The Robots Are Hungry:
Just Don't Put Chocolate or Children in the Way

Autonomous Vehicles Are Still Just Distributed Segmentation Faults

The two things you really don't want your billion-dollar, self-driving taxi fleet to do are: a) Ignore an active school bus stop arm, and b) Treat a pile of Kit Kat wrappers as a non-obstacle, then proceed to run it over.

Waymo is getting looked at by authorities in the US—again—for the school bus thing. That's serious, obviously. But the story about a taxi running over a massive pile of discarded wrappers and a cardboard box, because the system couldn't figure out that the ground was obstructed, that’s where you see the whole operation's soul. We’ve built AI that can write poetry and pass the bar, but it still gets confused by what a five-year-old would call 'garbage.'

They solved the hard problem (vision, prediction, smooth cornering) and failed the easy one (the common sense that tells a human, "if you are about to drive over a visible object that isn't pavement, stop"). The incentive is to keep moving and log the event for training data later. The reward is a robot that is still fundamentally a high-powered Roomba, except this Roomba is trying to get out of its investigation over failing to stop for... whatever.

The European Union is Still Sending Bills

In news that surprised exactly zero people who have to work with compliance, the EU fined X (the company formerly known as Twitter) €120M for breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA). The claim is they just haven’t been moderating content enough, specifically around things like AI-generated junk and foreign interference. Which is what the DSA is for, and which X publicly promised they would get right, or at least kinda-sorta right, maybe.

This is just what the cost of doing business looks like now. You either spend a few billion to hire enough people to check the boxes, or you pay the fine and call it a compliance expense. Either way, the content still comes out, just with slightly higher margins for the EU.

Security Through Laziness

Someone cracked a $200 piece of software protection just by using xcopy. The protection system was designed to detect tampering, but apparently it was just looking for the signature of a folder it installed. If you copied the protected files to a new folder and then copied them back, the software went: "Oh, well, this is new, must be fine!"

// Note: They spent time on the encryption/decryption routines, and saved all the keys in the executable. It’s the enterprise software equivalent of putting three deadbolts on your door and leaving the key under the mat.

The only truly unbreakable security is obscurity or a software license agreement nobody reads. This, however, is a masterpiece of making something look complicated while the actual mechanism is running on optimism.

Briefs

• The debate over $140k being the new poverty line is heating up. When people who make six figures are arguing they're barely scraping by, the whole system is maybe less a system and more a fever dream.
• Someone took the time to load PalmOS onto a Fisher Price Pixter—a children's toy. This is why we can't have nice things, but honestly, this is cooler than most tablets.
• AWS dropped the M9g instances. They are, as you might expect, more powerful and cost slightly more. The machine keeps turning.
• You can now check if your vehicle's license plate has been logged by the mass-surveillance Flock cameras via the "Have I Been Flocked?" site. The answer is probably yes, but at least you know who knows where you were.

// DEAD INTERNET THEORY