I've heard from English and German visitors that 4 way intersections are frequently disambiguated by a concept of priority roads, and they seem surprised by the relatively smaller number of intersections in SF that stop only one of the roads.
I saw plenty of Waymos managing to make it through intersections. They were slow and tentative, but definitely made forward progress.
I think the emergency "phone home" protocol requires a phone, presumably with enough channel capacity for reasonable video feeds. I wouldn't be surprised if the dead in the road Waymos were lacking connectivity.
There is of course also a possibility that the total demand exceeded the number of people at Waymos available for human intervention.
Yes, that is the same law in California, but so many people drift through stop signs that the guidance is close to meaningless.
In addition, there are 4-way stop signs all over SF and tourists regularly comment on how they work here.
The law is clear - yield to the right, but that is a pretty slow system in congested roads.
The local custom in SF is that someone is usually obviously first, rightmost, or just most aggressive, and opposing pairs of cars go simultaneously, while being wary about left turns.
Of course pedestrians have right of way in California, so someone in a crosswalk gives implied right of way to the road parallel to the person's crosswalk.
The result is 2x or better throughput, and lots of confused tourists.
So ... with the lights out on a Saturday before Xmas, there was a mess of SF local driving protocol, irritated shoppers, people coming to SF for Xmas parties, and just normal Saturday car and foot traffic.
I thought Waymo did pretty well, but as I said, I didn't see any ones that were dead in the middle of the street..
I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of lights that were out.
The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection. It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving.
The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get through the intersections. I saw one Waymo get bluffed out of its driving slot by cross traffic for perhaps 8 slots.
This was coupled with the fact that the Waymos seemed to all be following the same route. I saw a line of about a dozen trying to turn left, which is the trickiest thing to navigate.
And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the intersection.
On normal days, Waymos are much better at the 4-way stops than they used to be a few years back, by which I mean they are no longer dangerously timid. The Zoox (Amazon) cars are more like the Waymos used to be.
I expect there will be some software tweaks that will improve this situation, both routing around self-induced congestion and reading and crossing streets with dead lights.
Note that I didn't see any actually dead Waymos as others have reported here. I believe this is an extreme failsafe mode, and perhaps related to just too much weirdness for the software to handle.
It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.
Depending on the numbers involved, previous generation hardware can waterfall to infrastructure apps that are throughput based.
Things accessed through network APIs and billed per op or in aggregate. Distributed file systems, databases, even build and regression suite systems.
Another key point is that older generations of servers for full custom cloud environments tend to co-evolve with their environments. The amount of power and cooling for a rack may not support a modern deployment.
Especially if a generation lasts 6 years. You might be able to cascade gen N+1 to N, but N+6 may require a full retrofit. A 6 year old data center that is partially filled as individual servers fail may justify waiting for N+7 or even 8 to cover the cost of the downtime and retrofit.
There is a reason Google announced that they are depreciating servers over 6 years and Meta is at 5 years, vs the old accounting standard of 3 years.
Then of course there is a secondary market for memory and standard PCI cards, but the market for 6 year old tech is mainly spares, so it is unlikely to absorb the full size of the N-6 year data center build.
If you are considering a refurb style resale market for 6 year old tech, it is often the case that the performance per dollar is a non-starter because of the amount of power the older tech consumes.
While at Sun in the early 2000's, I was part of the due diligence team for an acquisition and had two days to review the entire code base of a 3 year old, 50 person software team.
This was standard practice, and the M&A policies knew that there was no way to actually understand all the code so there was a policy document to describe what to look for.
Of course the red flag things were unexpected 3rd party copyrights and/or license terms in case the code was encumbered.
But "swear words" were on the yellow flag list, in addition to "ToDo", "XXXX", and "Fix Me" types of things.
I remember thinking about places I have been in the past and that the people used those style comments tended to be the better programmers.
I mentioned this to the person leading the evaluation, and was told that point of noticing these kinds of comments was to look a more closely at the nearby code and try to decide if major functionality was missing or being faked.
It all worked out for that acquisition, but I remember being curious about whatever deal had gone bad in the distant past that made them codify this specific practice.
I think you are overestimating the value and amount of help from ARM, especially in the more recent Graviton generations, but of course I don't know Amazon's actual chip cost profile.
They put Ghislaine Maxwell in jail then had to wait until her appeal about Epstein's immunity deal made it to the Supreme Court.