The description of an unexpected/(impossible) orientation for an on road obstacle works as an excuse, right up to the point where you realize that the software should, explicitly, not run into anything at all. That’s got to be, like, the first law of (robotic) vehicle piloting.
It was just lucky that it happened twice as, otherwise, Alphabet likely would have shrugged it off as some unimportant, random event.
It’s great though - that’s how you get amazing services and technological advancement.
I wish we had that. In Europe you’re just stuck paying 50 euros for a taxi in major cities (who block the roads, etc. to maintain their monopolies).
Meanwhile in the USA you guys have VR headsets, bioluminescent houseplants and self-driving cars (not to mention the $100k+ salaries!), it’s incredible.
True, but your savings on non-luxury bones helps with the fees associated with luxury ones, I’m sure. I can’t do anything for my bones with a $30 glowing petunia.
Yeah it’s $40 for an Uber in Columbus or Cleveland as well. There isn’t a monopoly on taxis creating that price, thats just how much it actually costs to rent a car for cross city travel.
If you want a no regulations/free market at the helm, you want to move to India. They have all the rules you love.
It should of course not run into anything, but it does need to be able to identify obstacles at the very least for crash priority when crazy shit inevitably happens. For instance, maybe it hits a nice squishy Pomeranian that won’t cause any damage to itself instead of swerving to avoid it and possibly totalling itself by hitting a fire hydrant.
Or maybe it hits the fire hydrant instead of a toddler.
At any rate, being able to identify an obstacle and react to unexpected orientations of those obstacles is something I think a human driver does pretty well most of the time. Autonomous cars are irresponsible and frankly I can’t believe they’re legal to operate.
I didn’t read it as them saying “therefore this isn’t a problem,” it was an explanation for why it happened. Think about human explanations for accidents: “they pulled out in front of me” “they stopped abruptly”. Those don’t make it ok that an accident happened either.
I wasn't asking about the car's logic algorithm; we all know that the SDC made an error, since it [checks notes] hit another car. We already know it didn't do the correct thing. I was asking how else you think the developers should be working on the software other than one thing at a time. That seemed like a weird criticism.
Ideally they don’t need actual accidents to find errors, but discover said issues in QA and automated testing. Not hitting anything sounds like a manageable goal to be honest.
Honestly, I’m pragmatic, if less people die in accidents involving autonomous car, then yes.
The thing is we shouldn’t be trusting the manufacturers for these stats. It has to be reported by a government agency or something.
Similarly Autonomous car software should have to be certified by an independent organization before being deployed. Same thing for updates to the software. Otherwise we would get deadly updates from time to time.
If we deploy and handle autonomous car with the same safety approach as in aviation I’m sure this transition can be done fairly safely.
Rules are written in blood. Once you figure out all the standard cases, you can only try and predict as many edge cases that you can think of. You can’t make something fool proof because there will always be a greater fool that will come by.
Unexpected or not, it should do its best to stop or avoid the obstacle, not drive into it.
An autonomous vehicle shouldn’t ever be able to actively drive forward into anything. It’s basic collision detection that ought to brake the car here. If something is in the position the car wants to drive to, it simply shouldn’t drive there. There’s no reason to blame the obstacle for being towed incorrectly…
Same thing applies to a human driver. Most accidents happen because the driver makes a wrong assumption. The key to safe driving is not getting in situations where driving is based on assumptions.
Trajectory calculation is definitely an assumption and shouldn’t be allowed to override whatever sensor is checking for obstructions ahead of the car.
The car can’t move without trajectory calculations though.
If the car ahead of you pulls forward when the light goes green, your car can start moving forward as well keeping in mind the lead cars trajectory and speed.
If it was just don’t hit an object in its path, the car wouldn’t move forward until the lead was half way down the block.
The car knew the truck was there in this case, it wasn’t a failure to detect. Due to a programming failure it thought it was safe to move because the truck wouldn’t be there.
If you’re following a vehicle with proper distance and it slams the brakes you should be able to stop in time as you’ve calculated their trajectory and a safe speed behind. But if that same vehicle slams on the brakes and goes into reverse, well… Goodluck.
It’s all assumptions assuming the detection is accurate in the first place.
If you’re following a vehicle with proper distance and it slams the brakes you should be able to stop in time as you’ve calculated their trajectory and a safe speed behind.
