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Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

investor.lyft.com

301–310 of 350 posts

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#301

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In in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, a dad and his son were killed driving a car across a railway crossing with no gates. The dad (driver) was on his phone at the time and it is believed the phone blocked his view of the train and he was talking to much to hear the train. The person he was talking to said they were talking like normal and suddenly the phone cut off. Computers probably can not be worse that the people alrea…

If the bar is "better than someone talking on cell phone while crossing a railroad crossing without looking," I'll stick to manual driving. Self driving needs to be better than me, not better than average.

Hell, it needs to be better than you with a "train is coming, I'm going to slow down" driver assistance.

If you tell me that no such driver assistance exists, just apply it to scenarios where it exists, like lane keep assists and automatic emergency assists

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#302
post #240
post #227

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Sure, but when you load 20 people onto a vehicle, if you don't have a driver you still need a security guard.

Subways the world over do without just fine.

Subways in my country at least definitely do have guards (but they also have human drivers, so I don't think the two are really related).

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw Levandowski do a presentation of self-driving at an Uber all-hands and it was then and there that I knew that self-driving is 20+ years away. The example video showed so many small things that we take for granted as a human driver that would need to be built in or hand coded that AI or neural nets would never be able to get. There just isn’t a way that you can train every single little thing that could cause an…

AI/neural nets are good at detecting patterns, but only marginally so. Humans have such incredible pattern recognition that we have built-in fear mechanics for when things are _not_ a pattern we recognize. What percentage of the time do you experience fear when performing a task such as driving? Think about it - that's the margin for error that humans have in pattern recognition for that task.

I think the recognition performance is irrelevant, the failure mode of a model not knowing when there's something it can't recognize is the issue. Most clssifiers will just fail silently and let the toy car drive into a trailer.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#304
post #52

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This feels like bad faith. Musk has been making these claims every year since 2016. His coverage of these claims on HN is regular and thorough. I went ahead and Googled one for you from 2020: Tesla will be able to make its vehicles completely autonomous by the end of this year, founder Elon Musk has said. It was already "very close" to achieving the basic requirements of this "level-five" autonomy, which requires no…

Do you mean this comment? I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year. Basic functionality for level five isn't level five.

"Basic functionality for level five isn't level five."

I'm surprised you say this totally seriously. For me this means that level 5 will be this year, and then there might be extra new cool features, which are not necessary.

Basic functionality for level 5 sounds like both necessary and sufficient to me

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#305
post #225
post #221

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Perhaps. A lot of "long-haul" trucking is called trains.

In the US at least, trucks are by far the dominant means of transport, at 5x more freight than trains (slightly out of date, and by value): [1] https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/2017-north-american-freight-num...

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Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#306

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If we were talking about VW or Ford making stuff in Mexico people would be shitting all over made in Mexico. "Hurr durr side stepping muh UAW and muh OSHA" and stuff like that But brands that start with T and end with A can do no wrong on the white collar parts of the internet so Toyota gets a pass.

I mean, you're not wrong, but the history has shown that Japanese manufacturing is good. I don't know whether Toyota will pull it off, but if they do, they'll save some cash.

>but the history has shown that Japanese manufacturing is good.

Last I checked Nissan and Mitsubishi (though they're on the up and up lately) were Japanese. The people of the Camry tax brackets don't exactly hold them in high regard.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#307
post #146

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The world is already largely running on AI, just not the version of it that is in people's heads by watching sci-fi movies.

The world is running on good old software . I don't know of anything important that's running on anything that can be reasonably called AI . I think we can get by without Siri. Of course, if you include the entirety of machine learning under the AI label, then whatever. But in my opinion, a principal component analysis does not an AI make. Statistical inference has been around since before computers were invented.

I think there is some argument to be made that the Web is "running on" AI, since AI-driven ads businesses are the source of all money in the Web (essentially); and I do think that it's fair to call NNs "AI".

I for one am highly skeptical that the kind of automatic personalized targeting that AI enables is actually worth the price, but the industry overwhelmingly believes it is. So, removing AI from the picture would be considered to greatly diminish the value of advertising on the web per industry pricing, and with the ad money, much of the web would dry off.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#308
post #284

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Fuel is still wayyyy bigger than the driver. Both would be valuable - but a truck that is 30% more fuel efficient is probably going to save more money than one that doesn't need a driver (but still needs people more loading). There are different estimates everywhere - but I usually see 20-30% of trucking costs are drivers. In other freight industries (cargo ships, trains, etc.) it would obviously be less. https://www…

Another thing is that autonomous truck can drive 24h. In most countries there are regulation how often drivers have to take a break, e.g. in Poland after 4.5h of driving truck driver need 45min break, after 9h there is mandatory minimum 11h break.

In Australia on the major trucking routes, many trucks are company owned and are handed over to fresh drivers at rest stops. The trucks can proceed to destinations while the drivers sleep

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI/neural nets are good at detecting patterns, but only marginally so. Humans have such incredible pattern recognition that we have built-in fear mechanics for when things are _not_ a pattern we recognize. What percentage of the time do you experience fear when performing a task such as driving? Think about it - that's the margin for error that humans have in pattern recognition for that task.

You're raising an interesting point here. Humans pattern match everything (and integrate it into a world model). When something out of the ordinary appears, attention is brought to it immediately. By comparison, today's AIs just match what they can, leaving everything else out. I don't think that FSD can happen as long as that's the case.

I think a good rule to make is that to be fully selfreliant an AI would have to recognize random adjustments that are intentionally wrong or notably confusing for what they are or rather aren't.

I drove to work yesterday and a driver driving over the freshly painted lines to avoid a parked truck had basically caused a swerving lighter set of the lines in the middle of the road to appear. Similarly in my country at construction sites where the road is redirected for a while the new lines are often just in a different colour and the old ones remain. Sometimes they aren't and i've gotten confused at least once.

But what if it was intentional or more pronounced? Perhaps we really should paint ourselves a looney tunes-esque scenario. The kind where our hero paints some lines towards and a fake tunnel on a wall. Except instead of some by radar easily recognised wall it should be some other danger.

Also. If I put a cardboard cutout of a cartoon character next to or on a road will it cause these cars to slow down? Will it take a risk to swerve if the cutout appeared around a corner?

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#310
post #286

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> advanced in-house driver assists One thing I wish any car manufacturer would do is create a system that helps their users use the turn indicator. It’s an endemic problem here. Something like an annoying voice telling them that they should have used it immediately after turning. And if they fail to use it in three turns during the same drive they get a mandatory safety briefing before they can lock the car.

I think the better way would be automated cameras that fine vehicles that turn or change lanes without turning on the blinker beforehand.

More Orwell(TM) is the last thing the world needs.

You wanna write tickets post up a real meatbag cop and make them write tickets. Don't create some dystopian dragnet that you can tune for revenue generation.

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