehicle lighting. It is 100% valid, but was also placed as bait as explained above. Make sense?

Especially hilarious given I left the "lights" bullet (with zero explanation as the last item) as fool's bait. It was gloriously taken.

Agreed 100%. Though even Sandy's conclusions are that they're saving at the margins here. It is revolutionary in the sense that they're design and manufacturing techniques are unique, but they don't lead to orders of magnitude reduction in complexity/cost.

If you're asking this question seriously, I have to ask a clarification question: what are we actually talking about? Are we comparing just certain aspects of production of the whole thing? If you think about this from an engineering perspective for even 30 seconds there are so many differences that come to mind.

- Pack has to go through an order of magnitude more charge cycles than a phone

- Must operate in a much wider variety of conditions than a phone

- iPhones don't need to drive themselves

- iPhones don't need to pass crash tests

- Brakes don't exist on iPhones

- Suspension does not exist on iPhones

- iPhones don't propel themselves at 100 mph

- iPhones weight orders of magnitude less than a car

- Regulatory requirements are way less stringent for phones

- Lights

- ...

I'm sort of dumbfounded by the level of conversation here given this is HN and the reputation is one of very thoughtful discourse on current events relating to technology and engineering.

EDIT: line breaks, looks like I'm further contributing to the downward spiral here.

I was waiting for the Muskians to swoop in and spread their nonsense.

Guess what? I drive a white model 3 long range AWD and I love it. I'm still 1: an engineer with 10 years of hardware experience and 2: skeptical of every ounce of BS Elon Musk has ever spread.

You know how many parts are under the car? Have you taken one apart? They're complicated machines with, again, orders of magnitude more parts than a phone. Forget ICE vehicles, we're just talking about EVs and iPhones. You don't think Tesla relies on thousands of suppliers? Who do you think makes the screens, wiring hardness, cameras, brakes, glass, acoustic devices, steering, battery temp management, motorized seats, etc etc. And who do you think supplies their parts? And theirs? And so on and so forth. Its a complicated web of suppliers and manufacturers, much more so than what goes into a single iPhone (which is still very complicated). This is why a Tesla costs 35k+ and an iPhone costs ~1k. There are more parts that are more complicated and manufacturing them takes more time, effort, and people. Elon may have a magic car printer in his wet dreams but that won't happen in reality for four, five, or six decades.

Also, nobody, I repeat, absolutely nobody is holding their breath for you to hit 1m miles in your Tesla. Currently they don't even have a story for repair and so many parts are fused that if something breaks you can't replace it. The car is totaled. I recommend you watch all of the early Rich Rebuilds on YouTube if you really want to understand some of the nitty gritty details of these vehicles. Yes they are simpler than a normal ICE. By an order of magnitude? Certainly not. Progress is made at the margins, in increments of 1% then 5% then 10% then 15%. Not 1000% in one swoop.

EDIT: clarification

Despite becoming more similar in recent years, the cell phone supply chain is still very different than the automotive supply chain. The number of parts/unit differs by an order of magnitude and so does the size and weight, not to mention manufacturing techniques and materials. These are capabilities, not so much skills, and they aren't as transferable as you may think.

For instance, logistically things are very different in the automotive space. Many, many more people are required to ship a single unit. You also have many more variables that can hold up a production line anywhere in the hierarchy because you rely on more 3rd parties for parts. While these things are also true of consumer electronics, you may rely on a dozen suppliers for an iPhone, car companies often rely on hundreds.

Materials are also very different in the automotive space. You have to build with materials that will last 100k miles driving a 80mph in all weather, day/night, freezing/scorching etc etc. It is a very long tail to cover. Apple can do it, but it will take years and many, many partners to get it done.

Having an android and an iphone and had two vehicles with both AA and CarPlay, I can confirm that android auto is a much better experience than carplay.

Eagerly awaiting a response from all the Muskian know-it-alls when Apple confirms their hardware/software relies on LIDAR.

Yes yes, wishing shame on another is beyond the pale.

Seriously, wishing someone feels regret, shame, embarrassment isn't incompatible with forgiveness. Learning difficult lessons, especially from harmful mistakes, is the only way society makes progress.

