Tech news picked on 2026-10-30
Waymo to supply robotaxis based on Toyota electric vehicle bZ4X in Japan and the UK
- Toyota plans to produce the electric vehicle bZ4X 2027 model year, equipped with Waymo's autonomous driving system, at its Takaoka plant in Japan. Waymo plans to start test operations in Japan next year with this vehicle. The source adds that this vehicle is called BZ in North America.
- Waymo has been testing Jaguar I-Pace self-driving cars in London, UK for several months and plans to start a robotaxi service once it receives the necessary permits. The source says Waymo also intends to deploy bZ4X in the UK and other right-hand-drive countries.
- The two companies agreed to review a plan to apply Waymo's autonomous driving technology to privately owned Toyota vehicles, and a road safety project using Waymo's real operating data. The source says the specific details of the safety project are unclear.
Can People Be Exempted from Using AI at Work on Religious Grounds? A Non-Religious Humanist Case
- David Dermen, an administrative staff member at the University of Kentucky, is a humanist who does not believe in God, but he said he received a religious accommodation (a work adjustment based on religious belief) that allowed him not to use AI at work. The university explained that it reviewed each request individually.
- Dermen argued that AI threatens livelihoods, increases environmental burdens, and takes away human creative work. This is his claim, and the article has not confirmed it as fact.
- A lawyer for the American Humanist Association (AHA) said that concerns about AI and human dignity can arise from many traditions, including Catholicism, Universalism, and humanism, and that people who do not believe in God also receive legal protection at work. A university spokesperson said the accommodation was provided on the condition that the employee continues to perform the core functions of the job.
Impeccable, a skill that reduces AI design taste, compared across 4 ways with the same request
- Impeccable is a publicly available AI design assistant skill in the pbakaus/impeccable repository on GitHub. According to the original article, when installed in an AI tool such as Claude Code, it first asks for product information and sets a work order, which keeps the AI from falling back to a common average design.
- The author made the same landing page request in four ways. The number of automated check findings was 5 to 8 items, so the difference was small. On the author's judgment of whether the design still works after changing the product name, only the method that asked for product information first and then built the page was hard to reuse for other products.
- Run times were about 5 minutes for default Claude Code, about 15 minutes for the method that had existing results critiqued and revised, and about 20 minutes for the method that built from scratch with Impeccable. The author recorded these with a script in a Windows and WSL 2 environment with Claude Code v2.1.287, so these figures are values measured in that environment.