> why does the operating system need to be involved in this?
Well, the politicians probably meant to say “Apple, Google, Microsoft, plus maybe Sony and Nintendo”
i.e. the companies that already have biometrics, nigh-mandatory user accounts, app stores linked to real identities, parental controls, locked down attested kernels, and so on.
If phones had workable parental controls that let parents opt their kid into censorship, that’s better than the give-your-passport-to-the-porn-site approach the UK have taken.
Of course if they have applied it to every OS, not just the big corporate-controlled options, that’s a dumb choice.
The law defines an operating system provider as "a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general computing device." If the intent were to target mobile vendors or app store vendors, I would be fine with it, but that's not the text. Of course it's the case that US lawmakers often write incoherent or extremely onerous legislation and then turn around and say, like, "Oh that's obviously not what we actually meant. We don't know what any of this stuff is, it just sounded good."
> I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.
If a small business needs to send a replacement widget to a customer in a foreign country, they label it "$0 value" (as it's a free replacement part) and mail it with a swipe of a corporate credit card.
If a large business needs to do the same thing, the sender asks the mail room, giving them a budget code and delivery address; the mail room contacts the widget designer for a HTS code, size and weight; then contacts their shipping broker for a quote; then contacts the finance department to raise a purchase order; the finance department contacts the budget code owner for spend approval; then raises a purchase order; then forwards it to the sender who forwards it to the post room who forwards it to the shipping broker who arrange a collection. Later the shipping broker will send the post room an invoice against the purchase order, which they'll send on to finance, who'll query the sender who'll approve paying the invoice.
> Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway.
Quite possibly - but you have to remember to remove the bureaucracy, not just remove the people who operate the bureaucracy. If you try to do the large business process with the small business team, it'll be even slower.
I’m always surprised when I watch a video that is 9 minutes old and the sponsors segments get skipped automatically. That extension must be getting quite popular.
Keys could have certain restrictions [1] such as HTTP Referer, which meant you couldn't just embed a map on your website and charge a different website for the views.
Not perfect protection of course - an attacker could spam requests with all the right headers if they wanted to - but it removes one of the big motivations for copying someone else's API key.
> Maybe sovereign AI was always going to look like this. I hope not.
I worry we'll soon realise that modern AI is trapped in an inescapable web of politics, and the tech industry is sleepwalking into it.
We're living in an age where even asking the president's height is a political question. For the makers of 'traditional' software like word processors, all writing was the user's own - if someone used Microsoft Word to write a controversial history textbook and campaigned to get it adopted by high schools, the political quagmire was nothing to do with Microsoft and the rest of the tech industry.
That's not the case any more - now every high schooler researching anything from evolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict to the name of the gulf of Mexico is going to ask ChatGPT.
The political controversy over Gemini's image generation is just a preview of things to come.
The average person on HN, perhaps. From what I know of the interactions between government and tech, they know. Not only have external policy and research reports made this clear, their own internal teams keep them aware, and senior leadership is directly talking to political leaders.
Tech has developed a barrier between people who do the ugly work like Trust and Safety, and the engineering org. Every single tech platform deals with at global level crises regularly.
Interestingly, there have been people in the LIDAR industry predicting costs like this for many years. I heard numbers like $250 per vehicle back in 2012 [1]
Of course, ambitious pricing like this is all about economies of scale - sensors that are used in production vehicles are ordered by the million, and that lowers the costs massively. When the huge orders didn't materialise, the economies of scale and low prices didn't materialise either.
Also 'Luminar Technologies, a prominent U.S. lidar manufacturer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025' LIDAR is useful in a small set of scenarios (calibration and validation) but do not bet the farm on it or make it the centre piece of your sensor suite.
Also, MicroVision, the company in OP's article bought the IP from Luminar. This feels like a circular venture capital scam. Luminar originally went public via SPAC and made a bunch of people very wealthy before ultimately failing.
This is very wrong.
