Both of the above aren't current consumer models and the Cybercabs run one major version above this.
I've seen it avoid small rodents and deer that were hidden in foliage around a blind turn, it's super freaky with what it sees that humans can't and this is with only cameras. It is really good, in my experience, at reasoning about other vehicles and what they are about to do such as seeing a vehicle not slowing down quickly enough at a stop sign its crossing so it slows itself down to make sure the car stops. My favorite story is that it swerved out of the way of someone doing a u-turn from the opposing lane hidden behind another car; it had already gotten us out of the way before anyone in the car realized what had happened.
An AV is already superhuman because it never loses focus, it can see all the way around the car, and it can react quicker than any human, besides maybe an F1 driver, could.
If I wasn't so lazy I'd find and post the one where my Tesla slowed down to a stop at a red light, lulling me into a sense of security, and then without warning lurched forward and broke the red light.
That is not even a perception issue (I've already had multiple very close calls because of that, and I think Elon was extremely negligent in pushing for vision-only;) This is a damn bug in the planning logic. That's Elon's "move fast and break people" philosophy shining through.
I would trust autonomous cars if they're Waymo. I would not trust Tesla.
That is either an old story or you are on v12 because mine used to do it often and I haven't seen it in at least a year from my recollection. The newest versions are really good.
Waymos aren't without fault either, they smash the front off cars, run into static poles, block emergency vehicles, etc; just the nature of AV development.
This was from last year, so surely the technology has changed, but you know what hasn’t changed in the meantime? The marketing around it. If Elon has been saying the same thing over the years that people have been dying, why would you trust him today?
Before entrusting your life and the lives of those on the road to Elon, I would implore you to just google “latest Tesla FSD incidents” every so often for a sobering reality check.
And no one is claiming Waymo is perfect, but the statistics for Waymo are wayyyyy better than those from Tesla.
Every tesla owners excuse is "oh you're not on v64.438185b, thats why you ran over that dog". The youtube recommendations these guys are completely mental when you look at it from outside.
You are correct but I think previous comment hung on specific word you used: "semi-autonomous". What that would mean is a system that still requires attention / supervision. What I believe you meant is an AV that still has human controls but is capable of unsupervised driving.
If you aren't familiar with SAE AV levels, check them out. It is a common refrain that L3 AVs are a SUPER bad idea because they would be 99.9% perfect at driving but could still mess up so 'drivers' of them would become too trusting and minimally attentive which would cause accidents.
The common thing is that L3 needs to be skipped entirely so a car should either be L2 and wouldn't be good enough to drive entirely on its own for long periods (lane assist, low speed traffic jam chauffeur, etc) or L4+ where the car can drive on its own but if conditions degrade where it can't continue it is capable of finding a safe spot to stop rather than aborting in the middle of driving suddenly.
The controls vs no controls isn't really an argument. Like you said, it will basically be fine either way if the system is sufficiently advanced especially if autonomy can't be disengaged while moving.
> Haven't wealthy people spent most of history paying someone else to drive for them?
My understanding is that it is a legal and safety liability for them to drive. The driver is employed by and the car is owned by a company that the wealthy person founded and pays so if the driver hits & kills someone, the company gets sued for a bunch of money then the liability can be discharged in bankruptcy / isolated to the company's coffers rather than the wealthy person's.
It's the same gambit as their security. I am sure more than just Gates and Musk do it but I know that both of them own personal security companies who only provide security to themselves. It's all just shells of liability shielding.
Another consideration that needs to be made before tossing out private transit because "public transit is better" is not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.
If it is 2am and you need to get home as a woman, it would be a no brainer to get in an autonomous vehicle while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
If you have sensory difficulties that make public transit uncomfortable, private transit is always the better option.
The list goes on for many reasons and people that having only public transit would harm. The idea we can get rid of or otherwise push out private transit marginalizes everyone who isn't prototypical nor should we hand-wave that they can just rely on runs-on-other-people's-time disabled specific transports to get them into city centers because private transport isn't allowed in.
> not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.
Not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use cars. Cars are killing tens of thousands a year while destroying the environment.
> while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
While this is going to be city-dependent, I'm a woman who frequently travels along late at night on public transit and I've never had any issues beyond annoying drunk people. You're making this up.
> If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
Making sure that public transit is wheelchair-accessible is vitally important, I'm glad we agree on that. How do cars do in that regard? They don't work at all unless you can afford a chauffeur. Your argument here is essentially "public transit is sometimes bad, so it's not worth it to make it better", which is nonsensical.
> only public transit
> private transport isn't allowed in
Ridiculous strawman. Nobody is arguing for the abolition of the private vehicle, just the ways in which we design our cities to prioritize only private vehicles at the expense of everything else. Plenty of people in transit-friendly cities own cars. Replacing a large majority of private car trips would save lives, help the environment, make things more accessible, and make cities more pleasant to be in.
