[HN Gopher] GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8%...
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GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
Author : AlotOfReading
Score : 173 points
Date : 2020-05-14 18:31 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| thoraway1010 wrote:
| "doubling down on our engineering work and engineering talent,"
| Cruise spokesperson Milin Mehta told Reuters.
|
| Do these folks even try to hide their lies?
|
| Doubling down = 2x the engineering staff. This is as they lay off
| in their lidar team.
|
| Can companies be sued for these types of basically false claims
| or are we just stuck commenting on what lies they seem come up
| with. Can you imagine if your day to day life involved
| interacting with folks this dishonest?
| baddox wrote:
| What tort would you claim they've committed? It's not
| reasonable to interpret that claim as literally doubling the
| amount of engineering staff. No court would consider that for
| even a moment. And even if you could argue that a spokesperson
| is lying about fuzzy concepts like the amount of focus company
| places on engineering, who does that wrong?
| tschwimmer wrote:
| The first amendment protects this type of speech.
| majormajor wrote:
| One should question what interests we're protecting by
| allowing lying in various contexts vs having just a blanket
| "say whatever you want" default privilege.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| I don't know if anyone is consciously protecting their
| right to lie, but we are via inaction allowing them to
| construct the language of lying.
|
| If I made a programming language that got rid a basic
| object maps for example, I'd eliminate the scenarios where
| one would use a lookup map.
|
| These people construct their own language, and so long as
| we speak their language, we can't really speak against
| them. The words don't exist by design.
| Animats wrote:
| _This is as they lay off in their lidar team._
|
| There are too many LIDAR startups chasing too little market for
| LIDARs. The delay in self-driving cars reaching the market
| means automotive LIDARs are only selling in sample quantities.
| GM/Cruise may not need an in-house LIDAR unit.
| [deleted]
| cactus2093 wrote:
| I never hear the phrase "doubling down" used to mean
| "doubling", except maybe in the original usage in gambling. But
| colloquially it just means "increasing focus on". In that use
| there is no inherent contradiction in downsizing + attempting
| to increasing focus. In fact that seems to be what almost all
| companies who downsize are attempting to do.
|
| Edit: In fact come to think of it, even in blackjack when you
| double down, it's as much about committing as it is the
| doubling of the bet. You have to take one and only one card and
| that ends your turn, so you're turning down all other options
| to do this one thing, and in exchange for taking that risky
| move you get to double your bet.
| sulam wrote:
| The blackjack move is in fact a FOCUS of your attention,
| which potentially increases risk (but in fact if it increased
| your risk you wouldn't make that move -- you pick the focus
| based on expected value).
|
| And it's pretty rare (if ever) that someone says "I'm
| doubling down on X" and they mean to say "I'm going to double
| the size of my bet across all my activities." Pretty much the
| opposite.
| thoraway1010 wrote:
| doubling down is not about increasing focus. It is about
| increasing risk by making a BIGGER (not smaller) bet on
| something.
|
| This is in the original meaning in gambling (you are
| convinced you are right and so double your bet) and
| elsewhere.
|
| Only in PR land is a cash flow pullback and risk reduction
| step such as a headcount reduction called a doubling down. It
| goes to show how pernicious these types of intentional
| miswordings are.
| 8note wrote:
| Missing information: are they downsizing elsewhere as well,
| and the lidar folks are being downsized by less?
| ABeeSea wrote:
| Amazon launched Fire Phone and Alexa months apart. They
| shit-canned the phone and doubled down on Alexa. It's not
| just PR speak.
|
| Many of the phone people either left the company or went to
| work on Alexa. They also did a massive inventory write down
| for the phone in their quarterly report.
| tehjoker wrote:
| They mean they're increasing the workload of the remaining
| engineers, not that they're doing something to benefit or other
| wise honor them.
| thoraway1010 wrote:
| yep - the idea that they are doubling down on their
| engineering talent (2x headcount or 2x salaries or 2x
| resources) or whatever big bet they claim to be making seems
| like it might be a lie.
|
| The PR guy (Milin Mehta) used to work at Kraken Digital Asset
| Exchange. They are known for suing to identify ten reviewers
| on Glassdoor, claiming they are former employees in breach of
| their severance contract.
|
| Why work at companies like this?
| hckr_news wrote:
| That's quite incredible.
| linuxftw wrote:
| There's no better time to exploit your employees than when
| the job market is in the toilet.
| deminature wrote:
| They obviously don't mean it literally in terms of headcount,
| but more likely in terms of focus and determination.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Then it is mostly kumbaya.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Proof is in the pudding right?
|
| First to go.
| [deleted]
| primrose wrote:
| "Anyone using Lidar is doomed, DOOMED!"
|
| Looks like GM is catching up to where the industry was a year
| ago, from A cofounder of Waymo.
|
| https://youtu.be/0w1G2GyPTUM
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| runawaybottle wrote:
| This is the kind of stuff I always advise people in long term
| careers to be privy of. First to go always means least cared
| about.
|
| Nothing wrong with it, but always know your place in a company.
| Don't ever be lulled into rhetoric such as 'doubling down on
| engineering'.
|
| 'We care about code quality' - code quality sucks at the
| company, 'we care about work life balance' - there is none at
| the company, 'we value innovation' - can't even suggest
| anything to product, stay on spec....
|
| 'We care about future tech' -- lay off r&d at the first sight
| of a downturn.
|
| Just shut the fuck up already.
| thoraway1010 wrote:
| Somewhat true.
|
| My favorite: "We adhere to the highest ethical principles" -
| as they give you a 500 page ethics doc that no one reads or
| follows.
|
| But I've actually found it's a good / reliable tell. You just
| stay away from companies like this that can't talk straight
| and you end up a LOT happier. I don't mean they need to be
| nice - but just clear relatively honest normal English
| language communication.
|
| ie, "we're cutting back to reduce our burn rate." vs "we are
| doubling down on engineering talent." Some PR people actually
| get it I think and can basically be honest while adding some
| things you may not have thought of. Not in this case though!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _My favorite: "We adhere to the highest ethical
| principles" - as they give you a 500 page ethics doc that
| no one reads or follows._
|
| That's just a translation error. "To adhere" means "to
| stick"; while the formalized version sounds like they stick
| to high ethical princilples, what they meant is they _stick
| it to them_.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| The new-speak of hypocrisy is utterly cemented in corporate
| and pseudo corporate businesses.
|
| Sadly, a requisite skillet now days is having to navigate
| all the bullshit.
| thoraway1010 wrote:
| It can be funny though to take them seriously.
|
| When I was less responsible (younger) I would do that
| sometimes.
|
| Someone does a BS bunch of lines, stand up and thank them
| from the staff for committing to the additional resources
| for staff.
