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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • There’s a big cultural difference. Taiwanese workers, like Chinese, Korean, and Japanese workers as well, have a much higher tolerance for long work hours and less pay.

    All of these East Asian cultures have long-standing social norms against complaining and refusing to work hard. It’s a collectivist culture of work that puts the success of the company ahead of the individual’s interests. In return, companies tend to be loyal to workers so it’s very common to stay at one company for your whole career.

    We westerners used to have similar values back in the 1950s and earlier. That all changed during the counterculture.






  • I can’t blame enshittification on this one. The dating app model doesn’t work, period. Even in the case of a completely free, non-profit app, you still have the problem that as people pair off they leave the dating pool.

    The fundamental problem is that there’s a nonzero subpopulation of people who either have no interest in or are incapable of forming a stable long term relationship. As the dating pool filters over time, these folks get more and more concentrated in the population. This leads to the experience getting worse and worse for people who are interested and capable because they keep matching up with the wrong people.




  • I mean who knows. Maybe they just steal whatever valuable parts they can carry and dump the rest.

    The model has to be stored in the car for it to work. I mean can you imagine the car driving along and a network interruption causes the self-driving system to be unresponsive for a second? That could cause a crash immediately!

    So then if the model is stored in the car itself it can be stolen and sold to a rival self-driving car company in Russia or what have you. And in that case they could definitely repurpose the entire stolen car itself. They just need to replace the client code with their own so that the car connects to their servers.

    Besides, the model isn’t going to have maps or server connection stuff built into it. The maps are external and part of the GPS navigation, so those can be replaced. And all the command and control stuff is just conventionally programmed client software that can be redirected to another server or even a server hosted locally within the car itself for autonomous driving.

    Fundamentally, the reason self-driving cars are a bigger target than regular cars is that they leave no witnesses if you can disable the surveillance/logging. You don’t have to disable the cell towers for that, just the real time surveillance (just the company servers). Once the car goes dark it can no longer be tracked.




  • It’s transmitted that data but the gang has blocked the server from receiving it. I mentioned that earlier. This whole operation doesn’t go down unless you take out the eyes and ears of the company.

    All that other stuff can be replaced. It’s still a car with a $15,000 battery in it and drivetrain and all the sensors and electronics.

    And if the hackers can break in and steal data, they can steal the source code. Then they have all the keys to the kingdom.


  • Who said anything about software? Cut the wires to the battery! That will power down any car no matter what.

    The benefit to stealing a self driving car is that it’s a self driving car! What’s the retail price of self driving cars? $100k? More? The whole premise of the self-driving taxi and delivery companies is that the cars are too expensive for the consumer market so they operate on a rental basis instead. If self-driving cars became a mass market commodity like regular cars then thieves would just steal them the old fashioned way.

    Of course the self-driving features work without the network. GPS works without a cell network. It’s a receive-only protocol. The only thing that won’t work is the remote command and control dispatch. That would have to be hacked around.



  • If the goal is to steal the cars then all it takes is to order them to go somewhere while disabling (perhaps via DDoS) the logging and other telemetry servers that allow them to track the vehicles. Once they’re stopped where the criminals want them they can break in and disable the power supply to shut them down completely, then tow/push them into shipping containers to send overseas for modification and resale.

    There already exist international criminal gangs who do this sort of thing (edit: for regular, not self driving cars). Think of the resources of an organization the size of the Gulf Cartel. They operate their own cell phone network in Mexico. They’ve got hundreds of engineers. They absolutely could do an operation like this.