No kidding. If this happened in North Korea the trial would have lasted 15 minutes and the execution would have been a public spectacle.

I’m so glad my wife & I never got sucked into using things like Alexa.

I can recognize when a police officer is directing traffic at a dead traffic light. I can also recognize the intent of other drivers who may wave, flash their headlights, etc. I doubt any current self driving cars can accurately recognize any of those.

Exactly. Any such remote control would have to be trivial for a cop to use, and also need to directly control only the car(s) the cop is currently interacting with. Think of a situation like this where a traffic light is disabled and a cop is there directing traffic. If driverless cars are approaching from multiple directions then how does the cop direct his commands to only the one he’s focusing on at the given moment? Not all that easy when you think about it…

It wasn’t a cloud failure. The self driving cars are highly dependent on traffic lights being red/yellow/green. With the signals inoperative the cars don’t know what to do. Even if there were police officers directing traffic at intersections, the cars aren’t programmed to recognize & respond to them.

This is one of the many edge cases that I’ve been convinced will keep self driving cars from becoming mainstream unless/until true AGI is achieved.

A few years ago I stopped at a red light next to a construction site. I was watching the traffic light, so at first I didn’t notice a cop at the construction site trying to wave me through the red light. He finally took a few steps towards me and yelled to get my attention. Only then did I realize he was waving me through, so I did just that. I seriously doubt any current self driving car would recognize a police officer (and not just a random pedestrian) that’s overriding the traffic signal like that.

Another edge case, coincidentally at the same intersection a few years earlier was when there was a car fully engulfed in flames as I drove up. I could hear sirens in the distance, and the cars in every direction were making sure to safely get out of the way of the approaching fire trucks. At least one or two cars cautiously crossed on the red to get out of the way. Again, I doubt any current self driving car would have navigated that situation anywhere nearly as well as a human.

Don’t forget that they are also reportedly squandering their gold reserves, and are losing a lot of revenue from Ukraines growing attacks on oil infrastructure. Russia isn’t going to be able to pay its soldiers or buy equipment if those two trends continue.

Came here to say this.

In response to a mass shooting in 1996 Australia passed strict gun regulations. Since then you can pretty much count the number of mass shootings in that country on one hand.

Compare that to Wikipedias list of mass shootings in the USA for just 2025. I stopped counting that list at 300.

Clearly some techbro wants to monetize buzzwords plus laptop.

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There’s plenty of demand. CEOs and other senior leadership are demanding that it be shoehorned into anything that uses electricity.

How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?

I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?

You would do well to go read up on the 1990 AT&T long distance network collapse. A single line of changed code, rolled out months earlier, ultimately triggered what you might call these days a DDoS attack that took down all 114 long distance telephone switches in their global network. Over 50 million long distance calls were blocked in the 9 hours it took them to identify the cause and roll out a fix.

AT&T prided itself on the thoroughness of their testing & rollout strategy for any code changes. The bug that took them down was both timing-dependent and load-dependent, making it extremely difficult to test for, and required fairly specific real world conditions to trigger. That’s how it went unnoticed for months before it triggered.

I’m guessing it was actually something internal. If you look at their status page you’ll notice the outage occurred smack in between some sort of maintenance work they seem to be rolling out to most/all of their edge locations. As soon as they resolved the outage they continued with the regional maintenance updates.

I recently heard Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian political dissident, give a talk. He survived two attempted poisonings among other things. He described how the current method of poisoning is for Putin’s henchmen to sneak into your home and put polonium into your underwear. So this guy might want to consider walking around naked for a while as well…

You too will soon be able to buy an abandoned datacenter for just $1,000.

Back when the capacitor plague hit I had to manage locating & replacing over 500 motherboards in the datacenter of my then-employer. Imagine if a hardware glitch like that happened in one of these.