Your Transamerica pyramid picture is incredible among really cool pictures you have there. Quite cool to photograph for wikipedia like this, the world needs more people like you!
That art fixture's placement at the Mission Waymo Depot is kinda cool. It's evocative of a future in which humanity lives a life of indolence propped up by automation.
Looks like it's GAIA by Marco Cochrane, I remember seeing it out in the desert. It looks like it might not be related to Waymo and just on the adjacent property
As an old time burner, sometimes this kind of stuff seems like a flex, like 'you had to be there, sorry pleb' from the tech exec class. Anyway I'm glad they have something there than not.
I don't think the goal is indolence. The goal is freedom. We want a post-need society propped up by automation. That doesn't mean that we should spend our reclaimed time idling, though, but certainly we could.
It makes me think that we need more representations of humans on and in our cities, to remind us about who they are for. We can shift a small amount of architectural scale towards the human.
Reminds me of the half-buried in the sands of time sculptures in Blade Runner 2049; the surrounding self-driving auto depot only adds to the resemblance to some far off future.
It's the world most complex model railway with cars (not just trains) that go around in predetermined routes, and also go to the charging station when their battery is low. And I guess Waymos are a version of that but with human-scale! (Oh they still need humans to plug the charging cables into them).
I wonder if they park themselves or if the maintenance people park them...
When most road transport is automated it will seem crazy that everyone had to drive for themselves, or sit in the car with a complete stranger, who may prioritise their comfort over the traveller's with regard to audio, navigation noise, air 'fresheners' / diffusers, temperature. Perhaps analogous to having a flatmate; it's mostly done out of necessity rather than choice.
Can't they get out and kill the Ubers already instead of sitting in the lot?
(half-serious, but I have been wondering what are the reasons they don't just push the price towards zero during low hours?)
Seeing all these Waymos together like this... is depressing. You get a sense of the scale at which machines are replacing humans. This could be a scary movie made in 1970s about the robotic future... and that future has now arrived. What will the world look like 10, 20 years from now? What would a scary movie made today contain?
Robots and technology have been replacing humans for many decades. It's a positive thing and change is a natural part of life. It's hardly depressing, it's progress.
It's not like humans are somehow put on this earth only to do certain jobs or the same job forever. Contrary to 100+ plus years of predictions, humans will never become obsolete.
Just wanted to thank you for the Sutro Tower work (https://vincentwoo.com/3d/sutro_tower/), it was truly beautiful and I’ve been looking at it so many times, very nostalgic for me. This one is great too!
Could you please review and follow the site guidelines? "Oh, who cares." is not an ok way to respond to someone's work on HN, and is particularly bad when a thread is just getting underway.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
(of course I understand that it's disappointing when you're hoping for certain content and end up with something else, but still - please don't express that in a hostile way)
If you like that sort of thing, see "AGV Garden".[1]
(This is the port of Rotterdam, ten years ago. Sped up about 3x. Most big ports look like that now. Automated driving works really well when all those pesky humans are out of the way.)
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waymo_Zeekr_Vehicle_...
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waymo_Zeekr_Vehicle_...
Presumably they use the loophole called "paying the tariff".
And which number gets you there depends on your lifestyle.
And taking a job without any consideration of pay.
It's the world most complex model railway with cars (not just trains) that go around in predetermined routes, and also go to the charging station when their battery is low. And I guess Waymos are a version of that but with human-scale! (Oh they still need humans to plug the charging cables into them).
I wonder if they park themselves or if the maintenance people park them...
Also, the footage feels like Satellite Reign https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFZVXG0g40Q (or the original game, Syndicate Wars)
When most road transport is automated it will seem crazy that everyone had to drive for themselves, or sit in the car with a complete stranger, who may prioritise their comfort over the traveller's with regard to audio, navigation noise, air 'fresheners' / diffusers, temperature. Perhaps analogous to having a flatmate; it's mostly done out of necessity rather than choice.
After all, self driving cars have some of the highest positive to negative externality ratio of any modern technology
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/25/us/santa-monica-waymo-bat...
It's not like humans are somehow put on this earth only to do certain jobs or the same job forever. Contrary to 100+ plus years of predictions, humans will never become obsolete.
Perhaps we need a euphemism for UBI: Let's call it "level-1 rich".
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(of course I understand that it's disappointing when you're hoping for certain content and end up with something else, but still - please don't express that in a hostile way)
(This is the port of Rotterdam, ten years ago. Sped up about 3x. Most big ports look like that now. Automated driving works really well when all those pesky humans are out of the way.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo&