All the black hats are going to have a field day uncovering all manner of zero-day exploits…

No kidding. If this happened in North Korea the trial would have lasted 15 minutes and the execution would have been a public spectacle.

I’m so glad my wife & I never got sucked into using things like Alexa.

I can recognize when a police officer is directing traffic at a dead traffic light. I can also recognize the intent of other drivers who may wave, flash their headlights, etc. I doubt any current self driving cars can accurately recognize any of those.

Exactly. Any such remote control would have to be trivial for a cop to use, and also need to directly control only the car(s) the cop is currently interacting with. Think of a situation like this where a traffic light is disabled and a cop is there directing traffic. If driverless cars are approaching from multiple directions then how does the cop direct his commands to only the one he’s focusing on at the given moment? Not all that easy when you think about it…

It wasn’t a cloud failure. The self driving cars are highly dependent on traffic lights being red/yellow/green. With the signals inoperative the cars don’t know what to do. Even if there were police officers directing traffic at intersections, the cars aren’t programmed to recognize & respond to them.

This is one of the many edge cases that I’ve been convinced will keep self driving cars from becoming mainstream unless/until true AGI is achieved.

A few years ago I stopped at a red light next to a construction site. I was watching the traffic light, so at first I didn’t notice a cop at the construction site trying to wave me through the red light. He finally took a few steps towards me and yelled to get my attention. Only then did I realize he was waving me through, so I did just that. I seriously doubt any current self driving car would recognize a police officer (and not just a random pedestrian) that’s overriding the traffic signal like that.

Another edge case, coincidentally at the same intersection a few years earlier was when there was a car fully engulfed in flames as I drove up. I could hear sirens in the distance, and the cars in every direction were making sure to safely get out of the way of the approaching fire trucks. At least one or two cars cautiously crossed on the red to get out of the way. Again, I doubt any current self driving car would have navigated that situation anywhere nearly as well as a human.

Don’t forget that they are also reportedly squandering their gold reserves, and are losing a lot of revenue from Ukraines growing attacks on oil infrastructure. Russia isn’t going to be able to pay its soldiers or buy equipment if those two trends continue.

Came here to say this.

In response to a mass shooting in 1996 Australia passed strict gun regulations. Since then you can pretty much count the number of mass shootings in that country on one hand.

Compare that to Wikipedias list of mass shootings in the USA for just 2025. I stopped counting that list at 300.

Clearly some techbro wants to monetize buzzwords plus laptop.

In the original.

I spent a couple winters in the 80’s working as a drivers assistant for UPS. One of the places we picked up packages from was a back door of a strip mall. It was just a room with racks of VHS recorders where the owner was duplicating porn videos. We’d pick up literally a few garbage bags full of packages every day. I doubt that setup would have been there if it was all Betamax. It probably would have cost significantly more both to set up and for the blank tapes.

Just wait until buggy malware worms its way into these things and the screen just shows kernel panics in an infinite loop.

Edit: or worse, somebody hacks it to play random hardcore porn videos.

It’s free at Costco, covered by the warranty on the tires they sell. I also just knew the tire had a slow leak, and didn’t know it was a nail until they finished the repair. If they weren’t so busy they would have finished before I finished my shopping.

I recently had a freaking reserved appointment time at a Costco tire center to fix a nail I picked up. I still had to wait 2 hours, despite the appointment.

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Not to mention that it’s trivial to change your IP on most cloud providers. So if a VPN provider is using a cloud service for some of its gateways then it can quickly remember them if necessary.

Companies like Akamai already do this to an extent. My employer is an Akamai customer, and they’ve offered this service to us in the past when we saw a lot of malicious traffic originating from commercial VPN providers.

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