Stuck mid-ride for an hour
During a power outage hitting roughly 7,000 PG&E customers in San Francisco, Waymo cut freeway routes and paused service for an hour. The spokesperson said the company was 'making temporary adjustments while we monitor local conditions' — corporate for 'your car is sitting at the curb.' It's the third repeat after December's outage and the July 4th fireworks disruption; Mayor Daniel Lurie now wants stricter rules for autonomous vehicles during emergencies.[1]
Seen from the street, the difference is this: a robotaxi fleet's scale doesn't change the fact that it's still wired to the grid when the grid goes down. Last week I wrote about Siri reading your photos but searching your contacts for 'Iran'; this week's magic-meets-mishap moment is a different failure point — the infrastructure running underneath trips on something as mundane as a generator. My advice: if your city has outage risk that day, trust an old-fashioned cab over a Waymo.[1], [3]
Gemini's quota just went stealth
The same week, Google started counting how 'heavy' each Gemini request is instead of how many you send. So a day where you could generate three videos might drop to two if they're complex — and you can't know in advance. The free tier's limit is described only as 'standard'; transparency here isn't a design choice, it's the absence of one.[2]
My advice: don't panic, but get in the habit of checking 'Usage limits' under the gear icon — the top bar resets every five hours, the bottom one weekly. My guess is every major consumer assistant moves to this 'stealth quota' model within months, because promising a fixed number no longer hides the real cost. For the street-level user, the outcome's the same either way: dazzles you one second, hits you with 'you've reached your limit' the next.[2]