|
| Follow-up with third parties unironically echoing the
| message with outcomes the business does not want (ie,
| please send in your proposals as we are doubling down on
| our engineering).
|
| I make too much money to do anything like this (and have
| more control anyways) plus if you are more senior you are
| expected to understand the game.
| battery_cowboy wrote:
| I'm interviewing with a company that's taken a month so far
| with 8 different calls and still 3 phone calls to go. I
| keep doing it because they have never been less than honest
| with me. Everytime I ask a hard question, like what's the
| burn rate or how's the code base, they tell me the good and
| bad stuff, and how they're trying to fix it or if they
| don't even have time to fix it.
|
| When I wasn't sure I wanted to continue, the hiring manager
| called me for 45 minutes to discuss why, and convinced me
| that I should continue without making any promises and
| without lying about the fact that my concerns were real and
| that it wasn't garaunteed that my concerns would be fixed,
| but I felt better because he told me about how they're
| trying to fix them. Contrast that with my last company
| which blew smoke up my ass for the whole interview process
| and later I found it was a very badly run company on top of
| badly designed tech and bad financial modeling and that
| anything to fix it was impossible because of the politics.
|
| Further, I've been talking to the interviewers like they're
| real people rather than some god sent down to flummox me
| with dumb programming exercises and show off how cool they
| are.
|
| I'll never do another interview the "old way" again, I like
| being treated as a human in a two way process rather than a
| one way information extraction exercise.
| rifflebutter wrote:
| You seem to have misunderstood what the lidar team refers to.
|
| The Lidar team laid off is not part of Cruise's essential
| engineering team. It belongs to a small, research/demo-focused
| company that Cruise bought a long time ago which claimed they
| would make solid-state Lidars that costs 99% less than
| currently available lidars, which would cut most of the cost to
| self-driving cars using lidars today.
|
| They function as a separate entity from Cruise and have very
| little to do with Cruise's core self-driving technology team on
| a day to day basis.
|
| As the article has made clear, within Cruise's engineering
| team, only the non-essential teams (i.e. not core self-driving
| technology) have been impacted by this layoff.
| monadic2 wrote:
| This could just mean they aren't developing lidar further.
| Because there is no retraining culture it's difficult to tell.
| sulam wrote:
| One thing you also have to understand here (other than the
| replies I've read) is that you can in fact lay off people and
| yet increase the percentage investment you are making in
| something.
|
| You have to cut your budget by 30% -- you can do this as a
| haircut everyone takes, or you can be selective, and ask one
| group to take less of a cut and other groups to take more. Your
| overall spend will be more heavily weighted towards groups that
| take less of a cut, obviously.
|
| You can also leave your overall budget for one team unchanged,
| or even grow it, and simply change your focus by putting more
| emphasis (and budget) on one set of activities vs another.
|
| In the Cruise case either scenario is possible. They can have
| decided that 3rd party LIDAR is good enough, and not strategic
| enough, that they should cut there. That could be the sum of
| it, while other groups like HR, Marketing, etc takes bigger
| cuts. Alternatively they could use the same logic to cut the
| LIDAR team and then take the savings generated to invest more
| heavily in (made up example) route planning or something.
| aphextron wrote:
| >Doubling down = 2x the engineering staff. This is as they lay
| off in their lidar team.
|
| Self driving will be solved with computer vision. Lidar is an
| unnecessary technology even for full level 5 autonomy. Most
| self driving companies have come to this conclusion by now.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| Any data to back this up besides Musk saying his approach's
| the best?
| aphextron wrote:
| https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1197323020852793344
| rsynnott wrote:
| Do you really need anything other than the divinely
| inspired word of St Elon of Cars?
|
| (I think Musk's 'data' to justify this is that humans don't
| have LIDAR. Which is true, but irrelevant, unless he's
| seriously proposing AGI)
| gpm wrote:
| I mean, when musk says this he gives data to back it up -
| that humans manage just fine with visual systems, and that
| lidar is really expensive.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| > when musk says this he gives data to back it up - that
| humans manage just fine with visual systems
|
| What humans do 'just fine' isn't very relevant to self-
| driving tech. Humans balance just fine as well and yet
| the state of the art for robots is quite primitive.
|
| Airplanes also don't fly like birds.
|
| > lidar is really expensive
|
| Which, again, is somewhat separate to whether it is
| effective.
| aphextron wrote:
| >Humans balance just fine as well and yet the state of
| the art for robots is quite primitive.
|
| That's the whole point. Full autonomy will never truly
| happen until computers can do what human brains can with
| regards to driving. No amount of sensor technology will
| make up for that fact. It's a software problem, not a
| hardware problem.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| Sure. But that doesn't mean they have to do it the same
| way humans do, (same as airplanes don't emulate birds) -
| that is you can probably arrive at a similar outcome via
| multiple approaches, some quite different to how the
| human brain works.
| gpm wrote:
| > Which, again, is somewhat separate to whether it is
| effective.
|
| Somewhat, but if lidar was really cheap it wouldn't
| really matter if it was also not-necessary.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| Right, I just don't know we're far enough in to
| definitely say what is/isn't necessary at this point.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/07/elon-musk-calls-
| lidar-a...
|
| https://youtu.be/fNgEG5rCav4
|
| > Anthony Levandowski, former Google/Waymo engineer, now
| backtracks on lidar and says, "Elon is right."
| FireBeyond wrote:
| It also, conveniently, lessens the potential value of the
| data he took with him, to say this.
| 8note wrote:
| He might not be the most trustworthy source with the
| waymo thing.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Honestly, I'd rather work with them than with people who
| wilfully misinterpret statements and just flip a shit
| constantly.
|
| "I think it's time to double down on email marketing" -> my
| teammates understand that means I'm going to switch where I put
| most of my effort.
|
| I can just imagine you saying "Yet you're not allocating 8
| hours a day instead of 4 on this. I'm going to sue you"
|
| God, that would be exhausting.
| hckr_news wrote:
| It's just a weasel word that can mean anything. Avoid weasel
| words. In your situation, why not just say I'm going to put
| my current efforts and focus on X as you clearly meant.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Because human expression is cool, man. "You guys are
| killing it!" is way better than "You human beings are
| performing above average for this task. I appreciate this".
| Also it's not a weasel word. It's totally just an
| expression.
|
| I find it truly incredible that someone feels the way you
| do.
| [deleted]
| jiofih wrote:
| Well, can someone explain how does a company with no product and
| no market get affected by the pandemic? Seems like a cop out yet
| again.
| jfoster wrote:
| Cruise is part of GM.
| rifflebutter wrote:
| Correction -- Cruise is majority-owned by GM but not really a
| GM subsidiary after SoftBank invested in it.
