Being specific to misunderstandings is an element that's overlooked.

This advice tends to be taken onboard (often to extremes) by those who take it as a free pass to just say whatever comes to their mind, whenever they like, without explaining how they arrived there. Any excuse to avoid putting in effort to be understood or be conscious of the fact that human beings have emotions.

We are not robots.

I'm glad commenters here are aware of this, as HN sentiment is getting close to the point of treating each other as machines, whilst we train bots to have better communication skill such as empathetic reflection, and allow them more creativity and freedom.

Some people are more patient and sympathetic towards computers making mistakes and not following commands perfectly, or being too verbose, than we are with our fellow human beings.

Without knowing how you arrived at "the point", you are pushing all the work onto the recipient (or worse, every reader of your comment on HN) to verify what you say and how much they can trust you. That could involve researching, checking your credentials, or putting in effort to understand/overlook the emotional tone.

"This is the answer. I have the answer" style dumping of information is a poor form of human-human communication, unless you are directly answering a closed-ended question.

Even if it did make sense to "move fast and break things" inside working critical systems, doing so should surely be within the law and without going against the most basic of known security measures.

If you think about PFI etc. and how those contracts were crafted, it's no different to what happened to the UK's oil. That didn't eventually go to the citizens like Norway. Every last bit of the UK is being extracted now.

2026 is not based on wants and needs except in isolated situations. We are at the hypernormal point of manufacturing problems to sell solutions, because there's very little rent or work left to extract from assets. Lives of excess are maintained by depriving others of necessities. The intense control and misdirection required to keep this somewhat stable is starting to be felt.

Some projects have been forced so far, by diverting resources (either public-funded or not-yet-profitable VC money), but these efforts have not proven to be self-sustaining. Humans will be perpetually stuck where we are as a species if we cannot integrate the currently opposing ideas of up-front planning vs. move fast and break things.

Society is slowly realizing the step-change in difficulty between projects in controlled conditions that can have simplified models to these irreducibly complex systems. Western doctors are facing an interesting parallel, now becoming more aware to treat human beings in the same way--that we emerge as a result of parts which can be simplified and understood, but could never describe the overall system behavior. We are good examples of the intrinsic fault-tolerance required for such systems to remain stable.

Humans hear car/road noises, along with potential screams from outside or passenger shouts from inside, we sense vibrations, can respond to pedestrian or other driver hand signals, and constantly predict hazards through perceptions. How is the car doing all of this, if not for additional sensors and processing?

You can land a plane by eye, but what happens when there's fog? That's exactly like the situation in cars. LIDAR can provide extra sensory data where the cameras absolutely fail, just like our own eyes.

Knowing there's a solution to this, we are just to accept the car will fail where humans will? That's progress? Why wouldn't you want that extra data for such a small relative cost? LIDAR was already used on cars as a safety-only front collision avoidance system (that's how cheap it is to install).

In a properly designed system, adding data which is useful and cannot otherwise be inferred makes complete sense.

Given these cars are supposed to be so good that they will be working autonomously for you and pay themselves off in a year or two, the idea that LIDAR etc. is unnecessary and too expensive and will be lead to actively worse performance, is just insane logic for an "engineering" discussion.

Consider how many car manufacturers are backtracking, the fact that China will now win the EV race, utility energy prices have skyrocketed, and the damage done not only to the brand but people's view towards EVs in general.

Forcing this play happened too soon.

This is compounded by the system mistakes likely being hard-errors. A computer hard-error vs. human lapse of judgement is potentially the difference between the vehicle slowly crushing a small child as they scream and beg for help vs. a human stopping as soon as they felt/heard something. Context matters.

The compared error-rates must consider if it could have been avoided or mitigated, the near misses, the human vs. computer type of error, and how hard-errors may lead to horrifying scenarios.

The idea that mostly-automating the system because it's statistically better than humans, but requiring human-assistance to monitor and respond in these exact situations, was flawed logic to begin with. Comparisons of statistics should be made like-for-like, given these are scenarios we can easily control.

For example, a robotic taxis should at least be compared to professional drivers on similar routes, roads, vehicles, and times of day. Not just comparing "all drivers in all vehicles in all scenarios over time" with private company data that cherry-picks "automated driving" miles on highways etc. (where existing assistance systems could already achieve near-perfect results).

Companies testing autonomy on the public should be forced to upload all crash data to investigators as part of their licensing. The vehicles already have extremely detailed sensor and video data to operate. The fact that we have no verified data to compare to existing human statistics is damning. It's a farce.