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Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

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

#481

Post by ACCount37 »

xedrac wrote: post #470
ACCount37 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's funny how people take this perspective for Waymo, but when it comes to Tesla FSD, they are much less forgiving, even though I think Tesla's performance is at least as good, if not better.

I'd say the same about Tesla FSD. In fact, I favor Tesla's AI-centric approach in general.

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

#482

Post by qsera »

NiloCK wrote: post #480
qsera wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reaction speed does not matter if the driver can anticipate things before they happen. Actually I think what makes a good driver is ones ability to anticipate. I don't think computers are anywhere near a human in that regard. >visual awareness A point cloud and some computer vision is not "visual awareness". Your statistics is also biased is of its source. But in very controlled environments and for sedentary pace of…

80-90% reduction, over the course of 170 million miles driven on the famously very controlled city streets of LA, SF, Austin and Phoenix. On average, I wouldn't expect the regulatory agencies to be very friendly toward outright fraudulent reporting from Waymo. On the very outside, maybe these 80-90% reductions are optimistic roundups from 50-65% reductions. Or do you believe that Waymo is secretly running people down…

Can you tell me if this 80% reduction is comparing waymo with human taxi drivers?

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

#483

Post by flextheruler »

beernet wrote: post #454
DannyBee wrote: post #438

An infinite number of comments about how good/bad/etc this is, and nobody seems to have noticed that it is literally a report of exactly one waymo getting stuck in flooded water that caused this. I live in Atlanta. This was 3-4 inches of rain in 30 minutes, which is uncommon and was unexpected enough that the flash flood warnings were not issued until well after the flooding occurred. The reporting doesn't mention it…

> The reporting doesn't mention it, because it doesn't fit the narrative, but does anyone want to guess how many human drivers got suddenly stuck in the flood? This is the important point here. Human beings are highly apologetic towards other human beings, but not so much towards machines. At the same time, the expectation towards machines is much higher. Tells you more about humans than machines.

Comparing individual drivers to a taxi company is disingenuous and silly.

"How many taxi drivers got stuck?" is the actual comparison.

This is a paid taxi service. If I got an uncooked meal from a restaurant and their defense was that more people accidentally don't cook their food long enough than we do I don't think I'd be accommodating.

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

#484

Post by mschuster91 »

manwe150 wrote: post #460
mschuster91 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's uneconomical to hurricane-proof all housing in Florida. Given the yearly news about record breaking destruction... I'd say it is uneconomical to build in Florida at all . The only thing keeping some regions (in addition to FL and other hurricane hotspots, add California for fires and potentially earthquakes) afloat is politicians bribing populations by promising government bailouts or by forcing insurance comp…

The news tends to exaggerate a bit (quite a bit) for effect. Where the storm hits is devastating, but a mile away can be basically fine. So percentage wise very little of Florida gets destroyed, but of the part that gets flattened, it may be entirely destroyed. Same thing can happen periodically near virtually any body of water or stream. But hurricanes are something that can be observed and predicted in advance inst…

> But hurricanes are something that can be observed and predicted in advance instead of being out of nowhere like flooding

Yeah in advance enough to prevent loss of human life, but still, if you're hit, everything you own is gone. There just is not enough time to pack up more than maybe your laptops, phones, a bag of clothes and your most important paperwork.

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

#485

Post by jmalicki »

rawgabbit wrote: post #300
grumbel wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a little worried that this is still a problem after 20 years. Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? And flooded roads aren't exactly an unusual event to begin with.

Can Waymo cars even sense or detect flooded roadways? That is when it sees images of water covering the road, is it smart enough to know the car might get pushed into the raging waters? This is one of the reasons why I switched to Apple Maps years ago. Google Maps kept giving directions to small backroads that I knew were prone to flooding. I noticed it when Google announced they were changing the algorithm to save p…

It has lidar and radar, not just vision.

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

#486

Post by jmalicki »

Ekaros wrote: post #402
grumbel wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a little worried that this is still a problem after 20 years. Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? And flooded roads aren't exactly an unusual event to begin with.

To me standing water sounds like obvious thing to include in testing. And maybe even design some reasonable technical solution like sensors near say wheels. Areas with water should not be that uncommon that vehicles would never accidentally enter them. So seems like pools of say 10cm deep water should be included in testing.

A merely wet road (1mm of water) and one with 10cm can be hard to distinguish. If you avoid the former, you can't operate in rain at all.

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

#488

Post by DannyBee »

flextheruler wrote: post #483
beernet wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reporting doesn't mention it, because it doesn't fit the narrative, but does anyone want to guess how many human drivers got suddenly stuck in the flood? This is the important point here. Human beings are highly apologetic towards other human beings, but not so much towards machines. At the same time, the expectation towards machines is much higher. Tells you more about humans than machines.

Comparing individual drivers to a taxi company is disingenuous and silly. "How many taxi drivers got stuck?" is the actual comparison. This is a paid taxi service. If I got an uncooked meal from a restaurant and their defense was that more people accidentally don't cook their food long enough than we do I don't think I'd be accommodating.

"How many taxi drivers got stuck?" is the actual comparison."

I would bet a lot of money the number here is also >1.

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

#489

Post by HDBaseT »

krupan wrote: post #478
HDBaseT wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human has to pass a test to be able to drive. A human (for the most part) doesn't just unknowingly drive into floods. Why aren't we holding computers to AT LEAST the same expectation as humans.

I love when people bring this up. When was the last time anyone here had to pass an actual driving test, like where you have to physically drive a car? For me, age 16, which was more years ago than I like to count. How many licenses do we revoke for violating traffic laws? Getting into a car crash? Injuring someone in a car crash? Killing someone in a car crash? Not nearly enough! We are so lax about driving it's ins…

Less than 5 years ago, what's your point?

> "You want to hold these robot cars to some much higher standard"

No, I want to hold these cars to the same standard as humans. Humans very rarely, accidentally, drive into flooded water.

You have humans attempt to get through flooded roads all the time, that's another issue though.

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

#490

Post by HDBaseT »

bitpush wrote: post #310
HDBaseT wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human has to pass a test to be able to drive. A human (for the most part) doesn't just unknowingly drive into floods. Why aren't we holding computers to AT LEAST the same expectation as humans.

Are you suggesting every DL holder knows all the driving conditions? Quick, what should one do when the car starts drifting in ice? How about aqua planing? If it is just taking a regular DL test, then waymo, Tesla and others would be driving all across the US by now. They already have a higher standard

Those are completely different scenario though.

We're talking about a piece of software being unable to determine if something is flooded or not. 99% of humans presented with the same visual ques would be able to determine its flooded.

This is what I'm waiting parity with. I don't see how that's an unfair ask, especially considering Atlanta floods fairly regularly, its not entirely uncommon.

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