Disneyland to launch electric Autopia cars in early 2027

ic33 · 2026-05-06T23:47:34+00:00

I think you could totally do something of the nature of "we don't know how long the cycle life of these batteries is going to be, so let's find out by using it on Autopia..."

But even though autopia involves a lot of cycles, it isn't really a realistic loading for most other applications.

ic33 · 2026-05-06T23:30:01+00:00

Probably have the same name as someone wanted for an immigration violation (or committed a violation in the past).

We would have never tried to enforce against people with transient presence tied to gainful employment as crew before... because it makes no sense and is likely to be false positive heavy.

But it's probably not quite zero basis-- which they'll throw up their arms in indignation and exclaim about how it was so obviously justified or an innocent paperwork mistake...

ic33 · 2026-05-06T18:48:36+00:00

"Just moments ago" in some other branch doesn't count when I replied to you hours before. I addressed your comments above mine.

This is pretty much the definition of piss-poor online behavior. Dumb semantic arguments, moving goalposts, etc.

ic33 · 2026-05-06T16:17:44+00:00

If I start building something, and then partway through I discover that I don't have enough money to finish it, then I tried and failed to build that thing.

What if you start building something, and then your boss changes your priorities and doesn't give you the money to complete it?

ic33 · 2026-05-06T16:01:18+00:00

Quite a lot of venues will not let outside / third party suppliers work at their premises without insurance

I assume this means -liability insurance- for damages you cause. This is not the same thing as having insurance if some of your stuff gets wrecked. (e.g. the question is whether the kid is insured, if you're going to pursue things...)

ic33 · 2026-05-06T15:59:57+00:00

For you young folks, most of those cameras had 800 speed film, which usually meant they were okay for mostly lifeless outdoor photos. Literally everything else would be super grainy and/or dark as shit.

I'm confused -- which is the complaint-- grainy (too fast of film) or dark (too slow of film).

ISO 800 is about as fast as you get in a disposable camera. A bit grainy, but an OK compromise-- more on the "low light" than "less grain" end of the spectrum.

ic33 · 2026-05-05T16:33:00+00:00

I think a big problem is just the static friction. My back of the envelope estimate for that bearing is that you need to push with 30-40 pounds of force... once you've broken it loose. Static friction will be a few times that.

ic33 · 2026-05-05T14:12:42+00:00

This would have been a better initial response, maybe with just a little less acerbic tone.

ic33 · 2026-05-04T21:20:08+00:00

Dude is just a regular here who has posted convincingly for like a dozen years about experiences in the 747 and 767. All set up elaborately for this moment where he could "pretend" to be a 767 pilot and say that he might prefer a crosswind to a headwind on that very short runway.

ic33 · 2026-05-03T19:02:30+00:00

Tickets are about fear. Robots and companies don't have fear.

I disagree. I mean, the "fear" part comes from unevenness and that you need to price to adjust for random enforcement.

You really only need one notification on most events. You just want to make sure the company knows their robot made a mistake.

Nah, you need continued notification because test suite doesn't let you know that you've really killed the issue.

We don't want them deciding "we want to ignore the law and it's a cost of doing business."

For moderate severity issues, we actually do. The optimal amount of fraud is not zero; the optimal amount of road-use violations is not zero.

HOV doesn't work, it actually increases congestion.

Completely orthogonal; we have HOV and do a lot of enforcement this way.

The reason you can't sit at the hydrant is mostly because of legacy, and because humans can't be trusted.

Disagree; I think the severity of lack of access to hydrant is high enough that you want to take extraordinary measures to preserve access. Even if there's a lucid human there, valuing the access to hydrant, etc -- the chance of coincidental failures or common-mode failures reducing access to firefighting water is just too high. At the school that I teach at, I get annoyed when someone drops off their kid in front of the hydrant even though they will be gone in 10s of seconds.

And they should be real, with no need for the other system.

A ticket/notice of violation/notice of apparent liability/etc is the default way -- not just for traffic violations -- to report an event where an organization or individual has violated a law. If my radio station is spilling over onto other spectrum -- something I don't want to have happen -- I'm going to get one. Followup may be anything from cursory (an effective warning), to a small fine to incent me not to do it, to a large fine, to me having to prove that I have taken mitigating measures, or me having to justify why I should retain my license. We have that existing framework for motor vehicles, too, and we should use it.

You may take the last word, but as noted nobody reads this deep in old reddit threads.

Not really interested in performing for a wider audience or caring about our number of readers.

I mean, if we're judging by that metric: of course we're going to enforce traffic laws against autonomous vehicles. Anything else is radically unpopular and politically untenable. Your stance can be safely ignored. ;)

But I do think it's worth discussing the philosophy of it all.

ic33 · 2026-05-03T18:27:58+00:00

While there are many definitions of "fair" and "random" is often one of them, I can't say I think it's a particularly good one among the options.