There was a lot of scientific information about psychedelics from the 50s and 60s. Illegalization and stigmatization of psychedelics was largely political and antagonistic towards the scientific community that was doing actual research. Also anyone curious enough to try out psychedelics will realize they're very different from narcotics. In the US there was always a subculture that accepted use of psychedelics, information passing through books, writings, unofficial journals etc. So to say the information wasn't accessible just isn't true. It may have been hidden, but if it was it was in plain sight and to anyone curious this world was easily accessible and accepting.

People with means tend to locate in tax havens, not places that have good amenities. Presumably with sufficient resources, you can produce any sort of amenity you'd like.

How many times can SV, SF, the Bay Area, California die? How many of these articles will be written? How many 400+ comment meltdown threads about the end of Silicon Valley will we see?

Our economy is cyclical, so is the technology industry, and so is the technology industry within the Bay Area. It seems to me a large cohort of the HN community has reached an age where they'd typically move to suburbs, "back home", or just to cheaper areas to raise a family. This was hastened by COVID, and yet, the next cohort of new grads is right around the corner, just like it is every year. Is the calculus about where to live different? Slightly, now you pick from 10 metros instead of 5. Are people going to be full time remote? Yes. Can they live anywhere? Certainly. Will new grads be better of starting out in an office just like most people here did? Certainly yes.

Can we recognize for a moment that the collective value of the technology sector located along the West Coast is probably north of $10T? If anything, the tech industry is annexing new metros, not moving to them, as tech continues to eat the world.

You clearly don't frequent the WSJ opinion section. Try searching for "site:wsj.com california" on Google and let us know what you get. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that what's actually happening is the Murdoch's are allowing a Fox Newsification of the opinion section, essentially a compromise between the actual journalists there and trash/gutter opinion pieces intended to push a narrative. There's even news about this news[1]. So no, this isn't some game of 19 dimensional chess, its just a stupid false narrative being pushed by people with power, vested interests, massive jealousy, thin skin, and many grudges.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/159953/will-wall-street-jour...

Detroit is an interesting comparison, it is hard to imagine right now, but I won't count anything out completely. Obviously the factors there were very different. Detroit collapsed because consumers went elsewhere, not the labor.

Edit: clarification/wording

I expect Detroit at the very least.

I'm a pretty pessimistic individual, at least my wife tells me so, but I am actually very optimistic about California and the Bay Area. I think COVID will end up being the kick in the pants it needs to start dealing with many of the problems in the state and region. A scare or two about companies fleeing the state is necessary to get the state/counties/cities to cut back on suffocating red tape for small businesses. And if there is one place in the world setup to fight a big climate problem like fires, it is the academic and technological hive mind of California.

Back to the bad takes: from what I've read the takes are all from people who moved out of the Bay. Some people come here, start their careers, then have the luxury of leaving and working from wherever. That's great, but there will always be a batch of new grads looking for work and honestly the concentration there is so high they could lose 20% of the companies by market cap and this would still be the place to start out, along with a few other large metros. Just because you leave doesn't mean the city stops.

San Francisco, the city in a perpetual death spiral.

The number of bad "SF's gonna die!" takes on HN/twitter is so absurd I now read them with a "So bad it's good" type mindset. The number of times WSJ opinions alone have declared California dead is probably 20+.

The thing that will stop the oft remarked upon "death spiral" is, ahem, the fucking CA housing market. Where there are fluctuations in expensive asset prices, people see opportunity. If housing prices in SF drop by 5%, it's not like all the wealthy individuals who can buy just sit on the sidelines. Younger people with lesser means see opportunities to get rent control at a decent price etc. I'm looking forward to retractions of all these level zero takes when rent prices spike in July.

This is of course nothing new, for instance NY has gone through many ups and downs of its own and all along many in the media claimed "NY is dying!"

That actually isn't totally true. Approximate methods, in the formal sense, require a guarantee that they perform within X of the optimal solution. Not all NP-hard problems have polynomial approximations and the methods shown here are likely not approximations because they very likely provide no guarantees on performance. They provide zero guarantees.

