Waymo explains why its robotaxis got stuck during the SF blackout

Waymo explains why its robotaxis got stuck during the SF blackout | TechCrunch

Tech-news autonomous vehicles, robotaxis, Waymo December 26, 2025

Waymo is shipping a software update to help its robotaxis navigate disabled traffic lights during power outages “more decisively,” the company said Tuesday in a blog post that explains why its self-driving vehicles got stuck at intersections during a blackout in San Francisco this past weekend.

Waymo said the self-driving system in its robotaxis treats dead stop lights as four-way stops, just like humans are supposed to. That should have allowed the robotaxis to operate normally in spite of the massive outage.

Instead, many of the vehicles requested a “confirmation check” from Waymo’s fleet response team to make sure what they were doing was correct. All Waymo robotaxis have the ability to make these confirmation checks. With such a widespread outage on Saturday, there was a “concentrated spike” in these confirmation requests, Waymo said, which helped create all the congestion caught on video.

Waymo said it built this confirmation request system “out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment” but that it is now refining it to “match our current scale.”

“While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the [self-driving software] with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively,” the company wrote.

The software update will add “even more context about regional outages” to the company’s self-driving software. Waymo also said it will improve its emergency response protocols by “incorporating lessons from this event.”

While a lot of focus has been placed on the instances where Waymo’s robotaxis got stuck during the power outage, the company shared that its vehicles “successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday.”

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“Navigating an event of this magnitude presented a unique challenge for autonomous technology,” the company wrote.

Saturday’s mess is the latest example of how Waymo is still uncovering unforeseen issues with its software and its approach to designing a reliable fleet of self-driving vehicles. The company already had to ship multiple software updates to make its robotaxis wait for stopped school buses, which prompted a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation and led to a recall.

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‘Heated Rivalry’ Creator Reveals the Finale’s Biggest Changes From the Book and the Status of Season 2

OPPO Launches Filmmaker Accelerator Program in India With Discovery

Mobile photography used to be about taking the least muddied photo, but that’s not the case anymore. Smartphone photography is getting better every year, thanks to phones like the OPPO Find X9 Ultra. And OPPO clearly wants to be at the center of that movement in India. The company has now announced a new Filmmaker Accelerator Program, in collaboration with Warner Bros. Discovery, as part of its newly launched OPPO LUMO Creator Program. The initiative is aimed at emerging Indian creators and focuses heavily on short-form mobile storytelling.

OPPO Wants Creators to “Meet Culture Anew”

This year marks the third edition of OPPO’s Culture in a Shot initiative. Previous themes focused on documenting traditions and celebrations, but the 2026 edition shifts toward something broader. The new theme, “Meet Culture Anew, Make Your Moment,” focuses on how younger creators reinterpret culture through everyday moments, fashion, food, travel, and digital expression.

The centerpiece here is the Filmmaker Accelerator Program, which OPPO and Discovery are positioning as a proper mentorship pipeline for young creators. Selected participants will receive guidance from industry professionals across storytelling, filming, and post-production. OPPO will also provide access to its latest smartphones and creator grants.

Speaking on the matter, Goldee Patnaik, Head of Communications at OPPO India, said

At OPPO, we believe technology should empower people to tell stories that matter.‘Culture in a Shot’ reflects our belief that culture is living, evolving, and best expressed through real people and everyday moments. With the introduction of a dedicated video category this year, we aim to inspire a new generation of creators to tell powerful stories through short-form visual content and share them with the world.

The biggest winner gets:

₹5 lakh cash prize

An OPPO Find X9 Ultra smartphone

An opportunity to direct a collaborative short film with OPPO x Discovery later this year

Official recognition across OPPO India platforms

To participate, creators need to upload original videos on Instagram, 30 seconds to 10 minutes long, using hashtags such as #OPPOxDiscovery, #CultureInAShot, and #ShotOnOPPO. The contest runs from May 5 to July 15, 2026.

#OPPO #Launches #Filmmaker #Accelerator #Program #India #DiscoveryOppo

#OPPO #Launches #Filmmaker #Accelerator #Program #India #DiscoveryOppo">

mwasimuddin125 0

OPPO Find X9 Ultra. And OPPO clearly wants to be at the center of that movement in India. The company has now announced a new Filmmaker Accelerator Program, in collaboration with Warner Bros. Discovery, as part of its newly launched OPPO LUMO Creator Program. The initiative is aimed at emerging Indian creators and focuses heavily on short-form mobile storytelling.