You dont need to calculate their trajectory. It’s enough to know your own.
If a heavy box falls off a truck and stops dead in front of you, you need to be able to stop. That box has no trajectory, so it’s an error to include other vehicles trajectories in the safe distance calculation.
Traffic can move through an intersection closely by calculating a safe distance, which may be smaller than the legal definition, but still large enough to stop for anything suddenly appearing on the road. The only thing needed is that the distance is calculated based on your own speed and a visually confirmed position of other things. It can absolutely be done regardless of the speed or direction of other vehicles.
Anyway. A backwards facing truck is a weird thing to misinterpret. Trucks sometimes face backwards for whatever reasons.
It would be interesting to know how the self driving car would react to a ghost driver.
You dont need to calculate their trajectory. It’s enough to know your own.
This doesn’t make sense. It’s why I was saying the car won’t move at a stop light when it goes green until the car is half way down the street.
If the car is 2.5 seconds ahead of me at 60mph on the highway, it’s only 2.5 seconds ahead of me if the other car is doing 60 mph. If the car is doing 0mph then I’m going to crash into it.
It needs to know how fast and what direction the obstacle is going, and how to calculate the rate of acceleration/deceleration and extrapolate from there.
2.5 seconds at 60 mph is more than enough to come to a full stop. If the car in front of you dropped an anvil (traveling at 0 mph) on the road, you could stop before crashing into the anvil. You do not need to drive into the other cars trajectory path.
Yes you can. It is a stopping distance. 2.5 seconds at 60 mph is 220 feet. A car can brake from 60 to 0 in less than 220 feet. It will take longer than 2.5 seconds to do, but it won’t hit the object which originally was 2.5 seconds ahead.
Maybe a straight behind isn’t as good an example, although it is calculating the likelihood of it continuing to go straight.
An oncoming car, drifting out of the lane towards your lane.
It’s not going to hit you until it’s in your path, but the trajectory of it coming towards you is in your path.
If you don’t consider where it’s going and how fast it’s going, you won’t know if it’s going to enter your lane before you pass it.
If you’re only trying to avoid hitting objects and its not in your path until the last quarter second, you won’t take appropriate actions because you don’t know it’s coming at you.
All these measurements are taken as time between you and them and it uses that info to calculate the trajectories.
Yes I know and it should. What I am saying is that the trajectory calculations should never be allowed to override the basic collision calculations, like it did in this case.
It does not matter if the towed truck appeared to have a different trajectory than it actually had, because it was very obviously in the range of collision.
Do you have a reverse sensor in your car that beeps when you’re close to stuff?
It was the self driving car that drove into the tow truck. All it’s sensors must’ve been beeping, and it still decided to keep driving.
I love the corpospeak. why say “crashed into” when you can use “made contact” which sounds futuristic and implies that your product belongs to an alien civilization?
Just cancelled my prime subscription today. It was set to renew on Friday. I’ve been with prime for close to 10 years.
I don’t see any value. The price has nearly doubled since originally signing up. The free two day shipping was nice but more and more 2 days is 3-4 and I can get free shipping anyway on any order over $35 without prime so I’ll just build up my cart and be patient or order from another place.
The video content was nice but they’re fucking joking if they think I’m going to watch ads or pay $3 more per month to not have ads. I can easily pirate most content including live sports and they’re making it far less convenient to be part of their ecosystem.
I get my books from the library and store my photos locally.
The literal only downside i see is my buddy won’t get his twitch prime subscription from me every month so I guess I’m costing him like $2/month but he’s got several hundred so he’ll do without.
Same, just cancelled today, as well. I don’t buy nearly enough stuff on Amazon anymore to justify the free shipping, the prime video app is fine enough, but if I have to pay more for HDR/surround, well the line has to be drawn somewhere.
I don’t regularly watch anything on APV so this specific action doesn’t really effect me -but- the uninhibited profit seeking by the Entertainment Industry is out of control. As a high income household we’ve silently absorbed the rate hikes and content splitting in order to keep enjoying content but the latest industry moves around account sharing and charging extra for basic stuff is getting to be too much. The former because I’ve got kids in College and I shouldn’t have to pay for extra"accounts, even with Student Discounts, so they can watch things and I definitely shouldn’t have to pay for simple add-ons like HD, Vision, and Atmos!