People on wheelchair do drive, often with hands control. I knew a guy who would drive manual, since in our country automatic didn't even exist at the time. All with his hands.
Also as a disabled guy myself, public transport here in sweden is NOT accessible (despite what the swedish propaganda will claim) but even if it were, you're not going to have a stop inside your apartment, and when there's roadworks or ice or whatever and they leave you stranded 1-2km away from where you were supposed to go, having a ramp on the bus isn't going to help you that much.
Also I've witnessed drivers picking up and literally throwing out a woman on a wheelchair because the ramp didn't work. It wasn't her stop, she didn't want to get off, they were simply fed up with trying to get it to work.
I have been playing with something similar and I see these types of projects all the time. My criticism of things like this is that they seem to rely heavily on the ~*~magic~*~ of LLMs to do everything and try to paper over gaps with major hand-waving on everything beyond "agents do everything" when in reality, the most critical part is agents NOT doing much and relying on 'boring' deterministic backbones in an automatic fashion.
A good version of this kind of system would be pushing as much LLM magic out of the core and having solid internal tools that personas/agents _happen_ to have access to. So rather than having one big messy ball of ~*~magic~*~ where it burns tokens trying to invent strategy and keep track of every thread via memory, you have a few personas that manage specific tools to gather information about the world and outlay of the company. Inside those specific tools/platforms, you can have ~*~magic~*~ to do things deterministic code can't while still keeping the magic halves of CMO and copywriter separated by a deterministic concern-specific platform so structure is consistent and enforced by strongly typed code.
The model I think many go after is a strong monolith when the idealized 'autonomous company', in my opinion, should be decentralized and largely tool-driven rather than agent-driven along with not re-inventing the wheel / pushing third-party integrations out to the edge or later in the roadmap. It's a lot easier and better to just write an MCP against Linear than re-inventing the wheel on a todo app basically.
Let me know if that is your design because whenever I look at stuff like this, especially the broad promises of an autonomous company, all I can think about is just a slop factory that produces even worse slop the longer you run it due to agents running away and inventing new things.
I agree with your points, and that is how it is built. The backbone in OtoDock is deterministic code, the model only runs inside a session. Schedules are cron, triggers are webhooks, permissions are a fail closed gate per tool, cost limits are set per user and per agent, and delegation between agents is configured from the admin and the agent managers, an agent cannot change any of that. Agents only see the tools and skills their manager assigned and the integrations are MCPs against existing tools, GitHub, Notion, Home Assistant, Prometheus. Memory is plain markdown files you can read and edit.
So I agree that the company should be tool driven. OtoDock is the home of the agents, and from there they connect to and control the company tools
In addition the agents are distributed at the execution level, the control plane and dashboard run on the server but the agents can also run on whatever machine you pair, with their files synced.
When I lived in Jersey City, I committed the crime of living at a 1/2 address.
Literally nothing could get delivered to me if they used a Google Maps address bar. My address just didn't exist at all to that search bar. It could be found on maps, just not on that little search bar widget.
I ended up just putting my neighbors address and either intercepting delivery drivers or putting in the notes that I was at the half address next door.
Moral of the story: check your potential address BEFORE you move in
It's pretty messed up that the only way to "solve" this problem is by treating addresses that Google mishandles as uninhabitable, but I'd be lying if I didn't tell my wife I was concerned about living on a corner again when we were looking for houses to buy after that (luckily, the one we liked most and had our offer accepted for wasn't on a corner, and our plan is to never move again!)
It really radicalized me on the "Programmers don't understand [x]" series of articles.
A lot of problems would just be solved by trust-but-verify information. If a user wants to put non-sense in a text box, that should be a 'them problem' but a service that presumes all email address end in .com or that a user doesn't know their own address is worse. With that said, I understand why services do it because the Venn diagram of "will type non-sense into a field then wonder why it didn't work" and "will email into support and be the reason someone drinks" is largely a circle.
I do sometimes wonder if we are all writing more than we would if we just wrote the code ourselves.
I am asking that partially as a rhetorical question but also wondering your thoughts on when to deploy 'loop engineering' versus 'one-shot' versus writing the code yourself.
Additionally the post seems to talk in broad strokes without a specific proposal on a 'scorer' / determining adherence to the state goal. Do you have a thought on how that should be expressed? Do you feel that a human in the loop slows things down unnecessarily?
Domain names are a mess in my opinion. Even though we have over a thousand TLDs only a very small handful are considered for commerce or even thought to be valid.
I have a domain name with the TLD of "today". Many people think my email is [email]@[domain].today.com. It's not just the common person's fault but also software engineers / product managers who still have a very restrictive view of what a TLD is (under 3 three letters is the primary restriction I hit).
