(here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)

a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed?

of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment)

This isn’t a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they’ll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around.

we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform)

Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.

remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you?

This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.

yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see!

Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.

this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t:

Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.

oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this

  • David GerardMA
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    2611 months ago

    If we allow this hostile sentiment to spread it will be uneconomical for companies like waymo to operate.

    oh no! anyway

    thanks, uh “Roark66”

    • Steve
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      711 months ago

      This (driverless tech) is amazing for what it can do to help people that are old/poor and live in places with no public transport

      Roark66, I like you, kid. You have a whole life ahead of you

    • @V0ldek
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      1211 months ago

      The only way this could be better if it was a police self-driving car.

      • @bitofhope
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        611 months ago

        You know what, critical support for replacing all police cars with self-driving ones. With no one inside.

        • @froztbyte
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          611 months ago

          dunno, it’d give them even more ways to hide from responsibility and obscure abuses

        • @V0ldek
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          210 months ago

          NYPD chief: But can the car shoot you?

  • @DarkNightoftheSoul@mander.xyz
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    1211 months ago

    I’m new here. Is ycombinator the orange site, and I thought hacker/dev/techtypes liked ycombinator? A brief primer for a tourist would be appreciated.

    • @selfOPA
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      2211 months ago

      as the esteemed poster who doesn’t seem to know fuck about what we do here pointed out, the orange site is hacker news

      we’re a sister community to SneerClub and inherited a lot of its house posting style. part of our mission statement is to call out bigotry in the tech industry and to act as a pressure release valve for folks who are frustrated by it. unfortunately, hacker news has severe (and very well-documented) problems around amplifying and enabling race scientists, transphobes, various branches of neoreaction, and fascism. we derive enjoyment from sneering at and deconstructing garbage, sometimes in great detail.

      generally, the only way to truly get what we’re doing here is to check out our archives and lurk; we have several months of posts on lemmy and several years in our former subreddits r/SneerClub and r/TechTakes. I recommend looking up our Urbit threads if you’d like a good sampler platter of our posting style and subject matter (and a good example of hacker news helping mainstream neoreaction)

      if you are here to debate any of the above, take careful note of the sidebar

      • @DarkNightoftheSoul@mander.xyz
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        11 months ago

        I’m 100% here for shitting on people with bad and wrong opinions, but I’m also terminally online and need to get away from, uh… some of the powerful emotions on display here. Bad for my headspace. Keep doing god’s work though.

        • @selfOPA
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          911 months ago

          that’s understandable; it’s not for everyone. thanks for stopping by!

    • @Soyweiser
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      11 months ago

      Quite a few hacker/dev/techtypes do dislike ycombinator, but for most it isn’t some sort of thing they talk about a lot. Lot of the regulars here don’t like it for example (which includes the person who help Assange get into tech), but hacker-famous old tech hacker non-local Foone (who is looking for a job, and money so if you know anybody with spare either help them out.) really hates the place (so much so that they have redirected their site to some anti-YC thing when linked from there).

      But yeah, techtakes and sneerclub tend to have a bit of jargon (which is understandable in the second case, as lesswrong and other sneertargets also do a bit of jargon) so we have taken the orange site moniker from there. We also tend to be a bit hostile to outsiders due to the large influx of ‘explain yourself’ dumb r/destiny or r/redscare redditors on reddit. (Another reason to be a bit hostile is because if this is your first look into Silicon Valley Rationalism you will learn of things you should not learn of, things you cannot unsee or unlearn (people being contrarian about showering and then only showering once every 14 days for example)).

    • @froztbyte
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      911 months ago

      Yes, yc

      It’s not favourably thought of anywhere outside its walled garden of sycophant techbros. When it is, in fact, thought of. Which also isn’t much, because its sphere of relevance is extremely small

    • @m_randall@sh.itjust.works
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      311 months ago

      I’m here kinda often - looks like orange site is yc. Never seen the hostility displayed by OP towards it here though. In fact the only time I see links there tend to be via the mirroring bots.

      • @4am@lemm.ee
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        1411 months ago

        A lot of tech brains hold tech bro opinions, and that means blindly accepting that the current state of capitalism is “good for everyone if you just were more driven” and also includes latent racism which the speaker may not even be aware of

        STEMlords (takes one to know one) are often shave a bit too close with Occam’s razor, without considering that the absolute simplest solution often leaves out WAY more factors than they’ve even realized. And that leads to some pretty gross opinions. Like, Tim Pool level shit, sometimes.

        But bad opinions are everywhere. This is just humanity.

      • @V0ldek
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        1111 months ago

        I don’t think we’re hostile towards the orange cite as some philosophical concept.

        It is a splendid source of some extremely choice bad takes, though.

      • @selfOPA
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        811 months ago

        you’re “here kinda often” and haven’t ever seen us post about the orange site? fuck off with that

        • @froztbyte
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          1011 months ago

          Extreme orange blindness is known to the attorney-general to be one hell of a mask off indicator

        • stankmut
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          11 months ago

          It seems like they are talking about being on lemmy often, which is where they are reading this post. I’ve seen HN mirror links pretty often while browsing ‘All’ and this is the first time I’ve noticed this community. Many people browsing All have likely never interacted with your content before.

          • @selfOPA
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            1111 months ago

            oh cool, so they wandered into a sub they’ve never interacted with before, ignored all of its prior content and customs, didn’t even remotely try to address why one would be hostile towards racist posts on a site with a reputation for racism, and then immediately tone policed one of our admins?

            I wish I could ban them twice

    • @CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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      11 months ago

      My assumption would be that either a reply like that is someone who really doesn’t believe self driving will ever be viable (thus if all the cars are mandated to be driverless, people will give them up out of frustration with their flaws and be forced to go to alternatives like cycling instead), or someone who does expect the tech to work and expects them to be developed to a point of being significantly safer to be around than human drivers (thus as one reason people might not cycle is being or feeling unsafe due to the actions of nearby car drivers, a car that somehow did not have that issue becoming dominant would lead to people feeling more comfortable cycling).

    • @selfOPA
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      811 months ago

      yeah, I can’t even begin to deconstruct the orange site’s weird opinions on bikes, but this one was particularly bad. assuming self-driving tech works perfectly, that’d very clearly lead to cities having much less bike infrastructure and therefore a lot less folks having the ability to practically ride bicycles to places they want to be. but that’s not how the tech actually works; actual self-driving cars are fucking terrible at detecting and coexisting safely with bicycles and riders, and given how marginalized traveling by bike already is in American cities, there’s not a lot of incentive to make them better at it vs creating even more systems that punish folks for using any form of transport that isn’t a car

  • @ulkesh@beehaw.org
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    311 months ago

    Semi-off topic…I departed HN the moment it began to look and feel like all the Reddit morons had flocked there. It used to be a place where tech debate was heard and taken in, sources cited, and people were mostly respectful. It’s now become yet another cesspool on the internet.