This past weekend, one of Uber's autonomous vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, Elaine Herzberg. Video reveals that even as Elaine crossed in front of the car, the car did not stop or even slow. She was well within range of the vehicle's LIDAR, and local residents have posted their own videos showing that there was plenty of light to see by as well.

It's clear that Uber's reckless and callous company culture has produced an unsafe vehicle; in retrospect, it was always going to be Uber that took the first life. But what of the so-called "safety driver" sitting in the driver's seat? Dash video shows that she was looking down at the time of the accident (perhaps at a phone). Is she not to blame?

I submit that blaming the safety driver is both useless and dangerous.

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I bought an Asus RT-AC68U this weekend and tried to set it up. I was excited at first -- some aspects of the router are refreshingly better than the competition -- but ultimately I found it unusable problematic.

Updated after discovering a combination of misconfiguration and ISP shenanigans. My apologies to Asus, although there are still some serious issues with this router.

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I've been learning Spanish with free lesson "tapes" from Language Transfer (which I highly recommend.) The lessons are a collection of short audio MP3s and take the format of conversations between a teacher and a student; he introduces the language a bit at a time, and asks her questions; the listener is supposed to pause the track and answer each question, then hit play and hear her answer (which is sometimes wrong, of course.) It's a great format, but the only time I listen to the tapes is when I am walking somewhere. And this has produced an interesting effect.

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A little meditation on how it has changed for me to be a person on the web.

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