Since I don't believe we'll ever convince people that domains longer than 3 letters / full words are TLDs, I think the solution is every human being gets 10 domain names at marketprice then every domain ownership above that gets graduated ownership costs; the first year is market, second year is $100, third year is $500, fourth year is $1,000, and so on until the 10th year where it levels out at $10k per year.
The idea of it being if you want to hold onto a lot of domains you need to pay for it or make the domains economically viable. With what is essentially infinite space, we shouldn't be allowing domains to be like finite real world real estate to be speculated on.
I don't like the pollution of the global namespace. If someone thinks, there should be a domain named today, fine, but don't put it in the global namespace by creating a new TLD. DNS is a hierarchical structure, there is no reason domains should all be only 4 segments long. Arguable 'com.' should have really been 'com.us.', but that's history.
The gTLD scam actually decreased global namespace pollution. You used to register .com .org and .net so nobody else could claim the same name as you (nobody cared about other TLDs). Now with the proliferation of TLDs you can just pick a name and there's a good chance it's available under at least one TLD.
From a technical perspective I agree, but from a practicality perspective .com is way too full already, and if not for the alternative TLDs that crop up (.tech, .dev, etc) I would never have been able to get a personal site that's memorable and short.
1. People who can't understand how tld works, learn it. Changing the world to accomodate ignorance is not my preferred direction.
2. We don't link the concept of domain names to economically viable for an US citizen, since that is not a fair for probably a few billion other people.
I think this solves none of the current problems with domain names, but at least it does not add any new ones.
The concept that the only purpose for anything, whether it's a domain, a pair of shoes, a plot of land filled with trees, is economic growth or investment is a perverse sickness.
Habituation is difficult to overcome. If domain names had been freeform from the start, we wouldn’t have this particular issue.
Domain names are still a finite space, given that a full domain name can be at most 253 characters, and each domain label at most 63 characters. “Requiring” a .com/.org/.net/.CC at the end isn’t really that much of a restriction.
By the way, madamelic.com appears to be available.
> If domain names had been freeform from the start...
I'd argue that they're not freeform now. You need to pay ICANN something like 250k USD to consider your application for a new TLD, plus I think you need to convince them that you actually can operate the infrastructure required to reliably serve queries and subdomain registrations for that TLD.
I do agree that we have _way_ more TLDs now than the five or ten we had back in the 1990s, but the barrier to creating a new one is so large that I'd not describe them as "freeform".
That's a fair point. I knew I was going to popped for the comment about it being an infinite space, haha, because it definitely isn't but domain names don't necessarily have the physical constraints land does. There's no such thing, necessarily, as a domain name that is "in the boonies" or no way to create more domain space.
> By the way, madamelic.com appears to be available.
Hmmm! I may have to grab this one. The one I really want is madeline.com (it's owned by the family who made Madeline the book) but I am doubtful I will ever get that one without loads of money or ever, hah.
I am hesitant to say the domain because of spammers but it is the [shortened version of that name].today.
My family name was already taken as a domain 25 years ago, but well, you can’t expect to be able to own any but the most rare names. However, the space is large enough that you can invent a name that is available, and it’s fine.
I’m more annoyed by products/companies choosing names that are just common words.
Not enmeshed in game development and have only done it very lightly: what takes a game like this 1.5 - 2 years to finish?
Like at a minimum, it's art, sound, graphics, and programming. If they are re-using assets, that's one of them ~done. So what's taking them 2 years?
My background is in SaaS type stuff and if I went to who hired me and said it would take 2 years to build out a non-cutting edge product I am pretty sure I'd get fired. So can any game devs briefly/not-briefly explain why game dev like this takes so long? I am just curious to understand the dev cycle.
I'd assume that with investment, he'd have at least one person per team so all of these can largely be intertwined with each other but largely running at the same time.
I think you’re underrating the sheer amount of iteration that occurs. SaaS has requirements and then implementation- it’s a product that has a target it hits. Yes, churn happens, but the point is you’re working to a specific goal.
Games and any creative work isn’t like that. There’s constant iteration as new ideas come up or developers learn in play testing that certain parts of the game work better than others, and so they realign things continually and keep refining. I’m not a game dev btw, but blogs from devs show a continual cycle of refinement and feature creep.
At a quick glance: four months for the engine (which they wrote from scratch [1]) and, based on the budget [2], roughly nine months for crowdsourcing and pre-production (setting the overall story and puzzles, deciding on the look of the game, building small proofs-of-concept), seven months for production, three months for testing and bugfixing, and two months for release (which they overshot by three months).
I'll add that, unlike what your parent wrote, asset reuse will be minimal, in adventure games, one of the reward for solving puzzles is unlocking access to new locations and thus new art.
