Are we forgetting that this only happened because they got in huge trouble with regulators and had to withdraw their cars from the street for like a year? I wouldn't take their statement at complete face value and don't see any reason for pessimism for Waymo.
Yup, there is zero chance that the market is too small. The only issues are whether a company can the technology to work and obtain regulatory approval.
Size of the market is for all practical purposes function of price. The competition to robotaxis is first and foremost humans. The major question is if robotaxi companies can provide the service at the cost of ubers *profitably*.
"In the early 1980s AT&T asked McKinsey to estimate how many cellular phones would be in use in the world at the turn of the century. The consultancy noted all the problems with the new devices—the handsets were absurdly heavy, the batteries kept running out, the coverage was patchy and the cost per minute was exorbitant—and concluded that the total market would be about 900,000. At the time this persuaded AT&T to pull out of the market, although it changed its mind later. "
And in the more recent past, we asked Juicero if squeezing a small volume of bags by hand could be done more cheaply by machines, and they told us "absolutely!"
That said, it is up to the individual to work at Google or not, so it's not like they are a self-selecting population of maximally driven people. At least not the recently-joined folks.
By and large, Google is branded as the company people choose to go and coast maximally recently.
An AI that plays a fixed exploitative strategy will end up getting figured out relatively quickly and counter exploited pretty hard. This actually happens in real life sometimes when people attempt to deploy poker bots online.
Any exploitative AI also needs the ability to adjust in real time to a different exploitative strategy, which also needs to be not easily predictable, etc.
That doesn't make sense. Of course it's a "single point of failure". I don't think anyone could have ever thought otherwise. A competing archive service would undoubtedly be great for humanity.
I think people don't really stop to consider - the Internet Archive could be gone tomorrow; either through legal action, malice, accident, mismanagement of the non-profit, etc. It's just considered "an Internet tool that exists".
I would argue that their attempt to even try this emergency library thing indicates that the people in charge are a bit too cavalier with what they have, for whatever (likely well-intentioned) reasons they may have.
And while individuals can mirror/datahoard the publicly facing parts of the IA, that's not all they have access too.
So, we need a distributed planet-size, multi-redundant, partly-encrypted, archive that can absorb and host the entirety of IA multiple times (for redundancy), INCLUDING the borrowing library.
"why build one when you can have two at twice the price"
they have a duplicate headquarters in Vancouver now, a similarly grand building to their SF headquarters. Years ago there was a collab with the library of Alexandria in Egypt to host an offsite backup but I don't think it panned out.
This would be the poster child for durable backups such as Microsoft Silica (if Microsoft dared to piss off those plaintiffs).
At 99 Petabytes, an offline copy would take about 2,000 LTO-9 tapes. I'm not familiar with other vendors, but a single IBM TS4500 tape library offers about 400 PB of near-line storage and I don't think IBM would be making the largest ones in existence.
Also, CERN could host multiple copies on unused blocks of their storage farm.
edit: just found a StorageTek (now Oracle) that can do "57.6 EB of uncompressed data". That's just surreal. HPE sells a much more modest unit that can store 2.5 EB.
This comment reminded me of famous quote: "When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop."
Yes. If you have the pockets and logistics behind you, I'm sure Brewster would invite you for lunch to discuss. You'll need people for infra ops, people to coordinate hosting racks across the globe (preferably on every reasonable continent), and whatever the current cost is of a few exabytes of cost efficient storage hardware.
Yes, it's an alternative, not a copy. For example, it doesn't provide "emergency library" style borrowing, and maybe this missing feature is a pro, not a con.
On the other hand, it's doing something similarly dubious with paywalled news articles in that it bypasses many news sites' paywalls and supposedly injects its own ads next to the content.
There are even many comment threads detailing their strategy to avoid legal takedown requests by serving content via an "anti-CDN" (i.e. always serving content from abroad whenever possible, to make legal actions more difficult).
Any chance you're using Cloudflare DNS (directly or via e.g. iCloud Private Relay)? The people (person?) running archive have a somewhat complicated history with them.
Not using Cloudflare DNS, I use my own recursive resolver. And by "archive", I assume you mean archive.org; archive.is and archive.ph are different people.
>I just don't understand why people would use Chrome.
Really? That seems hard to believe.
I stuck with FF until around 2016 or so before being compelled to switch. The performance was just very clearly worse than Chrome's at the time. Not sure what the state of things is now.
This is HN, so another huge reason to use Chrome is for the devtools, which I've always had a very good experience with and know pretty well. I've always found other browser devtools miserable to work with in the past, though I admit I haven't invested serious time into learning them.
All that said, the adblocking fiasco may well get me to try out FF again as my daily browser. But personally I had very clear reasons for abandoning it originally, it wasn't just cargo cutting
There was a lot of talk about Firefox having poor performance, but I have never experienced any of it. For daily use Firefox has always been one of the more responsive applications on my PC.