| paxys wrote:
| Generally the investors tighten their wallets and start
| demanding results.
| sdan wrote:
| I've never seen a company aggressively hire as much as Cruise did
| in the last 3 years.
|
| Obviously this is a bad thing, but not entirely surprising they
| had to hold the brakes during this time.
| zelly wrote:
| Remember (approx. 6 months ago) when we were seriously,
| unironically worried that all menial labor jobs would be taken by
| AI?
|
| Now we're worried about all the AI jobs disappearing.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| I would think that even at an AI company only a very small
| minority actually do AI.
| beverly451 wrote:
| Vast number of menial jobs will still be automated, and if
| anything, the quarantines are going to speed up the process.
| jjcon wrote:
| I don't think anyone was/is really worried about either one of
| those. Additionally the majority of these cuts were
| administrative/non-engineering positions and of the cuts that
| were engineering most were not AI related.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > Now we're worried about all the AI jobs disappearing.
|
| I work in the space, and I'm not[1] worried about that at all.
| For what it's worth, anyone who knows what they're talking
| about also wasn't worried that all menial jobs would be taken
| by AI: fine motor control is really difficult, so
| paradoxically, janitors are safer than many middle-skilled
| white collar jobs are. More broadly, my model of AI is one of
| slow but inexorable progress: the dirty secret of tech eating
| the world is that most industries are run obscenely
| inefficiently. This doesn't suggest that Google et al can just
| jump into any random industry with both feet and have immediate
| success, but this is largely due to inertia (and in some case,
| regulatory barriers slowing transitions of any kind[2]), both
| of which are short- and medium-run concerns.
|
| The Cruise announcement in particular is a bit of a strange one
| to choose to make this point:
|
| > The layoffs represent about 8% of Cruise's workforce. The
| losses were mostly in business strategy, product development,
| design, and recruiting. The company also dismissed staff
| working on Lidar engineering in Pasadena, Calif.[3]
|
| Cruise has >2 years of runway in the bank right now[3], is a
| financial entity separate from GM (no longer wholly owned), and
| is shifting their resources away from "close to market" towards
| "investing in the research problem", just like other SDC
| companies like Waymo. The Covid downturn, like most downturns,
| is just a useful pretext to engage in this restructuring.
|
| I usually tend towards taking the pessimistic view of
| uncertainty that affects me personally, I guess because I'm
| relatively risk-averse. But all the signals I've seen from the
| economic impact of Covid indicate that AI jobs are going to be
| affected by the general economic downturn but be in much
| _better_ relative shape than many other jobs: while shelter-in-
| place won't last forever, the more-lsating effects will likely
| include things like increased inshoring of manufacturing and an
| increase in demand for delivery and logistics (both central
| applications for robotics). The trend of people spending more
| time online is only increasing too, and the applications of AI
| there are self-explanatory from the last decade (people really
| do underestimate what ML specialists do: "decreasing Google's
| datacenter cooling costs by 40%" isn't the central AI problem
| most people think of, but it's the kind of things that creates
| massive amounts of value.
|
| Possible longer-term trends that pose challenges for autonomous
| vehicle companies in particular (not AI eng in general)
| potentially include a) some deurbanization and b) less
| theoretical demand in shared transportation methods; but the
| latter may be somewhat mitigated by the refugees from transit
| to robotaxis (esp given that sharing an air pocket is so much
| more dangerous and hard to control than sharing surfaces).
|
| [1] With caveats, I guess; I and most of my friends in the
| field have been in or adjacent to AI for a lot longer than the
| current boom, so we're seeing a very different picture than
| people who did a Tensorflow tutorial two years ago.
|
| [2] Since I know this will be misinterpreted, I'll clarify:
| This isn't a suggestion that regulations are bad and should be
| run rough-shod over, just an acknowledgement that even good
| regulation tends to slow large shifts in the way industries
| run, just by introducing complexity and barriers to entry due
| to tribal knowledge of regulatory compliance. This isn't a
| criticism of regulation, just a well-known downside.
|
| [3] https://electrek.co/2020/05/14/gm-cruise-lays-off-8-of-
| staff...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _the dirty secret of tech eating the world is that most
| industries are run obscenely inefficiently_
|
| The dirty secret of tech is that most of its "solutions" to
| these inefficiencies usually cost more than the
| inefficiencies and create external dependencies on companies
| that are free to restructure their pricing to capture all of
| the economic gain from the eliminated inefficiencies. (See,
| for example, Google Maps, Uber Eats, AirBnB.)
| epoxyhockey wrote:
| _the layoff includes staff at an engineering team in Padasedna,
| California, that works on Lidar_
| nabla9 wrote:
| Almost 40 percent of those in households making less than
| $40,000 a year had lost a job in March. Tech sector has had it
| easy so far.
| notyourday wrote:
| Tech sector had it easy because it is still early and exec
| suite is desperately clinging to a belief this will be a V
| recovery rather than a slow and painful crawl down followed
| by the same kind of slow and painful crawl up.
| rtkwe wrote:
| It's going to be a bit weird because a lot of those should
| come back because the underlying business didn't suddenly
| become nonviable.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Looking at past economic studies, there is a long run
| hysteresis effect after depressions and while the jobs
| should come back it may be on a time frame of a decade or
| longer.
| puranjay wrote:
| I doubt the consumer confidence will be the same. Not to
| mention that some people will be staying at home much
| longer.
| malandrew wrote:
| And some people will cook more. For example, we have a
| lovely little neopolitan pizza joint a block away, but
| two days ago I received an Ooni Koda 16 and have
| discovered how easy it is to make my own neopolitan
| pizzas. That's basically a permanent reduction in my
| spending on pizza if/when it does reopen.
| asdff wrote:
| The demand is there, say for food, but the capital has
| evaporated and the restaurant no longer exists. To start a
| new one you would need investors to pay for up front costs,
| labor, food, and commercial rent, and who is feeling
| bullish enough to start a business notorious for it's razor
| thin margins at the start of a recession?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| This kind of thing is why it's so confusing to me that
| more commercial landlords haven't been willing to play
| ball with their tenants on rent breaks through this
| crisis. Like, what do you have to gain by throwing out a
| restaurant or other business that is ready to start right
| back up the moment the lockdown lifts, vs sitting on an
| empty unit for months and months while the economy
| remains in turmoil, getting nothing from it. I guess it's
| maybe a play for some deep-pocketed franchise operator to
| grab it on spec? Seems risky.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I read somewhere on HN that commercial real estate is
| financed differently from residential real estate, and in
| particular, financing costs are related to what a
| building _could_ earn rather than what a building _does_
| earn. If you keep rents the same but have vacancies, your
| funders apparently don 't count that against you, while
| if reduce rents, suddenly the earning potential of your
| building has dropped and it will cost you, even if the
| building is actually earning more in cash flow than if it
| were vacant.