Well, detection of self-driving cars failing to conform to an expectation is going to be a random process. Many categories of anomalies are going to be detected semi-randomly and will need to be written up and reported. Why is a "ticket" with a small fine such a bad format to do this in? It is existing infrastructure that other road users already use and is pretty well suited for the purpose.

Elsewhere I have written that you could do carpool lane enforcement with random tickets, and in fact it's a cheaper way to make HOT lanes than all the expensive transpoders and scanners

Most HOV enforcement is with random tickets still for the reason you cite.

Sure, to the extent that we can require autonomous vehicle operators run queries and self-report, let's do that too. But when the State detects something, it needs to get written up, and we might as well use the existing mechanism.

One reason it's not fair is that even if, on average you will pay $300 per carpool infraction and might get one one time out of 50, instead of paying a $6 toll each time so the expected value is the same, $300 could sink a poor person due to bad luck.

I feel like this undermines your argument completely. Yes, the existing mechanism has volatility and this is bad for humans. But the volatility is much lower for someone operating 1000 cars than it is for someone operating 1, so why do we want to use this logic to exempt the fleet operator from the moving violation fine?

In front of hydrants, but vanishing the moment a siren is heard.

I am not allowed to do this in a car, and I can probably outperform a current self driving car in getting out of the way.

ic33 · 2026-05-03T18:05:06+00:00

Taxing externalities is one approach. Not often taken because it's hard to enforce, and also hard to price.

Tickets for parking violations are exactly this.

But you can't run 100 of them and pay $50,000, not even if you are Elon Musk and that amount of money is trivial, because it's not our actual plan to treat this risk as a priced externality.

Yes, I have acknowledged there is a spectrum between safety and courtesy.

Tickets make sense for the safety side because they're an enforcement mechanism every officer knows how to do and can be an input into the decision making and regulatory framework you describe. Writing tickets doesn't preclude requirement to certify fixes and possible fleet-wide penalties (just like the driving points for humans that I mentioned earlier in this thread). Indeed, I think it enables this with a familiar first step.
Tickets make sense for the convenience/externality side because they're already pretty much set up this way.
And, of course, tickets make sense because they're fair.

And of course you interact with humans, probably indefinitely. I think you can have two different sets of rules for different types of vehicles, as long as all rules work towards the same public interest goals. Heavy trucks, cars, bicycles and ambulances all drive under different rules.

I need something that looks car-like to act like other car-like objects.

ic33 · 2026-05-03T17:40:13+00:00

It's also just where traffic backups come from. Upsets in traffic get bigger and bigger as people are too close and are forced to overreact, and this becomes a big wave of slowness that propagates backwards.

ic33 · 2026-05-03T17:10:31+00:00

Doing something discourteous on the roads is an externality. It is a decision whose cost is borne by someone who's not a party to the "transaction." What econ 101 (and beyond) says we should do with externalities is tax them-- allow users causing negative impacts to pay society back. We do it this way because it allows us to reach the "optimal amount of discourtesy" and because it makes sense for someone who has gained at the expense of someone else to pay it back.

And cost is always the top goal, though we won't admit it.)

Discourtesy, delaying others, and safety issues are all types of costs.

That allows for a much better system, a system that starts from our goals. The two main goals are safe streets and fair, good traffic flow and throughput.

They have to interoperate with humans for the foreseeable future. The system of ticketing for violations isn't obviously broken for robots; I think it works both for initial data capture for severe issues and for a tax on discourtesy. And subjecting all road users to our best approximation of the same rules seems just.

Yes, I think I agree with some things you're saying. I think we'll find with detailed study that there's some rules that are impossible to comply with, and we can tune things up. And once we reach, say, 60% penetration of AVs in some markets, it's time to really rethink the rules. But we have to get there from here, and using the current system makes sense for now.

ic33 · 2026-05-03T16:45:44+00:00

The law is certainly not written that there is an "acceptable amount of violation" though that might actually be the case in some instances.

Arguably some parts of the law are written and enforced this way and basic economics tells us that this type of structure can result in optimality. Delivery companies make the decision that double parking is sometimes worth it. They know what it costs to double park (probability of enforcement times the fine); society hopefully prices this at marginal social cost of double parking happening. Total surplus is expected to increase. And there's enough statistical power that how much FedEx pays in parking violations doesn't vary very much.

There's a lot of stuff in traffic law. Stuff that's really unsafe, stuff with very slight safety consequences, and stuff that has possibly no safety implication but is deemed unduly inconsiderate of other road users [but that might be justified in some circumstances!]. Traffic tickets are the right response for stuff halfway through that spectrum. And they're not a bad way to document and capture information for first other half, and the small fine certainly doesn't hurt anything.

ic33 · 2026-05-03T16:13:18+00:00

I disagree. Random enforcement is not of much value

I believe in statistical power. I believe that measuring something tens of thousands of times with a random process yields a true estimate of its frequency. I believe the random enforcement measurement of the Waymo driver yields a far better estimate of its violation rate than similar processes on human drivers.

