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

California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 1001 posts

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#671

Post by cogman10 »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #630
cogman10 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a general problem. Companies very often kill people and get fines. The body count before a company starts to get close to "this might kill the company" is absurdly high. Consider, the Dalkon shield which had a hospitalization rate of 5 in 1000 and a death toll easily in the 1000s (maybe 10s of thousands). [1] The company went bankrupt but not defunct. It is now a part of Pfizer. Nobody experienced any so…

yep, this is why I said it should be an existential crisis. mistakes happen, but if your mistakes can potentially cause bodily harm you better be damned well prepared to show how it was not negligence in any way or you should get a fine that scares the shit out of you. But that's the idealist side of me talking, the realist understands that will never happen.

Yeah, the big issue we have is that we reward ignorance. It's in the legal best interest for companies producing physical products to be as oblivious as possible to issues of safety. Legally, the worst the worst outcome for them happens when there's documented evidence of safety problems. It's far better to feign ignorance. "Who could have predicted that opioids were addictive!". "How could we have known that this doctor was overprescribing, we are a big company without the resources to track everything".

It should really be the opposite in an ideal world. A company that has documented "this is what we did to make sure everything was safe" should less culpable than the company that moves fast and breaks things/people/the planet.

If a company killed someone, I'd want their defense to be a list of everything they did to prevent that person from dying, not a "well shucks, accidents happened, and this was a tragedy that couldn't be avoided!". That's the response that should end a company's existence.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#672

Post by jakefromstatecs »

School-Cotton wrote: post #663
fhub wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another fun anecdote. When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way - the windshield wipers swipe once (I'm not sure they still do this). But it wasn't implemented very well at some point since the Waymo I was in was behind another one for many blocks. The wipers went at least 17 times. As an earlier adopter I provided lots of feedback. Even little things like I…

> When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way I hate “whimsical” stuff like this. Part of maturity/adulthood is coming to the realization that you don’t have the right to conscript other people into your sense of humor.

> Part of maturity/adulthood is coming to the realization that you don’t have the right to conscript other people into your sense of humor.

And yet, you aren't willing to accept that they have a different sense of humor without hating them. Ironic.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#673

Post by yterdy »

BoorishBears wrote: post #607
filoleg wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yeah, when something doesn’t conform to your narrative, it surely is an astroturf. All coming from accounts that are many years old and have thousands of karma points that leave meaningful posts on all types of topics. But the second they post about Waymo in a positive light, that instantly means astroturfing and not their true opinion based on their lived experiences.

Realistically, there are a lot of Googlers and Xooglers on Hacker News. One of the messages in this thread is literally stating they have special knowledge of the behinds the scene workings of Waymo. I work in the AV space and I honestly don't think there's much of a competitive mentality between the companies in the space, but at the same time there is a tendency of people to psudeo-astroturf these brands: where the…

Thank you. Contrary to other replies, you do not have to be employed directly by [Institution] expressly for the purposes of covertly pushing an agenda to be guilty of astroturfing.

What's important is the existence or appearance of a conflict of interest, particularly if you're not disclosing your connection. Having a friend who works for Google who might be upset at criticism counts. Being a former employee with stock counts. Having any kind of monetary or professional interest in FSD companies succeeding counts.

If someone is presenting their statements as that of a person who is not involved, and they actually are, their behavior is duplicitous, and justifiably characterized as astroturfing.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#674

Post by dekhn »

esoterica wrote: post #622
dekhn wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and for a long time you could drive on Great Highway at 35MPH and hit green at every single light. Always enjoyed that except that I would have preferred 50MPH

It should be illegal to drive above 25mph on any street that pedestrians regularly cross (i.e. all urban non-highway roads). Your enjoyment of speeding does not supersede other people’s right to not get struck by a car going 50mph.

This was not a necessary point to make, as I merely expressed a preference. And the law isn't going to be changed to accomodate your desires.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#675

Post by hot_gril »

l33t7332273 wrote: post #581
IKantRead wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF today is as close to Blade Runner that we'll ever get. Every billboard is for some AI company, you ride in a driverless cab across a literal mile of homeless people drugged out of their minds, screaming and pooping on the sidewalk. SF today is so aggressively dystopian that it's sort of hard not to enjoy the experience.