|
| Seems like a bit of a misincentive here, and a recipe for
| lenders to go bust too. Then again, it seems like
| commercial real estate has periodic financial crises, so
| this seems to reflect reality. Get ready for the next
| one.
| MiroF wrote:
| Meet retail
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| > the underlying business didn't suddenly become nonviable
|
| They may have. We don't know when or if things will go back
| to the way they were before March 2020 and how consumer and
| employer behavior will change.
|
| For example, maybe movie theaters are completely screwed.
| Except as a novelty, the big business chains may not
| survive. Universal Studios is already pushing back on
| theater release windows and no live-action movies are being
| filmed right now, and who knows for how long that lasts.
| Will the public feel safe enough to go back into theaters
| all at once before theaters run out of money as if nothing
| happened? I imagine some of those jobs at least are
| permanently gone.
|
| Employers will probably maintain work from home and cut
| back on office space. All those jobs that support
| maintaining offices may not come back either.
|
| I don't think the restaurant business will jump back
| either, people can't just restart their failed restaurant
| as if they didn't lose all that money they needed to keep
| their already slim margin business open before the
| pandemic.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _and no live-action movies are being filmed right now,_
|
| One nitpick: a number of live-action movies are being
| filmed right now, just not in the US. Several of my
| friends in Hollywood have found gigs for the next few
| weeks, and three of them are currently sitting out
| quarantine in a hotel so they can start working on
| Monday.
| zelly wrote:
| > Employers will probably maintain work from home and cut
| back on office space. All those jobs that support
| maintaining offices may not come back either.
|
| I think there will be a greater demand for office real
| estate because suddenly everyone needs double the space
| and (spacious) cubicles or standalone offices will make a
| comeback.
|
| That is, unless every company goes full remote.
| ghaff wrote:
| You maintain a location with a handful of dedicated
| offices together with hoteling and conference rooms for
| people to come in a day per week or so.
| icedchai wrote:
| It will be a long and slow ramp. I don't expect to sit
| inside a restaurant or go to the movies for the rest of
| this year, possibly most of 2021.
|
| Theaters were on the way out before any of this started.
| Movie ticket sales have been declining for years. That
| trend will only get worse.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Right - we saw a lot of businesses lose 80+% of their
| customers before any shelter in place orders were
| mandated. In low margin places like bars and restaurants,
| it's highly unlikely many can survive with even 75% of
| their normal level of business.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Jobs may come slowly back, but fraction of people and
| families will be permanently damaged in the process. People
| are not like rubber bands that return to where they were.
|
| The effects can be generational when families have
| children.
| sanguy wrote:
| CRUISE is a joke. These guys can't find their own ass with 4
| hands and a flashlight.
|
| So much internal overlap and fragmentation that I would not be
| shocked they are hiring and firing at the same time - perhaps
| even the same people
| thoraway1010 wrote:
| My impression was cruise was sort of the established players
| efforts to throw GOBS of money at a space they were worried
| about. Ie, a place that measures progress in part based on just
| expense.
|
| Ie, waymo's tech is interesting but we have cruise so we are
| OK. Or tesla's tech looks interesting, but we have cruise.
|
| I'd love to know what the kit they use for self driving costs.
| It looks monumentally expensive when you see one of their cars
| driving around.
|
| I'm interested in MobileEye's next version of tech - wish
| they'd be pushing harder or did the Intel borg swallow them?
| They seemed to have a practical and pretty reasonably priced
| approach.
| FreedomToCreate wrote:
| Waymo and Tesla have been designing a lot of their own
| hardware and I believe Cruise has been doing the same. Nvidia
| and Intel have been successful with getting start-ups into
| their ecosystem and attracted OEMS who want hardware for
| ADAS, but for FSD, you have to get the costs remarkably down,
| and that will need custom hardware without a middle man to
| pay. I doubt cruise is using anyones kit.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Funny, as they were just a few weeks ago (even during the
| lockdown) certain recruiters were saying they were aggressively
| hiring -- and are still listed as hiring for example here:
| https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/
|
| Seems like suddenly they got worried about how long they can
| maintain the burn rate.
|
| Doesn't help that driving and commuting fell off the map.
| chris11 wrote:
| Full self-driving is a long way off, but GM can use Cruise to
| develop new active safety systems for their current cars. I
| don't think GM is doing as well there as Toyota or Honda, let
| alone Tesla.
| amacneil wrote:
| Cruise (the SF company) doesn't do any work related to GM's
| current cars, we are focused 100% on full self driving.
|
| Note GM has another product called SuperCruise which is a
| totally different thing.
| hckr_news wrote:
| Funny thing about marketing. Tesla's autopilot and GM's
| supercruise is effectively the same thing in the scope of
| vehicle automation. GM is doing a poor job of showcasing it
| though to the general public, unless it's by default to
| avoid being sued.
| [deleted]
| rifflebutter wrote:
| There isn't necessarily any contradiction here. Lay off people
| whose work you no longer need / are not doing their jobs well,
| to hire people whose skills you need.
| Traster wrote:
| Priorities change. In 2019 people were buying into the Tesla
| bullshit and it wasn't a quesiton of "Will we get to driverless
| cars" it was "Will your driverless car be able ot make you a
| martini". Okay, more realistically completely autonomous
| driving vs autonomous busses on specific journeys etc.
|
| It's thinking in terms of plentiful resources, versus thinkin
| in terms of the minimum required. You can get rid of all those
| guys working on the automated fur slippers, but you might want
| to hire a few more guys working on the automated bus doors.
| aphextron wrote:
| It's not at all uncommon for companies to simultaneously
| perform layoffs while actively hiring.
| dragosmocrii wrote:
| Sell the highs, buy the lows
| sida wrote:
| Or you could see it as, they know who are the low
| performers. This is a good way to fire low performers in
| bulk without getting a lot of flak
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I think high and low cost was what they meant
| Fricken wrote:
| A couple years ago Cruise acquired Strobe, a Lidar start-up. It
| appears these are the people getting laid-off.
| jjcon wrote:
| I believe the majority of the layoffs were from recruiting and
| design.
| [deleted]
| iamleppert wrote:
| I went to a recruiting event that was put on by Cruise. It was
| disguised as a marketing "advisory board" where they asked us
| questions like "What motivates you as an engineer when looking
| for a new job? Would changing the world help?"
|
| "Would you like to be rewarded handsomely?"
|
| "Which of these statements most resonate with you?"
|
| They paid me $500 for about an hour to sit through their sales
| pitch. Then I finally caved and had an interview where the
| hardest question was how to flatten an array. I passed on that
| place...
