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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

#271

Post by watwut »

mattlondon wrote: post #262
mattlondon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a pedestrian if it hits them. I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach is not great, but there is always room for improvement ... e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in Oslo? Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that and autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved just a handful of lives a year.

Since I can't edit this: It is not just the energy involved from 5mph - not every accident is a cut and dry collision. A car doing 0.5mph still going to crush your skull when you go under the wheels. People are killed frequently in London (and I am sure other places) when they are crushed by slow moving vehicles turning left or right and the driver just did not see the person there and they are either slowly run-over…

A car doing 0.5mph will be stopped by the driver unless the driver is unconscious.

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

#272

Post by carlmr »

chii wrote: post #257
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Will the public feel safe enough to go back into theaters all at once before theaters run out of money as if nothing happened? the need for theatres and cinemas have not disappeared. They will come back once the virus situation is under control (in say 2-4 yrs time, when vaccine is available). Therefore, the jobs will come back in 2-4 yrs time. The companies will have been different - the old incumbents will have b…

>Same with office spaces. It's not like the need for office space will disappear indefinitely.

There is an arguable difference here, a lot of people were willing to WFH before the crisis, but most businesses didn't allow it. A crisis like this, forcing businesses to accept WFH, has the side benefit of doing a large experiment where business owners see whether WFH works for them, maybe even has good sides to it, but also what's negative about it.

Before, many employers were just apprehensive and would only think about this in theory. Many now see in practice what they were afraid about, and maybe they're not as afraid anymore.

So maybe office space will rebound, but maybe not. I'm quite sure in my city most office jobs are doable from home, however for meetings we might get back to some balanced level of WFH + office work. But it may never rebound to pre-crisis levels.

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

#273

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#274

Post by turtle_waffle »

redis_mlc wrote: post #215
MiroF wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spare me. Most self-driving is done in warm climates, in a circle. These companies are amassing thousands of empty miles on the same streets every day to impress people who don't know any better. I lived on a branch of the main Google circuit, and often they were the only traffic for most of the day. Even saw three Google vehicles in a line, but two were more common. What's the value of "self-driving" with no weather…

2 year old driving in Moscow after snowfall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx08yRsR9ow

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

#275

Post by barrenko »

There is no going back. Viruses are not going to disappear, we just lived in our urbanization bubble for a very long time. On the nature scale of things it's extremely short.

Cheap flights and ludicrous interconnectedness are not that necessary and are barely more than disease vectors.

Local food, local communities, and work in your basement on anything via the internet is a development for quite some time now.

Goods can stay transported as before, but shuffling tourists around the globe via government financing said industries out from bancruptcy every ten years is dumb, corona or no corona.

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

#276

Post by fingerlocks »

throwxmlphell wrote: post #219
iamleppert wrote: post #117

I went to a recruiting event that was put on by Cruise. It was disguised as a marketing "advisory board" where they asked us questions like "What motivates you as an engineer when looking for a new job? Would changing the world help?" "Would you like to be rewarded handsomely?" "Which of these statements most resonate with you?" They paid me $500 for about an hour to sit through their sales pitch. Then I finally cave…

I've been an interviewer at Cruise, including on panels where Kyle was part of the committee. Trust me, there are many employees who want to have a decent recruiting experience, and a lot of engineers who want to ask questions that are actually worth your time. The bullshit you experienced is 100% top-down from Kyle. For years there has been tremendous pressure to hit headcount goals and to throw money at the problem…

Who’s Kyle?

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

#277

Post by Tuna-Fish »

ashtonkem wrote: post #111
mattlondon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a large market/human-lives-saved benefit from the tech though, even if we never reach 100% self-driving autonomy E.g. it is pretty standard now that pretty much every car on sale has automatic emergency braking that tries to avoid running over pedestrians even if the driver does not see them, many (but not all I admit) cars have lane-keeping assist that automatically keep the car in the lane, and will a…

I’ve always been extremely dubious about the “self driving to save lives” angle for one very specific reason: we already know how to save lives. Slow. The. Cars. Down. Oslo managed to get their car deaths down to 1 in 2019. 1, in a city of 600,000. Los Angeles killed 240 that year, or 36x more per capita. And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives…

Because the costs of those measures are not worth the gain.

If you have a million commuters on the streets, each taking a total of an hour a day for their commute, 20 days per month, increasing the average commute time by just 1% effectively costs >300 lives per year.

The basic rule of any change you want to make to the system is that speeds need to go up, not down. Better AI assist systems help speeds go up, therefore they reduce the cost of commuting in human lives.

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

#278

Post by TulliusCicero »

bob33212 wrote: post #207
TulliusCicero wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. Lane miles in the US are in the many millions. Each mile of track costs a million+ dollars. You're talking many trillions of dollars to railify every road in the country. So no, there's basically no way that's cheaper than figuring out self-driving…

It is so strange that people don't see what is happening at Tesla. They are driving billions of miles under AI control. It is totally fine to dislike Musk or to think that autopilot is unsafe today, but how can you look at billions of miles and say that it isn't going to work within the next few years.

That's easy: recording billions of miles of data is only part of solving the problem.

I'm sure they'll get there eventually, but having a ton of data isn't a cheat code that makes rapid progress inevitable.

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

#279

Post by mac01021 »

colechristensen wrote: post #246
mikepurvis wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's not enough downward pressure on rents in general. Tax unoccupied space, and not a little. 10x property taxes for vacant units with real standards for what counts as occupied.

That might deter the creation of new housing supply.

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

#280

Post by aaronax »

icedchai wrote: post #175
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This makes me ponder how fortunate I am (or dumb I am) to have eaten in a restaurant twice in the past week.
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