Apps with maps use a specific and different Mercator projection which produces a nice quadtree for dynamically loading data. This is possible with other projections too, but reprojection and training users to expect a different looking map is expensive.
Almost nobody plots courses of constant bearing on a map. Almost nobody uses a map to measure area either.
99% of the use cases for maps these days are for local navigation where artifacts are minor. The differences in map projection are basically irrelevant to users in these cases.
His point is that "written and vegan agreements" is not the same thing as "has a contract" and that the legal niceties need to be respected or else it would be impossible to get anything done.
Asking "is it cool if I paint your wall?" more than three decades ago doesn't create a contract or protect the work.
I highly doubt that street artists made a legally binding agreement with the owners that protects the art for the simple reason that this would be a ridiculous encumbrance on the property that would be unacceptable to most sane people.
Or, they stop doing things that enrage millions of people and the protests go away. They don’t need protection from their actions at everyone’s privacy expense, they need to face the people and adjust their actions until that’s something they’re willing to do.
Many people have to make unpopular decisions because society needs them to. Would you say the same thing about, say, a politician raising gas taxes?
What about a ridehailing app that displaces a taxi cartel with a long track record of being awful for consumers?
A world where people are not free to do unpopular things without being torn to shreds by angry mobs seems deeply impoverished to me.
"The people" at one point supported slavery, racism, etc., etc. Is AI like any of those? Probably not, but the same principles apply. The law is a much better option than mob rule, and tracking protests is hardly a violation of anyone's rights.
Yes, if you want power you should also face the downside of misusing it (which these people are). I would love to see these protests brought to the offices and homes of the CEOs.
If your take is "terrorizing people for making unpopular decisions is good" then you are not a serious person. Protesting is fine, harassment is not, and protesting outside someone's home is most certainly harassment.
I am confident that you would find a protest outside your home about you to be terrifying. Any sane person would. It's not acceptable and is not protected by the first amendment.
I don't do things that would make people protest outside my house. These people did, and while you may not think I'm a "serious person", you're going to find that society is going in this direction due to the flagrant abuse coming from those in power. Do you not know about the French revolution?
If you do things which impact a large number of people, you will inevitably piss some of them off.
> Do you not know about the French revolution?
The main losers in the French revolution were regular people, and the country ended up under a totalitarian dictator who conquered large swathes of Europe and invented the concept of total war. I'm not sure you should be holding it up as an example of protests (which were astonishingly violent in this case) leading to good and reasonable outcomes.
If you do things that impact a large number of people, you should definitely feel the consequence of your actions. No one is forced into these positions, in fact they work very hard to acquire power over others. That should come with very real downsides.
Regardless of whether you think the French revolution was good or not, it was the inevitable outcome of a very similar situation we find ourselves in.
I’m all for protesting, but surely you can agree that there is heightened risk if a person is in close proximity to people who oppose them strongly enough to act.
The whole purpose of a protest is to cause behavioral change; their hustling them out the back door is a success.
All sorts of things can lead to violence, including a failure to protest. With enough weasel words, anything can sound reasonable, to people who don't pay attention to that stuff. So?
Driving a car is not an emotional act 99.9% of the time. Driving a car while you are emotional is in fact dangerous and often leads to violence.
Pretests aren't dispassionate. That's why they have to be protected, that's also why it's deranged to suggest what you are suggesting. The main difference between the setup of a protest and a lynch mob is that the subject of a peaceful protest isn't usually present.
> I'm sure you have a solid and thought-out answer that justifies such a casual attitude towards violence.
The ones with a casual attitude towards violence are those executives. Facebook leadership showed an incredibly casual attitude towards the genocide in Myanmar in which their platform played a huge role. Their purchases of doomsday bunkers further help show their attitude towards violence.
There is a world of difference between building a doomsday bunker (which is definitely not limited to the ultra wealthy) and suggesting that someone should walk through a riled up crowd that hates their guts.
If you are unwilling to accept that statement, have a good day, because I'm gonna stop here for my own sanity.
The overwhelming majority of bad driving is caused by alcohol and other drugs, drowsiness, and inattentive driving.
Sober, well-rested human beings who pay full attention to the road are surprisingly good drivers, to the point where I'm not actually sure that robotaxis can reliably beat them yet.
Yeah, a hundred years from now fewer people will drive themselves, but considering how many people DESPISE driving and only do it because it's required of them, that isn't bad.