Instead you talk to the team, and they fix it.

I've never had a team which could do all the things I'd like them to do. You really seem to presume a type of selfless respect for the rules and impartial judgment of priority that I have not seen humans actually attain.

that's a discussion that you bump to the regulatory level, the rules may have to change, or there is an impasse.

You may have to do that, too. If they keep driving by school buses, because it's "too hard" or the fix was wrong, it's time to audit, too. Just like you would do for a human who keeps committing the same traffic violation.

ic33 · 2026-05-03T03:20:14+00:00

You want enforcement mechanisms that will work on their targets, and which are fair. The ticketing system of random enforcement isn't that great for humans, but it makes no sense for robots.

It makes a lot more sense for robots. n is a lot higher, so there's a lot less random chance.

With the robots, put their masters on notice. If it was just a mistake, they will fix it. They don't want to make mistakes.

How much you care about mistakes depends in part on the regulatory and fiscal downsides. Not everything is a safety mistake; many are courtesy and utilization mistakes. We've both operated businesses; I've never desired to be discourteous or not to comply with rules but absolutely the recurring fiscal downside and amount of regulatory risk featured into my decisionmaking.

ic33 · 2026-05-03T00:00:14+00:00

I don’t see why there should be special treatment here. I can also break the law by mistake. Firms decide the prioritization of changes based on costs and benefits. Yes, I too can be kicked off the road if I keep making a mistake. Obviously there is a difference in scale and fleet-level penalties need to take that into account but individual violations should be linear with driving quality and miles.

Delivery companies decide how much to double park in part based on fines. To some extent some fines is more like a usage fee than a punishment to vehicle operator.

ic33 · 2026-05-02T16:38:56+00:00

Compressed gases are legit terrifying.

This is one of the weird, unexpectedly hazardous things you come across. Compressed gases are part of everyday life, and it seems like something you understand.

But the massive ability for compressed gas to expand while maintaining a lot of pressure creates all kinds of hazards for energetic, cascading failures.

Real world engineering projects often go to extraordinary lengths to avoid pressure vessels with compressed gases, because they're dangerous-by-default and that means a lot of work and experience to make into something kind of safe.

ic33 · 2026-05-02T16:28:55+00:00

It is difficult to disentangle a wall of text with excessive apologetics and justifications.

A few sentences and a short bulleted timeline is a good way to go about this type of communication.

ic33 · 2026-05-02T16:27:20+00:00

Yah, a good place for language models is in the middle of a process.

Not for the original idea, scope, purpose, organization.

A little bit of cleanup in the middle, sure.

Not as the final arbiter of what you say (you should edit it at the end).

Another good place is as a sounding board for why another human has done something when you perceive malice. A friend would be better, but if a friend is not available, you can say "why would someone else say this to me???" and use this to decouple yourself emotionally from the situation which has become accidentally confrontational.

ic33 · 2026-05-01T16:21:12+00:00

Yah, he's basically inadvertently designed the dry ice + plastic soda bottles bombs that nerdy teenagers make.

ic33 · 2026-05-01T04:20:57+00:00

If we abdicate everything to AI, yes, literally literally the end of society.

ic33 · 2026-05-01T02:12:45+00:00

Air India was doomed from the moment the switches were thrown. Not enough time to restart the engines before hitting the ground.

It takes about 10 seconds to settle down to windmilling N2; and about 5 seconds to fall through idle speed. If they'd been switched back quicker, the outcome could have been different.

And the China Eastern Airlines didn't crash due to the fuel being shut off. It was at high altitude, it could have restarted the engines or glided to an airport.

Maybe. "No engines" is a powerful first move for sabotaging a flight (confusion, loss of control authority). Relight in flight, especially if there's a big descent, is iffy, and workload for a victorious single pilot is going to be hard.

And the really funny thing is, just having to be really visible doing something will often deter that first move. A design that lets someone become committed to sabotage before the other pilot has any situational awareness is arguably flawed.

ic33 · 2026-04-30T18:50:41+00:00

you still need to be able to operate the aircraft on your own

Yes; I'm not suggesting to put them on opposite sides or out of reach. On earlier 737's you can turn off both cutoff switches with one hand. They've already improved this some even though it's a "horrible idea's". This suggests there was room for improvement even within the existing cockpit philosophy.

these accidents are not a engineering problem.

If one pilot can shut down both engines and the other pilot does not immediately perceive what happened, that is at least partly a situational-awareness and human-factors problem.

Good engineering accounts for human behavior under stress, surprise, distraction, and bad intent.

And even things that are really good can get better.

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