Honest question: what's the value of running the benchmark and reporting a performance regression if the author is not familiar with basic operation of the software? I'd argue that not understanding those settings disqualifies you from making statements about it.
The performance was reduced without a settings change. That is still a regression even if huge pages mitigates the problem.
I'd be curious to know if there's still a regression with hugepages turned on in older kernels.
If you are benchmarking something and the only changed variable between benchmarks is the kernel, that is useful information. Even if your environment isn't correctly setup.
I've worked at Google and Amazon. Both paid H-1B less than their american counterparts. In particular because the H-1B workers didn't jump companies as frequent.
All H1B salaries are posted online. First of thats the law.
Google , Facebook etc all post salaries of every H1B application. The salaries are always in top 5% of Software engineering salaries.
You are making stuff up or ignorant of H1B process.
If a cop notices this, who gets the ticket? Asking because I’ve noticed Waymos starting to go above the speed limit now. They’re generally just matching the flow of traffic like everyone else, but it does raise the question: who gets fined? And if the fleet as a whole racks up more than 4 points in 12 months, would Waymo loose it's license similar to human drivers?
I saw a waymo go in a nonexistent rightmost lane at a stop light, I thought it was going to turn but it instead proceeded to go forward and force the driver in the actual rightmostlane to break to allow it to merge else it would have caused an accident as there was no lane in front of it.
This was on El Camino in Santa Clara. I was highly suprised as I was under the assumption they were pretty much production ready as they have been expanding their area a lot.
Use statistical incidence rates and not "i saw a thing.." to make that call. I mean I'm sure most drivers regularly think "wow maybe humans shouldnt be allowed to drive" every time they go out on the road.
The thing about human drivers is we’re all unique little stupid snowflakes.
If a software powered car is vulnerable to a certain condition, presumably, all running that software system are. The rare day we can generalize a bad driving story, in fact.
I don't think this checks out. Would the model do the same thing when presented with the exact same inputs? Yes. Is it more likely to do the same thing at the same intersection? Probably. But if you repeat a similar setup somewhere it might not. Bad behavior still exists and should be fixed, but it doesn't mean they're bad drivers in general.
People have trouble seeing outside of their own biases and understanding how different another view can be with a different background and context to the situation. I have no problem confidently saying the parent poster has definitely made worse and more questionable driving decisions under more constrained and more dangerous situations on the road, and then never thinks twice about it after that moment because it had no consequences. All they need to do is look at driver safety statistics of autonomous vehicles vs humans to immediately reject their flawed understanding, and they never will.
Luckily, cars and driving in general aren't enshrined as an early amendment of the constitution (in the US) and aren't even considered a legal right, so pushback to change won't be artificially inflated several decades by heavily motivated interest groups seeking to spread misinformation about their safety. Not a bang, but a whimper.
You're missing that the difference is incentives, specifically perverse incentives being scaled up. If we were talking about an individual hacker who programmed their car for automated driving and it made the above wrong decision, people would straightforwardly attribute fault to the individual. The problem here is that large corpos, who will eagerly tout their perogative to do whatever they want as long as it's within the law, going beyond even that and breaking the law with impunity.
We can easily imagine a crash from such a thing being declared "no fault" (or even the fault of the turning driver!) based on corpo-sympathetic police, judiciary, and regulators who have succumbed to the inevitable "computer can't be wrong". That perceived lack of justice is the problem - when another individual does something wrong (either accidentally or willful) and gets away with it, we can brush it off as their bad behavior will eventually catch up to them. Whereas with corpos it has been thoroughly demonstrated that this will not happen.
That page addresses tort liability, not liability for driving infractions or crimes. Liability for damages when a company does it is more settled of a situation.
It still isn't quite as clear who or if anyone is liable when traffic laws are broken:
Sounds like the tickets should be at least more expensive than the cost of equivalent QA (and if not, self driving companies might offload QA to the police).
I remember when they told us that autonomous cars wouldn’t break laws and wouldn’t speed.
