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Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

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Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#21
post #6

This is what happens when optimists win and the realists are cut out of the conversation. As a taxi service, I believe I would want to know if I'm about to have a shortage of taxis in any one area of town, and I'd better only have a concentration in one area of town for an event the entire world is talking about, like a reunion tour or a championship game. Even with the hack, the moment all of the taxis started conve…

It’s already so hard to build a large company, you just don’t have the resources to chase super rare, low pain outcomes.

This is the first time this has happened and the total cost of it is at most a few hours revenue. They’ll likely add safeguards to prevent such a thing now, but if they ran the company preparing for every possible way things could go wrong, they’d get absolutely nothing done.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#24
post #21
post #6

This is what happens when optimists win and the realists are cut out of the conversation. As a taxi service, I believe I would want to know if I'm about to have a shortage of taxis in any one area of town, and I'd better only have a concentration in one area of town for an event the entire world is talking about, like a reunion tour or a championship game. Even with the hack, the moment all of the taxis started conve…

It’s already so hard to build a large company, you just don’t have the resources to chase super rare, low pain outcomes. This is the first time this has happened and the total cost of it is at most a few hours revenue. They’ll likely add safeguards to prevent such a thing now, but if they ran the company preparing for every possible way things could go wrong, they’d get absolutely nothing done.

Good reasoning. Hindsight bias comes to mind:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#25

this is also something that's oddly absent from the self-driving debates. Mass deployment of the same models or apis in automated systems is very brittle because it means errors are highly correlated. it's like a form of central planning. individual drivers or individual taxi firms in a market due to their decentralization are much more robust to any kind of individual failure. People often ask "is the car smarter th…

Yes. Additionally, this is a commonly cited win of cars in cars v. public transport. You can take your car anywhere in the zombie apocalypse*, whereas any system that requires central planning (trains) are more likely to break.

Making cars (human or machine driven) depend on a centralized service basically takes away that advantage.

* assuming you have enough fuel/battery

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#26
post #3

is this the future of self driving cars?

I’ve had this worry for years of a state level attack via network connected FSD cars. But I’m hardly alone, it was shown in a Fast and Furious movie, so people are thinking of it.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#28
post #26
post #3

is this the future of self driving cars?

I’ve had this worry for years of a state level attack via network connected FSD cars. But I’m hardly alone, it was shown in a Fast and Furious movie, so people are thinking of it.

oh yeah that was the first thing I thought of when I saw this

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#30
post #26
post #3

is this the future of self driving cars?

I’ve had this worry for years of a state level attack via network connected FSD cars. But I’m hardly alone, it was shown in a Fast and Furious movie, so people are thinking of it.

First mention of using driverless vehicles as weapons I recall was Daemon by Daniel Suarez.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series)

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