That's around 44.64 (0.18831) per month, no wonder ads are preferrable to companies over subscriptions! That's actually a lot for people that listen to music all day every day at work.

Imagine your last thing in your mind being an ad about mongoDB.

> it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.

Oh, the self driving car business will get there, believe me. This is just the first iteration. Designed to get everybody on board with the idea.

I wonder if Waymo gets a cut. I also wonder if riding in a Waymo at the time signals that you're in a demographic that can afford a Waymo and thus get more expensive ads.

We do support YouTube Music and actually supported that before Spotify. But we only do ad-supported on Spotify and iHeartRadio (also paid Spotify).

I think it's also a privacy thing; you have to go into the Waymo app and “connect” your YouTube Music account (even though both have the same @gmail.com address), because otherwise the terms of service of one do not allow sharing data with the other without user consent. (Contrary to popular perception Google is very finicky about privacy, at least privacy as defined as conforming to the terms of service.)

In January YouTube music worked fine when I took Waymo in Menlo Park.

Some do and some more successful than others.

This is one of those comments that made me laugh nervously. It's straight out of Ubik or another PKD novel, which probably means it's less than 5 years away from being real.

It wasn't possible to stop at the speed the Waymo was moving at.

The Waymo didn't have the stop sign, the other driver did, at a three way intersection.

The other driver decided to suddenly enter the intersection, when the Waymo was like 5-10 meters away. This was after having stopped at the stop sign.

Either they weren't looking or intentionally trying to cause an accident. Swerving prevented the Waymo from crashing at 40 km/h into the driver's door.

I assume waymo has a constant full picture of what's around, so swerve should be way safer for a machine than a human

For a human this advice is true. But what if a computer can near-instantly calculate a perfect swerve within the performance envelope of the car and driving conditions?

> swerving is more likely to make you lose control

Even if you're not a panicky human but a optimally regulated control system?

Most often, but this seems to describe the rare exception.

This depends a huge amount on car, driver and situation. It was the right advice for a learner driver in the 90s with no stability control, no experience and no side airbags, because if you’re going to hit something, hitting it front on is the least risky way. I’m not convinced it’s the right advice for a competent driver in a modern vehicle.

> If cut off they absolutely will go full brake rather than perform any sort of spicy lane change or turn.

Essentially, a meat driver was waiting at a stop sign to make a turn onto the main road. I was in a Waymo driving on the main road and did not have a stop sign.

When we were 10 meters away from the intersection, the meat driver suddenly started to enter the intersection. I have no idea why.

Full brake would've hit the other car in the driver's side door at 40 km/h.

> under-playing how decent the average human is.

I got to SMFC in CSGO which means I'm in the top 3% of players in clicking on heads within 500 ms of them appearing on my screen. I have never reacted as fast as that Waymo did.

I think you're humongously overselling the average driver. I mean, the stats for waymo vs human drivers speak for themselves.

Here is a photo I took inside of the Waymo outside of an Erewhon. Going to Erewhon and experiencing the $20 Hailey Bieber smoothie was on my brother's bucket list and riding in a Waymo was on mine.

https://files.catbox.moe/jdjwy5.jpg

https://files.catbox.moe/mh4ivw.jpg

I have included EXIF data in an attempt to prove this really happened and I'm not an AI commenting bot.

I believe it is, in fact, humor.

What levers are there, really? Waymo has a monopoly and it seems like they will for a while, so they have a lot of power, but all I really see them doing is making it expensive. Anything that makes the experience worse takes away from their ability to take market share away from Uber/Lyft.

enshitification should be a new certainty along with death and taxes

Not tightly coupled in obvious ways, but as I understand it they aren’t putting it on pickup trucks, convertibles, or anything toeing a boat etc. Their vehicles don’t have aftermarket suspension systems dramatically changing handling characteristics, or turned one into a stretched limo etc.

Which means the software can safely assume the vehicle will behave within a relatively narrow operating range.

The new (as of now than a year ago) Waymo cars still had human safety drivers last I saw one (a month or two ago). I also don't see them taking customers. So they do seem to slow roll hardware rollouts.

We're not even a decade beyond some poorly conceived software crashing two otherwise functional aircraft into the ground and now it's going to save us all...

Frequency matters.

One of these sets of risk is mostly theoretical (aside from the large scale stoplight outage), one of them is happening often enough that anyone who takes rideshare repeatedly will have a story.

If we limit ourselves to risks that have actually manifested, not hypothetical risks, I'd rather risk getting stuck at an intersection if there is a city wide power outage than deal with the weird conversations I've had on rideshares (not even counting the countless drivers who demonstrated that it is possible to drive a car without crashing for the duration of one rideshare ride without taking your eyes off the phone for more than a few seconds at a time).

> A disgruntled waymo contractor in the Philippines can remote drive you into a crowd of people.

They cannot. The remote drivers for Waymo offer "nudges" to the robot driver, but they cannot do full remote control.

They can effectively mark a dot in the middle of a crowd of people on their tablet and say "Your best course of action is to drive here", and the waymo very well might decide to try and follow that suggestion, but they cannot override Waymo's brakes nor coded-in "do not hit humans" mandate, and the waymo would stop before hitting anyone.

> Only a relatively small number of these cars have been on the road, in limited conditions, and only for a small number years.

The average uber driver has driven fewer miles on the road than Waymo's software, and hasn't seen all the conditions either. Most uber drivers have cumulatively like 5-20 years driving experience in the city they're driving in.

Waymo has racked up waaaay more miles than the average single human ever gets, and unlike humans, all the Waymos benefit from improvements to the software.

> There will be failures and risks we haven't even imagined yet.

This is pointless fearmongering. Like, ketchup could cause cancer, but we have no meaningful evidence in that direction, so saying "ketchup has unknown risks we haven't imagined yet" is silly.

We know now that waymo is statistically safer than human drivers, I personally know that I haven't had a waymo driver make me feel unsafe yet, but uber drivers often did, so you know, waymo seems to have some pretty nice improvements already.

I'll wait for actual evidence of these "unimaginable risks and failures" before I evaluate them. At this point, it would have to be a pretty bad failure to change the math though.

Is there some benefit to talking to weird Uber drivers I've yet to discover that's comparable with 'going outside at all'?

I realize it is hard to do this, but please understand that other people have different perspectives on personal safety. For example, try and image how things might be different if you were a woman alone in an Uber with a driver who starts saying weird things.

I would rather say they develop crippling anxiety and agoraphobia. This is happening right now even to adults working from home.

This seems a little silly. Did mobs of jobless taxi drivers attack the Uber drivers who took their jobs? No. No offense, but if you have a girlfriend, wife, or female friend, you might want to ask them about safety and security of ride sharing services. I suspect their answer will be an eye opener for you.

Using "second order effects" because big words sound cool without understanding the whole point of "second order"...

Crashes are not accidents. Language matters. People should go to jail for harming others