The companies that have real boards would never take the risk.
Once Elon’s air cover is blown, the government is going the dissect Tesla. Once someone gets the injunction to stop deletion of crash data and allow for inspection, they are cooked.
I don't think self-driving is remotely close to working at any scale. I also don't think it's the killer-app. Right now, cheap electrics and moreso cheap hybrids are the killer.
It works "at scale" if you have no idea what "at scale" actually means and have never left the Bay Area or NYC. Or if you like, don't believe weather exists.
I ride in my friends Model Y Performance with HW 4.5 from time to time and it always gets us from point A to point B without any interventions that I have seen yet and this is in Wisconsin, and yes it was working well with some snow and ice conditions this past winter. It seems really impressive to me at least.
Okay, but do you admit it (self-driving, either Tesla or Waymo) works in the Bay Area? Because the OP said self-driving is not remotely working "at any scale".
That's fair. In all honesty I'm already feeling challenged but given how much time I save I can set aside some time to keep myself sharp. I can learn more languages. Additionally, as pointed out by others, I'm trading coding effort for design and and strategy, which generally control business outcomes a lot more.
Having said that, I won't use AI for production system if I don't understand the programming constructs in enough detail.
Easily 99 percent on most tasks. As an example, for a Python project with a dozen modules and ~50 files,a simple instruction like "Design a config file backed by Pydantic to store the project's settings. Keep the models modular" sets up nested Pydantic models, moves the settings to sensibly named JSON fields and updates the code to use Pydantic classes everywhere. Takes a few minutes maybe. Manually done the same task would take me half a few hours in the best case and a day in the worst case.
Ask them their name/ last initial, employee ID or unique identifier for the conversation, direct phone number, job title and what location they're based at. Scammers will pretty much always refuse/argue/hang up on this (once I had one start insulting my mother in Hindi when I asked him this). Then call your bank's proper number and verify all of these details.
(But in any case your bank will never call outwards to you, unless you've specifically requested that, which you almost never do.)
Unfortunately my UK banks (and others) DO regularly make calls to me unannounced and demand my ID to 'prove who I am'. They are not scam calls and the callers cannot understand what they are doing wrong. If I'd had more strength in the last round of this stupidity I'd have done a number on them with the regulator. (I used to work in finance and was the director of a regulated financial entity, so I think I'd have a head start.)
In the US Caller ID has been so hopelessly compromised (for almost two decades now, that's on Congress) that financial institutions almost never make outbound calls, and only ever use standardized published numbers; I wasn't aware other countries differ so much.
Please tell us more context with regard to your UK banks making multiple unannounced calls demanding your ID ... were you an individual customer? finance director? MD? or what? Why on earth do they do that? Have you told them in writing not to? There must be more backstory to that.
Banking example: trying to move some savings from one UK bank to another - back to where the money had originally come from, and that had just purchased the first bank too. It took 8h on the phone over a week or so to get the money back, which was interspersed with a comedic number of calls from withheld numbers and people unknown to me demanding enough info to get access to my money. And other very poor practice. The bank even conceeded at least once in writing that it knew that it was screwing up and sent me £100 by way of apology - but carried right on screwing up.
Non-banking: getting a call out of the blue from my Internet Service Provider again demanding enough credentials to get access to my (business) account, and unable to understand why that was very poor practice. I used to like that ISP a lot, and have been with it for a looooooong time, but the angry exchange with who seems to have been my account manager has soured the relationship a lot.
Happy note: just had a sensible interaction with my bank where it called me back but the caller understood why NOT to ask data that could be used to access my account, and we managed to resolve the issue that I was having (which, I think, was my error)!
My bank (big green French one) pretty much always calls me whenever I do some unusual money transfer, even between my company and my personal accounts (they're both with the same bank), even though the transfers are authenticated either via the app or by an SMS code. However, the people calling me don't ask any details, just "is this vladvasiliu? Is it actually you who initiated this transfer, for x amount on y date?".
What are they, then? Sales/marketing calls? Or some security notifications ("we noticed some suspicious operations in the last 3 days...")? If it's the former, that's still scam in my books. Specifically, it's a first-party scam, as opposed to a third-party scam, where some third party pretends to be your bank.
They both should be treated similarly; unfortunately, you can't report first-party scams to police.
In my experience they're security calls. UK has good opt out marketing rules for legit companies.
But the usual security call is exactly like a spam call, no authentication from their end, immediately requesting id verification "answer these security questions", and refusing to go off script.
People have been asking for years to be able to lodge a security challenge code on their profile that can add confidence in the caller. Given there are already multiple security questions on an account, this could be a process change: the security challenge script becomes "the first and sixteenth characters of your mother's maiden name are 7 and F, what are the third and fifth characters of your first pets name".