In this case, they may reuse some of the sprites for the main characters (default animations). Most of the animations are custom and can't be reused.
Likewise for the voice acting (I'd expect them to start from scratch here, the mood of the games may be a bit different).
In my experience, business software has narrow and predictable use cases. Note taking: You need to add, delete and update notes and the real meat of the product is usually in the note organization. Even SAP has use cases simple in nature: Account for milk cartons sold. The use cases just grow complex once you work in 30 countries or more. "Pay the right taxes on milk cartons sold" becomes tricky.
However, this is parallelizable: You can work on all 30 countries at once and ship when ready. You can work on taking and organizing notes in parallel. You can work on scaling in parallel. You can streamline UX in parallel while introducing tagging, or trees, or groups, or anything.
A game, and especially a narrative game, has an intrinsic linear component, the plot. You can work on a certain amount in parallel, sure: Once the rough shape of the plot is laid out, you can start working on assets, necessary engine features, sounds, dialog in parallel.
But you still have a strong need that a player or play tester has a good progression from act one to act two to act three, and a good progression from puzzle one to puzzle two to puzzle three. This takes a lot of very slow iteration.
This involves human testing by nature. You get a playtest every few months, if you have the money. You can easily throw more CI hardware to run your integration tests more often for more countries. Playtesters, especially those who don't know the game, are very, very limited.
Then you also want characters and settings to be consistent across the plot. If done well, this takes a lot of adjustments and refinement both back and forth. Sometimes the setting of Act three requires a character to have a certain trait, and that trait should be developed, so you now go back to Acts one and two to see if you can build up the character -- without knocking down the entire house of cards already in place.
And once you get to polish and atmosphere, it becomes even harder and more time consuming, because then you need new playtesters even more.
From a past job and working on some features, I spent a day or two presenting like 6-8 different options, and then spent half a day in different testing groups to figure out which procedural generation option "feels the best" for what the game designer wants. With a better spec, that could've been an hour. This made players more excited. Probably.
You need to build the engine/tech, need to support various platforms including building a rendering pipeline (so Vulkan, DirectX and Metal). You need to support animation (probably just 2D?), audio (including various effects and params), different types of input, a UI system, etc. To author the assets you need editors of some form for building the scenes, for cinematics, for the narrative, for the animations, a lot of these will be custom. Then to get the assets in the game you need a pipeline that coverts everything into platform specific formats. And all of this has to be performant, targeting 60fps ideally and cross platform.
That's just the tech side. Then you need all the other disciplines to be in sync. Can't start on animations until you have characters, can't start on those until you have concepts but can't have those until you have a narrative. And these will go via a lot of iterations as you try things out and figure out what works.
Then there's testing, the possibilities from a user perspective are really broad so the bug surface is massive. For a simple app the user is quite limited so it's simpler to enforce rules and unit tests. With a game a user can do a lot across many platforms and the issues can be on the low level graphics driver or just logic puzzle errors.
Then you have certification, platform holders have a book of tests they do to your game so you don't brick the console. Things like, does you game handle unplugging the console while you're saving to disk?
I can imagine they'll reuse a ton of tech from previous games, but there's always new things you need to do. Two years is actually pretty fast for the industry.
It's just like when during development the client/the users realize the system can do more and better, so the specs are changed because it makes a lot of sense to do that.
Game dev is always like that: you won't realize what works and what doesn't until you can actually playtest the game... then you'll think of fixes and you'll have to go back implementing them.
Don't really have the context, but I'd trust the expert that it will get done on the schedule they want. I'd say people on the outside of things often ask these kinds of questions due to lacking any context on production schedules. See: the last time your PM said "can't we just..."
He's also a small shop and perhaps they intentionally move slower. I suspect he doesn't need to urgently get paid for this.
Story writing is probably non linear in time it takes, and I imagine there's a fair amount of waterfall. E.g you can't schedule voice actors until the story and dialogue is done. Oh wait, the voice actors have other commitments so they'll be by in 3 months. Etc.
FSD driving in decently heavy rain (this is mine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKePEavEhv
Both of the above aren't current consumer models and the Cybercabs run one major version above this.
I've seen it avoid small rodents and deer that were hidden in foliage around a blind turn, it's super freaky with what it sees that humans can't and this is with only cameras. It is really good, in my experience, at reasoning about other vehicles and what they are about to do such as seeing a vehicle not slowing down quickly enough at a stop sign its crossing so it slows itself down to make sure the car stops. My favorite story is that it swerved out of the way of someone doing a u-turn from the opposing lane hidden behind another car; it had already gotten us out of the way before anyone in the car realized what had happened.
An AV is already superhuman because it never loses focus, it can see all the way around the car, and it can react quicker than any human, besides maybe an F1 driver, could.
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