I always felt this was just a strategy, and that soon enough fleet operators would turn up the dials on speed and aggressiveness. After all, the only people who can complain are the people outside the car, and they will be dead.
There are highways in the US where drivers regularly go 10-20 over the speed limit, if not more; maintaining the speed limit on a road that's labeled as 45MPH zone, but is treated as a 65, will be dangerous for everyone involved, both the cars approaching the slowpoke at 20+ miles an hour, and the slowpoke itself.
I don't know how Waymo is going to square that circle.
That's Phoenix, it's here. Waymos commit to nominally keep the speed at the speed limit but it is _extremely noticeable_ that that's the case because literally NO ONE drives 65 on the freeways here. Everyone is at minimum at 74. It's a rite of passage in Arizona. It's not even a speeding ticket until 75. Goes back to the 70s with the feds trying to force speed limit laws or threatening to revoke highway funding. Arizona said "fine, but it's not a speeding ticket. it's 'misuse of a finite resource.'"
So you'll see the Waymos kind of puttering along at 65 as everyone zooms around them. They DO say they'll occasionally exceed speeds when it's safer to do so, but it's obvious they don't want a narrative of them being speed demons and flying around exceeding the speed limit.
I used to live in a place where this was common -- the issue was not just speed, but a general disregard for traffic law because traffic law was unenforced. You could be going 50 in a 35 and someone would aggressively pass you. At some point, the road is simply occupied by unsafe drivers and there's not much you can do other than hold your line and be as predictable as possible to the aggressive drivers around you.
I understand this phenomenon and experienced it when I used to drive. What I found so revealing was it ultimately meant that the people weren’t actually driving their cars.
Each ostensibly independent driver was being forced to drive a certain way by the most aggressive driver behind them, and in turn they were required to force the driver ahead of them to drive in the same way.
> a road that's labeled as 45MPH zone, but is treated as a 65
If this is the case, then the speed limit is too low. To control speed on such a road you either need draconian enforcement or you need to change the road so people aren't comfortable driving that fast. Make the lanes narrower, introduce lane shifts or reduce the number of lanes, etc.
A large problem in speed limit setting is that 85th percentile is used many times for setting the speed limit and other factors are ignored or aren't weighted as heavily.
It's a very fuzzy practice, and I think as we continue towards an automated driving world, we need to be more critical of how speed limits are set.
Using the 85th percentile as a means to determine speed limits ends up with 15% of all drivers exceeding the speed limit, or worse, more drivers exceed the speed limit than those original 15% because they know consequences may be rare.
Sometimes bad road design (e.g. lanes too wide) are to blame, but in miserable neighborhoods with no traffic enforcement at rush hour you can also end up in a situation where the majority of people on the road are simply aggressive drivers who are familiar with the road. At some point you do need to enforce the law if it isn't being respected. There is a growing subset of people in the US who not only disregard traffic law but pride themselves in a distain for it.
IDK if it's draconian but speed cameras or simply forcing cars to have modules that report speeds at certain points and issue fines automatically should be standard by now. What's the point of having smarter cars if they can't be forced to stay below the legal speed limit.
I don't think building enforcement into cars would be a good idea, or even effective, but a few speed cameras work wonders for changing the overall 'temperature' of driving in an area.
Falsehoods programmers believe about speed limits:
1. The speed limit of a road is always marked by a sign
2. The speed limit of a road is in a database
3. You can look up the GPS location of a vehicle to determine what road it is on
4. Roads have exactly one speed limit at any one moment in time
5. Speed limits rarely change
6. Well, maybe speed limits do change, but only during certain fixed times
7. Roads have speed limits
8. Cars are only driven on roads
9. There are no exceptions for following speed limits
10. Well maybe there are but we can safely ignore those without any real consequences
[...]
I've personally done some software experimentation with speed limit detection in vehicles. The combined accuracy of automatic-traffic-sign recognition and speed limit databases + GPS is far less than 100% in real world driving conditions.
