I'm a little sad to see this because I'm moving northward to Seattle next month, I've lived in Portland proper for over 16 years, and Seattle doesn't have Waymo yet. Great timing lol.

Portland will probably be a great testing ground for them because generally speaking you have a lot of tech curious and tech averse people here living together. When we got electric scooters there were both tons of people using them and a lot of people throwing them in the Willamette. Pretty big artistic community that doesn't look kindly on AI right now. This has no real bearing on Waymo's success, but I'll be interested to see how they navigate the PR part of it.

They announced back in September that they’re coming to Seattle. https://www.king5.com/article/traffic/traffic-news/autonomou...

Waymo has already been mapping Seattle for months. I don’t see customers in Portland having access before Seattle.

God willing. Unfortunately Seattle has a recent history of award-winning marksmanship when it comes to turning its own feet into Swiss cheese. A few years ago we passed a brilliant gig worker minimum wage law which:

1. Caused rideshare pricing to skyrocket, resulting in

2. way fewer people taking rideshare trips, so

3. drivers end up making less than before, and

4. when you do take one, 95% of the time the driver pulls up two blocks away and plays chicken with you to capitalize on the minimum wage amount while doing the least and incurring the least miles on their car.

Handshakes all around. I'm sure we have the most brilliant minds at work figuring out how to kneecap Waymo as much as possible so we can maintain this standard of service.

Kind of just an unstructured meditation routine no?

And I should really meditate more.

This is me, I think it comes from a personality of wanting to make sure I say something but generally trusting that the author has more context than I do. I float questions and nits but generally will approve if I don't see anything glaring. If I spot anything where I think "we should definitely go another direction here" I ask for changes instead of approving and make them super clear.

Totally agreed, but it always comes back to managing the average over the best. It is a lot more effective to enforce a culture of approvals than a culture of collaboration. Managers should be striving for the later, but not every team is built the same way and many in leadership just need assurance that the bare minimum is getting done.

Really disheartening to see this and it brings up so many thoughts and feelings I have over the current state of the US, politically, popularly, and how everyone is thinking about morality personally.

If this had happened during, say, the Osama bin Laden raid I think it would have been one of those "damaging the American psyche" stories that would have run for months with a giant trial and a lot of public shame. Trump coming onto the scene and his first term broke a lot of people's capacity for caring about those sorts of events.

Now we have an operation the public didn't ask for, initiated by people with no clear moral codes of their own and very unclear objectives, ones that we can largely assume are for their own personal gain as well, and all of that trickling down to blatantly illegal use of confidential data for personal gain by someone the public would typically respect. And I'm sure a subset of people will try to make this into a big story, but with everything else that's gone on recently I think it probably fades after a few days (except for the prosecutors involved of course).

Yep, actively suppressing renewable efforts all the way down to shaming on a cultural level. It should be a net positive for Americans to adopt renewables - cheaper energy, more independence, good for the environment - but instead its viewed as silly or too unreliable when it isn't.

I think the lack of concentration in some areas, particularly hubs in Texas and Florida, is actually pretty eye-opening. To me these areas should be very dense with panels from the cost/benefit alone.

So there are a couple of issues here. First, there are a lot of panels in the Austin/San Antonio area, and if you live around here you see a lot of them.

Once you get outside of the larger cities panels, on houses in particular have nothing to do with costs, but instead a more deeply ingrained bias against them because the population is heavily propagandized to.

I have friends that have things like solar deer feeders and cameras and all kinds of other stand alone solar devices that won't put solar on their house "because panels are too polluting"

Exactly, the data backs up the cultural bias happening in these regions. Its not a matter of population density or cost/benefit, but a matter of virtue signaling (or lack of virtue signaling?). I think if people were making rational cost decisions installing these would be a no brainer, but they fear being ostracized from their groups.

My initial thought was that was a weird choice in this article, but I wouldn't fault someone for being thorough.

Probably a better choice as an appendix, move the good stuff up to the top. But overall its NBD.

One is one. Two is a coincidence. And three is a trend. That's my personal head canon.

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action." — Auric Goldfinger

You know, I mention this stuff all the time in various meetings and discussions. I read a lot of stuff on Hacker News and just have years of accumulated knowledge from the various colleagues I've worked with. Its nice to have a little reference sheet.