> "the resulting congestion required law enforcement to manually manage intersections"
Does anyone know if a Waymo vehicle will actually respond to a LEO giving directions at a dark intersection, or if it will just disregard them in favour of treating it as a 4 way stop?
I suddenly find that I really want an answer to this as well because I'm now imagining what might ensue if one of these attempted to board a car ferry. Typically there's a sign "turn headlights off", you're expected to maintain something like 5 mph (the flow of traffic should never stop), and you get directed by a human to cross multiple lane markings often deviating from the path that the vehicle immediately in front of you took.
Car ferries don't really make much sense in a Waymo-ubiquitous world. It's not your vehicle; there isn't really a reason why you would need to have the same vehicle on the other side of ferry ride. You're better off having one Waymo network on one side of the waterway, a separate Waymo network on the other side, and then a passenger-only ferry with a much higher passenger capacity (and oftentimes, they go much faster, since you can have hull forms like wave-piercing catamarans, hydrofoils, and hovercraft when you aren't carrying cars).
There are some places where a car ferry is essentially a bridge and just operate as part of the highway, e.g. there are two such instances in sacramento: https://dot.ca.gov/caltrans-near-me/district-4/d4-projects/d... The rides are about a minute long and you very much wouldn't want to change vehicles.
Another common scenario is vastly different population density on the far side of the ferry route. It seems unlikely to me that autonomous vehicle companies would want to maintain a giant seasonal fleet at such destinations.
In a lot of cases rather than seasonal it will be a surge every weekend.
I think that Waymo isn't concerned about those types of scenario because they only operate in a limited area, and can tune their systems to operate best in that area (EG not worrying about car ferries, human-operated parking lots etc)
Your scenario seems to have a lot of overlap with a construction worker directing traffic around a road construction site. I have no idea if Waymo is any good at navigating these, but I am sure there is a lot of model training around these scenarios because they are common in urban driving environments.
Sometimes, but not always. They may need to stop traffic for a moment to get some machine out and then there is no board. Sometimes they will tell you an alternate that is much faster than waiting as well.
This was found to be one of the early challenges of self driving: reading traffic signal gestures of traffic agents. It does it. But the jury is out if it does it well.
It also needs to be able to ensure the signals are coming from a human that actually has authority to command it. Don't really want it taking hand signals from anyone.
Why do people keep saying this whole "it's hard for humans, too" thing in every damn self driving car thread? Is it some kind of excuse to let the self driving car be shit at it? I don't care if people are shit at it, isn't the whole point that these cars will be safer than people?
Yeah we know people suck at driving. What situation is there that people don't suck at? People suck at 4 way stops. People suck at merging onto the freeway. People can't even exit the freeway without causing a mess. People can't even drive in a straight goddamn line without varying speed by 10mph and weaving all over the road. What exactly are we trying to say here?
The amount of times this has been asked with no confirmation leads me to believe they still do not.
Tesla fanboys gush about how FSD can understand LEO at irregular traffic conditions, but no company I’m aware of has confirmed their systems are capable.
That's between Waymo and their investors at this point. They claim it's not, but it's not there's any way for them to actually prove they aren't, like the moon landing.
FSD on the other hand works fine without sleight of hand techniques, since I’ve taken it up to rural Maine without any cellular connectivity and it worked great, even in irregular rural traffic situations.
Teslas currently have a driver in the front who could take over in these situations.
Waymo said they normally handle traffic light outages as 4-way stops, but sometimes call home for help - perhaps if they detect someone in the intersection directing traffic ?
Makes you wonder in general how these cars are designed to handle police directing traffic.
It kind of makes sense. Why program or train on such a rare occurrence. Just send it off to a human to interpret and be done with it. If that's the case then Tesla is closer to Waymo then previously thought. Maybe even ahead.
I don't think traffic light outages (e.g. flashing yellow) or police directing traffic at intersections is that rare, but regardless these cars do need to handle it in a safe and legal manner, which either means recognizing police gestures in a reliable way, or phoning home.
We know that Waymos phone home when needed, but not sure how Tesla handles these situations. I'm not sure how you conclude anything about Tesla based on their current temporary "safety monitor" humans in the cars - this is just a temporary measure until they get approval to go autonomous.
I seem to remember as a kid that cops would be directing traffic often if a signal was out or malfunctioning. I haven't seen that in years. The only time I see anyone directing traffic is around accidents, construction zones, or special events.
Googling for this, apparently Tesla do try to recognize police gestures, and are getting better at it.
I wonder who gets the ticket when a driverless car does break the law and get stopped by police? If it's a Taxi service (maybe without a passenger in the car) then maybe it'd the service, but that's a bit different than issuing a traffic ticket to a driver (where there's points as well as a fine).
What if it's a privately owner car - would the ticket go to the car owner, or to the company that built the car ?!
I've never understood the negative comments around UX for GIMP. It always feels just fine for me. Some stuff is in menus, but its a complex application with a lot of parts so I understand that
Maybe I missed something, but I don't quite understand the video title "NIST's NTP clock was microseconds from disaster". Is there some limit of drift before it's unrecoverable? Can't they just pull the correct time from the other campus if it gets too far off?
If Jeff wants to maintain his job of making Youtube videos, youtube itself forces him to make clickbait thumbnails and titles.
They have A/B testing infrastructure available to creators for exactly that purpose.