I’m lucky enough to be able to stand up a Media Server (Plex in my case) and am currently integrating that with “Arrr” services so I can hop off this carousel of rent-seeking insanity.
Prime was a reasonable value for me a decade ago. The streaming side was never the main draw but it was a nice added bonus, especially when Netflix started to lose a lot of the content I actually wanted to watch.
Unfortunately, Amazon’s been flooded with worthless trash, and they made the conscious decision to make searching and filtering as useless as possible. It’s actually impressive that they’ve so degraded their service that it’s usually more convenient for me to go shopping locally than to try to navigate the unending mine field on Amazon.
So of course they try to ruin the last thing keeping me subscribed. I’m done, they can fuck off. I’ve got a jellyfin server, I don’t need these assholes.
Unfortunately, I’m sure they’ll make an obscene amount of money with this move, because apparently the world is full of people who will pay good money to bend over and take it.
Meanwhile I get support for both completely ad free with infinite selection on my Jellyfin server… What on earth are these companies thinking, you literally get a superior product by not paying for it. I would gladly pay a small fee per download of DRM free files if that were an option.
The easiest way forward is to take that and couple it with something like this for near instant access to a shit ton of content.
Edit: If you are using Set Top Boxes or Smart TVs like Roku / Google / Samsung make sure there’s a Jellyfin client available for your device. You may need to use something else like Plex or Kodi if a Jellyfin client isn’t available for your environment.
Jellyfin, kodi, openelec, emby and plex are currently the best self-hosted media streaming platforms. Just attach some hard drive with your vacation videos, ripped dvds/blurays, other owned content and you can have your own service that is only available in your local network at home, for free, with whatever quality you want. One benefit is that this will still work in the rare occasion that your ISP screws up and knocks your neighborhood offline. The downside is you have to have sufficient storage and need to acquire your media yourself.
Back in the day, before streaming was a thing, there were lots of people saying that they’d gladly pay for content if it was served to them in a convenient way. But why would you pay for a worse experience (at that time physical media, often at lower quality, and lower availability) when you can get a better one for free?
Along came streaming. Lo and behold, piracy decreased. Where the fuck do you even go to pirate music anymore? All the big sites have shut down. Video piracy is kinda still going strong, probably mostly due to bullshit concerning exclusives, but it’s way less than it used to be.
Its their platform, they can do whatever they want with it I guess, but this trend is definitely gonna be a big boost to piracy.
It never went away but lots of people I know who did all that stopped bothering.
When the range in netflix went down, fees went up and everybody launched different services, I was really thinking of sailing but it was Netflix blocking sharing that was the final straw.
Back in the day, before streaming was a thing, there were lots of people saying that they’d gladly pay for content if it was served to them in a convenient way.
It wasn’t just people saying that, it was backed up by studies.
Music piracy just kinda gets ripped from official sources. Be it Spotify with an Adblock script, or downloading the song from YouTube.
If you want super high quality stuff, you can find groups dedicated to it. But for most users, just modding streaming services to give them what they want for free is enough.
I mean, yeah. I signed up for a year of Prime last summer. They just decide to put in ads? At least wait for the subscription to expire before pulling this crap.
Every time they do something like this, I wait longer and longer to resubscribe. It’s just been getting worse, not better.
Bezos, just go to Mars already with the rest of the billionaires. Guess how much taxes you’ll save up there. We don’t need you.
Perhaps you once wrote a piece called “Making the Most of Paywalled Articles”. Unfortunately, Google can’t find it. Let’s just ask Bing.
Hey Bing, please summarize the article “Making the Most of Paywalled Articles” by Evotech.
Copilot Certainly! The article titled “Making the Most of Paywalled Articles” by Evotech discusses strategies for accessing articles that are locked behind paywalls. Here are the key points:
Yeah… I think we can skip the “summary”. Don’t get me wrong. This stuff is amazing and I love it. But it is what it is. I really hate that MS and OAI don’t communicate the “limitations” properly.
The electric company. AI’s reading articles written by other AI’s. Everyone trying to figure out how to squeeze more revenue out of it. But everyone’s paying the electric bill for all these servers and the electric company doesn’t have to give a shit about any of it.
engadget.com
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