SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Self-Driving Robot Cars Clog Up the Streets of San Francisco



One point I can concur on in the rather polarizing AI conversation, is that we shouldn’t trust it with transportation, as its accessibility is already an issue for many. This lack of accessibility can’t just be invented away, and if that were the case, it would’ve already been done. Truth of the matter is that public transport is more of an architectural and legislative issue than a technological one, and that fixing the whole host of problems surrounding this is more long-term than just some new product in the market.

This past summer, there’s been a brewing conflict between the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and city residents regarding the deployment of self-driving vehicle services. The companies responsible, Cruise and Waymo, claim that their vehicles reduce accidents and improve traffic, though incidents involving these automatic vehicles tend to suggest the opposite. (2)(3)

This all culminated into a protest organized by the “Week of Cone” on TikTok, which shows people disabling automatic vehicles with traffic cones. (1)

In early June, SF officials filed a comment pushing back against the Utilities Commission in light of public concerns. This is effectively pushing law-makers towards more strict regulation on these vehicles, despite the companies denying the criticism from both the people and the state. (4) As San Francisco becomes the first US city to try automated driving, it’s important to keep an eye on it and think of how this will eventually affect the rest of the country over the coming decade.

1) https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/06/robotaxi-haters-in-san-francisco-are-disabling-waymo-cruise-traffic-cones/?guccounter=1
2) https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-fire-truck-block-san-francisco-autonomous-vehicles/
3) https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/vnmpf1/bunch_of_cruise_cars_stuck_on_gough_by_robin/
4) https://sfstandard.com/2023/06/02/san-francisco-officials-make-last-ditch-effort-to-block-robotaxi-deployment/

So the way I initially planned to keep this blog updated was by having templates to go off of and talking about things in a more structured, mechanical way. However, this has proven ineffective, as the news comes and goes super quick, and the media landscape pretty much changes week after week, and I’m barely able to catch up each month. So in yet another change of approach, I’ll just start covering stuff as I see them and have the blogs come out in a more improvised way. There will still be some structure but at least it won’t read so robotically.

Can Open-Source Hardware Be Truly Open?



As open source software has become more and more readily available, this made me wonder what’s happening on the hardware end of things. As is currently with companies’ manufacturing labor being outsourced, and designed specifically to prevent user repair [Apple being the most infamous example of this], the idea of people not only having that right, but being able to also integrate their own parts seems like just the sort of thing the tech world needs as a whole.

Well, as this article explains (1), it isn’t so easy. One of the big reasons being that the majority of tech funding these days is more likely to go to AI than hardware. So it’s rare that open-source companies even get to see investor funding, and when it does happen, they slowly start drifting away from their initial open-source practices.

This affects the community negatively, as this was once seen as a creative solution to allow users their right to repair and modify their tech, these companies are ironically making it harder by making users sign NDA’s, sign up for required webinars, etc.

1) https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/07/12/when-open-becomes-opaque-the-changing-face-of-open-source-hardware-companies/

ARM processors: The Future of Mobile Computing?



On a related note, there’s been a fair deal of Linux-based hardware making the rounds in news lately, with the Steam Deck definitely being amongst the most popular. However, I wanted to share some stuff about the mini PCs by PlanetPC. (2) These guys have made a variety of tech in the past, but I’m just now finding out about these.

What piques my interest for the most part is its use of ARM processors, which are usually seen in smartphones. It only seems to be a recent development that ARMs are gonna be used more and more frequently with laptops and mobile desktops. This also makes me wonder what direction consoles are gonna start going in, as competition in that market has been pretty lackluster.

A huge competitor is Qualcomm(4), who manufactures the processors for the most recent android devices. One of them being the Samsung Galaxy Book 2 (3). This used previous iterations of their older processors, and unfortunately suffered many issues. However with Qualcomm’s most recent processor, the 8cx, it’s shown to have many improvements. Those being lower watt-usage, improved battery life and cellular connectivity. It even manages to beat out Intel by a few metrics.

While laptops aren’t necessarily known for their fidelity, mobile devices generally are becoming more and more powerful than we once anticipated. It’s nice seeing little improvements like these, because back when I used mainly mobile during the 2010s, I just remember things being agonizingly sluggish.

2) https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/desktop-pcs
3) https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/26/18024696/samsung-galaxy-book-2-tablet-laptop-review-specs-price-features
4) https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18128630/qualcomm-snapdragon-8cx-announcement-technology-summit-maui