OPPO Wants Creators to “Meet Culture Anew”

This year marks the third edition of OPPO’s Culture in a Shot initiative. Previous themes focused on documenting traditions and celebrations, but the 2026 edition shifts toward something broader. The new theme, “Meet Culture Anew, Make Your Moment,” focuses on how younger creators reinterpret culture through everyday moments, fashion, food, travel, and digital expression.

The centerpiece here is the Filmmaker Accelerator Program, which OPPO and Discovery are positioning as a proper mentorship pipeline for young creators. Selected participants will receive guidance from industry professionals across storytelling, filming, and post-production. OPPO will also provide access to its latest smartphones and creator grants.

Speaking on the matter, Goldee Patnaik, Head of Communications at OPPO India, said

At OPPO, we believe technology should empower people to tell stories that matter.‘Culture in a Shot’ reflects our belief that culture is living, evolving, and best expressed through real people and everyday moments. With the introduction of a dedicated video category this year, we aim to inspire a new generation of creators to tell powerful stories through short-form visual content and share them with the world.

The biggest winner gets:

₹5 lakh cash prize
An OPPO Find X9 Ultra smartphone
An opportunity to direct a collaborative short film with OPPO x Discovery later this year
Official recognition across OPPO India platforms

To participate, creators need to upload original videos on Instagram, 30 seconds to 10 minutes long, using hashtags such as #OPPOxDiscovery, #CultureInAShot, and #ShotOnOPPO. The contest runs from May 5 to July 15, 2026.

#OPPO #Launches #Filmmaker #Accelerator #Program #India #DiscoveryOppo">OPPO Launches Filmmaker Accelerator Program in India With Discovery

Mobile photography used to be about taking the least muddied photo, but that’s not the case anymore. Smartphone photography is getting better every year, thanks to phones like the OPPO Find X9 Ultra. And OPPO clearly wants to be at the center of that movement in India. The company has now announced a new Filmmaker Accelerator Program, in collaboration with Warner Bros. Discovery, as part of its newly launched OPPO LUMO Creator Program. The initiative is aimed at emerging Indian creators and focuses heavily on short-form mobile storytelling.

OPPO Wants Creators to “Meet Culture Anew”

Speaking on the matter, Goldee Patnaik, Head of Communications at OPPO India, said

At OPPO, we believe technology should empower people to tell stories that matter.‘Culture in a Shot’ reflects our belief that culture is living, evolving, and best expressed through real people and everyday moments. With the introduction of a dedicated video category this year, we aim to inspire a new generation of creators to tell powerful stories through short-form visual content and share them with the world.

The biggest winner gets:

₹5 lakh cash prize
An OPPO Find X9 Ultra smartphone
An opportunity to direct a collaborative short film with OPPO x Discovery later this year
Official recognition across OPPO India platforms

#OPPO #Launches #Filmmaker #Accelerator #Program #India #DiscoveryOppo

Yes, Apple Is Reportedly Retooling Some Liquid Glass Problems for macOS 27
By providing a needed security patch to an older version of iOS last month, Apple tacitly—but unofficially—acknowledged that avoiding the Liquid Glass aesthetic is a valid choice. Now, according to anonymous sources who spoke to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, an upcoming update will address problems with Liquid Glass in macOS 26. If you haven’t updated because you hate it, or are worried the design flaws make it unusable, you are seen.

Gurman writes that Apple “is preparing what people internally consider to be a ‘slight redesign’ for macOS 27,” and that the company is looking to fix, “shadows and transparency quirks.” Gurman’s sources sound a bit defensive, however. They tell him the Liquid Glass update “didn’t necessarily suffer from design problems,” but instead had “a not-completely-baked implementation from Apple’s software engineering team.” The fixes, then, are supposed to “make Liquid Glass look the way Apple’s design team intended it to from the start.” Got it? The designers thought everything through from the beginning, but the artless neanderthals who built their designs into software—this thinking goes—let them down. My first impression was that it was overly generous of Gurman to give voice to this framing of the Liquid Glass story, but I have to admit that it’s also a genuinely plausible explanation for just how hated the design scheme ended up being. For instance, while Apple has already chipped away at some of the bigger problems, Tahoe shipped with some issues that were beyond annoying and actually interfered with usability, particularly for low vision people. Before the 26.3 update in February, as OS X Daily noted, choosing the option to reduce transparency “would leave considerable transparent effects, including in sidebars, headers, titlebars, search boxes, and more, leading to situations where text would overlap and interface elements would be washed out with blurry colors and interface elements.”

