Elon Musk and Tesla ignored Autopilot’s fatal flaws, judge says evidence shows

Tesla may owe punitive damages to victim as key trial over Autopilot proceeds.

See full article...

 

[hestermofet]

Musk has shown he has no regard for human life, so he needs to pay.

Musk is the luckiest whiniest brat in the world. He'll weasel his way out of this too

I'm only half-convinced at this point that Autopilot running over people is a bug, and not actually an intended feature. Elon Musk's hero once said:

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."

This seems to be Elon Musk's attitude to Autopilot.

 

[hestermofet]

Request from an American. Stop misnaming us. Citizens of the United States of America are Americans. There is one rule that people routinely forget: Don't be an asshole. Use the terms you're asked to use.

Fuck off. Don't be an asshole, please address your response to this post to "Your royal highness".

 

[hestermofet]

99.9% is still better than any human though. I think we can agree that no human perfectly handles 100% of cases, it is just not physically possible to do. That is why we have human accidents every day. So the more reasonable question is what % IS considered acceptable. If humans are 95% and a given system is 99.9%, well for me I prefer whichever of the two has better statistics overall.

This is very questionable statistics.

First, 99.9% is some number somebody pulled out of their ass, we don't know how many cases Tesla's system fails in. In terms of cross-traffic, it sounds like significantly lower success rate than 99.9%, enough that Tesla got sued for killing enough people.

Second, there ARE individuals who can handle 100% of cases perfectly, with no incidents that are worthy of reporting on to a driver's abstract. There are drivers with impeccably clean driving records that go back 40 years. On aggregate, humans as a whole cannot handle 100% of all cases of adverse driving perfectly. But through a combination of luck and skill, there are some individuals who can, so stating "no human perfectly handles 100% of cases, it is just not physically possible to do" is completely false when there is clear evidence to the contrary.

Just because you might be a shitty driver, don't make broad sweeping statements that all people are.

That is why we have human accidents every day. So the more reasonable question is what % IS considered acceptable.

No, this is not why we have accidents everyday. We have accidents every day because of the law of the vital few. According to the Pareto Principle, 80% of consequences are the result of 20% of causes. You can probably expect that 80% of accidents are caused by 20% of drivers. The average driver is generally good enough to not cause an accident.

 

[hestermofet]

Also, just how happy do we think most Canadians would be to have everyone call them simply "Americans"?

I dunno, there are lots of us here, you could just ask one of us. If every time someone does it, a USian cries over their hurt fee-fees, this Canadian in particular would be chuffed to bits.

 

[hestermofet]

Can't wait to see Elon on the stand wanting to pull a piece of paper out of his pocket that'll waive all this away.

"They call it the worthless clause. It means that every company I have ever built is worthless. Don't believe anything you read about them, do your own research!"

 

[hestermofet]

Musk has put more effort into adding media center fart sounds, games, and other useless junk than improving the self-driving over the last several years.
https://www.copilotsearch.com/posts/what-is-tesla-fart-mode/https://inshorts.com/en/news/tesla-adds-6-farting-noises-names-one-after-short-sellers-1545328964930

The comparisons of Tesla to the Simpsons' episode started as a meme, but now it is looking more and more accurate.

It's gotten to the point where every second or third thread about Tesla references this image:

I for one am anxiously looking forward to the first Ars article about Tesla where Aurich does a riff on this image for the article thumbnail.

 

[hestermofet]

The general rule is that a group should be called by whatever name they choose to call them selves, and not by what outsiders who feel offended by that group's choice decide they should be called. The overwhelming majority of people in the USA prefer "American". I suspect that most haven't even heard of "USian". If you don't like that, you either have to convince the majority of them to change it to "USian"

Kind of like how we convinced entire populations of other countries that their country is actually called "Germany", "Hungary", "Albania", "Wales", "Austria", "Croatia", "Estonia", "Holland", "Greece", "India", "Switzerland", etc?

Here's a useful hint: any country with a name you use that ends in "-ia" is probably not called that by people who live there, especially if they don't speak a Latinate language, or historically have minimal Hellenistic influence.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ia#English
Exonyms are surprisingly common, especially in the English language (but other languages too). It's something that English is actually notorious for. In English, exonyms are arguably the norm and endonyms are rarely used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_exonyms
The US in particular is infamous for turning "Harinder" into "Harry" and "Parvati" into "Polly" because it's "too hard" to pronounce. It's so bad and insulting that that the "American version" of a personal name is commonly a punchline in the rest of the world, because when you are faced with such callous, intolerable cruelty on an ongoing basis, what else are you supposed to do but laugh it off? Kind of like how USians joke about "what is your stripper name?". This particular injustice is something that is significantly more rare in other countries with high degrees of immigration like the UK, Canada, and Sweden. Don't get upset that for once it's happening to your country and your residents too.

The arrogance, complete lack of self-awareness, and hypocrisy, man, it's just jaw-dropping. GTFO. I mean, fuck, USians still use the highly offensive term "Eskimo" for their own citizens, even in federal government documents.

 

[hestermofet]

The situation in Canada regarding Eskimo is clear: it's offensive, say Inuit instead.

