Seriously. People are outraged about the theoretical potential for human harm while there is a god damn constant death rate here that is 4x higher than every other western country.
I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith.
Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.
They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing.
People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.
Hey, I hear you. And I'm sad. Because I'd like to say that the right way is to:
build infrastructure that promotes safe driving, and
train drivers to show respect for other people on the road
However, those are both non-starters in the US. So your answer, which comes down to "at least self-driving is better than those damn people" might be the one that actually works.
I've spend some time driving in both the US and the UK and while infrastructure in the US could be improved I don't think that's the main issue.
What's different is driver training and attitude. Passing a driving test in the US is too easy to encourage new drivers to learn to drive. And an average American driver shows less respect to pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, aggressive driving is relatively common. Bad drivers can be encountered in the UK of course but on average British drive better.
Huge SUV and pickup trucks are also part of the problem - they are more dangerous for everyone except people in such vehicle.
San Francisco has done a ton of that recently. They've added protected bike lanes and even experimented with a center bike lane on Valencia Street which must have cost a shit ton of money. I give them credit for trying (and a lot of my tax dollars). There are a lot of no right on red situations and a lot of flights that are specific to bicycles and not cars. The city is trying and it has the will and the money to do it. We just have to hope that it doesn't all disappear into corruption and political nonsense.
Yes, this is really it for me. Self-driving isn’t the best solution, but the real solution requires lots of politics and lots of time to build. Tech is the one thing we are pretty good at in this country, and feels like the one thing that makes it possible to have change quickly and without endless politicking.
I currently live in a place where, when walking on the street, I routinely almost get hit by vehicles while crossing crosswalks with the cross light on.
However, I used to live in a place where every local driver did an 'after you' that included pedestrians, regardless of road rules, and generally drove the speed limit (and usually less).
As you said, people often continue to drive at full speed through unlit intersections let alone roads. Doesn't that then imply that a Waymo stopping on such a road is not "failing safe"? It's just asking for someone to hit it -- even if they'd be at fault, it's still not safe.
That’s nonsense logic. Is it not “safe” for pedestrians to use a crosswalk since a car might not stop? If that’s your definition of “safety” then all hope of a coordinated system is lost.
I want nothing to do with Waymo or any of the others, but they're all being forced on me. I think self-driving cars are one of the biggest and stupidest misallocations of resources and talent we've seen yet. And they're being developed using public resources that we all own (yet I never had a chance to vote on it) for the benefit of a private company that only those with enough disposable income can buy into. I don't happen to own any of their stock, so I'm not seeing any benefit. Why would I care how well they're doing? And they helped themselves to my roads as a testing ground; why would I afford them the slightest slack when they mess up? Meanwhile the people who can least afford to buy in, are actually living on the streets where these are being tested and are shouldering a disproportionate share of the risks. So it only takes mere inconvenience, or their mere existence, to bother and annoy me, not human harm. It's a machine designed to steal from the commons. And actually in tort law, theft IS harm. But physical harm to humans has also happened and will happen. Cars driven by humans: same, except also having a lengthy history that includes documented physical harm to humans. They too are machines for stealing from the public to advantage the owners. The things being stolen are clean air, climate, land/space, and safety/life. So my argument is fully consistent. There are exceptions in it for trucks, trains and buses, and even for some cars, in cases where the benefit offsets the harm, and the public has meaningfully approved it.
When people say "western" they often don't mean "western hemisphere" but the "first world". So Peru wouldn't be "western" by this definition but Australia might be.
Yeah, HN just loves the term "The West" / "Western", which weirdly includes Australia and New Zealand, but excludes Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. (What about South Africa? Unsure.) To me, it is better to say something like "G7-like" (or OECD) nations, because that includes all highly developed nations.
No, what they really mean is "a subset of typically rich typically western europe that I can cherry pick to prove my point" though anywhere formerly colonized by a European power and any developed nation in Asia is fair game depending on context.
