141–150 of 504 posts
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We are all unwilling testers of every new teenage driver who hits the road.
Aside: I'm happy to see that teenage drivers today have a lot more required training than I did when I got my license. At least in this US state, and likely most of them. I'm also really happy about the continued advances in auto safety technology.
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Well, most of the time. If the cop feels like it, they can make you have a very bad time. https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/7645474002 “An Arkansas woman says she had no safe place to pull over in July 2020 when a state trooper tried to stop her for speeding, so she turned on her hazard lights and slowed down. Moments later, the officer rammed her vehicle, causing it to flip over and injuring the woman”
Remove "most of the time". This narrative that police are boogeymen who will subject you to their emotional whims is so overplayed its not even funny any more. There may be 1 in 100 truly awful police men and women out there, just as their are truly awful people in every known profession. People share a viral, highly edited video on tiktok to make themselves look like the victim only for the entire world to pile on a…
I think on average, I saw an act of gross police misbehavior about once a month. Sometimes it was quite savage. Always racist. I'm white, but many of my friends weren't. 20 years later I still have intrusive memories of standing by helplessly while terrible things were said and done to my not-white friends, and I still have violent fantasies about those cops getting theirs in kind.
Sure, this was often aimed at young people who may or may not be smoking pot or engaged in other mildly truant behavior. The police were not reacting to the truant behavior. They were targeting the minorly truant young people because they wanted to get their rocks off, and these victims were easily available and had no recourse.
Being used to riding motorcycles in the US, why are headlights not always on for all vehicles at this point? LED bulbs last a very long time and there is little reason to not have them on during the day. I know, it’s much more fun to anthropomorphize the car in this case, but the simple solution is to just hard wire them.
Mechanics need to be able to turn them off when they work on them or they’ll get blinded. Every car I’ve driven in the last 10 years seems to have an auto mode though. I’d be surprised if the Chevy’s these are based on don’t have an auto mode. It could be that a fuse blew here.
You'd think 'are the lights on' would be a self-check it would perform, though. GM has to know that headlights go out occasionally, right?
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> suspending the one car is actually a rather elegant solution If the software in a commercial aircraft were to be found defective, would we really be OK if only the individual aircraft in which the fault manifested itself gets grounded (assuming that aircraft isn't itself already on the ground in thousands of pieces spread all over a hillside...) Surely the FAA (or international equivalents) would issue an airworthi…
It depends. If it's an issue with just that vehicle then yes, you don't ground the whole fleet. If it's non-safety-critical, then it needs to be fixed asap but nothing gets grounded. If it's safety critical, then yes, all planes are grounded. But, I'd argue FAA levels of safety aren't suitable for cars. If a car has an engine failure or even a structural failure, they can usually just stop. Planes don't have that opt…
I had supposed we were thinking primarily about software faults and specifically those relating to the self-driving bit of a self-driving car.
Best case: self-driving car gets lost and is found with flat battery miles from "home" (?)
Worst-case: self-driving car kills cyclist/pedestrian and doesn't even notice or stop.
We should spend some thought on how to handle the latter because it will happen sooner or later. To be blunt: if the algo kills, why wouldn't you ground the algo (all instances of it)?
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Yes, every self-driving car should have a row of LED lights at the front. Also, they should indicate that the AI is actively scanning its environment by switching the LEDs on and off in a regular left-to-right pattern.
And a guy with the flag running in front of the vehicle.
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People did say exactly the same for regular cars. The result was a massive advertising campaign to establish the concept of jaywalking, and to make the street the sole domain of the car. I can easily imagine a similar campaign to label pedestrians as irresponsible for walking outside without an ultrasonic emitter, or a lidar reflector, or whatever integrates with the self-driving system. Whatever shifts the responsib…
You say "advertising campaign" as if it were some conspiracy by the world's big auto manufacturers 1. Do you have any sources? 2. You don't think that roads should be a car only domain? What do you think roads are for?
For 2, I'd make a distinction between paths built for long-distance travel (roads) and paths built for connecting to destinations (streets). The two have fundamentally different goals that cannot be safely achieved at the same time. To allow for high-speed travel, a road should be as predictable as possible, with limited entrances and exits and barriers to prevent people and animals from wandering onto the road, and should be restricted to vehicles that can maintain a high speed. To allow streets to connect to destinations; such as homes, shops, and workplaces; there should be many entrances and exits to the street. The destinations should be packed as tightly as possible, so that they can be reached with a minimal distance traveled. It's not just that these goals require tradeoffs, but that they are fundamentally antithetical to each other.
The best way to satisfy these two goals is by having separate designs for streets and roads. The roads are pathed around pedestrian areas, and allow branching off into them at limited locations. The streets are mixed use, with rougher surfaces (e.g. brick/cobblestone) to prevent high-speed travel. This doesn't exclude motor vehicles from using roads altogether, allowing for use cases such as delivering food to cornershops or dropping off somebody with limited mobility, but does steer motorized traffic off of the streets and onto the roads wherever possible.
Being used to riding motorcycles in the US, why are headlights not always on for all vehicles at this point? LED bulbs last a very long time and there is little reason to not have them on during the day. I know, it’s much more fun to anthropomorphize the car in this case, but the simple solution is to just hard wire them.
Mechanics need to be able to turn them off when they work on them or they’ll get blinded. Every car I’ve driven in the last 10 years seems to have an auto mode though. I’d be surprised if the Chevy’s these are based on don’t have an auto mode. It could be that a fuse blew here.
In Canada it's programmed to reset to Auto every time the car is started, but not the U.S. model.
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In Italy our police cars are much faster, a police car is usually called "volante" (literally "flying"), the more correct name is "autopattuglia" which is more like "patrol car". Then we have the two different animal derived names, police cars are "pantere" (panthers) and the Carabinieri ones are "gazzelle" (gazelles). As well you can't cruise with a car, the cruise control (often untranslated) is a "regolatore di ve…
> a police car is usually called "volante" (literally "flying") Don't all cars driven by Italians do that? I think that I've even seen a Punto with a single poor tire on the pavement once. :)
https://it.motor1.com/news/457740/lamborghini-huracan-polizi...
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You say "advertising campaign" as if it were some conspiracy by the world's big auto manufacturers 1. Do you have any sources? 2. You don't think that roads should be a car only domain? What do you think roads are for?
> 2. You don't think that roads should be a car only domain? What do you think roads are for? For example for my messanger on my horse so he doesn't get stuck in the mutt on it's voyage to the next city. ... or maybe my zenturie to support my legion? What makes you think (or suggest) that roads where invented for cars?
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Remove "most of the time". This narrative that police are boogeymen who will subject you to their emotional whims is so overplayed its not even funny any more. There may be 1 in 100 truly awful police men and women out there, just as their are truly awful people in every known profession. People share a viral, highly edited video on tiktok to make themselves look like the victim only for the entire world to pile on a…
I grew up in the late 90s in NYC, and spent a lot of time hanging out "on the streets". I think on average, I saw an act of gross police misbehavior about once a month. Sometimes it was quite savage. Always racist. I'm white, but many of my friends weren't. 20 years later I still have intrusive memories of standing by helplessly while terrible things were said and done to my not-white friends, and I still have violen…