Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 498 posts

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#411

Post by mschuster91 »

jsrozner wrote: post #307
robotresearcher wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in the field, not at Waymo. Everyone in the business is acutely aware of weather, along with hundreds of other factors, many much less obvious. The engineers whose expertise you assume away are actually debating corner cases like the one we saw of someone carrying a bicycle on their skateboard. In fact the companies run test campaigns in shitty weather all over the country on purpose, at great expense.

Yeah maybe we should just stop doing that and invest in public transit infrastructure instead.

Last mile is still a thing. We need long distance public transit, regional public transit, local public transit (buses, trams, cable cars, ...) and we also need hyperlocal public transit (taxis, autonomous vehicles/"peoplemovers").

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#412

Post by streetfighter64 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #120
etempleton wrote: post #90

This is really my bear case against AI. I am not against it. I actually think it is really neat! But we have been working on driverless cars for how long and spent how much? And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them. Tesla failed to deliver driverless cars but now is pivoting to the much more complex fully autonomous robots. And we can’t get AI to stop hallucinating facts, but any day we are going…

The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough". A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again. If you think t…

> You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again.

This mindset seems a bit dubious when you're dealing with moving vehicles. Sure flooding is pretty harmless, but how are you going to add a "manual override" for the car failing to stop for something unexpected when driving at highway speeds? Or a bunch of other plausible scenarios, who knows what the developers have thought of or not in their quest for "not chasing perfection". That the issue never comes up again seems like a pretty weak consolation for the guy that got hit.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#413

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

mschuster91 wrote: post #408
ethbr1 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs. One of the things that annoys me most about non-engineering mindsets is not looking at problems from a multivariate optimization perspective. There are problems, and then there are always more variables to be balanced to optimally solve them than people expect. The critical additional ones, more often than not: time and m…

> Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs. That doesn't mitigate much. The mass of a paper and matchsticks "house" just isn't enough to resist it getting torn apart - if not by the wind, then by debris. The only kind of structure able to survive a dead-on hit is steel bar reinforced concrete or very, very solidly built brick-and-mortar. But that is expensive to…

If people are going to build cheap houses, it makes sense to spend a little bit more on adding the hurricane ties (it's not like they're expensive or difficult to use). It might not be perfect, but it's surely better than just relying on gravity.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#414

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

JimTheMan wrote: post #303
jimbo808 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The huge disadvantage they have over people is that their cars cost $250k, require a workforce of people to retrieve and repair them, maintain them, clean them, monitor them, etc. They are more expensive to operate than a normal car with a human driver, so far. The break-even point requires a lot of problems to be solved, and even then, the upside is not looking to be astronomical in the best case.

Hard disk drives were the size of washing machines. I don't see how they will ever be practical!

Well, washing machines were once the size of washing machines; and they still are.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#415

Post by Sharlin »

dhbradshaw wrote: post #123

To me this doesn't seem like a disaster but just the kind of thing that happens as you role out a service and expose it to new challenges. Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance. The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitch…

An alternate viewpoint is that it looks like after 20 years they still haven't even started solving weather issues that you encounter anywhere outside a California climate.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#416

Post by [deleted] »

bluGill wrote: post #229
autoexec wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Floods are the most common and widespread of all weather-related natural disasters...Flooding occurs in every U.S. state and territory, and is a threat experienced anywhere in the world that receives rain." ( https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/floods/ ) If they were going to plan for any kind of dangerous weather, flooding should have been very high up on that list. People tend to take flash flood warnings…

They are still not very common. They happen more than other weather, but that still isn't common.

[deleted]

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#417

Post by micromacrofoot »

llbbdd wrote: post #302
micromacrofoot wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're speaking authoritatively but you don't even understand the basics of a lot of municipal train systems. > they take up a lot of space that people can't walk on, that cars can't drive on, that isn't useful to park housing or commerce near there are multiple cities that already have systems where all of this is true through various sections — Boston for example has the green line, which has rail embedded in stree…

Not everybody lives in a dense city center or wants to, which is where the usefulness of trains ends and cars begins. > children use them to get to school, they're accessible the elderly and disabled. Many things that automated cars can not do. ...all of those things are things cars can do today, why would automated cars be any different?

yeah but guess where they're trying to get self driving cars to work: dense city centers — robotaxis aren't economical if they're driving an hour out to rural areas, so again... they're trying to turn a profit in an area that's best suited for trains

it's yet another scam under the guise of futurism

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#418

Post by cucumber3732842 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #408
ethbr1 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs. One of the things that annoys me most about non-engineering mindsets is not looking at problems from a multivariate optimization perspective. There are problems, and then there are always more variables to be balanced to optimally solve them than people expect. The critical additional ones, more often than not: time and m…

> Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs. That doesn't mitigate much. The mass of a paper and matchsticks "house" just isn't enough to resist it getting torn apart - if not by the wind, then by debris. The only kind of structure able to survive a dead-on hit is steel bar reinforced concrete or very, very solidly built brick-and-mortar. But that is expensive to…

Explain to the class where the water is gonna get all that momentum from. Florida is flat.

The storm surge goes up (and a whole bunch of water falls on top of it). The storm surge goes down. This isn't some river bursting it's banks.

Between the requirements imposed by needing to resist hurricane winds and the slab ties it's "good enough" that there's a 99.9999% chance the building will stay on it's foundation long enough for something else to be the problem.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#419

Post by ghaff »

bluGill wrote: post #227
Muromec wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as one could expect waymo to train on it, one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets

Why? Functioning cities often shutdown for a day here or there for weather. I live in a northern city where we laugh at southern cities for shutting down for 1 inch of snow - but it is the right thing for them because it doesn't happen enough to be worth dealing with. If my city shutdown for 6 inches of snow we would be shutdown unacceptably often so we instead have higher taxes to pay for all the infrastructure need…

And, in the north, you have snowstorms. I'm glad to not be in a situation where you were pretty much expected to drive into office jobs every day whatever the conditions any longer. But that used to be the case barring the rare state of emergency.

Yes, there were certainly plows. But driving was still somewhat dangerous and you saw cars off roads on a regular basis. Driving into work on one of those daysz, I picked a pregnant woman off the median of a road whose car had gotten stuck.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#420

Post by mrits »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #413
mschuster91 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs. That doesn't mitigate much. The mass of a paper and matchsticks "house" just isn't enough to resist it getting torn apart - if not by the wind, then by debris. The only kind of structure able to survive a dead-on hit is steel bar reinforced concrete or very, very solidly built brick-and-mortar. But that is expensive to…

If people are going to build cheap houses, it makes sense to spend a little bit more on adding the hurricane ties (it's not like they're expensive or difficult to use). It might not be perfect, but it's surely better than just relying on gravity.

Do they not bolt the house to the slab in Florida? This is a main part of the inspection in Texas
Post reply on HN