Notice eastern europe is nearly always left out of social issue discussions.
Some Mediterranean bordering nations are always left out of government efficacy discussions.
It's not about comparing like-ish for like-ish. It's about finding a plausibly deniable way to frame the issue so that the US gets kneecapped by the inclusion of West Virginia or 'bama New Mexico or Chicago or whatever else it is that is an outlier and tanks its numbers while the thing on the other side of the comparison exempts that analogue entirely and this makes whatever policy position the person doing the framing is advocating for look good.
You see this slight of hand up and down and left and right across every possible topic of discussion in communities composed of american demographics that generally look towards Europe for solutions for things.
> Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving
Is this written in jest, or is there something more serious behind it? Off the top of my head, I cannot think of an obvious reason why "road handedness" (left vs right) would matter for road safety. Could it something about more people are right-handed so there is some 2nd order safety effect that I am overlooking?
Their comment was in jest, but I've wondered before if left vs right hand driving could affect safety. As you note right-handed people are more common. The countries with the highest percentages of left-handed people are around 12-13%.
In countries that drive on the right then drivers use their dominant hand for any controls that are on the inward side and their other hand for the control that are on the outward side of the driver.
Generally that means that the non-dominant hand handles exterior lighting, turn signals, windows, and locks. The dominant hand handles windshield wipers, transmission, and anything on the center console such as the climate and entertainment systems, and often also the navigation system.
In left drive counties that is mostly reversed for right-handed people, with the possible exception of the exterior lighting, turn signals, and windshield wipers. Those exceptions are the controls that are usually on stalks attached to the steering column. From what I've read sometimes manufactures use the same stalk positions in left and right drive models instead of reversing them like they do the rest of the controls.
Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference? If everyone obeyed safety recommendations I'd expect it to not make enough difference to be noticeable, but not everyone obeys safety recommendations 100% of the time.
If someone for example tried to type in a destination using the on-screen keyboard on the navigation system console while driving I'd expect that they would take longer to do so if they were using their non-dominant hand, so they would be distracted longer.
> Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference?
Large airplanes usually have a pilot on either side of the center console, and they AFAIK take turns operating the airplane, so if it made a difference, I'd expected it to be studied by the aerospace industry. Given that I've never seen it mentioned on any of the airplane incident reports I've read, it probably isn't a big factor, and I see no reason why it would be different for cars.
> The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.
Is this a serious comment? Is that actually what you think they meant by "Western"? When people talk about Russia vs "the West", do you also think they mean Russia vs the Western hemisphere?
Presumably, like Cruise, if the safety rate is appalling then they get their permits revoked which is 99% the same as jail for a company that only does self driving cars.
The problem is that we have a Congress that cares more about in-group loyalty than they do about idiocy.
Meanwhile, we even have Michael Burry pointing out the obvious: we're losing to China because we're not building up every bit of energy capacity that we can. But, sure, why not just ban windfarms in a location perfectly suited to them:
My background is philosophy of language. I studied formal/mathematical logic in grad school. I was always embarrassed that I couldn't code, but the computer sciences classes were teaching languages that were inscrutable for someone even with my background, with syntax heavily focused on jargony math and technical concepts like object orientation (likely java at the time).
Around 2010, I was talking about this with friend about this failing of mine, and he said "you should try python, I've heard it is popular with non-math folks." So I bought a book, and as soon as I opened it, I could just read it. It took me a couple days of reading to wrap my head around object orientation, but on the functional side, I could have written fizz buzz like, maybe half an hour after opening the book.
Humans have logic pre-built into our brains, it's just that we use natural language as our syntax. Python cleverly used as much of the natural language syntax as was practicable to remove the barriers to entry for non-math majors. Whitespace is perfect example of a natural language syntax feature.
The whitespace thing is actually one of python's major flaws. That feature attaches syntactic meaning to non-printing characters. From a human standpoint, there're many examples of silence having some kind of meaning. From an engineering standpoint, that entire methodology is insane. Communication needs to be positive and deliberate.