Then again, some designs were heavily criticized on an aesthetic basis, not as bad implementation. There’s probably no bigger Apple fan than John Gruber of Daring Fireball, and his take on the redesign of some of the icons was scorching: “I don’t think the old icons for these apps from MacOS 15 were particularly good — Apple has mostly lost its “icons look cool” game. But the new ones in MacOS 26 Tahoe are objectively terrible.”

Gurman has claimed in the past that Liquid Glass is sort of a long game, rolled out in advance of the release of the 20th anniversary iPhone, which he expects to be a huge design milestone for Apple. Supposedly, that phone’s overall vibe will benefit from Liquid Glass. When all is revealed, maybe the world will agree. In the meantime, macOS is getting some tweaks, and we should expect, Gurman says, “more of a cleanup and refinement effort aligned with the company’s wider push to polish its software this year.” #Apple #Reportedly #Retooling #Liquid #Glass #Problems #macOSApple,Liquid Glass,macos 27

mwasimuddin125 0

By providing a needed security patch to an older version of iOS last month, Apple tacitly—but unofficially—acknowledged that avoiding the Liquid Glass aesthetic is a valid choice.

Now, according to anonymous sources who spoke to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, an upcoming update will address problems with Liquid Glass in macOS 26. If you haven’t updated because you hate it, or are worried the design flaws make it unusable, you are seen.

Gurman writes that Apple “is preparing what people internally consider to be a ‘slight redesign’ for macOS 27,” and that the company is looking to fix, “shadows and transparency quirks.”

Gurman’s sources sound a bit defensive, however. They tell him the Liquid Glass update “didn’t necessarily suffer from design problems,” but instead had “a not-completely-baked implementation from Apple’s software engineering team.” The fixes, then, are supposed to “make Liquid Glass look the way Apple’s design team intended it to from the start.” Got it? The designers thought everything through from the beginning, but the artless neanderthals who built their designs into software—this thinking goes—let them down.

My first impression was that it was overly generous of Gurman to give voice to this framing of the Liquid Glass story, but I have to admit that it’s also a genuinely plausible explanation for just how hated the design scheme ended up being.

For instance, while Apple has already chipped away at some of the bigger problems, Tahoe shipped with some issues that were beyond annoying and actually interfered with usability, particularly for low vision people. Before the 26.3 update in February, as OS X Daily noted, choosing the option to reduce transparency “would leave considerable transparent effects, including in sidebars, headers, titlebars, search boxes, and more, leading to situations where text would overlap and interface elements would be washed out with blurry colors and interface elements.”

Then again, some designs were heavily criticized on an aesthetic basis, not as bad implementation. There’s probably no bigger Apple fan than John Gruber of Daring Fireball, and his take on the redesign of some of the icons was scorching: “I don’t think the old icons for these apps from MacOS 15 were particularly good — Apple has mostly lost its “icons look cool” game. But the new ones in MacOS 26 Tahoe are objectively terrible.”

Gurman has claimed in the past that Liquid Glass is sort of a long game, rolled out in advance of the release of the 20th anniversary iPhone, which he expects to be a huge design milestone for Apple. Supposedly, that phone’s overall vibe will benefit from Liquid Glass. When all is revealed, maybe the world will agree.

In the meantime, macOS is getting some tweaks, and we should expect, Gurman says, “more of a cleanup and refinement effort aligned with the company’s wider push to polish its software this year.”

#Apple #Reportedly #Retooling #Liquid #Glass #Problems #macOSApple,Liquid Glass,macos 27">Yes, Apple Is Reportedly Retooling Some Liquid Glass Problems for macOS 27

By providing a needed security patch to an older version of iOS last month, Apple tacitly—but unofficially—acknowledged that avoiding the Liquid Glass aesthetic is a valid choice.

Now, according to anonymous sources who spoke to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, an upcoming update will address problems with Liquid Glass in macOS 26. If you haven’t updated because you hate it, or are worried the design flaws make it unusable, you are seen.

Gurman writes that Apple “is preparing what people internally consider to be a ‘slight redesign’ for macOS 27,” and that the company is looking to fix, “shadows and transparency quirks.”

