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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

#191

Post by [deleted] »

svet_0 wrote: post #187
jwr wrote: 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…

Autonomous cars are already safer than human drivers. Not as featureful or accurate, but safer.

[deleted]

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

#192

Post by joshribakoff »

eru wrote: post #170
qayxc wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is it non-deterministic? It's non-deterministic in a practical sense; you cannot reproduce the exact circumstances that caused a certain behaviour. Maybe a bug flew by one of the cameras at a certain moment, or a pedestrian with certain type of clothing passed by. You get the idea.

Depends. In principle you can log exactly what data the camera sends to the decision making unit. And you could replay that data. The camera itself might not be deterministic enough to reproduce the same data with the same beetle, but replaying the log should work. (Keep the log in a 'black box' on the car, and perhaps only keep the last x hours of data, if necessary.) I think Waymo already does something like these…

what you’re referring to is just simulating, at least after the point your modified algorithm does something slightly different in the simulator than the real car did in real life.

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

#193

Post by js2 »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #183
CogitoCogito wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's extremely clear that I'm not trying to portray that exact number as a fact and more as a general portrayment of "most police officers are good, just as most people are good" That sounds about as useful as the anecdotes in this thread. Police aren't a random sample of the population after all. Even if it's true that most people are good, that doesn't imply most police are.

Alright sure, I guess so. Neither of us have any hard data to back up our opinion so I guess it turns into a debate of feelings, which will lead neither of us anywhere. What I do know is that as of May 2021 there were 665,380 police officer employed in the US, and trying to generalize all of them in any way based on a few highly edited videos is absolutely not a valid approach given the standard practices in data sci…

Look up the per-capita number of deaths caused by U.S law enforcement officers vs other countries.

Then look up the per-capita number of people put in hospitals by U.S. law enforcement officers vs other countries.

Then look up the consequences U.S. law enforcement officers face when they harm or kill. Also look up their relative training.

Finally look up most dangerous professions and see where law enforcement ranks to get an idea of whether their lives are truly in such danger as to justify their actions.

After looking at this data (and I apologize for not providing citations directly but I’m on mobile), it’s hard to avoid forming the opinion that U.S. law enforcement is undertrained, unjustifiably aggressive, protective of bad officers, and unaccountable to the communities it serves.

Anecdotally, I’ve had more than my fair share of interactions with officers and about 20% of them have been hotheaded jerks.

Oh, I forgot one: look at the domestic abuse numbers for law enforcement officers too.

Edit: here’s at least one citation:

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen...

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

#194

Post by rsynnott »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #113
sseagull wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This feels a bit like Father Ted's defense of the Church's child protection record: "Say if there are 200 million priests in the world and five percent are paedophiles. That's still only 10 million."

1 in 100 would be _far_ too high. Maybe 1 in 100 people are awful in the general population, but ideally you'd hold police to a much higher standard.

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

#195

Post by [deleted] »

eps wrote: post #179
xadhominemx wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are all unwilling testers of every new teenage driver who hits the road.

Depends on the country, but here teenagers are drilled so much during their L phase and on the cars with a manual transmission, so they are probably the safest drivers on the road.

[deleted]

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

#196

Post by ocdtrekkie »

eru wrote: post #164
logifail wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 option. 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-c…

I wonder whether that would just lead to people using slightly tweaked variants of the same algorithm branded to be different? (Of course, you don't want to fork too much, because there's probably a certification per algorithm needed. But it might make sense for Google to officially field a thousand 'different' algorithms, so that a single incident doesn't ground the entire fleet?)

Engineers often fail to realize you can't cheese a judge and if you try to, the law will come down much, much harder on you.

Either one of two things will be the case with this approach:

1. The algorithm will be too imperceptibly different to be treated as a different program. Adding some tiny decimals somewhere won't make it unlikely to make the same mistakes, and the entire class of algorithms will be treated as one.

2. The algorithm will be different enough to make different decisions, which means one program is probably "better" than the other(s) and they'll be taking a bigger risk by deploying cars to the road that are more dangerous than others.

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

#197

Post by dotancohen »

jaclaz wrote: post #148
dotancohen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. :)

No Pinto ever set foot (I mean tire) in Italy AFAICT, I think they weren't ever imported in Europe, but - seriously - I once happened to be overtaken by one of the few Lamborghini's they have, on a highway, I was going (cruising) at a "normal" speed (some 120 kmh) and had this strange "something blue" feeling in the rear mirror and by the time I realized it was the police flashing lights I heard "whoosh" and they wer…

Oops, I corrected "Pinto" to "Punto". For some reason, typing that just feels like it's a dirty word.

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

#198

Post by QuarterReptile »

yc-kraln wrote: post #136
snovv_crash wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US driving test standards are still a joke compared to overseas.

There is no such thing as "US" driving test standards. Each state has its own requirements. Some are quite weak, and some are very vigorous: For instance, Maryland driving licenses are accepted 1:1 as equivalent to the German driving license, you can exchange them without an exam or test. NY and CA... do not simply transfer.

The interesting thing is that Maryland drivers are among the worst I've seen over a wider spectrum of factors. Sober California drivers seem pretty safe. Virginia drivers are miserable on interstates because they pass one another at 1-3mph differentials (I assume this is a response to the reputed harsh soeeding enforcement there) and are victims of often-wrong signage, but are otherwise uninteresting. South Carolina drivers cause dangerous situations by trying to give away their right of way. Maryland drivers aggressively fight back agaibst merges, change lanes erratically, and crash in a quarter inch of snow at shocking rates, despite the fact that their salt trucks have higher mass-flow-rates than their snow storms. The only drivers who stand out vs Maryland are in big military areas where there's a significant minority of people driving 20mph faster than traffic and merging erratically while doing so.

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

#199

Post by ghaff »

fallingknife wrote: post #141
wyldfire wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Has that training had any noticable impact accident statistics? Seems like just more bureaucracy to me.

My recollection of learning to drive many years ago was that I took driver's ed, drive my parents around a bit, but then didn't drive much/own a car until after grad school. And therefore, didn't really have much driving experience until later. (And didn't really learn to drive a stick until many years later when I bought a car with one.)

I guess I'm skeptical that having some more classroom time and a more rigorous testing improves young person driving a lot--much less makes much of any difference to how people with a few years of driving under their belt drive.

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

#200

Post by fho »

ISL wrote: post #137
xadhominemx wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are all unwilling testers of every new teenage driver who hits the road.

And every drunk/elderly driver -- the car's decision to move after a traffic-stop felt very much the behavior of someone with impaired cognition.

Anecdote: There was an old lady living nearby who despite being 80+ years still driving around in her 20 year old car. She literally ran over traffic cones and ... a child on a tricycle [1] and never got prosecuted.

She recently passed away ... sad, but the streets around here are definitely safer now.

(This was in Germany just for reference)

[1] The child was fine it was a low speed collision ... but still ...

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