| [deleted]
| FreedomToCreate wrote:
| Just a note, but this is a perfect time for companies to lay off
| low performers without getting a lot of flak. This is usually the
| case when you see companies lay off people while continuing to
| hire as well.
| throwaway1940 wrote:
| From what I've heard about the Airbnb and Lyft layoffs, many
| people who were affected were actually high performers who were
| paid well but working on projects that were deprioritized by
| upper management.
|
| Laying off these people allowed them to satisfy their budget
| cuts while laying off relatively few people.
|
| Continuing to hire sounds strange, but if the offers are lower
| the company will still save money. Pausing the recruiting
| pipeline would also hurt them once things start picking up
| again.
| malandrew wrote:
| I don't know how this makes any sense. Engineering is the
| only way to automate things to allow a business to scale
| sublinearly. Why layoff high performing engineers when you
| can reassign them to problems where the goal is to automate
| things enough to reduce costs to below the cost of keeping
| them around. Any high performer should be able to create
| enough value within 6 months to pay the salary for the hole
| year. If anything, you buy your company the optionality to
| further layoff non-engineers that you can't yet layoff until
| their job is automated.
|
| Now this may not be possible at smaller companies but at a
| company the size of AirBnB or Lyft certainly has enough
| problems that could still be better automated to help reduce
| costs further.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| If there isn't sufficient work available, there isn't
| sufficient work.
|
| For a highly-paid employee, you sometimes just can't create
| sufficient other work for them to do if you eliminate the
| work they were originally doing and other people are
| already doing the work they could putatively have been
| assigned to.
|
| And quite honestly, a person's understanding of non-
| engineering functions would have to be extremely limited to
| think that more than a fraction of them could be automated
| away. Software has been the "it" industry for decades now.
| Jobs that haven't been automated by now are _hard_ for
| software /robotics to take over.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| "lay off low performers "
|
| From layoffs I saw as a contractor, layoffs of this size are
| often not based on individual performance. Usually it's whole
| departments or functions that get laid off. If you have a good
| network you may be able to jump somewhere else.
| baddox wrote:
| Comments like this show up on all stories about layoffs. I
| don't really understand your point. There's never any reason to
| have layoffs unless the company deems it a good financial
| decision, right? And surely all layoffs would hit the lowest
| performers (by the company's estimation of performance, which
| obviously might be flawed), right? So what is the difference
| between "the company did layoffs of its lowest performers due
| to financial pressure caused in part by the pandemic" and "the
| company did layoffs of its lowest performers using the pandemic
| as an excuse to avoid bad PR"? To me those are nearly identical
| scenarios.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| It's true (or roughly true) that there isn't a reason to do
| layoffs unless the company deems it a good financial
| decision. But it's not true that a company will do layoffs
| whenever it's a good financial decision. You may know that
| there are low performers but choose not to let them go
| because you're worried about morale more generally to that
| other high performers will take it as a sign of trouble and
| jump ship. But in a bad economic environment that is less of
| an issue because high performers are probably more risk
| averse and fewer competitors are hiring anyway.
| squnch wrote:
| It affects the departing employees quite a bit. In an
| economic crisis, laid-off employees don't have a stigma
| associated with them. In good times, others think, "wow these
| guys must have been real stinkers." And layoffs don't always
| hit the low performers. If a company is shutting down entire
| businesses, like shutting down their operations in a certain
| country, top performers in an unneeded business unit can get
| laid off.
| close04 wrote:
| In many countries proving someone is a low performer is a
| high bar. They certainly can't dump 10% of their workforce
| without a justification like restructuring or downsizing,
| something a company wouldn't go through just to replace some
| people. A fake restructuring might hurt the business even
| more than some lower performing employees. And if a company
| does go through this phase, legally it can't just turn around
| and upsize by hiring other people the next day (not that this
| would guarantee they end up in a better position than
| before).
|
| Such a crisis is a good moment to slim down the workforce
| since it is a legitimate restructuring and it avoids any
| image harm. and it's not just low performers that suffer
| sometimes. An average performer might get caught in the net
| if the pay/performance ratio is not good. Many good
| performers also do just because the area they worked in is
| not deemed profitable or necessary anymore.
| arachnids wrote:
| People don't want to join companies that have recently had a
| layoff because they're generally interpreted as a sign that
| the company isn't doing well financially, outside of
| companies that advertise firing low performers as an aspect
| of their culture (Netflix). In an ordinary market, losing low
| performing business functions might make your company more
| efficient but it comes with outsized PR cost that makes it
| harder to hire.
|
| A broader economic crisis offers good cover for such an
| action. If everyone is laying employees off, it's not as bad
| if you do it too.
| hellomyguys wrote:
| Layoffs don't just layoff lowest performers, they often
| layoff departments that the company doesn't find necessary
| anymore. High performers are laid off all the time.
| foota wrote:
| One indicates the state of the company and might indicate
| wider issues for the industry and the other doesn't?
| cbanek wrote:
| Well I think in good times, it's trickier to do a layoff.
| Like you said, it can appear like it's related to financial
| pressure. In good times, if you do a layoff,
| investors/shareholders will worry that you are doing it due
| to financial pressure or limited opportunities to use those
| employees to make money (growth). The way to say it isn't
| about financial pressure is to take the PR hit and say these
| are low performers. Which kind of implies you messed up by
| hiring them. So either way, it hurts you in good times.
|
| Now in bad times, it's considered "prudent," because everyone
| is under financial pressure. Laying off people preemptively
| wins in both ways in that in can look like you're eliminating
| financial pressure when everyone is worried about it (as
| opposed to the good times, where you will be singled out), as
| well as being able to get rid of the lowest performers and
| reducing pay of everyone else while avoiding bad PR, and even
| being considered good because you're still employing the
| rest. As long as the business remains solvent it's a win-win
| for the company.
|
| Not saying this is good or bad for the economy or the
| employees, but just reflecting on some of the game theory of
| this.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| Laying off in good times means you were bad at hiring in
| the first place. Laying off in the bad times means the bad
| things weren't your fault. It's a very good way to not have
| to convey to the market, your investors, your supervisors,
| and/or yourself that you may not be very good at hiring
| while also giving yourself another go at it (hopefully with
| better results, though probably not, unfortunately).
| arachnids wrote:
| I think everyone is bad at hiring because hiring is hard.
| The problem is that companies are also bad at letting low
| performers go because we're human beings and public
| perception, conflict avoidance and empathy for co-workers
| influence our decisions
| michaelt wrote:
| _> So what is the difference between "the company did layoffs
| of its lowest performers due to financial pressure caused in
| part by the pandemic" and "the company did layoffs of its
| lowest performers using the pandemic as an excuse to avoid
| bad PR"?_
|
| 1. Whether the company might cut deeper later
|
| 2. Whether other companies will be forced to follow suit
|
| 3. Because of 1 and 2, whether the average HN reader should
| worry about their livelihood.