Remember that Apple SSL bug "goto fail"? That was a whitespace bug, because even if the C feature predated python, everyone's eyes had been trained to slide right off that particularly crass shortcut as python was widespread by that point.
>Communication needs to be positive and deliberate.
I don't know what you mean by this.
>The whitespace thing is actually one of python's major flaws. That feature attaches syntactic meaning to non-printing characters. From a human standpoint, there're many examples of silence having some kind of meaning. From an engineering standpoint, that entire methodology is insane.
It's not non-printed characters, it's alignment. The period is a parallel for the semicolon in programming, to signal the end of a unit, but the whitespace in python is a parallel to the bullet point, or poetic stanza. Those both parallel to python in the form of atomic statements.
Most people's concern is the hanging indentation. Here, I would argue that we can effectively prove that hanging indentation is vastly more parallel to natural language than braces. Simply search for "handwritten recipes" and you will see that in a natural language assembly exercises -- effectively a real world parallel to programming -- human beings naturally default to hanging indentation when grouping sub-categories of items together.
Does this parallel to the jargony math you'll find in math books? No. But it trivially flows from human beings in the real world, and there is nothing formally incorrect in the syntax. Thus, we would likely find that layperson would intuitively understand the hanging indentation, where as braces as syntax is jargony, and must be learned.
I don't think it has anything to do with Python. I had plenty of 'if' errors in C++ caused by indenting the second line and not putting braces around it prior to Python. They were always painful to debug. I finally just _always_ put a brace around an 'if' block, regardless of whether it is one line or many, and I've never had that problem again. I think the problem is that C lets you omit the brace for one line; it should always require a brace.
Python executes like it reads, which seems like a positive feature to me. Makes errors like C's two-line if block impossible.
There's functionally little difference between spaces being non-printable characters, unless there are examples of text editors that do not render offset empty space when they're used.
Spaces vs tabs, sure, that's an argument.
But it doesn't seem reasonable to argue that {something that is visible in a text editor} is different than any other kind of character.
It's not like Python was using the bell ASCII or somesuch.
I live in the affected neighborhood. There were hundreds of drivers that did not know how to handle a power outage... it was a minority of drivers, but it was a nontrivial, but nominally large number. I even saw a Muni bus blow through a blacked out intersection. The difference is the Waymos failed in a way that prevented potential injury, whereas the humans who failed, all fail in a way that would create potential injury.
I wish the Waymos handled it better, yes, but I think that the failure state they took is preferable to the alternative.
Locking down the roads creates a lot of potential injuries too.
And "don't blow through an intersection with dead lights" is super easy to program. That's not enough for me to forgive them of all that much misbehavior.
I wouldn't say "super easy" but if an autonomous vehicle isn't programmed to handle:
1: streetlight with no lights
2: streetlight with blinking red
2.5: streetlight with blinking yellow
Then they are 100% not qualified to be on the road. Those are basic situations and incredibly easy to replicate, simulate, and incorporate into the training data.
That is to say, they are not edge cases.
Dealing with other drivers in those settings is much harder to do but that's a different problem and you should be simulating your car in a wide variety of other driver dynamics. From everyone being very nice to everyone being hyper aggressive and the full spectrum in between.
If you are just arguing that they're not qualified to be on the road, then I agree with you. I've been an autonomous vehicle skeptic for a long time, mainly because in think our automobile transportation system is inherently dangerous. It's going to be a tough sell though, considering that they are already -- generally -- better drivers than a nontrivial number of human beings.
It's a tough question. The entire reason I'm defending this shortcoming is exactly that I prefer the fail-safe shutdown to any attempt to navigate bizarre, barely conforming to traffic code, blacked out intersections that are inherently dangerous.
Specifically identifying road signs, traffic lights, and dead traffic lights is a narrow problem that has feasible solutions. To the point where we can reasonably say “yeah, this sub-component basically works perfectly.”