The situation in the US isn't as clear: the transition away from "Eskimo" is being held up by the lack of agreement on a replacement term. The Yupik and Aleut don't consider themselves Inuit.

So what is wrong with calling non-Inuit individuals Yupik and Aleut? How is Eskimo an acceptable status quo? That's like saying "I'm going to keep saying the N-word because African-American isn't widely accepted yet". Which it wasn't always: Colored was at one time an accepted alternative by some people. So if you don't know whether to say "African-American" or "Colored", should you just default to the N-word?

 

[hestermofet]

You do realize that languages other than English also practice this type of thing? EG (and leaving out any articles that are used)

Oh crap, you got me! I never considered that! You tore apart my whole post! I retract all of it, I am so embarassed.

Oh, wait.

Exonyms are surprisingly common, especially in the English language (but other languages too).

lol. This is hilarious:

Oh. look, German:
Deutschland, Albanien, Wales, Österreich, Kroatien, Estland, Holland, Griechenland, Indien, Schweiz

hahaha. Nice point you made there, German-speakers use the endonyms for German-speaking countries. Good job pointing out the obvious!

 

[hestermofet]

Perhaps Yupik peoples don't want to be called Aleut and vice versa, and no one has yet figured out a term that is acceptable to both peoples,

Why do you feel it is necessary to lump two unlike cultures and nations together with the same term?

so until that happens they're stuck with the (inappropriate) term by default?

I don't get why they need to be stuck with an offensive term because you are too lazy to distinguish them apart when talking about them.

After all, I wouldn't think that Sioux would want to be called Navajo

So don't? I don't understand what point you are trying to make.

I don't have one good term to refer to people from Texas and Massachussetts, so I guess they're stuck being called "Assholes". WTF is wrong with you?

 

[hestermofet]

Nobody ever used the N-word in official writings, so that was easy to stop doing.

Are you for fucking real?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_nigger_in_proper_namesCheck the section on place names in the US. Most of those were published in USGS publications.

 

[hestermofet]

The point is that every language uses Exonyms for other countries.

Yes, and? Did I ever say exonyms are wrong? Or was I responding to a USian getting butthurt about other people using exonyms for residents of the USA, as if they for some reason are the only group of people on the face of the whole fucking planet that are allowed force everyone else to refer to them they want to be referred to?

 

[hestermofet]

Sorry for the double reply, but

Wait, what? I thought the whole point of espresso was that it's more powerful. Adding water just makes it coffee, doesn't it?

No, "more powerful" is not the (only) point. In the US, it kind of is, but that's not universal. Adding "shots of espresso" to increase the strength of the coffee is a North American thing, more or less. Espresso is added to other coffee-based drinks around the world, but usually for flavour, not as a caffeine additive.

Espresso is made fundementally differently than percolated or press coffee, so has a very different flavour profile. The roasting process results in more oils being released, the use of high pressure (9-10 bars) to rapidly extract within seconds the coffee from the beans works differently than soaking and percolating ground beans over several minutes. The oils are what give espresso crema, which is something that the normal roasting process for coffee beans doesn't produce, so you don't get crema with percolated coffee, or whatever.

You use a different type of roasting process for espresso beans, you use a different type of brewing process for the final product. This all leads to a dramatically different outcome. Not just in caffeine content, but also flavour. If you want the flavour of espresso but in the portion size of a percolated or pressed coffee, you make yourself an Americano. Americanos are sipped for a while like filter coffee, espressos are drunk more quickly typically, within a few swigs.

 

[hestermofet]

Sooo... Getting sued by multiple groups for multiple reasons generally related to his products being cheap junk and a direct danger to society;

Getting investigated by multiple governments for the exact same reason;

And his workers are in open revolt against him...

I love how Libertarians always end up in the exact same place.

My favourite piece of random trivia is that Ayn Rand enjoyed the twilight years of her life as "welfare queen".
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ayn-rand-social-security/

 

[hestermofet]

It’s in the best interest of car manufacturers to keep their customers alive and seatbelts are a small price to pay to help with that.

Not sure if there is a missing sarcasm tag, but leave it the Internet to come up with an argument in favour of seat belts that relies on profit motive rather than something like, oh, I don't know, empathy, a basic sense of human decency, and saving lives.

Why is it so fucking hard for some people to do the right thing unless there is money in it for them?

 

[hestermofet]

I apologized, thanked her for the correction, and we finished our beers, and continued with the conversation with our friends. I reminded myself that there are a good number of regional accents here in the US. Because I happen to speak with what they call "Standard Business dialect," does not mean my sister's more aggressive Chicago accent, or friends from the South, or Texas, or the Pepperidge Farms Remembers area (the Northeast), or even here in California, are wrong.

And even in the UK, accents differ based on where you go to school.

Accents in the British Isles are not just regional, they are also different registers of social class and status. Which means people will code switch all the time, depending on the audience, or how important what they are saying is. Which is especially fun to witness if you catch someone doing it mid-sentence.

You see the same thing in North America with immigrants from English-speaking countries. It's fun to watch someone drop into an Indian accent or Jamaican patois halfway through what they are saying, or even just for one word, if they want to say something with extra emphasis.