|
| (HN readers are, of course, 100% high performers their
| employers are lucky to have)
| curiousllama wrote:
| When I see a layoff story, I think two things: 1. Those poor
| folks losing their jobs... 2. That company must be under a
| lot of financial pressure
|
| The comment above yours is basically saying: #2 might not be
| the case, especially with only 8% being laid off"
| asdff wrote:
| Last in, first out.
| tree3 wrote:
| True, but GM and other auto makers aren't selling cars right
| now. They are impacted severely
| xoxoy wrote:
| GM is not hiring. The auto industry is being hit hard right
| now. And Cruise is notorious for being a toxic mess as is.
| kevindeasis wrote:
| On other forums it seems like it splits into two group. One
| group says that it depends on the team and that they love
| their current team. And the other group is how working for
| Cruise is the worst decision they've made in their life.
|
| My curiosity is with, how does a company totally change their
| culture and do a complete 180%? From having workers
| completely hating their current company to completely not
| seeing themselves in moving to a different company. As some
| companies used to have employees mentioning it is the worst
| tech company in the bay area to one of the best in the bay
| area
| csdreamer7 wrote:
| I would recommend reading the Open Organization by Jim
| Whitehurst to get example of how process affects employee
| motivation.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I'm not sure this makes Cruise particularly unique.
|
| There are a lot of FAANG and ex-FAANG employees on this
| board, and you can find lots of people who love their job
| and feel like they are well-treated, compensated and
| respected and doing a meaningful impactful job, and there
| are plenty who felt ignored, underpaid and disrespected
| while working as a cog in an machine designed to sell ads.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I think you'll find most FAANG developers feel quite well
| paid. But cog in a machine definitely describes many of
| the complaints.
| djsumdog wrote:
| It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though
| there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think
| self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study
| and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on
| existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and
| subsidize rail cars.
|
| I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be
| viable. I've worked in computer vision startups and know how
| powerful the tech can be, but it still can't account with even a
| fraction of challenging driving conditions. I don't think
| anything short of general purpose AI could handle it. We are some
| pretty big discoveries away from general AI.
|
| I also don't think they solve any real transport issues compared
| to traditional mass transit: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-
| driving-cars-will-not-so...
| kylec wrote:
| I think we're very far away from general-purpose self-driving
| that can drive in all locations, conditions, and handle all
| scenarios. But we don't necessarily need an all-or-nothing
| solution - I think we could be reasonably close to a self-
| driving system that can handle a whitelisted set of roads and
| highways, especially if those roads were augmented to
| accommodate that self-driving in some way.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Yeah, I've always understood that to be the big initial
| play-- get all those long-haul trucking miles autonomous,
| relegate human drivers to handling the in-city miles and
| cargo yards. I think Ottomotto (remember them?) might have
| even made a video years ago which pitched this exact scheme.
|
| Of course, the environmentalist in me is saddened by the
| thought of further driving down the cost of that shipping
| mode which might be most compatible with being switched to
| rail freight.
| etrk wrote:
| Regardless of road quality, weather conditions are
| unpredictable.
|
| When the rain or snow or haboob kicks in, I guess your car
| will pull over to the side of the road and you'll need to
| drive manually until conditions improve. We'll need to keep
| the steering wheel around for the foreseeable future.
| gizmo385 wrote:
| Does anyone know what Waymo does when a haboob happens?
| Those are at least relatively common in the Phoenix area.
| kevindong wrote:
| Self driving cars don't have to truly autonomous to be
| genuinely useful.
|
| Just level 3 or 4 autonomous vehicles would probably be good
| enough to be worth buying.
| gopalv wrote:
| > I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. ... > I
| feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be
| viable.
|
| Take out "cars" from that phrase and I think there might be a
| different answer to it, sooner or later.
|
| Specifically I liked Otto's original proposals and it sounded
| almost viable. The idea of having a Sacramento -> Chicago or
| Houston to Dallas routes for trucking with autonomous vehicles,
| with the last mile routes covered by normal container trucks
| sounded like it would work in the near term.
|
| The fact that these are big rig trucks ensures the unit volume
| cost of the hardware isn't going to be a big problem (a 25k
| computer in a 35k car vs a 120k one in a 800k truck), the
| servicing can be legally mandated (patch upgrades or cleaning
| cameras), the power supply management can also be handled if
| they want to go electric with a container + rig model.
|
| There are fewer questions about a long haul highway only self-
| driving route, maybe even something which will change the
| economics of shipping stuff through the panama canal vs going
| over land in a hub-spoke model without a train depot style
| unloading/inventory station.
| xoxoy wrote:
| Otto? You mean the company that stole trade secrets from
| Google to sell to Uber and whose founder is currently staring
| at a $179M settlement?
| arijun wrote:
| Yes? The whole thing may have been a ploy but I (and I
| assume GP) think their stated plan was very reasonable.
| virtue3 wrote:
| Ho would this provide significant benefit over a rail freight
| system?
| dnautics wrote:
| I think Peleton (not the exercise company, but the trucking
| one): had an even better intermediate stage plan to get
| trucking to fully autonomous.
| skwb wrote:
| I completely agree. I don't think the only value in AI is to
| totally replace humans, but rather automate the boring and
| costly parts that don't require a ton of thinking.
|
| In my field of AI in radiology, I see a lot of people trying
| to completely automate things that don't have to be, and
| thereby fail to innovate on the particularly hard parts.
| Sometimes it's better to just have a human somewhere in the
| loop to make the harder judgement calls.
| DethNinja wrote:
| In my opinion self driving cars far exceed the capabilities of
| current ML algorithms. I mean I guess you can spend couple of
| billions and implement some sort of expert system on top of
| that but it won't be as simple as just training the ML
| algorithm.
|
| Much better approach would be using ML as a safety sensor
| helper and let people drive the cars instead. For example, ML
| algorithm can detect if a pedestrian is on the road even on low
| vision conditions and might warn the driver, or check if there
| a car is acting weirdly on the road and warn the driver to be
| aware.
|
| I think there is a catch 22 situation going on with self-
| driving cars. By the time we get to self driving cars at human
| level, we will already have cybernetic beings at human
| intelligence level and that will change the entire industries
| and the society itself, which might actually decrease the
| profits expected by self-driving car companies.
| MiroF wrote:
| > I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all.
|
| How do you explain actual self-driving cars on the road? I find
| this attitude confusing as it seems to not jive with empirical
| reality.
