>I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population.

When you say professional taxi drivers, do you mean people who drive for Uber/Lyft? Because that's who these companies are looking to replace.

I disagree. Some people will drunk drive no matter the legal consequences, or in my case, I once rear-ended someone because I was drowsy but kept driving because I wanted to get home (fortunately no one was hurt, and yes, the accident was completely my fault). The comparison should be against the general population of human drivers because that's the reality on the road.

You really think the safety bar for running a commercial autonomous taxi service should be set lower than the average human legally entitled to drive!?!

Why? Allow enough humans to drive and inevitably some of them will start doing so drunk. It's in our collective nature.

It's illegal and we send people to jail for it. What is this.

Making something illegal doesn't stop some people from doing it, so it's something that should be considered when looking at the overall safety of human drivers. One benefit of robots driving is that they won't get drunk, get distracted because they had a stressful day, get drowsy but still try to make it home, speed because they're late for an appointment, etc...

I don't get it, someone's clearly willing to break the law if they are drunk driving, unless you're banning steering wheels I'm not sure how that's going to help.

Why would someone drive drunk if they can just let their car drive them home while they snooze in the back?

>How about we invest in making our cities more pedestrian, bike, and public transportation friendly?

There are tons of companies that would love to help (get paid to) build out public transit infrastructure in cities. You think any major city would have trouble attracting bids to build tram systems, subways, or even buy more busses?

Look at your local leaders, how many of them are pro-public transit? How many of them have a long history of blocking projects because they want to "preserve neighborhood character" or some other lame excuse?

> Keeping autonomous vehicles on the road will result in thousands of edge cases, and without a clear safety benefit (as opposed to Level 1 systems) its better to stop everything and reconsider.

True, but I bet either a Cruise or a Waymo would have stopped rather than hit that woman crossing the street, and they definitely would not have fled the scene like the human driver did.

I mean it did hit her (again), ran her over, then stayed on top of her. That's not a better scenario at all. A Level 1 system can still avoid hitting people.

Did you read the whole thing? She was knocked onto its path. It might be have been physically impossible to avoid hitting her at that point.

>more pedestrian friendly infrastructure and use the boring technology that already exists to get people where they want to go. the future is on buses and trains and bikes and pedestrian friendly 15 minute communities

This is a political problem though, it's not something businesses can solve.

> This is a political problem though, it's not something businesses can solve.

correct. there's no easy answer, there's no silver bullet. it's on all of us to demand this of our local policymakers.

That's not hard for me to imagine. Now that I think about it, it should probably be standard for autonomous cars -- if there's an accident or something unexpected it should pull over, unless it can't reach the side of the road without hitting something or someone is trapped under the car.

> it should pull over, unless it can't reach the side of the road without hitting something or someone is trapped under the car.

Or…insert how many other edge cases? There are plenty of scenarios where it shouldn’t pull over, aren’t there? Training the myriad unique situations and proper responses just feels untenable, at least with current technology.

If your urban planning is going to prioritize giving tourists scenic views rather than building affordable homes for the people that live and work in the city, then you shouldn't be surprised if the city turns into an giant museum/resort where only the wealthy can afford a decent QoL (because they're the only ones who can financially compete with the tourists).

Here's the thing: with the proliferation of AirBnB and real-estate-as-an-investment that's already the case regardless of density.

In my corner of the world people move out of large cities not because they enjoy driving so much, but because they don't have the credit score for anything within city limits

Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.

>but because they don't have the credit score for anything within city limits

That's because there's not enough housing in the city limits.

>Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.

That's not true, adding a few more sky scrapers increases the amount of space for people and does not impact the amount of sunlight people can enjoy.

Cities can also do things like add more rail lines, so people can commute from further away -- which also increases the amount of space for people.

>I talked to someone who was renting out their basement apartment on AirBnB for a few months before a remodel was scheduled. They had one tenant try to file complaints about everything, down to the color of the bedding not matching the photos posted online. “Property not as described in listing”.

This doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Maybe the listing should match what they were actually offering to rent?

I mean, I actually agree with this take, even though it’s subjective. While guests can be unreasonable, I suspect many hosts are taking glamour shots of the bedrooms and then keeping them in normal conditions while charging a premium.

You see the same thing in fast food advertisements. A glorious hamburger on TV, and a greasy smushed mess when you purchase one.

The question is why we tolerate the latter, not why we should accept the former.

It's extremely unreasonable.

Yeah need more to assess this one. Perfect match? Nah. But should be at least in the same quality / style ballpark and at least matching each other.

Next time I get a hotel I am definitely going to nick pick the sheets they had in the pictures online vs what I see in person.

Hotels have all the same sheets, so much so that a picture of your hotel room can often be traced to a particular address.

It’s insane to demand that the sheet color at an Airbnb match the color on the photo. It’s not materially relevant.

Now if the photo showed a queen bed and you got a twin, that would be a material difference. Perhaps even if the sheets were shown as cotton and you got something else.

But for me if I escape an Airbnb alive, I count it a win.

I would say many are and many Airbnb listings are not.

OP's scenario sounds like a shithead (which exist everywhere on every platform) was abusing the system to save some cash.

I guess it depends on the listing, but I once booked a place that was billed as a nice romantic getaway in a beach town on AirBnB, and when we got there the room didn't look anything like the picture, many of the sheets and towels did not match and were low quality, and many of the small pillows, rugs, decorative curtains, and other furnishings shown in the ad were not there.

Yes I insisted on and got a full refund -- they were advertising a boutique, romantic getaway, not a cheap motel near the beach.

Looking at the residential complex in the article, Risørholmen, it looks like the "ugly" modern houses have rooftop gardens are large windows while the traditional houses have only a few small windows. Sure, the red tiled roofs look nice, but I wonder if this is a case of aesthetics taking precedent over functionality.

In Finland in the 1970s, there was a trend away from traditional gable roof to modern flat ones: so much cleaner, more elegant, and easy to build!

Then they realized that it snows a lot in Finland, and having big flat spaces where snow can accumulate is not a great idea.

To add to this: large windows seem great on the surface, however in Nordic countries, the houses are generally very well insulated and rarely have air conditioning, so the new houses with floor to ceiling windows turn into unlivable greenhouses in the summer.

>so the new houses with floor to ceiling windows turn into unlivable greenhouses in the summer.

I find this hard to believe. I live in a place with tall (not quite floor to ceiling) windows and hot summers and having such large windows gives the house way more ventilation, not less.

I remember a apartment where I live as student. First floor next to bus stop, west fasting windows. So not really that great to open. And the central ventilation itself was not that effective. Net result was 27C inside in mid winter...

But it is the alternative to paying workmen to go up on slanted rooves to knock the snow off them - "lumityö".

In addition to functional advantages, the modern variant of that complex just looks better to me. It would be even better if it was a bit more colorful.