Compared to the overall self-driving problem which is very much not a super easy problem.
The cars already know those are intersections with lights. I'm not talking about that part. Just the basic logic that you don't go through at speed unless there is a green (or yellow) light.
>The cars already know those are intersections with lights.
That's not how any of this works. You can anthropomorphize all you like, but they don't "know" things. They're only able to predictably respond to their training data. A blackout scenario is not in the training data.
Even ignoring the observations we can make, the computers have maps programmed in. Yes they do know the locations of intersections, no training necessary.
And the usual setup of an autonomous car is an object recognition system feeding into a rules system. If the object recognition system says an object is there, and that object is there, that's good enough to call "knowing" for the purpose of talking about what the cars should do.
Or to phrase things entirely differently: Finding lights is one of the easy parts. It's basically a solved problem. Cutting your speed when there isn't a green or yellow light is table stakes. These cars earn 2 good boy points for that, and lose 30 for blocking the road.
>They're only able to predictably respond to their training data. A blackout scenario is not in the training data.
Is there anyway to read more about this? I'm skeptical that there aren't any human coded traffic laws in the Waymo software stack, and it just infers everything from "training data".
Yes, it does lead to blocking the traffic but that is the only safe action to do in such an intersection; if an intersection has traffic lights, there's enough traffic that stop&give way is not a viable operation.
Usually in that case you would make it a priority to the right /or left so that everyone only has to look at one side (besides the pedestrians) and in a very busy intersection people with common sense and education naturally do an alternance where you give way to every other car.
I don't know if waymos are programmed for that and it could very well be that there were so many pedestrian crossing it wouldn't apply it anyway.
I mean, yes, if the Waymo's could safely pull over, or even know how to handle every emergency situation, I think that would be better. I'd say that's a big ask though. Training autonomous vehicles for blackouts, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, hail storms, landslides, sinkholes, tsunamis, floods, or even just fog is not really feasible given that most humans won't even navigate the properly. I'll keep saying it: I'm glad the cars were set to fail-safely when they encountered a situation they couldn't understand.
I honestly wish the human drivers blowing through intersections that night would have done the same. It's miracle no one was killed.
The word carrying water here is "need." My partner and I ran an errand in the blackout, we didn't need to do it, but we wanted to. I drove us almost exclusively through an area of the city that had power, but we still ran into issues, including multiple disabled Waymos during that trip. Even in the areas with power, people were driving weirdly. If were able to do it over, I would have stayed home.
I was in the affected area and we effectively lost all but messaging. Not the whole time, but definitely while I was ordering takeout at a place with power. I couldn't get an image to send to a friend.
I lived in the training zone for both Waymo and Cruise. They were there for literally years before they were offering rides to anyone. The idea that they could train them for emergency scenarios, especially ones that happen so infrequently like a power outage on a route they regularly drive, seems borderline nonsensical, but I honestly don't know if there is a plausible way to do it.
There are plenty of foods with vitamin D. You don't actually need to supplement it unless you're a vegetarian, you just need to actively include those foods in your diet.
The current argument I've read for why fair-skinned people even evolved near the North Sea and not anywhere else near the arctic is exactly that the Gulf Stream allowed a cereals-based diet rather than a meat based diet, which led to vitamin D deficiencies which caused problems in pregnancy, leading to people with fairer skin being the most likely to avoid those problems.
You definitely don't need to get your vitamin D from the sun.
I don't know where you read that fair skin is a diet adaptation and not a sunlight one, but that's wrong: fair skin is an adaptation to northern latitudes due to reduced sunlight. The majority of people of African descent in America are vitamin D deficient, but in Ghana — where there is much poorer nutrition, but more sunlight — they're not. Meanwhile, the majority of white Americans are not vitamin D deficient. [1]
Getting sufficient vitamin D takes 6x longer sun exposure for black people than for white people. [2] In northern latitudes that's pretty difficult.