I think this comment is slightly exaggerated. I didn’t see that many ads for AI companies and while I did see some driverless vehicles, they were in the minority and I only saw them on my second full day exploring the city. There are a large number of homeless people openly doing drugs, and there is some poop, but I find these descriptions to be generally inaccurate. Don’t get me wrong, the situation is bad, but base…

Nearly every billboard I've in SF, when I used to live near there 1-7 years ago, was tech. So not AI, but maybe "one app to rule them all" (I forget whose slogan that was).

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#676

Post by Swenrekcah »

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #521
fhub wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since it seems people are interested. I had one situation which this sort of thing made me a bit uneasy (So one gripe actually). I was sitting back right seat. Waymo was waiting to make an unprotected left turn over two lanes. There was a vehicle waiting to also make an unprotected left in the other direction. Behind it was a truck. Waymo made that turn where I wouldn't have. I thought it through after and it had at…

I've been in this situation, and it's something that seems to get tweaked every week. They definitely pushed the "aggressive" lever up a little over the last month. I think it's one of those cases where it's sort of obvious it can calculate trajectories and speeds much better than a human, so it's a safe manoeuvre in theory, but it "feels" bad as a passenger. Same thing for where it can see that it can squeeze throug…

It is also very important to consider the effect on other drivers.

A self driving car might calculate it can squeeze through a gap in oncoming traffic but doing so probably will cause human drivers of those cars to slam the breaks and create a large crash.

So unless they’re driving on a road where only self driving is allowed they’ll probably need to be much more conservative than they can be.

Also thinking about it, the first roads to become robot-only driven will probably be inner city streets where pedestrians abound, so no aggressive driving there either.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#677

Post by alsodumb »

alphabetting wrote: post #37

The large opposition to AVs gives these companies zero-margin for error especially in a place like SF. Hopefully they'll be back on the road soon. My experience in Waymos have felt much safer than the average Uber.

Let’s agree that Waymo and Cruise are not in the same league. I don’t use AV in general anymore, I explicitly differentiate between Waymo and everyone else.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#678

Post by foota »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #651
ehsankia wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Oharmaceuticals have many different tiers of trials, but even with that, there are still new discoveries and surprises once they reach the full population. Waymo has been testing their tech for over a decade in much smaller and controlled situations. Similarly, all of these companies also have done tests with humans behind the wheel for years. To claim that they've done no testing and are going straight t…

Perhaps you know more than me about pharmaceutical testing, but people are aware that they're part of a trial, and more importantly, they consent to participating, correct? I did not claim they're not testing, they clearly are. My argument is that people that didn't sign up to be test subjects are getting hurt in the process. It's worth pointing out the discrepancy in human safety trials, is it not? Why should AV tes…

The state ultimately is the one that is giving permission here on behalf of people, much the same way as the FDA decides when a medication is safe enough to be administered, or the FAA when a plane is ready, etc.,

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#679

Post by hot_gril »

lziest wrote: post #645
Lonestar1440 wrote: post #120

From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year, and many small drives within the city): Cruise cars do not perform acceptably. They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far belo…

I second the absurd conservative driving of Cruise. At the peak hour, even going straight, the Cruise car would suddenly slow down in the middle of the intersection because it seemed it just discovered the pedestrian cross walk and got scared.

This sounds like Berkeley human drivers.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#680

Post by alooPotato »

wsinks wrote: post #662
alooPotato wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes lights let higher throughput roads have more time. i don't see why it makes my statement not true.

I take point with your use of 'correctly' because traffic engineering cannot get every car to its destination without stopping it even if it knew every destination. Cars already do talk to various traffic lights via underground sensors and occasionally a camera. The investment required to have a fully networked traffic light system with a centralized controller would be immense, and would create an organization with…

This is getting into traffic research territory - i.e. given the entire dataset (current and historic) can you shorten average trip time vs individual cars just doing whats best for them. Either way, having a real time data infrastructure seems only positive.

Traffic lights are already remotely controlled by city planning departments, it's the software that's missing. My whole point is that driverless cars, where the city enforces data sharing and maybe even some routing, can have a real impact on throughput times.

The best part is that most of this is just software. And not ~$2B to make a 1.7 mile subway line or 10+years to make a bus lane (see SF)

Post reply on HN