If you experienced poor performance the common explanation at the time was that you either had a profile folder that had accumulated all sorts of stuff that somehow caused a slowdown, or had some unfortunate extensions installed.
I experienced poor perfonmance until what, maybe 2013? I really don’t understand if people really experience poor performance of if that’s just something people say about firefox.
I've used Firefox consistently since about 2006, and it is true. We use gmail and meet in work - both are snappier and break less in chrome than in Firefox. I probably spend 30% of my browser time on those two sites in work.
The fact that Google's gmail and Google Meet break more in Firefox than in Google's Chrome leads me to wonder what they are doing to make Firefox work as badly as it does.
Built in translation is a big one that I rarely see mentioned.
I was long time fan of FF while living in Ireland and the UK, but when I moved to Sweden and later Germany I was effectively forced to switch to Chrome.
Being required to interact with websites in other languages regularly meant that FF (circa 2018) was just not an option. The chrome experience for translating webpages was vastly superior to any other browser, which I needed to use 3rd party translating apps to get anywhere. These were clunky, low performance black boxes that I tried to live with and failed.
I see now that other browsers are starting to properly do built-in translation, but Chrome was way ahead for a long time. So for non-English speakers I imagine Chrome was a must use tool for a long time.
Moving countries and languages means the translate function becomes a priceless necessity on a daily basis, and Chrome's and Edge's built-in translation features are second to none, so I switched away from FF when I moved country. Firefox third party translation addons exist but they always felt clunky and flaky being often slower and sometimes failing where Chrome and Edge would breeze through.
Better privacy is nice but convenience and saving time and frustration is nicer. Beret me all you want but it's not a hill I'm willing to die on.
I am in a similar situation I actually switched to Brave a few months ago and while the translate function is there, it is VERY slow for some reason and seems to work less often than Chrome.
I wonder if I am just imagining things or if they use a different service for translation or, if the same, if it is being throttled.
> The performance was just very clearly worse than Chrome's at the time.
A lesson of how sometimes "ship it now and improve later" could make huge damage to the reputation of a product.
Lately I've been advocating change to Firefox more than ever. Do you want to guess what's been the reply I've heard back more? "But Firefox is clunky and much slower than Chrome!"
They had a bad experience due to slowness compared to Chrome at the time, and that impression still lives on today, putting an end to any slight possibility of migration. At least until a friend explains the situation as it is nowadays. Thankfully they mostly listened and some agreed to try it.
Devtools on FF are very good. Extremely rarely do I need Chrome, for tools like debugging svg animations. I suspect the overwhelming majority of devtool users don't have to debug svg.
I only switch to chrome when I need to fake response payload, I couldn't figure that out in ff. Otherwise pretty much the same functionality. They also look the same.
"I stuck with FF until around 2016 or so before being compelled to switch. The performance was just very clearly worse..."
This is a fair point. Personally, I don't recall seeing a big difference between the two. Maybe there was. Perhaps it was not that bad so it wasn't as issue for me.
As for dev tools, I have been happy with Firefox - but then when I am doing web development I am testing on various browsers, anyway. So I use dev tools for all of them.
Performance-wise, Firefox was significantly worse up until v57 (AKA Quantum release), which was released in 2017. I've made the switch when that version hit Nighly and haven't looked back since.
Nowadays I don't think there's a big performance gap one way or the other.
The problem is that it took so much time for Firefox to improve performances and implement process per tab that by the time they finally did it, even the more hardcore geeks had switched to Chrome.
That was, what, 7 years ago? That's about 5 CPU generations ago. Any performance differences were solved a long time ago, although chrome seems to use a lot more memory last time I looked (I use both on a regular basis). It's worth revisiting tooling once in a while instead of getting stuck in time.
If chrome does it for you for dev tools, then use it for that. No need to use it for general browsing.
Performance? Yeah there was once a time that Chrome was a bit snappier than Firefox, but nothing significant. I think it's mostly the placebo effect of people just thinking they are using a faster/slower browser.
Development of devtools was indeed quite good early on in Chrome. But Firefox already had the Firebug extension, which was basically the first kind of browser devtools as far as I can remember. And then Firefox also eventually implemented the devtools natively, and Firebug eventually disappeared. And that did take some time while Chrome had the devtools already native. But still Firefox with their open plugin system allowed for Firebug to evolve, and Chrome's devtools (and also Firefox's) was for sure inspired by Firebug.
So why do people use Chrome really? Placebo, hype, lack of historical context, and ignorance of privacy, I would say.
I worked with both for years and one of the reason who made me switch from Chrome to Firefox between 2016-2018 was the devtools. I found the Firefox's ones were way better and Mozilla implemented new features way faster than Google for some reasons.
is it possible the devtools experience is one of those things that is largely dependent on where you initially learned it? firefox is my daily driver, and I can't stand chrome devtools anytime I'm forced to use them