Gurman’s sources sound a bit defensive, however. They tell him the Liquid Glass update “didn’t necessarily suffer from design problems,” but instead had “a not-completely-baked implementation from Apple’s software engineering team.” The fixes, then, are supposed to “make Liquid Glass look the way Apple’s design team intended it to from the start.” Got it? The designers thought everything through from the beginning, but the artless neanderthals who built their designs into software—this thinking goes—let them down.

My first impression was that it was overly generous of Gurman to give voice to this framing of the Liquid Glass story, but I have to admit that it’s also a genuinely plausible explanation for just how hated the design scheme ended up being.

For instance, while Apple has already chipped away at some of the bigger problems, Tahoe shipped with some issues that were beyond annoying and actually interfered with usability, particularly for low vision people. Before the 26.3 update in February, as OS X Daily noted, choosing the option to reduce transparency “would leave considerable transparent effects, including in sidebars, headers, titlebars, search boxes, and more, leading to situations where text would overlap and interface elements would be washed out with blurry colors and interface elements.”

Then again, some designs were heavily criticized on an aesthetic basis, not as bad implementation. There’s probably no bigger Apple fan than John Gruber of Daring Fireball, and his take on the redesign of some of the icons was scorching: “I don’t think the old icons for these apps from MacOS 15 were particularly good — Apple has mostly lost its “icons look cool” game. But the new ones in MacOS 26 Tahoe are objectively terrible.”

Gurman has claimed in the past that Liquid Glass is sort of a long game, rolled out in advance of the release of the 20th anniversary iPhone, which he expects to be a huge design milestone for Apple. Supposedly, that phone’s overall vibe will benefit from Liquid Glass. When all is revealed, maybe the world will agree.

In the meantime, macOS is getting some tweaks, and we should expect, Gurman says, “more of a cleanup and refinement effort aligned with the company’s wider push to polish its software this year.”

#Apple #Reportedly #Retooling #Liquid #Glass #Problems #macOSApple,Liquid Glass,macos 27

After three people died on a cruise ship struck by a hantavirus, authorities are actively tracking down 29 people who had left the ship. They’re trying to trace the spread of the virus. It’s a long, arduous, global process to find and notify people who might be at risk of infection.

Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be an app for that?

Contact-tracing apps were a global effort starting in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Enabled by phone companies like Apple and Google, contact tracing was designed to use Bluetooth connections to detect when people had come in contact with someone who had or would later test positive for Covid and report as much. It didn’t do much to solve the spread of the pandemic, but tracking the virus became more effective at least. The same process wouldn’t go well for the hantavirus problem.

“There is no use of apps for this hantavirus outbreak,” Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an email response to WIRED. “The number of cases are small, and it’s important to trace all contacts exactly to stop transmission.”

On a smaller scale of infection like this, officials have to start at the source (an infected individual), then go person-by-person, confirming where they went and who they might have come into contact with. Data collected by apps from a broad swath of devices would not be anywhere close to accurate enough to give a good idea of where the virus might have hitchhiked to next.

Contact tracing on a wider scale, like, say, a global pandemic, is less about tracking the individual infections and more about understanding what parts of the population might be affected, giving people the opportunity to self-quarantine after exposure. But that depends on how people choose to respond, and how the technology is utilized by public emergency systems. During the Covid pandemic, contact-tracing via apps tended to work better in more carefully managed European countries, but did not slow the spread in the US.

Making devices accessible to that kind of proximity information has also brought all sorts of concerns about privacy, given that the technology would require always-on access to work properly. Contact tracing also struggled to maintain accuracy, and in some cases could be providing false negatives or positives that don’t help further real information about the spread of the virus.

Especially in the case of something like the Hantavirus, where every person on that cruise ship can theoretically be directly tracked and contacted, it’s better to do that process the hard way.

“During small but highly fatal outbreaks, more precision is required,” Gurley wrote.

