In the very late 90s - so only a year or two after the Good Friday Agreement - he gave a talk in Dublin. The only part I remember was when he went off on his tangent about access to guns being an essential component of a free society and then stood there wondering why he was suddenly being heckled.

You forgot to mention that Mom and Pop also benefit from their fleet being linked exclusively to the Robocharge(tm) charging network, which provides reliable charging 24/7 for a simple convenience fee of 25% on top of the local power company's grid rate.

Anthony Levandowski (the Waymo guy) on the robot cabs: "You’re putting the power back into the people’s hands, where a small business owner could have, you know, a fleet of 10 cars or 20 cars that they run themselves as their business. It’s a great model for the future where it’s lots of mom and pops, rather than one mega corp that does that.”

Because that is EXACTLY what will happen and it will absolutely NOT be the case that megacorps will simply do exactly what megacorps do and flood cities with robotaxis running at a loss in order to control the market and then jack up prices. No siree, it'll be all Mom and Pop's Friendly Robotaxi Company.

Don't have much use for a protocol droid either.

Was thinking about this over the weekend and it suddenly struck me that saltman and his fellow podcasting bros (thank you, TSMC execs) are the modern equivalent of the guys in academic posts who'd describe themselves using titles like "futurist" and spent their time turning out papers that got them interviewed on telly, inspired other academics with too much spare time to write their own takes on it and get interviewed on TV as well, maybe write a book and get an adoring profile in WIRED, that sort of thing. Maybe they'd have a sideline in cyberpunk fiction or be part of a group that hung around in Berkeley making languid proclamations about how cyberspace would be the end of all laws and stuff like that. They were the first hype men of tech -- didn't actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas. Certainly loved the sound of their own voices and adored the attention. But they were very clear that these were ideas to hang stuff off in the future, not the present.

Nobody was dumb enough to actually take their stuff at face value as something they should immediately throw huge amounts of money at to make them reality. This started to blur during the period when Negroponte was really hustling and everything the MIT Media Lab squirted out was treated like the second coming. It blurred further when tech companies started employing people to act as hype men who had job titles like "Chief Visionary". These guys could take the ideas coming from the nerdy engineers and turn them into excited press releases that would get the top brass excited into giving them more headcount to work on it. Type specimen: Shingy (formerly of AOL)

Today, that circlejerk (futurists - journalism - readers - companies - investors) has collapsed into a line with two points. Someone like Altman shows up with a barely-proof-of-concept idea but is able to hype it directly to VCs who have too much money and no imagination and make decisions based entirely on FOMO. So Altman appears, gets showered with cash, then as he's being showered with cash and hyping for all it's worth other tech companies and VCs jump on the FOMO wagon and pour cash into it as well and... we get to today. Not so much a circlejerk as a reacharound. The sanity filter of open discussion and decent tech journalism between blue-sky ideas and billions of dollars of cash has been removed completely.

The most recent bubbles - cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, LLMs... none of these would have progressed much beyond a few academic papers, maybe a PoC and some excited cyberpunk mailing list traffic until about 15 years ago. The computing power to do them was easily available, it's just that people would have asked "What is this for?" and "Why is it better?". It's what happens when you stop using academia (generally a fairly sceptical community) as an ideas factory and start using coked-up Stanford grads who've spent their entire university career being constantly told how special and important they are.

Result: massive waste of talent which could be used on genuinely innovative and society-improving ideas, stifling of said genuinely good ideas as "a startup" now has to mean $10m in seed capital and "graduating" from an incubator rather than a couple of people coding in an apartment, billions of dollars firehosed off a cliff for no good reason, the environment being set on fire, and society is being made incrementally worse and not better.

How fucking depressing. Capitalism, you suck.

(full disclosure: I've had dinner with a couple of top-tier Cyberpunk Luminaries in the US and one of them was pretty much the most annoying, self-satisfied "I Am Very Clever And Will Talk Loudly" person I've ever met. I now know what it feels like to be mansplained at having had things like basic facts about the country I was then living in and the European Union explained to me incorrectly.)

Having read a bit about this dispute and the parties involved I think the best settlement prospect for this lawsuit is to set everybody involved on fire.

