I like your thesis, but what about this: all this self driving debate is nonsense if you require Tesla to pay all damages plus additional damages, "because you were hit by a robot!". That should make sure Tesla improves the system, and that it operates above human safety levels. Then one can forget about legislation and Tesla can do its job.
So to circle back to your thesis: when the car is operating autonomously, the manufacturer is responsible. If it goes broke then what? Then the owner will need to insure the car privately. So Tesla insurance might have to continue to operate (and be profitable).
The question this raises is if Tesla should sell any self-driving cars at all, or instead it should just drive them itself.
> That should make sure Tesla improves the system, and that it operates above human safety levels.
There are two problems with this.
The first is that insurance covers things that weren't really anyone's fault, or that it's not clear whose fault it was. For example, the most direct and preventable cause of many car crashes is poorly designed intersections, but then the city exempts itself from liability and people still expect someone to pay so it falls to insurance. There isn't really much the OEM can do about the poorly designed intersection or the improperly banked curve or snowy roads etc.
The second is that you would then need to front-load a vehicle-lifetime's worth of car insurance into the purchase price of the car, which significantly raises the cost to the consumer over paying as you go because of the time value of money. It also compounds the cost of insurance, because if the price of the car includes the cost of insurance and then the car gets totaled, the insurance would have to pay out the now-higher cost of the car.
> The question this raises is if Tesla should sell any self-driving cars at all, or instead it should just drive them itself.
This is precisely the argument for not doing it that way. Why should we want the destruction of ownership in lieu of pushing everyone to a subscription service? What happens to poor people who could have had a used car but now all the older cars go to the crusher because it allows the OEMs to sustain artificial scarcity for the service?
> 12000 objects spread over an area larger than the surface of the earth isn't all that much
People keep saying this, but the only way to assure there is no collision is to have non-intersecting orbits, but that is not going to work: not enough space.
It's a tell that SpaceX is now lowering the orbits, even though their satellites mostly move in flocks that maintain a formation relative to each other: because the other ways are exhausted.
Of course if they do cause a (low orbit) Kessler syndrom, then they don't have a business any more, and SpaceX will have achieved the opposite of its stated goals.
The major reason to lower these orbits is likely the risk of a terrorist state turning these constellations into a weapon, by willingly causing the Kessler syndrome. SpaceX isn't going to tell you that, just as it doesn't tell you it's the USA's most important military asset.
> The major reason to lower these orbits is likely the risk of a terrorist state turning these constellations into a weapon, by willingly causing the Kessler syndrome.
Hard to see how the repositioning appreciably alters this risk, since there are still thousands of satellites in the original plane to get hit by shrapnel from intentionally caused collisions, and the satellites in the lower orbit aren't invulnerable to it either
Suspect there's a rather more practical calculation that the extra thruster firings needed to main position in a lower orbit with more atmospheric drag are offset by the smaller number of conjunction avoidance manoeuvres they need to undertake in less congested space (the cost of lowering the orbit is simply deducted from their original delta-v budget for end of life deorbiting). In simple terms they get lower accidental collision risk without operations in the lower orbit shortening satellite lifetime.
> Hard to see how the repositioning appreciably alters this risk, since there are still thousands of satellites in the same plane to get hit by shrapnel from intentionally caused collisions, and the satellites in the lower orbit aren't invulnerable to it either
Yes, but the lower the orbit, the faster atmospheric drag (which isn't zero, just low) cleans up a cascade.
Feel like I'm repeating myself here, but they're moving less than half of them, which is going to have a negligible impact on a state with sufficient ASAT weapons' ability to create a massive mess with the many thousands of Starlink satellites operating in their original plane. Not even like the satellites in the lowest orbit are insulated from the effects of debris cascades set off in higher reaches of LEO either
Plenty of operational reasons to want a large fraction of your constellation in a slightly lower orbit, none of them involve "terrorist states"
It is the difference between optimization and unacceptable risks. Unacceptable risks make you act, they create a leitmotiv, and you don't seem to get that. So you talk about other motives, while ignoring the potentially main one.
Space no longer is a friendly place, it is the battle field of the future. SpaceX is a major military power in ascent, Musk is richer than many nations already, and he'll be in the supervillain category soon, and alone in actual physical power. He sits between the nations as a different entity in nature. It's happening in front of your eyes but you don't see it. That's why you are repeating yourself, as if we didn't see what you see. You speak about a technical motive we all see, as if only you see it. We all see that, it's trivial given the subject, and I mentioned it. Maybe we're not as stupid as you think we are, "teacher".
If that's the only risk, sure. But there's modelling and observation that suggest the required number of ASAT weapons to cause a Kessler cascade is currently zero, i.e. we're already in the early stages of one.
Because physics of orbital dynamics is less dramatic than shown in film, lowering orbits of satelites is an effective way to mitigate this.
This paper is brought up elsewhere in this thread and responded to. TL; DR It raises interesting modelling strategies, and develops on cool numerical methods from Kessler (2001), but it's far off from "pretty good chance."
Working on a HTML syntax replacement. Compact enough to seamlessly embed into markdown (or another engine), augment it, or replace it completely. Obviously also cleans up the id=, class= or style= attributes hassle. What bothers you most about HTML?
Maybe they benchmarked it and processors are so good at predicting the indirection, it doesn't matter much. In out-of-order processors there is a lot of untapped potential. As an example, Rust inserts bounds checks almost for free.
> Straight double quotes (") and single quotes (') are parsed as curly quotes
I don't know who actually likes curly quotes, they are clearly excess to me. And as parsing sometimes fails (as the site says it may), you get inconsistent results, and failures stick out like a sore thumb.
Here is another syntax: this is <*bold>. Very unlikely to clash, can be vibe coded in an hour. But it's more of the same.
For reading, I don’t know who prefers straight quotes.
For writing—
There are more than a few people on HN who deliberately type curly quotes and other non-ASCII punctuation, due to a strong preference for them. I’m one of them.
I use Compose sequences: ; ; for left single quote, : : for left double, ' ' for right single, " " for right double.
(Accordingly, I hate being subjected to automatic curlification, partly because it’s not always correct, but more because if I typed ' or " you better believe I meant ' or ".)
So to circle back to your thesis: when the car is operating autonomously, the manufacturer is responsible. If it goes broke then what? Then the owner will need to insure the car privately. So Tesla insurance might have to continue to operate (and be profitable).
The question this raises is if Tesla should sell any self-driving cars at all, or instead it should just drive them itself.
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