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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2619 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 8, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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In 2010, the vibe (to me at least) was that self-driving cars had effectively been developed; by 2025, substantially all the cars on the roads of American cities would be fully autonomous (without requiring a human standing at-the-ready to take over in a crisis).

Tesla were (and probably still are) lying about how much progress they had already made, and bullshitting about the likely speed of future progress, and were widely believed by fanbois and the low end of the tech media because Tesla.

As far as I am aware, there has never been a time when people who had worked on autonomous vehicles thought Tesla was ahead of Waymo, but Tesla have always been publicly over-optimistic (including shipping a non-working product for cash upfront) in a way Waymo don't need to be.

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