#ContactTracing #Apps #Hantaviruscoronavirus,covid-19,viruses,health,pandemics">

Could Contact-Tracing Apps Help With the Hantavirus? Not ReallyAfter three people died on a cruise ship struck by a hantavirus, authorities are actively tracking down 29 people who had left the ship. They’re trying to trace the spread of the virus. It’s a long, arduous, global process to find and notify people who might be at risk of infection.Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be an app for that?Contact-tracing apps were a global effort starting in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Enabled by phone companies like Apple and Google, contact tracing was designed to use Bluetooth connections to detect when people had come in contact with someone who had or would later test positive for Covid and report as much. It didn’t do much to solve the spread of the pandemic, but tracking the virus became more effective at least. The same process wouldn’t go well for the hantavirus problem.“There is no use of apps for this hantavirus outbreak,” Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an email response to WIRED. “The number of cases are small, and it’s important to trace all contacts exactly to stop transmission.”On a smaller scale of infection like this, officials have to start at the source (an infected individual), then go person-by-person, confirming where they went and who they might have come into contact with. Data collected by apps from a broad swath of devices would not be anywhere close to accurate enough to give a good idea of where the virus might have hitchhiked to next.Contact tracing on a wider scale, like, say, a global pandemic, is less about tracking the individual infections and more about understanding what parts of the population might be affected, giving people the opportunity to self-quarantine after exposure. But that depends on how people choose to respond, and how the technology is utilized by public emergency systems. During the Covid pandemic, contact-tracing via apps tended to work better in more carefully managed European countries, but did not slow the spread in the US.Making devices accessible to that kind of proximity information has also brought all sorts of concerns about privacy, given that the technology would require always-on access to work properly. Contact tracing also struggled to maintain accuracy, and in some cases could be providing false negatives or positives that don’t help further real information about the spread of the virus.Especially in the case of something like the Hantavirus, where every person on that cruise ship can theoretically be directly tracked and contacted, it’s better to do that process the hard way.“During small but highly fatal outbreaks, more precision is required,” Gurley wrote.#ContactTracing #Apps #Hantaviruscoronavirus,covid-19,viruses,health,pandemics

mwasimuddin125 0

After three people died on a cruise ship struck by a hantavirus, authorities are actively tracking down 29 people who had left the ship. They’re trying to trace the spread of the virus. It’s a long, arduous, global process to find and notify people who might be at risk of infection.
Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be an app for that?
Contact-tracing apps were a global effort starting in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Enabled by phone companies like Apple and Google, contact tracing was designed to use Bluetooth connections to detect when people had come in contact with someone who had or would later test positive for Covid and report as much. It didn’t do much to solve the spread of the pandemic, but tracking the virus became more effective at least. The same process wouldn’t go well for the hantavirus problem.
“There is no use of apps for this hantavirus outbreak,” Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an email response to WIRED. “The number of cases are small, and it’s important to trace all contacts exactly to stop transmission.”
On a smaller scale of infection like this, officials have to start at the source (an infected individual), then go person-by-person, confirming where they went and who they might have come into contact with. Data collected by apps from a broad swath of devices would not be anywhere close to accurate enough to give a good idea of where the virus might have hitchhiked to next.
Contact tracing on a wider scale, like, say, a global pandemic, is less about tracking the individual infections and more about understanding what parts of the population might be affected, giving people the opportunity to self-quarantine after exposure. But that depends on how people choose to respond, and how the technology is utilized by public emergency systems. During the Covid pandemic, contact-tracing via apps tended to work better in more carefully managed European countries, but did not slow the spread in the US.
Making devices accessible to that kind of proximity information has also brought all sorts of concerns about privacy, given that the technology would require always-on access to work properly. Contact tracing also struggled to maintain accuracy, and in some cases could be providing false negatives or positives that don’t help further real information about the spread of the virus.
Especially in the case of something like the Hantavirus, where every person on that cruise ship can theoretically be directly tracked and contacted, it’s better to do that process the hard way.
“During small but highly fatal outbreaks, more precision is required,” Gurley wrote.

#ContactTracing #Apps #Hantaviruscoronavirus,covid-19,viruses,health,pandemics">Could Contact-Tracing Apps Help With the Hantavirus? Not Really

Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be an app for that?

Especially in the case of something like the Hantavirus, where every person on that cruise ship can theoretically be directly tracked and contacted, it’s better to do that process the hard way.

“During small but highly fatal outbreaks, more precision is required,” Gurley wrote.

#ContactTracing #Apps #Hantaviruscoronavirus,covid-19,viruses,health,pandemics

‘Heated Rivalry’ Creator Reveals the Finale’s Biggest Changes From the Book and the Status of Season 2

US judge blocks detention of British social media campaigner

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OPPO Wants Creators to “Meet Culture Anew”

OPPO Wants Creators to “Meet Culture Anew”

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