There's a road near me that just dropped the speed limit to 40. This is a divided road, two 12-foot lanes in each direction, good visibility, with turning lanes at intersections. It's highway-class. Most people drive 55 or 60, because that speed feels appropriate and reasonably safe (search the "85th percentile" rule in setting speed limits to read more about this).
By reducing the speed limit to 40 the road is IMO less safe, because there are always some people who very conscientiously do not exceed the posted speed limit. So now you have some people driving 40, while most people still want to go 55 or 60. This creates an unsafe mix of vehicle speeds.
I'm fairly certain "slower traffic keep right" is part of the expected flow.
Maybe the Waymo is technically speeding, but so is everyone else, because speed limits aren't magic, and if the de-facto limit ends up being 50 when the posted limit is 40 or 45, going slower creates extra conflict points for accidents.
Get it straight. It is going faster than the speed limit that creates extra conflict points for accidents. That's the problem. If better enforcement is needed via cameras, radar, etc, then that's the solution....not everyone speeding. Speed kills.
Just slightly over half of US states require you to move right to yield to faster traffic. In some places it is completely allowable to drive the speed limit in the left lane.
>After all, the only people who can complain are the people outside the car, and they will be dead.
I'm not sure how you can earnestly make this claim while reading people complaining about the speed and aggressiveness. Do you suspect you're replying to ghosts?
Tesla specifically programmed their self driving mode to roll through stop signs without stopping. I don't think anyone has believed the claims of the self driving marketers for a long time now.
People are getting wise they can abuse these cars on the road, cut them off, not let them in. Waymo needs to respond like other drivers in the city if they want to merge lanes, force their way into the lane and demand space is created.
> Asking because I’ve noticed Waymos starting to go above the speed limit now
Where at? Im curious because I see a lot of people say this, but Ive never seen them go more than 1mph over the limit when riding in them, and watch them do 65 on the freeway every day, even when people are passing.
The UI is simpler because the product is simpler. If all you want is 1-2 VMs in the cloud and to not think about the rest, its great. For any actual business that's moved from 'hobby'/'seed' phase, its not the right platform.
For great many businesses way past the "hobby" stage, a managed DB + managed queue + managed cache + a few VMs under managed k8s + serverless functions is plenty enough. Given a right architecture, this could serve a million paying customers. When you have more, you usually have the resources to consider a more elaborate setup.
I'd say that for most businesses 3-4 VMs, or a couple of bare metal boxes, is already enough, unless they grow explosively.
The neo is the Chromebook for education revolution. It’s cheap and better than 98%+ of windows laptops. I’d not be surprised to see further Mac penetration to the business sector
I think it’s worth mentioning also- 8 GB ram on a Mac is not the same as 8 GB on a windows OS machine, given the poor state of windows as an OS as of the past few years.
Do browsers and Electron apps magically take up less memory on Macs? What is "good enough?" I never notice problems on my 16GB Windows laptop, so just for fun I closed all of my 6 always-on Electron-type apps, all of the 10 browser windows I had open, a couple other ever-present apps, and it looks like without anything else Windows 10 takes about 4GB, which I think is in the same ballpark as OS X. And I probably have some stuff running that I didn't close, this is very unscientific.
Anecdotally also, my one laptop that I've upgraded to Windows 11 is a lot snappier. As a rule I haven't noticed memory pressure on any device I've owned ever as a "regular user," it only really applies to gaming and heavy development with lots of VMs, especially these days.
I don’t see much “for anybody”, but I do see a lot of “for students / people who browse the web / word processing” which is still a pretty large set of people, and the Neo handles those workloads just fine
13” is not really that small. It’s a screen size many people choose.
The Neo is also not a play for businesses directly. It seems pretty clearly a play for students who will eventually enter the business world with their personal laptop preferences.
I spent one year using an M1 8GB Macbook Air as a professional developer during covid. The A18 Pro flies around the M1. You can definitely use this as a dev - especially when we're just prompting AI nowadays.
