Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–296 of 296 posts

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

#291

Post by MertsA »

ashtonkem wrote: post #211
filoleg wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we only need to slow down cars to 25mph where pedestrians are present. I don't have the numbers on hand, but I would wager to guess that a good chunk of road injuries and deaths happen not just between drivers and pedestrians, but between drivers and other drivers. Also, most areas in the US where pedestrians can be present are already limited to 25mph/35mph.

60% of the 2019 road fatalities in Los Angeles were non-drivers. So drivers represent a good chunk, but not even a majority. Of course this statistic is going to very wildly based on which city we’re talking about. To be fair to my original point, we can also reduce driver fatalities by slowing down highways and offering non-car transit options. The lowest hanging fruit in this area is probably shifting cargo transit…

It kills me that we give such huge hidden subsidies to the trucking industry. Every time this discussion comes up, at least on Reddit, someone always comes out of the woodwork claiming that truckers pay a bunch of fuel tax and registration fees and that proposals to increase taxes on trucking is going to drive up the costs of all goods. For anyone who isn't already aware, the "billions of dollars in subsidy" is in reference to the substantial amount of damage large trucks do to the roads. My Honda Civic going down the road does basically no damage to it at all and it doesn't appreciably damage the road. A large truck going down the road at 80,000 lbs is going to cause far more damage to the road than the fuel tax and registration fees that they paid. Road wear scales to the fourth power of axle weight, so aside from road age itself the vast majority of wear is solely from trucking.

https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-roa...

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

#292

Post by kgin »

ulfw wrote: post #253
tomlu wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that such situations are non life threatening. The vehicle will pull over and wait for a human operator. It's not crazy to imagine that computers could handle split second decisions better than humans but choose to bail out to the side of the road if there's something they can't handle.

There isn’t always a “side of the road” tho. (think tunnels, walls, Old Towns, busy city centres...)

Tunnels are perhaps the only "no stopping" situation where there is nowhere to pull over. Luckily, tunnels are also the absolute simplest self-driving scenario.

Tunnels have to kept clear of obstacles. If an SDC would have to stop, so would a human-driven car.

For the others, stopped cars are very common.

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

#293

Post by MertsA »

ulfw wrote: post #253
tomlu wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that such situations are non life threatening. The vehicle will pull over and wait for a human operator. It's not crazy to imagine that computers could handle split second decisions better than humans but choose to bail out to the side of the road if there's something they can't handle.

There isn’t always a “side of the road” tho. (think tunnels, walls, Old Towns, busy city centres...)

So long as "bail to a human" doesn't take long e.g. 5 seconds to connect to an operator, it might not need to pull aside at all.

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

#294

Post by ericd »

eanzenberg wrote: post #286
ericd wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you watched Powell’s most recent remarks? He doesn’t seem to agree with your assessment.

These types of people predict the worst so that they are never wrong on the downside. That’s why the initial death projection was 2m people. Imagine if they instead predicted 1000 deaths. Same stuff happens with global warming preds. You’re getting the worst case, x100, every time.

Who are "these types of people"? Fed Chairmen are usually pretty level-headed.

Do you have an academic source for the global warming claim?

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

#295

Post by stevenwliao »

marvin wrote: post #260
mikeyouse wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right - we saw a lot of businesses lose 80+% of their customers before any shelter in place orders were mandated. In low margin places like bars and restaurants, it's highly unlikely many can survive with even 75% of their normal level of business.

That just means prices will go up. Nothing is certain, of course, but those prices are low mostly because of high competition, not because people are unable to pay. There will certainly be a bit of both, but it's not like you won't be able to find a restaurant after the pandemic.

Some businesses' fixed costs mean raising prices won't prevent bankruptcy.

Restaurants will remain available, but will movie theaters? They were already being disrupted by streaming services.

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

#296

Post by thoraway1010 »

wutbrodo wrote: post #233
thoraway1010 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep - the idea that they are doubling down on their engineering talent (2x headcount or 2x salaries or 2x resources) or whatever big bet they claim to be making seems like it might be a lie. The PR guy (Milin Mehta) used to work at Kraken Digital Asset Exchange. They are known for suing to identify ten reviewers on Glassdoor, claiming they are former employees in breach of their severance contract. Why work at compan…

Leaving aside your apparently poor reading comprehension skills ("doubling down" does not mean doubling), this explicitly contradicts an internal memo leaked to TC: > The company will “continue to hire aggressively in the most critical areas within engineering, which right now means doubling down on senior leadership and senior IC roles to further support out improving core tech objective,” Ammann wrote in the memo.…

That's a MUCH clearer story! Folks maybe just publish their memos vs these I guess hashed news stories.

The Reuters article focused on the layoffs, lack of confirmation on number of layoffs, and PR quote etc - I wish I'd seen this article earlier.

Post reply on HN