Links for July 3, 2022

What to Read

🚕 Cruise robotaxis blocked traffic for hours on this San Francisco street — TechCrunch

Anyone who's gotten stuck in a company's automated phone menu that couldn't route them to a relevant employee knows that automation is great until it's not.

When whole fleets of aircraft are grounded because of a computer error, that's inconvenient for passengers, but it doesn't otherwise interrupt urban life.

But what happens when an entire fleet of driverless cars stop operating? Robotaxi company Cruise provided us with a window into the future this week when its vehicles — which don't require an operator to sit behind the wheel — ceased operating.

The mishap comes less than a week after Cruise launched its first fully driverless, commercial robotaxi service in the city. Cruise’s vehicles are initially operating between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. on designated streets and without a human safety operator behind the wheel.

Cruise robotaxis stop operating, block traffic on San Francisco street – TechCrunch

More than a half dozen Cruise robotaxis stopped operating and sat in a street in San Francisco late Tuesday night, blocking traffic for a couple of hours until employees arrived and manually moved the autonomous vehicles. Photos and a description of the Cruise robotaxi blockade were shared to a Red…

TechCrunchRebecca Bellan

🍂 Is life lived in seasons? — RadReads

Khe Hy presents a cogent argument that life can be divided up into distinct phases, or seasons. A useful way to think about which season you're in and how to make the most of it:

The seasons analogy is a compelling one. After all, it makes sense to divide your life up into discrete buckets. Each season punctuated by its unique characteristics, such as your health, the status of your dependents, your finances and your relationships.

At 42 years old, here are some of my life seasons:

Is life lived in seasons?

You go to college, get job, get married, have a kid and then retire. Should you base your decisions on seasons? Or is it a trap?

RadReadsKhe Hy

What to Watch

📸 Will This New Invention be the Death of Photography? — Micael Widell

I'm continuing to link to DALL-E 2 content, because I don't think we fully appreciate the massive cultural shift that's coming. We just can't know the implications of artificial intelligence that can generate realistic photos, illustrations in any style, or even entire app interfaces out of just a single text prompt.

Micael Widell takes a stab at what this technological breakthrough means for photography specifically. Don't be put off by the clickbaity title — jump to the 5:38 mark to see how DALL-E can manipulate real images just as effectively as it can generate novel ones.

Tweets of the Week

Have a great week,‌‌‌‌‌‌
John