> The overwhelming majority of bad driving is caused by alcohol and other drugs, drowsiness, and inattentive driving.
> Sober, well-rested human beings who pay full attention to the road are surprisingly good drivers, to the point where I'm not actually sure that robotaxis can reliably beat them yet.
Including "inattentive" and "pay full attention to the road" feels a little tautological? Like, what's your definition of "inattentive"? More or less by definition, if there's an accident, someone was "inattentive" and didn't do the correct thing. Unless they were actively malicious and trying to hurt someone, which I agree would be a tiny minority of car accidents.
Inattentive here means not looking at the road. I've been in car accidents where drivers were looking at the road and got blinded or missed some traffic because they were overloaded with other stuff. That's pretty rare.
So you mean to tell me that when I called a Waymo a few weeks ago at 1AM because I was drunk at a bar and wanted to go home, it was actually because my government and Google wanted me to go home?
Woah! This conspiracy goes deeper than I thought! Next you'll tell me that a taxi ride requires mutual consent between me, the taxi driver, and the dispatch company!
Can you actually define what the kool-aid is here? Because AV companies are saying "look at this new product, it objectively drives better and safer than a human, you don't have to deal with a human driver, it works 24/7, and in our experience most people prefer it to driving."
I have NEVER seen a single person accuse anyone of being a bad person for still preferring to drive a car manually. Not once, not even the usual one or two crazy people you can find to support almost any other crazy statement.
Where is the kool-aid from the robotaxi side that's so visible? Keep in mind that "kool-aid" implies that something is factually incorrect.
> "look at this new product, it objectively drives better and safer than a human, you don't have to deal with a human driver, it works 24/7, and in our experience most people prefer it to driving."
A lot of these are true about other things like pedestrian-friendly streets, bike lanes, and mass rail transit. The kool-aid is that the robotaxi people act like they are the first one to solve this problem.
Pedestrian friendly streets are great! You can't walk that far, and I love walking places when I have time and energy.
Bike lanes are great! I bike to work. If I'm not careful I'll arrive sweaty, and that inherently limits when and where I bike.
Mass rail transit is great! It cannot get directly to every door or frequently even to within walking distance of every door (I take a train to the office when I don't wanna bike).
I really do understand that it's trendy to hate on cars. There are a lot of bad things that come with car dependence.
All of that is true AND YET cars make us more productive and allow us to do things that would be impossible otherwise.
Robotaxi companies are not trying to replace any of those things. That makes no sense because they don't need to do that to succeed.
So I will ask again: what is the kool-aid that I'm supposedly drinking?
I think you're drinking the "technology is apolitical and will solve all our problems" American-drink-I-ve-never-seen.
We've seen what can be done with the magical technologies of today, like misinformation abd mass surveillance. I think it's naive to assume self driving technology won't be used badly, specially when car infrastructure is already a "political" topic, having impact in city planning, budgets and stuff.
I remember this video by CGP Grey where the guy says like when all cars are self-driving cars everything will be perfect.
I remember, in 2016, liking the video, then time passed, went to Europe, and saw the actual solution to the problem. And now, in 2026, I see a bunch of comments in the video in the same vein.
Technology can solve problems which are objectively measurable. If you want the politics to match your ideals you can vote and volunteer; blaming self driving cars for issues caused by politics is like blaming construction companies for arson.
Sure, some number of years is reasonable - but what do you think that is? Because 70 is insane. A single bestseller should not be able to support an extended family over three generations; at some point the rent-seeking becomes excessive. If you publish a work, at some point it stops being yours. The fact that this takes a whole lifetime is already very generous.
I don't disagree; personally I think you could go with life plus 35 and cap the whole thing at 80 years from publication.
But I do think some potential post-mortem protection is essential for creative work to remain viable, and that means that any post-mortem buyer of an artist's estate has to be able to get value from recent work for a period of time.
This whole discussion is somewhat fantastical now anyway, because copyright is fucked.
But the intent was always to make working artists' lives possible; the various copyright extensions have always been for the benefit of corporate copyright holders, and it is unfair to vilify individual working artists for that.
Almost nobody plots courses of constant bearing on a map. Almost nobody uses a map to measure area either.
99% of the use cases for maps these days are for local navigation where artifacts are minor. The differences in map projection are basically irrelevant to users in these cases.
reply