If what you took away from that is "EU trains are FUBAR because something something conflicts" then you weren't paying attention. Automating trains isn't that hard to do (London's Victoria Line has been more or less self-driving since 1967) with some kind of transponders-and-in-cab-control arrangement, but they still to this day have to have a train operator (i.e., a driver) in the cab. This is not because the automation can't make the train go and make it stop again at the right place, it's because actually pushing a lever back and forth is only a tiny part of the job of driving a train. The rest is about knowing rules many of which are extremely safety-critical, evaluating rules, and applying knowledge and experience to make sure those rules are correctly applied. For instance, you can put a passenger train on a fenced-off track with no intermittent route changes and it can drive itself from A to B using existing technology. The problem, however, is what happens if something goes wrong? A wire connecting a trackside transponder fails -- the train will stop because it doesn't know what to do. A foreign body is detected on the track in front? The train will have to stop until someone moves it. And not only that train will be stopped, but all the trains behind it will be stopped until someone can get there in person.. and let's hope they don't have to use the strech of track that's blocked to get there.

So you still need a human on the train to resolve these problems - a signal failure means a two-way conversation with the signalbox to confirm what's going on and get given manual permission to proceed, usually at a reduced speed. A foreign object can be examined on the spot, moved if the driver is able to do so, and the track checked over to make sure it hasn't been damaged by the impact. And this is a very simple example. Driving a train is one of those jobs (a lot like being a pilot, and few people seem to be talking about getting rid of airline pilots) which is 99% routine but 1% exceptions, and the possible number of exceptions is nearly infinite. Automation in the cab is certainly a useful thing just as automation in your car is a useful thing and for the same reason - it frees up expensive human eyeballs and brains to worry less about the repetitive mechanics of the 99% routine so they can pay more attention to any potential 1% exceptions coming down the line. Automation simply can't meet the safety requirements -- there's no "acceptable number" of accidents or fatalities in railway operations unless that number is zero.

There are, to be fair, some extremely niche operations where full automation can and does work -- mostly on isolated metro systems where the infrastructure is expansive enough, there are no level crossings, and the line operates effectively in a vacuum. Even in that case, the Victoria Line can't meet the safety requirements as the tunnels have no side walkways and passenger evacuation means walking people off through the middle of the cab onto what have to be assumed to be live electrical rails without going through complex safety procedures to be sure they're safe.

Railway safety in Europe is nothing like what a lot of people think it is (i.e., akin to highway safety). It's taken very, very seriously and no compromises are ever acceptable. Even many rules which seem hard to explain today exist because a massively improbable series of failures at some point in the past caused disaster or near-disaster and could still repeat themselves today if not for this rule. It's complex, sure, but for a system that's undergone 200 years of continuous evolution and development and still remains extremely safe it's anything but FUBAR.

Kinder, Küche, Kosplay?

It's worth noting in the Grauniad's defence that the piece which mentioned them (among others) last year wasn't a commissioned interview article, it was a column by Arwa Mahdawi. Columnists usually have a regular gig to write opinion pieces on some topic relevant to their interests and then submit them for publication -- in other words, they don't have an editor telling them to go and cover something, they write about what they feel like writing about even if it turns out to be at odds with the paper's editorial policy (e.g. Simon Jenkins, who is a Guardian columnist despite regularly expressing some highly un-Guardian-reader views). As Mahdawi is a columnist who regularly focuses on feminist issues and the United States this would be entirely within her field of interest.

Still doesn't mean these people deserve yet more coverage, though. I hope their kids get out of this toxic family having suffered as little harm as possible from a mother who apparently thinks that the only solution to "cheap, good-quality snowsuits bought from Russia" not fitting when you're pregnant is dressing like a tradwife and a father who really doesn't seem to like them and who does an abuse in front of a journalist which he thinks he can just explain away with pseudoscientific bullshit as "hey, that looked like abuse but it wasn't, it was SCIENCE".

Im also annoyed at how much words are written about the Collins. Stop promoting these doofuses. (They have come up in sneerclub before)

Apologies. First time poster, all that stuff.

The corporal punishment thing is a weirdly Anglophone obsession -- assaulting (sorry, "smacking") your kids has been a crime here since 1977 and the kids seem to be alright as well as having the bonus of being less likely to have grown up surrounded by violence and the threat of violence. In 7 years here I've seen exactly one person hit a child in public (looked a lot like a visiting grandma from elsewhere) and it came as a real shock. The more the Collins types (and, of course, fundie types) try to justify this as "normal" the less normal it appears to everyone else.

It's really hard not to draw parallels between Musk's attitude to protesters and the attitude so many white South Africans had to protesting black (and progressive white) people in the 70s and 80s -- just replace "left-wing" with "communist" and you're there. Maybe he grew up seeing the cops beating the shit out of people for protesting on the TV news so often that he thinks that's the norm.