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San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

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Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. No, sidewalks and bike lanes are for pedestrians and bicyclists. Bike lanes are less common than sidewalks so I think it's reasonable to include them on low-speed/highly congested stretches of road, but to assume they should have a full access to, e.g. and interstate or highway is ridiculous and would hinder literally thousands of people.

OK, let's all take a deep breath here - we might just have a different understanding of the word "road". My definition of "road" is not restricted to interstates and highways, but it includes any larger road, err, street. Of course, nobody wants pedestrians or cyclists on highways. It looks like we agree there. But I refuse the popular notion that roads (as in larger streets, or any street between villages/towns/citi…

But why should shared roads be preferred over sidewalks? I see quite a few potential disadvantages but no real advantages whatsoever.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the problems with technology that Ted Kaczynski wrote about. You can't opt out. > Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the…

We're quoting the Unabomber now? Certainly you can choose good quotes from non-serial killers.

Why not? It is a good and relevant point.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#353
post #72

I am really worried by the fact that I am the unwilling tester in the Great Driverless Car Experiment. Tradition has it that when you load-test a new bridge, you put the architect underneath. I feel like this, except I didn't design those driverless cars, somebody else did. Being an experienced software engineer, my trust in the software in these cars is pretty low. And yet they are testing them on me, because I can…

Maybe now is the time to start raising the bar on human and upcoming automated drivers. Both could have to pass a driving test that includes challenging, difficult situations. Day, night, rain, snow, fog, heavy traffic, missing lane lines, simulated pedestrians (including small children) leaping out between parked cars, and more. For further difficulty, both kinds of drivers could have to pass this within a x% margin…

The reason to hold humans and self driving cars to a different standard is that humans have already "class qualified" under ... well ... every condition that we drive in... with on the order of a billion driving years of total experience to the limitations of human-driving and far in excess of 10 million years of additional driving added per year along with a considerable amount of study across many decades.

Though there are systematic flaws in human drivers they're reasonably well known given the level of experience we have, there are many mitigations in place in both our cars and road designs, and many of these flaws are intuitively modeled by the other humans on the road as well as pedestrians allowing for real-time compensation.

The driverless cars, on the other hand-- we have radically less experience with as a class and there are many reasons to believe that vendor to vendor (e.g. due to sensor modalities) or even version to version will behave less self-consistently than human drivers do as a class. We know of some systematic faults in their operation which cause them to behave in ways that are highly surprising to humans, and we should expect to find many more as we gain experience.

To the extent that the properties of self driving cars have been formally studied at all it's been primarily by their creators which are obviously self interested. Some of the practices used in early supervised self-driving also actively undermined understanding their safety (e.g. executing a hand over to the human once the car was already in an nonrecoverable unsafe state and then attributing the accident to human driving since at the time of the collision the human was back in charge, but maybe only by a hundred milliseconds; or companies committing perjury to use the DMCA to force down unfavorable videos created by others)

This isn't an argument that we might not benefit from more rigorous driver testing or even from testing ideas that originated from self-driving car testing... but parity between driverless car tests and human testing shouldn't be a goal, particularly not when so many orders of magnitude separate our human driving experience from driverless experience.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#354

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.

> Mechanics need to be able to turn them off when they work on them

Couldn't you just turn off the car?

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

de-amped URL: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/06/10/arkans... I thought that Google was supposed to stop the AMP project? can't they automatically redirect old AMP URLs to the correct real URL?

clearly, it's not an engrained G service that lots and lots of people depend on, as that's the typical decision Googs waits for before pulling the plug

There are LOTS of AMP links floating around... most people don't even know that they depend on it...

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#356
post #72

I am really worried by the fact that I am the unwilling tester in the Great Driverless Car Experiment. Tradition has it that when you load-test a new bridge, you put the architect underneath. I feel like this, except I didn't design those driverless cars, somebody else did. Being an experienced software engineer, my trust in the software in these cars is pretty low. And yet they are testing them on me, because I can…

The driverless car is already safer than the other people you share the road with everyday.

We can't make safe driverless cars if people frequently make false claims about their current safety.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the problems with technology that Ted Kaczynski wrote about. You can't opt out. > Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the…

We're quoting the Unabomber now? Certainly you can choose good quotes from non-serial killers.

The fact that someone did something terrible does not imply that everything they ever said or did was wrong. That's dangerous thinking. The Unabomber's short manifesto makes a number of salient points about the negative interplay between technology and the human condition, and offers a neat potential explanation for why so many people are unhappy despite being surrounded by modern conveniences.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#358

Just my anecdote, saw a cruise car trying to turn left from the middle lane on Franklin. Came to a complete stop, bringing traffic to a halt, and waited for the cars on its left to clear out, including anyone who went around, then cautiously moved into the left lane and turned. Some kind of rude, selfish programming I’d be yelling at a person for.

I have lots of anecdotes of the opposite. Many, many times I've been driving around SF and noted "Hey! That driver had an opportunity to be an ass and instead chose to be a polite, reasonable driver. Ohhhh, it's a Cruise car. That explains it." 9/10 times it's a robot car.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright but again, the anecdote of "This one time in Arkansas" can't reasonably be used as a justification for stating "All police are bad and out of control all over the country"

I think it is entirely reasonable to push for a (much) higher standard of police accountability. The problem is not that all police are bad and out of control, it's that whenever these incidents occur the leadership and police unions institutionally push back forcefully on accountability. This institutional pushback is what makes this into a systemic problem that needs to be addressed.

Sure I agree, that is reasonable. Many people try to make the argument that all/most police are bad and out of control, which is what I refute.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, you choose whether to ride that airplane or take those drugs. You probably don't get to choose when someone else's driverless car runs you over.

Nor do you get to choose when someone's airplane possibly crashes into your street from above.

There were 9 airplane crashes, worldwide, in 2021[1].

It's estimated 31,720 people died in car crashes, in the US, in 2021[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviation_accidents_an...

[2] https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/nhtsa-estimates...

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