In the UK, banks like Starling, Monzo and Revolut (and building societies such as Nationwide) have added a call status feature in their apps [0][1][2] that tells you if they are actually the ones calling.
Yeah, this is a no brainer (and I think most banks let you verify via the app rather than personal info) to avoid the annoying uncertainty (but note my mother would not be able to handle that I expect)
No "challenge code" your profile can be used to authenticate a caller. Profiles get leaked, almost all of them have been at some point, or at least that's the safe assumption to operate under.
Yeah as sibling points out, lots of orgs have scammy official security calls. This leads to a dance I have been through quite often.
<phone rings, I pick up> Hello
Them: Am I speaking to Sean Hunter
Me: Yes
Them: This is <rubbish bank who should know better>. Can you confirm your <date of birth/full address with postcode>
Me: Yes
Them: Err, … sorry I didn’t quite catch that.
Me: Yes.
Them: <thoroughly confused>I asked whether you can confirm your <date of birth/full address with postcode>
Me: Yes. I can.
Them: err… I can’t talk to you without you passing security.
Me: You called me.
Them: I’m sorry…?
Me: You called me. You wanting to talk to me about something is your problem.
Them: I need you to pass security before I can talk to you.
Me: OK, well. Have a nice day. <hang up>
Almost this exact thing has happened multiple times with one of my bank accounts which I can’t completely shut because of boring reasons but I have basically deprecated because they do this sort of nonsense. My main bank now is much better.
One of my banks refused to talk to me over the phone and informed me to go to a branch with 2 pieces of ID. Fair, it was a credit card opened online.
Only to find the 2 pieces of ID were just for them to talk to me and ask for more documents. Rubbish like employment letters (uhhhh, how about YOU call my employer instead of me printing out the “letter” they’ll email me?) or tax return stuff mid-year.
I cut up the credit card and mailed the pieces to their legal department. Someone called me pretty quick and without any authentication hassles.
That’s wild.
If my bank needs something from me they send an email saying that a message is available in the online portal - or in some cases they send me a physical letter.
Anything else would be highly suspicious
I generally say at some point before terminating the call "you should not train your customers to give out account access credentials to strangers" and the caller usually has no clue what I mean. Does no one in the security teams have theory of mind?
This will be the way I bring up the issue with the regulator if I do. I can think of many ways round this issue that would be much safer and not especially arduous.
A few of the bank people that I spoke to during the last caper were pretty senior and those did understand the issue that I raised but found themselves constrained by their rules, though one or two got creative with me in a good way. (Pretty much none of those who called me were 'minimum wage' in my estimation.) But very more senior management should be setting good scripts and expectations for the less-well-paid staff doing the grunt work. That is what their higher pay should be buying, IMHO.
I dream of a time I don’t have a bank, or not in any traditional sense.
I’d been hunting for ways to use a Wisecard standoff a bank but got a bit wary of what would happen if they went bust. Government backed guarantee do not exist for Wise.
I ask them for all of that and their credit card details, mothers maiden name, name of their first pet, first school they went to, and what colour underwear they’re wearing.
I should probably learn how to insult their mother in Hindi too.
Or, which has worked great for me; just never answer the phone. If people need something they will email or chat. If not then it is not going to be important.
This. If people have a "real" reason to correspond with you they will have no problem making a record of it via a voicemail or text or email or whatever.
I've had friends that got into a spot of bother and tried calling from an unknown number. If it's a phone you can't text from, then leaving a voice mail with voice transcription is about the only way I'll know it's a friendly call
Nowadays, when banks call you here, they allow you to verify the bank is actually calling you with the mobile app - you can see their name and number they're calling you from in the app. Also, you can often verify you're you with the app too, same as any other app authorization, so you don't have to share any details over the phone. I feel like this is a pretty good improvement.
That does seem better than blind trust but that app infrastructure could get compromised. I would still be wary in any situation where I did not originate the call with the bank.
Ye, I only get called by banks when my transaction gets classified as potentially fraudulent (which pretty much just means that it is for a bigger amount of money) or some other even more rare situations like finishing a loan application. Still, I'd rather be double sure that it is the bank that's calling me because I don't want to assume solely based on the convenient timing.
If the app infrastructure is compromised, the bank is liable so it feels like less of a problem. If the app does offer authorizing through the app, I shouldn't be asked any personal details that my bank already knows so I (hopefully) would still be wary, if put in such a situation though. Obviously hard to know what I'd actually do unless it actually happens to me.
We have an app called bankid. If my bank calls me they'll ask me to open the app to auth, the app shows that the specific bank initiated auth and also says that they called me.
Same app is used to auth to government pages and all kinds of stuff online, even purchases.
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