|
| I agree that we should focus on mass transit, but Waymo drives
| hundreds/thousands of miles without driver intervention.
| anyfoo wrote:
| More important than simple probability is the "expectancy
| value", which is roughly spoken (and cumulatively) the
| probability multiplied by the effect when the probability
| comes to pass.
| MiroF wrote:
| I'm confused what this comment is saying - are you just
| trying to say that someone getting killed by a car is
| really really bad? If so, I agree.
| djsumdog wrote:
| There aren't any self driving cars on the road that don't
| have a safety driver, and the ones that are out there get
| confused all the time. The Uber one had a software dev turn
| off the lidar sensor to test the computer vision at night and
| it ended up killing a woman crossing the street.
| MiroF wrote:
| Waymo/Cruise and Uber aren't even in the same class and as
| I said, Waymo/Cruise cars go thousands of miles without
| driver intervention.
|
| Waymo cars go 11,000+ miles without driver intervention on
| average.
|
| I would encourage doing actual research into this subject,
| rather than relying on your gut or the news articles you
| read.
| economicslol wrote:
| >I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all
|
| They said the same thing about a Computer beating a Human at
| Chess or Go, or Radiology, or countless other examples. I don't
| see why a random person on hackernews would be any more correct
| than any of the previous naysayers.
| OpieCunningham wrote:
| They also said the same thing about time travel and dragons.
| anyfoo wrote:
| This might be more like turning lead into gold, which after
| (at least) several hundred years of effort we can do now,
| with merely completely absurdly uneconomic and unpractical
| levels of effort and energy.
| CaffeineSqurr wrote:
| It's not getting publicized very much but they did lay off
| people from the core AV teams (planning, controls, perception,
| mapping, etc.) in addition to the otherwise cited groups.
| sida wrote:
| > I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be
| cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-
| car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars
|
| Guess what, these people have run the numbers
|
| > solve any real transport issues compared to traditional mass
| transit
|
| I think that's thinking small. Why can't self-driving be
| applied to mass transit.
|
| Let's take out all the cars and replace them with 15 passenger
| self-driving vans. And set up many stops that are dynamically
| routed by UberPool. You can get convenience of a car, the cost
| of a bus and far less pollution.
| Eridrus wrote:
| It's hard to find out how much has been invested in self
| driving cars, but I think you're massively underestimating the
| cost of building rail in the US. A billion dollars a mile is a
| realistic figure for rail in cities. NYC spent more than double
| that recently.
|
| For those costs, you're probably getting somewhere between 5
| and 100 miles of rail.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| A billion dollars a mile is for subways though, and I'm
| guessing tunnelling is the major component in that cost.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Underground stations is the majority of the cost. The
| tunnel boring machine is relatively cheap compared to
| securing enough property to build stations, and it could be
| said that New York's recent subways have massively
| overengineered their stations.
|
| That being said, elevated railways have always been a very
| hard sell in dense areas, and ground level has its own host
| of problems.
| jcranmer wrote:
| A billion dollars per mile of rail is an excessively
| overpriced cost of construction that ought to have severe
| political pressure to explain why so much money is being
| wasted.
|
| Construction cost of subways outside of places like NYC that
| apparently have no concept of cost control is typically about
| $100-300 million/mile.
| Eridrus wrote:
| Lol. The reason costs are so high is because there is
| severe political pressure to keep them that way from
| contractors, unions, etc, and we're rich enough to afford
| it.
|
| For context, we have 4 million miles of road in the US. So
| even with $100m/mile, we're talking trillions of dollars
| before we even get to the actual feasibility of putting
| rail everywhere.
|
| Rail is great, but there's no world where it does the same
| thing self-driving vehicles would.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| This isn't quite a fair comparison; many of those roads
| are running through areas with low land values. Comparing
| ground-level rail through cornfields in Oklahoma is
| apples and oranges to a busy, high-capacity subway
| underneath Manhattan.
| MiroF wrote:
| > Construction cost of subways outside of places like NYC
| that apparently have no concept of cost control is
| typically about $100-300 million/mile.
|
| Where within the United States is this true? (note: United
| States is known for high construction costs)
|
| e: or just downvote me - but I don't know anywhere with a
| $100 million/mile subway system.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| There's at least two success criteria for SDC tech:
|
| 1) How much safer than humans does SDC need to be before we can
| ethically use it?
|
| 2) When will it be legalized?
|
| The ethics is a hard question. My preference is safety
| standards should be way higher than the vehicular carnage we
| accept today. I doubt most people think that way though.
|
| Legalization (and commercialization, especially if corporate
| liability is waived), could come at any moment. Given the US
| government accepts 3000 daily COVID19 deaths as a reasonable
| baseline, it seems there would be little moral qualms. If SDCs
| are about as good (or maybe even no more than a little worse)
| than human drivers approval could be granted, ethics be damned.
| kgin wrote:
| We may never have 100% level 5 driving.
|
| But with level 4 + remote assistance, you don't need to support
| all the edge cases to have a car with no steering wheel. You
| only need to reduce the need for remote assistance enough to
| make the economics work out.
|
| We will all have been riding around happily in cars without
| steering wheels for decades before "true self driving" comes to
| pass.
|
| It's possible that remote assistance centers will never shut
| down entirely, even 100 years from now, still waiting on the
| off-chance that a .00000000001% edge case pops up that the
| system still can't handle.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Can you explain this more thoroughly? So the AI cannot itself
| resolve a situation that requires resolution within a split
| second, therefore it passes control (reliable, latency
| free?!) to a remote operations center where humans get to...
| assess the situation in order to remotely tell the vehicle
| how to react in time? I must have completely misunderstood,
| because I don't see how any part of that plan is working?
| mattlondon wrote:
| There will be a large market/human-lives-saved benefit from the
| tech though, even if we never reach 100% self-driving autonomy
|
| E.g. it is pretty standard now that pretty much every car on
| sale has automatic emergency braking that tries to avoid
| running over pedestrians even if the driver does not see them,
| many (but not all I admit) cars have lane-keeping assist that
| automatically keep the car in the lane, and will automatically
| adjust the speed to match the car in front and so on (right
| down to slamming on the brakes to avoid a rear-end shunt if
| needed). Then there are the self-parking cars, the ones with
| synthetic overhead 360 degree camera viewpoints, ones that
| prevent "unintended acceleration" in car parks, ones that read
| the road signs to let you know the speed limit etc. And these
| are "normal" cars that a common joe can afford, not high-end
| six-figure Mercedes/BMW/Lexus/Tesla etc
|
| This sort of tech was science fiction not so long ago, yet now
| it is literally standard-fit.
