We’ll hang things up for the year on Dec. 24 and pick things back up on Jan. 5. 

Happy holidays. (Yippee-Ki-Yay.) —AN

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What happened when Waymo robotaxis met a San Francisco blackout

An extraordinary experiment happened over the weekend in San Francisco.

What would a fleet of autonomous vehicles do when a widespread power outage knocked out traffic lights across one-third of the city? 

We quickly found out—and the results were plastered all over social media. 

On Saturday afternoon, Waymo vehicles throughout SF opted to stop where they were or pull over and throw on their hazard lights—“blocking intersections” and “compounding gridlock,” observed the San Francisco Standard—leading the Alphabet-owned robotaxi operator to suspend service throughout the city. (It resumed Sunday evening.)

In a statement, Waymo said that its vehicles are “designed to treat non-functional signals as four-way stops” but “the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual.” 

As locals worked through the outage, a moderate debate about the robotaxi fleet continued online. Was it so wrong to expect Waymo’s vehicles to play it safe when infrastructure stopped working? After all, aren’t human drivers predictably chaotic when things go sideways? What exactly should robotaxis optimize for: traffic flow or citizen safety? 

And: Just how safe is stopping if you prompt traffic to go around you?

Waymo resumed service Sunday evening, no doubt grappling with these questions (and what city officials might have to say about them). “We are already learning and improving from this event,” it said. —AN

More tech

—Pirates scrape Spotify. Activists Anna’s Archive release hundreds of terabytes of music and metadata via torrent files.

—Shield AI: Sitting at a global inflection point for fully autonomous warfighting.

—SoftBank cashes out to back OpenAI. The Japanese conglomerate is looking under every rock to fulfill its “all in” OpenAI funding promise.

—Chaos at CISA. A failed, unsanctioned polygraph by its acting director has the U.S. cybersecurity agency in disarray.

—PE firms acquire Clearwater Analytics for $8.4 billion. Permira and Warburg Pincus lead the investor group seeking to buy the fintech firm.

—Uber goes to London. A robotaxi trial in partnership with Baidu will begin in the first half of next year.

—Data center deals reach $61 billion worldwide in 2025, according to S&P Global.

—Chatbots’ uncanny valley. Making AI agents more human-like creates cognitive dissonance and trust issues, researchers say.

—Daylight between David Sacks and tech lobbyists. Tech reps say the AI czar’s push to use Trump’s executive order to suppress state AI regulation is the right idea, wrong execution.

• The Jacksonville Jaguars defeated the Denver Broncos 34-20, ending the Broncos’ 11-game winning streak.
• Jacksonville’s victory has positioned them as a potential Super Bowl contender in the AFC.
• Coach Liam Coen used comments from Broncos coach Sean Payton about Jacksonville being a “smaller market” as motivation.

DENVER — Time to recalibrate our expectations for this Jacksonville Jaguars team. Time to set a higher bar. Time to think about bigger things. Time to talk about goals beyond an AFC South title.

Like Super Bowl things.

How can you not after watching the Jaguars beat the Denver Broncos 34-20 at the cauldron known as Empower Field at Mile High on Sunday, Dec. 21? It was impressive and thorough and workmanlike, how the Jaguars ended the Broncos’ 11-game winning streak and handed them their first home loss in more than a year.

The Jaguars should believe a division title — they lead the Houston Texans by a game — isn’t enough.

The Jaguars should feel winning a first-round playoff game is only the beginning of a magical run in January/February.

And the Jaguars should be confident regardless of whether they have to return to Denver or play at New England next month.

“The fight of this team,” veteran receiver Tim Patrick said as he shook his head. “It was our first time this year going back and forth against somebody and battling and the continued will to execute at a high level when the pressure was on, I’m definitely proud of the guys.”

Welcome to the party, Jaguars. The Super Bowl Contender Party.

Hey, New England, Denver and Buffalo in the AFC and the Los Angeles Rams, Seattle, Philadelphia and Chicago in the NFC, make a place at the table for the Jaguars, who have won 11 games in a season for the first time since 2007 and have a six-game heater for the first time since 1999.

They … have … arrived.

“It’s not about ‘arriving’ — I knew what we had in OTAs (last spring),” cornerback Jourdan Lewis said. “I guess the rest of the league (now) understands who we are.”

An anonymous donor stepped in last month to save a Seattle-area community center that was slated to close.

Last week, community members learned that the new owner was travel writer and TV host Rick Steves, who pledged to keep it open and free for people needing hot showers and hot meals.

“I vividly remember what it’s like as a kid backpacking around the world to need a shower, to need a place to wash your clothes,” Steves told a crowd who gathered on Wednesday to celebrate the purchase over cake and with words fait accompli written in red icing.

Many homeless people had come to depend on the Lynnwood Hygiene Center, which had operated rent-free on the property since 2020.

But the center said in November that it would close after the property was sold to a developer.

Steves said he learned about the hygiene center’s impending closure by reading about it in a local online newspaper — just weeks before it was set to shut down.

Despite living nearby, he said he hadn’t even known the center existed.

In fact, Steves told NPR he didn’t even know what a hygiene center was until he read about the closure — a place where people can shower, wash clothes, grab a hot meal and spend a few hours indoors.

“I realized, oh my goodness, there’s an invisible community with an invisible center helping invisible people. And it’s not right. It needs to be kept alive,” Steves said.

In a series of posts on Bluesky, Steves said was struck by how difficult it would be to replace.

Steves said he bought the property for $2.25 million.

Members of the community pitched in another $400,000 in donations, which the center says will go toward renovations and expanding services.

“It’s huge,” said Sandra Mears, executive director of the Jean Kim Foundation, which runs the hygiene center.

Mears says before Steves came in, she had been told to plan a goodbye party.

“I didn’t want a goodbye party,” she said.

Thanks to the donations, Mears says the Lynnwood Hygiene Center will continue serving around 700 people in the community, providing upwards of 16,000 hot meals and 10,000 showers a year.

Steves called the purchase the best $2.25 million he could imagine spending.

But he says private donations are also not a substitute for public investment — and shouldn’t determine whether essential services survive.

He describes his decision as a response to what he sees as a failure of public priorities, not a model to be relied upon.

“If we don’t have [$2.25 million] for a whole county to give homeless people a shower and a place to get out of the rain and a place to wash their clothes, what kind of society are we?” Steves said.