LIDAR scanners have revolutionized surveying by
enabling rapid, high-precision 3D mapping of terrain and infrastructure, capturing millions of data points per second. LIDAR can penetrate dense vegetation, allowing accurate, ground-level, mapping in forested or obstructed areas. Drone mounted LIDAR has become very popular. Tripod mounted LIDAR scanners are very commonly used on construction sites. Handhels LIDAR scanners can map the inside of buildings with incredible accuracy. This is very commonly used to create digital twins of factories.
Lidar is critical for any autonomous vehicle. It turns out a very accurate 3D point cloud of the environment is very useful for self driving. Crazy, I know.
I work with programs approaching L3+ from L2, with the requirement that the system works for 99% of roads (not tesla before people start fixating on that).
We find that the cases where lidar really helps are in gathering training data, parking, and if focused enough some long distance precision.
None of these have been instrumental in a final product; personally I suspect that many of the cars including lidar use it for data collection and edge cases more than as part of the driving perception model.
Waymo is the best current autonomous driving system and Waymo uses LIDAR. This is because LIDAR is an incredibly effective sensor for accurate range data. Vision and Radar range data is much less accurate and reliable.
Waymo used LIDAR in the realtime control loop. It combines LiDAR, camera, and radar data in real time to build a 3D representation of the environment, which is constantly updated.
I fundamentally don't trust any level 4 system that doesn't use LIDAR
Yes, I am aware of waymo... What they do is impressive. However they don't have a product that works for all highways yet, that's the space I work in, and we have no real fixation on lidar... It's nice but not a requirement, and hard to justify the cost unless you can make sales because of it (and there are some places where this is the case, but not everywhere)
You don't need the mm precision of lidar very often; we find that it offers nothing at speed over radar; and in tight manoeuvres the cameras we need for human park assist and ultrasonics do well enough.
It in not more accurate; but it is more precise, but that doesn't really matter. (Radar gives you relative speed directly, this is more important than a very precise point at highway speeds).
Waymo is level 4. I think currently it is nearly impossible to make a level 4 system as safe as Waymo without Lidar. Maybe new 4d imaging radar or THz radar could change this. Sensor modalities have physics-based limitations, current camera+radar isn't sufficient for L4.
Sort of; accidents are the absolute core of the product. They are rare, but they are the focus of the design.
By edge cases I mean scenarios like the lights going out in an underground garage; low vision due to colourful smoke or dust, or things like optical illusions or occlusion that a human would just need to remember.
Lidar can help, but not really enough to be worth it.
Urban operating domain combined with legacy approaches.
If I was designing a robotaxi 10 years ago I would use lidar, designing consumer vehicles for near future L3 it's no longer the best use of resources. I prefer more compute and cameras for the money.
Our current issues are now scene understanding and navigation; followed by parking. We get very little value from LIDAR in the driving cases, so much so that we don't even use it for active nav even on cars that have it. Only for training and parking.
Yeah, not compared with the extra money being spent on compute directly. $200 gets you a fair amount of extra processing power, and that's if one LIDAR is even enough, with the solid state style currently around we need several.
Things like when to change lanes, do I need to yield for that ambulance, or what is that pedestrian going to do, are not really improved by point clouds.
I still want the massive point clouds for validation and ground truth, but not for driving.
Like Waymo? (https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-robotaxi-spotted-unable-to-cross-...) 17 years after betting the farm on LIDAR the solution fails to navigate a puddle. Sorry but they bet on the wrong technology, Tesla has overtaken them with multi camera and NN solution.
Your conclusion from a single incident is a bad inference. One vehicle getting confused by a puddle (likely a sensor fusion edge case or mapping artifact, not a fundamental LIDAR failure) doesn't indict the technology. Tesla's cameras have produces vastly more failures.
Waymo has driven tens of millions of autonomous miles with a serious injury/fatality rate dramatically lower than human drivers. The actual data shows the technology works. Tesla FSD still requires active driver supervision and is not legally or technically a robotaxi system. Comparing them as if they're at parity is wrong.
LIDAR gives direct metric depth with no inference required. Camera-only systems must infer depth from 2D images using neural networks, which introduces failure modes LIDAR doesn't have. Radar is very valuable when LIDAR and cameras give ambiguous data.
