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GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

reuters.com

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Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#171

Post by MiroF »

djsumdog wrote: post #159
MiroF wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. How do you explain actual self-driving cars on the road? I find this attitude confusing as it seems to not jive with empirical reality. I agree that we should focus on mass transit, but Waymo drives hundreds/thousands of miles without driver intervention.

There aren't any self driving cars on the road that don't have a safety driver, and the ones that are out there get confused all the time. The Uber one had a software dev turn off the lidar sensor to test the computer vision at night and it ended up killing a woman crossing the street.

Waymo/Cruise and Uber aren't even in the same class and as I said, Waymo/Cruise cars go thousands of miles without driver intervention.

Waymo cars go 11,000+ miles without driver intervention on average.

I would encourage doing actual research into this subject, rather than relying on your gut or the news articles you read.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#172

Post by bobthepanda »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #109
Eridrus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to find out how much has been invested in self driving cars, but I think you're massively underestimating the cost of building rail in the US. A billion dollars a mile is a realistic figure for rail in cities. NYC spent more than double that recently. For those costs, you're probably getting somewhere between 5 and 100 miles of rail.

A billion dollars a mile is for subways though, and I'm guessing tunnelling is the major component in that cost.

Underground stations is the majority of the cost. The tunnel boring machine is relatively cheap compared to securing enough property to build stations, and it could be said that New York's recent subways have massively overengineered their stations.

That being said, elevated railways have always been a very hard sell in dense areas, and ground level has its own host of problems.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#173

Post by bobthepanda »

Eridrus wrote: post #163
jcranmer wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A billion dollars per mile of rail is an excessively overpriced cost of construction that ought to have severe political pressure to explain why so much money is being wasted. Construction cost of subways outside of places like NYC that apparently have no concept of cost control is typically about $100-300 million/mile.

Lol. The reason costs are so high is because there is severe political pressure to keep them that way from contractors, unions, etc, and we're rich enough to afford it. For context, we have 4 million miles of road in the US. So even with $100m/mile, we're talking trillions of dollars before we even get to the actual feasibility of putting rail everywhere. Rail is great, but there's no world where it does the same thi…

This isn't quite a fair comparison; many of those roads are running through areas with low land values. Comparing ground-level rail through cornfields in Oklahoma is apples and oranges to a busy, high-capacity subway underneath Manhattan.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#174

Post by MiroF »

anyfoo wrote: post #158
MiroF wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. How do you explain actual self-driving cars on the road? I find this attitude confusing as it seems to not jive with empirical reality. I agree that we should focus on mass transit, but Waymo drives hundreds/thousands of miles without driver intervention.

More important than simple probability is the “expectancy value”, which is roughly spoken (and cumulatively) the probability multiplied by the effect when the probability comes to pass.

I'm confused what this comment is saying - are you just trying to say that someone getting killed by a car is really really bad? If so, I agree.

I've never heard of "expectancy value" in my life - it's definitely not a standard probability term.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#175

Post by icedchai »

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #88
rtkwe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to be a bit weird because a lot of those should come back because the underlying business didn't suddenly become nonviable.

> the underlying business didn't suddenly become nonviable They may have. We don't know when or if things will go back to the way they were before March 2020 and how consumer and employer behavior will change. For example, maybe movie theaters are completely screwed. Except as a novelty, the big business chains may not survive. Universal Studios is already pushing back on theater release windows and no live-action mo…

It will be a long and slow ramp. I don't expect to sit inside a restaurant or go to the movies for the rest of this year, possibly most of 2021.

Theaters were on the way out before any of this started. Movie ticket sales have been declining for years. That trend will only get worse.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#176

Post by nostrademons »

mikepurvis wrote: post #106
asdff wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demand is there, say for food, but the capital has evaporated and the restaurant no longer exists. To start a new one you would need investors to pay for up front costs, labor, food, and commercial rent, and who is feeling bullish enough to start a business notorious for it's razor thin margins at the start of a recession?

This kind of thing is why it's so confusing to me that more commercial landlords haven't been willing to play ball with their tenants on rent breaks through this crisis. Like, what do you have to gain by throwing out a restaurant or other business that is ready to start right back up the moment the lockdown lifts, vs sitting on an empty unit for months and months while the economy remains in turmoil, getting nothing…

I read somewhere on HN that commercial real estate is financed differently from residential real estate, and in particular, financing costs are related to what a building could earn rather than what a building does earn. If you keep rents the same but have vacancies, your funders apparently don't count that against you, while if reduce rents, suddenly the earning potential of your building has dropped and it will cost you, even if the building is actually earning more in cash flow than if it were vacant.

Seems like a bit of a misincentive here, and a recipe for lenders to go bust too. Then again, it seems like commercial real estate has periodic financial crises, so this seems to reflect reality. Get ready for the next one.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#178

Post by gamblor956 »

hckr_news wrote: post #131
renewiltord wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'd rather work with them than with people who wilfully misinterpret statements and just flip a shit constantly. "I think it's time to double down on email marketing" -> my teammates understand that means I'm going to switch where I put most of my effort. I can just imagine you saying "Yet you're not allocating 8 hours a day instead of 4 on this. I'm going to sue you" God, that would be exhausting.

It’s just a weasel word that can mean anything. Avoid weasel words. In your situation, why not just say I’m going to put my current efforts and focus on X as you clearly meant.

why not just say I’m going to put my current efforts and focus on X as you clearly meant.

That is literally what they said, using a colloquialism that has exactly the desired meaning.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#179

Post by fiftyfifty »

anyfoo wrote: post #152
fiftyfifty wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why rails? With some of this self driving tech you could just put sensors in the road and have the vehicles follow pre-determined routes. I've always thought that's where this self driving tech should have first gone in the early stages. Instead of having a large bus come by once every 30 minutes you could have a fleet of small self driving vans coming by every 5 minutes. If you don't have to pay so many drivers that…

Sometimes I am speechless. You’ve just made public transport less efficient on several axis.

Speechless? Where I live we have full size public buses that are frequently only carrying one or two people. In fact if I had a nickle for every time I've seen a completely empty light rail train in the middle of the day in Denver, I'd be a rich man by now. Public transport in the vast majority of the US is a failure. In Colorado Uber and Lyft probably haul 10-100 times more people every day than ride our public transportation, that's not efficient at all. The main complaint people have is public transportation doesn't run often enough, or provide enough routes, self driving vehicles could fix that and make it economic for US cities. If you had smaller buses (sometimes called vans) you could run them more often and thus make them more appealing to the masses. Is it less efficient, yes, but if it gains more riders that's a net gain IMO.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#180

Post by sp332 »

FreedomToCreate wrote: post #26

Just a note, but this is a perfect time for companies to lay off low performers without getting a lot of flak. This is usually the case when you see companies lay off people while continuing to hire as well.

They let Rob Fuller @mubix go, which makes me lean toward the idea that they let expensive people go instead of low performers.
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