My favorite one that I read about is mushrooms. If you grow them in the sun, some species allegedly acquire vitamin D. I am not sure how much nor if this is truly effective, but it gives me a good excuse to grow various mushrooms next spring.
You might be interested in the British history of Vitamin D supplementation. It all started with kids in the cities getting rickets because the pollution (smog) was that bad that they never got to see further than a metre or two during the worst of it. The way to get around was by taking the tram as that had rails to guide it through the 'pea soupers'.
So they put the kids on trains and took them off to the seaside.
But then...
The railway also allowed milk to be brought into the cities. So they added vitamin D to milk. That was how the rickets was solved. In time milk became free at school, usually it was warm by morning break, which was when it would get consumed, from mini-milk bottles, that would get reused.
I am only piecing together this history, no definitive source, unless you include my elderly neighbour. However, food history is fascinating, once you get away from celebrated brands to the unsung heroes of the vegetable aisle.
What I can't work out is why the children were so vulnerable to rickets when the adults weren't. Workers weren't being sent out to the countryside or beach to get some sun, just the kids. Rickets doesn't affect adults with grown bones, in theory, the adults should have had really painful joints and osteoporosis, but maybe this was not understood at the time.
In time the clean air zones were setup and the smog was banished to a certain extent, by which time it became uncommon to fortify milk with vitamin D. Finally we had Margaret Thatcher, famously the 'milk snatcher', for stopping free school milk.
In the UK we do get vitamin D randomly added to processed foods (what else?) and this is a scattergun approach to fortifying the population. If you don't eat processed foods then you are not going to get any of that processed food fortification goodness.
Then there are the animal corpse sources, as in oily fish and whatnot. If you eat any diet except for whole-food-plant-based vegan, then you are going to get vitamin D either through dead animal or fortification. Vegetarians just have to eat maaassivve blocks of cheese, which they will, with a few eggs and some breakfast cereal to get their vitamin D needs roughly covered. Junk-food vegans should get some vitamin D goodness from fortifications too, particularly if they consume things like 'oat milk' (as if oats have mammary glands). Pure junk food, a.k.a. 'Standard American Diet', should also be pretty good for vitamin D.
So this only really leaves the whole-food, plant-based, everything-cooked-from-scratch vegan diet as lacking, at least as far as the winter months is concerned. Was this a problem historically? I don't think so. Since people used to work the fields, they had plenty of vitamin D to carry over for winter.
Before we had 'modern day racism' in the UK, we had a situation where the aristocracy had white skin and everyone else had leathery brown skin, from working outside. White skin was proof that you didn't have to work the fields and therefore, you were higher status. Racism pre-dated racism, if you get my drift, it was mere class-based xenophobia back then. To be 'truly white' you had to have no tan.
Since meat was hard to come by, peasants were 95% vegan by default, yet working the fields, so vitamin D deficiency was not a problem, for the 1% aristocracy (since they had their oily fish, red meat and dairy) or for the 99% that had to spend lots of time outdoors.
I am not sure where you are coming from regarding the Gulf Stream and cereals. The Fertile Crescent was where farming began for Europe, with wheat not actually growing in the UK and other grains (barley) being the chosen grain. It was only with the Norman Conquest that wheat made it to the UK.
When the Romans made it to the UK they were perplexed at what they found. There were two tribes, the nomadic cattle types and the hill fort living grain growers that were not nomadic. The hill forts got in the way of the migration routes between pastures. The Romans were disgusted by the milk drinking since nobody would do that in Rome, where everyone was lactose intolerant, unlike the Celts.
> What I can't work out is why the children were so vulnerable to rickets when the adults weren't
Presumably, children need regular and consistent amounts due to bone growth. Once past puberty, less mineralization of calcium and phosphate happens, which is one of the processes in the body that requires vitamin D.