Stepping back though, you do make that hardware choice when you select a service from an IaaS. The actual selection is hidden from you, though. It is a tradeoff where the industry has overwhelmingly come out on one side. I think it's time to start questioning this. Instead of hiring engineers with "AWS experience" why not engineers with experience automating systems using OSS tooling?

This article may be poorly written, but if you actually read through the whole thing, it makes some brilliant points:

1. IaaS providers are incentivized to create services that lure you with managed solutions that seem like a great deal on paper, while they are actually more expensive to operate than their self-rolled alternative.

2. "DevOps" and "Infra" people charged with making these decisions often follow the industry zeitgeist, which for the moment is whatever AWS, GCP, and Azure are offering. This is in spite of the best interests of the company they work for. The right decision in so many cases is what choice one can defend when something goes wrong, or what you can parlay into the next gig. If costs, performance, and features aren't closely managed, scrutinized, compared, going with a solution like Aurora/Redshift/Dynamo won't be challenged.

3. Nothing is easily comparable because these services aren't just a CPU as you mention, instead they're hardware and software rolled into one. This is intentional, and has little to do with making things easier for you. At best, IaaS providers defend this as "differentiation" but it's closer to obfuscation of true cost. Go ahead and ask your AWS rep if use case x, y, and z will perform well on lambdas and you'll likely get a near canned response that they all fit perfectly, even if y is a job with high load spread uniformly through time. The only way you can make this comparison is by creating the two services, standing them up in production for a week and checking the bill. In other cases such as FPGAs and databases, you'll have a much harder time as not only is the software/hardware offering unique, but the user code will be completely different and require entire rewrites to get what _might_ be a fair comparison.

They'd certainly have a lot of very angry customers who were promised this was unnecessary and other OEMs would drop LiDAR. If it turns out that more accurate depth perception is necessary for L3 AVs, every Tesla owner with "FSD" wasted 6-10k, unless Tesla voluntarily retrofits these vehicles, which would likely kill their profit for half a decade. Recalls are always much more expensive than getting it right first.

Object detection is mostly solved though, right? I don't think anyone is advocating using LiDAR for detection. It is used to accurately model depth and then localize the vehicle and surrounding objects/vehicles. The "floating" phenomenon you're talking about is noise from the computation method(s) Tesla uses to build a composite 3D model. You can fix that with LiDAR. I'd wager this noise gets worse in some circumstances. You can try to fix it by piling on noise reduction methods, but at a certain point, one has to wonder when it becomes obvious that an extra $X/vehicle to make the problem go away forever makes sense, where X is a monotonically decreasing value that'll probably get down to ~$200 with scale/R&D.

Would you recommend starting AV development in Manhattan for safety, then?

Agreed, Tesla made these decisions in 2014(ish) which was way before it was clear that convolutional neural networks would not give satisfactory depth perception and therefore localization without some major breakthroughs that just haven't happened. I actually believe these choices by Tesla were the rational choices at the time. If you remember back to the beginning of this decade, the deep learning revolution seemed like it was going to take over every industry and turn everything upside down. That progress unfortunately stopped and Tesla seems to be holding the proverbial bag. These companies are all executing strategies in a game that will last for at least another decade if not two. Things will change, but at the moment, it seems to me that LiDAR was the correct choice (subject to change).

To me, the revolution that actually mattered the most was the cell phone supply chain revolution (if you can call it that). That is what allowed these companies to equip their vehicles with cheap cameras, radar, and eventually LiDAR.

My own prediction based on the fact that almost all other AV programs are using LIDAR, costs are decreasing with scale /R&D, and Teslas localization looks shotty at best. As costs continue to drop, its going to be tough for the company to continue rationalize sticking with cameras only just to keep Elon's ego in tact.

As the AV space continues to mature, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that Waymo made some good choices:

1. Prioritizing safety over everything has kept regulators far away and there haven't been any mishaps that I'm aware of.

2. Using multiple high resolution sensor modalities (LIDAR, camera) has led to very accurate localization and environment understanding, evident in on board videos [1]

3. LIDAR costs continue to drop precipitously, it now seems quite possible that next gen Teslas may sneak a unit on board to improve localization and depth perception.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsfUmU30kWY, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZ6tJSj9T4&t