|
| There will be a slow but steady "encroachment" of more and more
| automation into cars as the years go by - you can _guarantee_
| that companies like Cruise are churning out the patents at the
| least for this sort of thing, even if not outright directly
| licensing technologies. It feels like a land-grab phase right
| now, even if there is no real intention to reach L5.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I've always been extremely dubious about the "self driving to
| save lives" angle for one very specific reason: we already
| know how to save lives. Slow. The. Cars. Down. Oslo managed
| to get their car deaths down to 1 in 2019. 1, in a city of
| 600,000. Los Angeles killed 240 that year, or 36x more per
| capita.
|
| And yet, we don't actually apply any known techniques to
| reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives,
| we'd implement these measures today rather than banking on a
| long term tech solution.
|
| I believe that self driving is about a fantasy world in which
| we can ignore all the negative consequences of a low density,
| car centric world. Pedestrian deaths? AI magic will solve it.
| Long commutes? Just eat breakfast in your car! Emissions? Why
| well just switch over to EVs! Never mind that half of this
| tech is either not real, or orders of magnitude less
| efficient than the transit that Europe has used for almost
| half a century!
|
| The truth is we can fix all of these things _right now_ , but
| it would involve sacrifices for those whom the system is
| already benefitting. So instead we've made up a fantasy world
| where we can have our cake and eat it too.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's a cost benefit calculation. Sure we can make everyone
| go 25mph, but how much does that slow down commerce? It's a
| tradeoff people aren't willing to make. They'd rather
| sacrifice a few lives than take three hours to get 75
| miles.
|
| But the self driving tech allows us to get much safer while
| still going at normal speeds. Or maybe allows us to be
| equally safe at higher speeds.
|
| Either way it's a win.
| mattlondon wrote:
| A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a
| pedestrian if it hits them.
|
| I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach is
| not great, but there is always room for improvement ...
| e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in Oslo?
| Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that _and_
| autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved just a
| handful of lives a year.
| MiroF wrote:
| > A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a
| pedestrian if it hits them.
|
| what?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Obviously cars and pedestrians should be separated, but
| you are dramatically understating the impact speed has on
| pedestrian survival rates.
|
| At 5mph your chance of surviving a collision is extremely
| high. Heck, you have a 93% chance of surviving a _20mph_
| crash, depending on your age. Survival rates drop off
| quickly with speed however, with only 80% surviving at
| 30mph, and 45mph being a 50 /50 chance for most of the
| population.
|
| The effect is that slowing cars down from 35mph to 20mph
| in areas where pedestrians are close to cars could
| potentially _double_ the chance of a pedestrian surviving
| a crash. And that's not even accounting for how much less
| likely a collision is to happen at 20mph than 35mph.
|
| Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-
| many-speeds
|
| Edit: of course, we can and should add more tech to make
| cars safer. That's why backup cameras and seat belts are
| mandatory, and that's a good thing. But as an argument
| for _self driving cars_ , I think that they really come
| up short when there are tons of effective strategies
| available right now that we aren't applying. And that's
| my point.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach
| is not great, but there is always room for improvement
| ... e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in
| Oslo? Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that
| and autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved
| just a handful of lives a year.
|
| The problem is twofold:
|
| 1. Cruise and co. may very well run out of money before
| they develop tech reliable enough to save people en
| masse. One proposal decades ago to solve the cars vs
| people problem was to physically grade separate them
| entirely, but as it turns out building multistory streets
| doesn't scale very well.
|
| 2. People and politicians, today, are using self driving
| cars as the magic bullet to avoid spending money on other
| solutions and changing bad habits. Why spend money on
| rail or buses if the second coming of Jesus for cars is
| around the corner? And to a degree, there is an
| opportunity cost to spending money on unproven X rather
| than proven Y.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| Why rails? With some of this self driving tech you could just
| put sensors in the road and have the vehicles follow pre-
| determined routes. I've always thought that's where this self
| driving tech should have first gone in the early stages.
| Instead of having a large bus come by once every 30 minutes you
| could have a fleet of small self driving vans coming by every 5
| minutes. If you don't have to pay so many drivers that could be
| cost effective. Something like that could change public
| transport and would be very accessible to even small cities.
| MiroF wrote:
| Transporting people together in a single thing is much more
| efficient than having a big roomy box for every person.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| Agreed, I was thinking the self driving vans or mini-buses
| would hold maybe 10 people. They wouldn't have to be as big
| as a full size bus as they would come by more often, making
| them more convenient for the riders.
|
| I live in a smaller city and we have full size buses that
| only come by every half an hour, which means if you miss a
| connection it could take you an hour and a half to travel a
| distance you could easily drive in 15-20 minutes. If the
| buses came by more often, more people would ride them, but
| that would be cost prohibitive if you had to pay all the
| drivers.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Sometimes I am speechless. You've just made public transport
| _less_ efficient on several axis.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Sort of off topic, I've noticed news articles have been very lax
| with basic editing:
|
| "Thursday, the layoff includes staff at an engineering team in
| Padasedna, California"
|
| The article says "Reporting By Jane Lanhee Lee and David
| Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and David Gregorio". Two
| editors missed the typo.
| kgin wrote:
| Padasedna, Cafilroina: The City of Roses
| rifflebutter wrote:
| I noticed that too :D
| greendave wrote:
| > Before the layoffs, Cruise had 1,800 full-time employees.
|
| Their hiring rate has been remarkable. Less than 3 years ago
| (6/2017) they had 200 employees. Just over a year ago (3/2019),
| they had ~1000.
| Traster wrote:
| Do people have experience of that ever being a success? Because
| I would ball park it and say my team can still basically be
| productive at 33% growth per year - for every 1 new employee
| you need about 3 established employees. I've got to imagine
| that the _vast_ majority of those new employees don 't know
| what they're' meant to be doing, and let's face it, they've
| probably got 16 different people doing the exact same
| infrastructure job that 16 different teams thought was
| essential, hired for, and didn't trust anyone else to deliver.
| paxys wrote:
| Wow that is ridiculous. There is absolutely no way to have
| those numbers without a major compromise in the quality of
| hires.
| ISL wrote:
| There are 7,500,000,000 people in the world. A lot more than
| 800 of them are good at their jobs.
| paxys wrote:
| 800 hires a year means ~15 people starting every week.
| Every one of those 800 positions likely received hundreds
| of resumes, which needed to be sifted through. Then you
| need to have calls with each candidate, narrow down the
| pool further. Then all the onsite rounds. For an initial
| team of 200 that is an impossible task.
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| The "initial" 200 people don't hire the next 800, they
| hire the next 1.
|
| Then the 201 people hire the next 1, and the 202 hire the
| next one, and so forth.
| baddox wrote:
| Note that the average or median "quality" of employees isn't
| really that relevant if you just need more employees to do
| more total work.
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