I was there. I encountered multiple stopped Waymos in the street. It was annoying, but not dangerous. They had their lights on. Any driver following the rules of the road would get around them fine. It was definitely imperfect, but safe. Much safer than the humans blowing through those very same intersections.
A fail-safe is EXACTLY blocking roads at intersections without power, not proceeding through intersections without power. It's much safer to be stopped than to keep going. I honestly wish the humans driving through blacked out intersections without slowing down in my neighborhood last night actually understood this.
It’s not a fail-safe. It’s a different failure mode. Jamming up traffic, including emergency traffic, creates systemic problems.
It’s a bit like designing an electronic lock that can’t be opened if the power goes out. If your recourse to exiting a dangerous situation becomes breaking the door, then the lock is unsafe.
Fail-safe means "in a situation where the function fails, fail in a way that doesn't cause injury" -> the cars didn't know how to proceed, so they stopped, with their lights on, in a way that any attentive driver could safely navigate... which is a failing safe.
The alternative here, is a protocol that obviously hasn't been tested. How on earth are you going to test a Waymo in blackout conditions? I would rather have them just stop, than hope they navigate those untested conditions with vulnerable pedestrians and vehicles acting unpredictable.
> Fail-safe means "in a situation where the function fails, fail in a way that doesn't cause injury"
In a very local sense, this is true. In terms of the traffic system, this can create a systemic problem if the stoppage causes a traffic jam that creates problems for emergency vehicles.
Thus it is a _different_ failure mode.
If someone stops in the middle of traffic because they’re lost, their GPS went out, or they realized that they’re unsafe to drive, we don’t celebrate that as the driver entering a fail-safe mode. We call that “bad judgment” and give them a ticket.
If it precipitates a larger problem where lives are lost, they may be in considerable legal or financial trouble.
I don’t see why we should treat Waymo any differently.
Traffic doesn’t cause injury. Why are we concerned about traffic flow in a blackout situation. The cars stopped at intersections, EMS could use the oncoming lanes. I’m not seeing how it’s not a fail safe, you’re describing it as not being fail-ideal, and I would agree.
I'm confused, is your concern that enough Waymos shut themselves down on a one way road, at the same intersection, so as to block the intersection? Yes, I could see that as being a concern. I suspect it would be reported almost immediately, and would be at the top of the list of for the folks at Waymo to address. The cars weren't abandoned. They eventually moved. Though, I suspect they had to be manually driven (virtually or otherwise), out of the way. I can see how this could be a problem, but considering it would likely be at the top of the list of problems for Waymo -- again, during an emergency -- that I suspect it's not a serious concern in the long run.
Would I preferred that they had a light turn on that was flashing "An unknown emergency is occurring, please park me"? Yes, I think that would be a better solution. I would have preferred better performance from Waymo. My entire point here is that I'm happy that in my neighborhood, the Waymos were acting in a fail-safe manner, rather than just winging it.
First responders have a method of disengaging autonomy and driving the car manually out of the way, described in the waymo first responder manual. Allegedly EMS can’t actually do so due to liability issues, but that is entirely the fault of American litigiousness and not Waymo.
Simulate them on a test course? There are absolutely places with street lights and everything that you could test something. Hell since they don’t need to work you can just have some put up in a parking lot to test with. Who cares.
You don’t need to wait for a city blackout to actually test this kind of scenario.
The thing still has cameras. And LIDAR. It should be fully capable of pulling over on its own safely. Why would not having a traffic light prevent that?
Humans are expected to negotiate this. The robots should be too. That’s part of driving. If the lights fail, the law tells you what you’re supposed to do. And it is not stop the intersection.
An intersection without power is supposed to be treated as a 4-way stop. An unfortunately high, nontrivial number of drivers last night were not following that rule.
The outrage people would rightly have at Waymo allowing a number of its vehicles to blow the lights would be huge. People running blacked out lights is unacceptable.
I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith.
Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.
They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing.
People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.
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