Live data from Hacker News

Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

thelastdriverlicenseholder.com

141–150 of 514 posts

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#141
post #73
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the market is not worth existing if it harms the planet. And most cities were actually designed for streetcar lines in the U.S., that includes all the big ones in California too. We just need to reengage that, and do simple things like give the existing bus networks signal preemption and their own lanes. Plus considering most car trips are under 5 miles and california has good weather, it makes no sense why…

Some cities even started out with a bunch of street-cars then tore out all the lines (for cars!) rather than expand existing rail - looking at you Seattle

Philly did this too, though in the recent years the city started bringing some lines back. Heck, when the full tram network was around a 100 years ago, it could take you pretty far out into the suburbs, while today you either have to take the train which comes every 30-60 minutes or drive.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#142

It's amazing how driverless taxies are a reality now . It shows how there is progress being made as much as there is talk about stagnation.

Fsd isn’t as hard when you have tons of LiDAR cameras, radar, and super high definition mapping.

Tesla is the only one working on real world FSD that doesn’t rely on all that stuff

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#143

It's amazing how driverless taxies are a reality now . It shows how there is progress being made as much as there is talk about stagnation.

It also shows how none of our governments seem to care to prevent companies from testing dangerous products on the street with other unwilling drivers

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but to get away from that you need gradual steps Given that you bring up the space program in the same post I'll stick with the metaphor and point out that you can't go to the moon by climbing up trees, or as Russ Ackoff said, doing the wrong thing right is worse than doing the right thing wrong, because making the wrong thing more efficient just makes things worse. If you want fully automated, efficient transport t…

Trains and subways don't get you from anywhere to anywhere. They are incredibly expensive and take many years to add new lines, disrupting all kinds of things in the meantime. And they often take way longer to get you places. My time has value. There's a million things I'd rather be doing than waiting for a train, or waiting while a train makes tons of stops along the way that a car wouldn't. And are you expecting me…

> And are you expecting me to carry bags of groceries on the train? How's that work?

What exactly do you think people without cars do, or people who live in London? Or New York City? It works perfectly fine. Or you get can groceries delivered pretty easily and cheaply.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worth noting however that the size, power consumption and antenna precision of a watch-sized or bicycle computer size GPS(+glonass, Galileo, beidou, qzss) receiver is considerably smaller than what should be in these vehicles. I have not seen any mention of GPS service degradation in hobbyist drone enthusiast groups over the last week, some of whom use quite small GPS modules with serial connection to the fligh…

I would find it odd if they were not using precise positioning using local reference stations broadcasting corrections over IP or RF. EDIT: Appears GPS/IMU/LIDAR is sufficient, my mistake. TIL.

They're almost certainly using dead reckoning with wheel rotation sensors to get the precision they need in an urban environment where radios are kinda trash.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#146
post #96

With all of the talk, usually around Teslas but I suppose it applies to all EVs, that I've seen over the years akin to, "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," I have to ask... shouldn't we anticipate seeing similar issues to this in that scenario? I mean yeah, there will be different manufacturers so it's not like every car in a city could come to a standstill.…

It's like people have totally forgotten about the CAP theorem just because it is cars and not some kind of concurrent threading infrastructure!!

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a customer's perspective, it isn't clear that a software taxi driver is in any way better than a human taxi driver The taxi driver having 0% chance of raping or stealing you would be prominent a clear win. Or really any of many many other issues you could have with an actual human person with a specific world view and social position interacting with you. Not even considering if you yourself have specific shor…

The robo taxi can't steal FROM you very easily, but it can certainly steal YOU.

Good correction :)

Then, the robot taxi is probably not stealing you on its own, there would need to be other humans involved...

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would find it odd if they were not using precise positioning using local reference stations broadcasting corrections over IP or RF. EDIT: Appears GPS/IMU/LIDAR is sufficient, my mistake. TIL.

They're almost certainly using dead reckoning with wheel rotation sensors to get the precision they need in an urban environment where radios are kinda trash.

I would think zero wheel rotation sensors and just LIDAR, which cruise uses extensively.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," Some genius 10x'er forgets to carry the 1 or something, and all of a sudden an entire city full of cars all collide with pedestrians all at once.

We could have the same fear with all these satellites being shot up into space. Couldn't they all start raining down on earth with some poor calculations or coding mistakes in the course-correction software? I don't know enough about this stuff to know if this is a realistic thing or just the premise of a bad sci-fi movie.

Satellites would, I assume, burn up on re-enter if they happened to de-orbit. I'm more worried about them banging into one another and surrounding the Earth in an impenetrable debris field that makes future space exploration/travel nearly impossible - IMO that would be a death sentence for all of us.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," Some genius 10x'er forgets to carry the 1 or something, and all of a sudden an entire city full of cars all collide with pedestrians all at once.

And that will usher in the great Engineering licensing requirements for building high-risk software.

Can't come soon enough IMO
Post reply on HN