The California PUC granted Waymo a permit to operate 24 hours/day in San Francisco taking select members of the public for rides with no safety driver in the vehicle. Waymo says it will begin this shortly. This comes on the heels of them expanding such service in Phoenix, as reported in my article on how the death of self-driving cars has been greatly exaggerated earlier this week.
This service will be with “trusted testers” rather than members of the broad public that can ride in Chandler and Phoenix, Arizona. Limiting ridership can be useful when demand is higher than supply, and also to learn from people who ride it repeatedly, but it has another less noble purpose, namely that riders can be under NDA and not exposing any problems to the public. (Waymo previously has required this of “trusted testers” but says they will very quickly transition to not needing an NDA.) Once a service allows members of the general public to ride with no conditions, it’s a declaration that “we’re confident we are not going to do anything embarrassing.” Cruise, which is Waymo’s rival in SF, has been serving the public for some time, and on Nov 16 announced they will be doing daytime rides with GM employees. Cruise had previously only been operating with passengers after 10pm on much calmer streets.
Waymo also announced it will deploy in Los Angeles soon (it has been testing with staff there.) In LA they also revealed their new robotaxi model, built by Geely under the Zeekr brand in China. I will have more comment when I get to see it, though I am disappointed the front seats don’t swivel to allow more social settings when a group of more than 2 go for a ride. (Facing backwards is less comfortable for some, but also safer in a forward crash.) California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), in ongoing efforts to support transportation innovation, today authorized Waymo LLC to participate in California’s pilot program to provide “driverless” autonomous vehicle (AV) passenger service to the public. Waymo joins the CPUC’s Driverless Pilot program, in which passengers can ride in a test AV that operates without a driver in the vehicle. Waymo may not charge passengers for any rides in test AVs.
Defiant Sam Bankman-Fried declares he has ‘2 weeks to raise $8b’ after FTX bankruptcy.
In Twitter DMs, Bankman-Fried told Vox what went wrong, why he did what he did, and what lies he told along the way.
The Artemis mission is preparing astronauts for this lofty goal.
Humans are on course to be living and even working on the moon by 2030, a NASA official told BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg program.
Howard Hu, the head of the U.S. agency’s Orion lunar spacecraft programme, said astronauts could stay on the celestial object for extended periods of time by the end of this decade.
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (Reuters) — The United States and Russia are expected to meet soon and discuss resuming inspections under the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty that have been paused since before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Tuesday.
Speaking at a daily press briefing, Price said the bilateral consultative commission (BCC), the mechanism for implementation of the last remaining arms control agreement between the world’s two largest nuclear powers, will meet “in the near future.”
Russia in August suspended cooperation with inspections under the treaty, blaming travel restrictions imposed by Washington and its allies over Moscow’s February invasion of Ukraine, but said it was still committed to complying with the provisions of the treaty.
Twitter could ‘face outage’ during FIFA World Cup 2022, claims insider’First World Cup match on Sunday! Watch on Twitter for best coverage & real-time commentary,’ Musk tweeted earlier.
Twitter has a 50–50 chance of experiencing a major crash during the FIFA World Cup 2022, a recently departed employee, told The Guardian on Saturday.
“Between the lack of preparations and the lack of staffing, I think it’s going to be a rough World Cup for Twitter,” said the former employee.
He suggested that an incident of some kind – such as a service responding slowly or incorrectly – is almost a certainty during the 29-day competition in Qatar, estimating a 90% possibility of something going wrong that users would see.
The likelihood of Twitter staying online during the competition, which kicks off on Sunday, is no better than even, according to the former employee.
Galactica was supposed to help \.
Commentary: The public can access new research faster than ever before. But in the era of misinformation, new challenges emerge.
“A world without heart attack and stroke” — New video from our 2022 #RejuvenationStartupSummit: Mike Kope, CEO of Corporate Affairs, Cyclarity Therapeutics — prevents age-related conditions such as atherosclerosis, heart attack, and stroke by addressing the root cause. Enjoy!
Mike Kope, CEO of Cyclarity Therapeutics at Rejuvenation Startup Summit 2022.
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“Leveraging a platform to develop therapeutics that render calcified tissue and organs supple again” — New video from our #RejuvenationStartupSummit: Matthias Breugelmans, CEO of Elastrin Therapeutics Inc… Enjoy!
Matthias Breugelmans, CEO of Elastrin Therapeutics at Rejuvenation Startup Summit 2022.
Connect to Forever Healthy:
* Videos: https://forever-healthy.org/videos/
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