Waymo in Portland
Some Internets at Waymo (business model: "Uber for pothole photography") announce they will manually drive their cars around Portland to familiarise them with rain, as if the city's famously wet streets have not been conquered by dumber technology for decades. The mayor, a man whose Vision Zero pledge is functionally identical to promising to legislate gravity, gushes about a 13x reduction in serious crashes—a number conjured from the same spreadsheet that gave us "six strangers per day" as a metric for success. Hackernews, all of whom are either aspiring mattress-testers dreaming of sleeping in a Rivian or privacy hawks asking for an EFF logo, cannot decide whether this is a beautiful vision or an obvious ad, but the stakes are high: three, possibly even four, people in Baltimore have seen a test vehicle.