Big tech should loose its safe harbor protection. It’s both an aggregator AND a curator. The algorithms showing you what to see is no different than a newspaper editor. Just like newspapers big tech should be liable for their “feeds” showing harmful and defamatory information
I would be happy if congress passed a law saying a social media has no liability for anything their users post as long as the algorithm is completely open source. If we had social media like that, they'd even have APIs that let users design their own algorithm and we'd see a golden age of social media emerge from it. Twitter seems to moving in this direction but they enjoy no legal protections from being open at the moment. Blusky is already this way I believe, but without a neutral and trusted centralized control it's a bit different of an animal.
I don’t see how it would ever make sense to hold social media liable for user posted defamation.
Look at the recent Afroman defamation lawsuit and consider how YouTube is supposed to know whether that music video was defamatory or not. It took a court 3 years to reach a conclusion but you want YouTube to make that same call instantly, on millions of posts a day. What you’d get is a world where Afroman’s (non defamatory) speech basically cannot be shared on social media at all.
I think the difference should be whether they are a dumb pipe, or whether they exercise editorial control and/or promote some content over others.
If you are truly a dumb pipe, that just transmits whatever the users post, then you shouldn't be liable for what goes over your wires. Like the phone company.
As soon as you start acting as an editor: amplifying some content and downplaying (or removing) other content, re-ordering it, ranking it, and so on, then you are placing your name on the content and in a sense should share liability around it.
Companies should have to deliberately decide who they are going to be: are they just wires like the phone company, or are they a newspaper's letters-to-the-editor department? They shouldn't be able to act like one, but have the liability of the other.
That seems unworkable because, well, I just don’t want social media to be dumb pipes. Without sites making editorial decisions every site will be full of porn and animal torture videos. The current status quo seems way better tbh.
Well, local history in the US, judged by most current Americans, would probably say the current system is better than the previous one, and the current one spawned from a revolution. Maybe the second (third?) time it'll incrementally improve at least.
The current system is the result of hundreds of years of gradual democratization and economic development, not the revolution. For an example of the US without the American Revolution, look at Canada. They’re doing fine. Here in the US, the Revolution didn’t cause life to change at all for the vast majority of people.
Whether the majority of people believe that or not has more to do with the place of the Revolution in our national mythology than with what actually happened in reality.
The Revolution allowed a new system to be built, but it is a teleological fallacy to point to the current system as the result. Centuries of trial, error, and institutional hardening led to the system current Americans would judge.
The first post-revolution organizational system of the US, described in the Articles of Confederation, is very different than the difficult and contingent pivot to a federal system. Almost a million US citizens died in the transition.
"Almost every" is a very strong statement. But even granted that, the interregnum periods (civil wars and revolutions) tend to be so horrific that they are wise to avoid. In fact, people like Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes who lived through revolutions tended to come to the cynical conclusion that any system of government was better than a civil war. I don't agree with that conclusion, but I'd rather see the system reform itself than jump immediately to "tear up the constitution and start over"
No matter how much you hate Communists, you must admit the fall of the USSR was catastrophic in terms of quality of life and life expectancy. All the public goods and services were sold off en masse and children were driven to prostitution to avoid starvation.
~30 years later all the quick investors of the privatization run the country and have been sending all their able bodied men into a drone-based meat grinder with no end in sight.
Smart employees understand this dynamic. When leadership hides information - it always means its bad. The first thing I noticed when I had a bout of bad employers was that they claimed "we can't share financial information because of XYZ investor/legal reason."
Those startups all had major financial problems within 6 months to 2 years. Management has strong incentives to hide bad information from employees.
ehh there is a common thread that when management becomes convinced either of falsehoods or that lying to employees is the best strategy, the business outcomes won't be the best either.
Yep, I've worked at two startups which started to really emphasise The Numbers in weekly all-hands meetings, and how we're all in it together to improve them, etc. Both of those jobs ended in redundancy.
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