What metrics has Telsa overtaken Waymo? Deployed robotaxi revenue miles? No. Disengagement rates? No published comparable data. Safety per mile in driverless operation? No.
A Tesla wouldn't stop for a puddle. Also its not locked to a small geofenced area (people have driven coast to coast without a single intervention on FSD including parking spot to parking spot) when I can buy a Waymo vehicle that does this then Waymo would have caught up with Tesla.
Your puddle example is utterly irrelevant. Tesla's are notorious for phantom breaking. Robotaxis are very much locked to tiny geofenced areas. Some even shaped like a penis because Musk is such a child.
"people have driven coast to coast without a single intervention on FSD including parking spot to parking spot"
I find this claim very dubious. Prove it. Teslas never drive empty for a very good reason.
Err they have lots of Model Ys in Austin as Robotaxis right now with no drivers. I guess this is also 'dubious'. Look it's clear you have a huge bias I would urge you to read up on https://grokipedia.com/page/List_of_fallacies otherwise your emotional responses will blind you to reality.
"hey have lots of Model Ys in Austin as Robotaxis right now with no drivers"
They do not. They have a very small number of them open to a select number of people, not the general public. And they are limited to even smaller areas. You need to understand that Musk is NOT an engineer, he is more of a con man desperate to inflate tesla stock price. If he says self driving cars don't need LIDAR then they must actually need it.
Who should I believe a random poster on hackernews who has likely an average salary or Elon Musk who is the richest man in the world and create multiple trillion dollar companies......hard one!
Whats wrong with grokipedia its a bit less woke/far left wing, more balanced.
You are just mindlessly regurgitating the lies of Musk and using an "appeal to wealth" to justify not analyzing them. He has been lying about self driving since 2016.
For nearly a decade Elon Musk has claimed Teslas can truly drive themselves. They can’t. Now California regulators, a Miami jury and a new class action suit are calling him on it.
> Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars.
Interestingly, there are already some comparatively cheap LIDAR units on the market.
In the automotive market, ideally you need a 200m+ range (or whatever the stopping distance of your vehicle is) and you need to operate in bright direct sunlight (good luck making an eye-safe laser that doesn't get washed out by the sun) and you need more than one scanning plane (for when the car goes over bumps).
On the other hand, for indoor robotics where a 10m range is enough and there's much less direct sunlight? Your local robotics stockist probably already has something <$400
Neato from San Diego has developed a $30 (indoor, parallax based) LIDAR about 20 years ago, for their vacuum cleaners [1].
Later, improved units based on the same principle became ubiquitous in Chinese robot vacuums [2]. Such LIDARs, and similarly looking more conventional time-of-flight units are sold for anywhere between $20-$200, depending on the details of the design.
Sounds like the quality isn't all that great but LD06 sensors look like they're about $20 and someone who works on libraries about this suggested the STL27L which seems to be about $160 and here's an outdoor scan from it: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pidar-scan-240901-0647-7997b...
Not sure if the ld06 is a scanner like this or if it's just a line (like you'd use for a cheaper robot vac).
IMHO a better approach would be two-layered tagging to indicate traffic from children.
Firstly traffic can be tagged by ISPs/cell phone companies, at the bill payer's behest (whose name and age has already been verified). Secondly, smartphone OSes can tag traffic at the behest of parental controls (which already exist).
> I’m also largely cynical to the idea that anyone’s doing any free speeching on meta or Twitter in the first place. If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.
The thing is, any speech controls imposed on Facebook and Twitter will probably be imposed on all services - including IRC.
And while Facebook and Twitter are capable of compliance and have bottomless pockets to implement it, IRC isn't and doesn't.
Well, the politicians probably meant to say “Apple, Google, Microsoft, plus maybe Sony and Nintendo”
i.e. the companies that already have biometrics, nigh-mandatory user accounts, app stores linked to real identities, parental controls, locked down attested kernels, and so on.
If phones had workable parental controls that let parents opt their kid into censorship, that’s better than the give-your-passport-to-the-porn-site approach the UK have taken.
Of course if they have applied it to every OS, not just the big corporate-controlled options, that’s a dumb choice.
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