If you say "Oh but he doesn't have to use that" you are wrong. If a creator's videos get low enough click through and "engagement", youtube just stops showing it to people.
Jeff, like every creator on youtube, is in an antagonistic deathmatch for your attention with people like Mr. Beast, and Youtube would rather five Mr Beasts than a thousand Jeffs. Youtube builds their platform to empower and enrich Mr Beast, and to force everyone else to adopt more of Mr Beasts methods to stay getting views, and getting their paycheck
It does not matter if you are "subscribed" to a channel for example. Youtube will still fail to show you new videos from your subscriptions if you don't play the stupid game enough.
Stop blaming the people who did not at all make this choice. Blame Youtube. Support platforms, like nebula and whatever that guntube service is called, with real money.
Did you know this video existed before it was posted to HN? I did, because it showed up in my feed even though I am not subscribed to jeff, because he plays the game well. I watched it too because I had no idea that weather was causing such a problem in Colorado and love hearing about NIST and the people who basically run the infrastructure of the internet that everyone takes for granted.
>I watched it too because I had no idea that weather was causing such a problem in Colorado and love hearing about NIST and the people who basically run the infrastructure of the internet that everyone takes for granted.
Are you aware that text based news about the NIST problems have been posted on HN in the past few days?
I just use ye old faithful of piratebay, through the tor browser so my ISP doesn't do shenanigans to it, then ffmpeg to get only the streams I care about (video, english audio / japanese audio + english subtitles) and reencode it to h264 mp4 so the files aren't gigantic and are compatible with everything. A bit old-school maybe but it generally works fine for me.
I live in the UK so I'll also sometimes pull stuff from iPlayer, which yt-dlp works perfectly for, and also off youtube
Can you please reconsider using TOR for piracy? It strains the Tor Network and makes life harder for exit node providers. The Tor Project has advised against it as well[0]. There are many cheap VPN Providers that allow port forwarding and will give you an even better torrenting experience.
Using the Tor-Browser to get the links on ThePirateBay et. al. is of course fine, torrenting the content though is where it becomes a problem.
I don't torrent through tor, I just use it to get the links. I've found that if I use TPB on the normal internet, my ISP (or someone who can see my connections) seems to be poisoning the results, since all my torrents result in a 1.89gb executable file that I'm sure as hell not opening. Getting the links through tor doesn't have the same issue, and then I download them over the normal internet, and everything works fine
Add me to the list of people curious about this. It feels more like some sort of bug than a real attack, it would be odd to use such a huge file for every torrent.
Sure, but this way I know what I'm getting, rather than just hoping I get the right thing. I don't mind doing a little bit of cleanup to make sure I'm getting what I want
And if you don't want to torrent at all, there are recent tools (nzbdav) to build a large *arr library that streams directly from usenet, without need for self-storage
Plus, if you you are handy enough to be taking the screws out of your car but don't have a CNC mill, you probably know someone who does, who would love a little weekend project to turn you up a nice BMW screwdriver
How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times
1. Go out every morning to work in your field.
2. When the Sun rises, make a note on the same fixed piece of wood, e.g., a fence.
3. Observe the leftmost and rightmost positions, these are your solstices.
4 You can now use your fence to identify and predict solstices.
I have read that the auspicious date of December 25th may have been intended to be the Solstice but that the degree of error for "making a note on a fence" is why we have the 25th.
It seems unintuitive today because people living in cities and towns don’t usually see sunrises and sunsets from where they live. If you had a way to easily reference the sunrise and sunset points against known horizon, it’d be very easy to tell.
Also because today we have accurate clocks and most of us don't depend on seasons for anything. Farmers care about when to plant, and a few gardeners pay attention, but for most of us nothing changes in life. (I'm carefully not counting the traditional vacations that most of us have around this time - though that is important to us and historically related, we could move the date and it wouldn't affect anything else).
Honestly I bet you would have at least a reasonable intuition about it if you were among them. It's pretty remarkable how much our distractions and 'being indoors' all the time dulls our senses to nature.
I started doing astrophotography about three years ago. I'd always been interested in 'space' but never really spent hours upon hours out at night over the course of months actually just studying the night sky. I remember wondering as a kid how people even thought about planets or came up with these wild stories with the constellations...to me it just kind of looked like a bright field of randomly twinkling lights.
Well, when you're out every night from 10pm to 2am looking up, it all just kind of comes alive. You see everything. The motion of the planets, the elliptic upon which they travel, the gradual shift of the entire field as the seasons change, the undulations of the moon and it's varied trajectory across the sky. The shifting of the sun's set and rise and the ebb and flow of day vs night. Everything. Your mind just starts to harmonize with the rhythm of it all. It's pretty wonderful.
> How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was
Solstice is a small thing they figured long ago, there are things they managed that are much more complex than that. In India there are whole temples dedicated to astronomy and built to align with different celestial geometries.
They didn't like go out on Dec 21st, and look where the sun was and mark it. They didn't even have calendars like that. They watched the sun every day, and waited until it stopped being lower in the sky at it's highest point in the day (or whatever other sign of the solstice they wanted to use), and marked that angle and built whatever viewport they wanted (a door, tunnel, etc).
Then they could just go wherever they built the thing that pointed at that point in the sky, and go, oh, okay, the solstice is soon, or just happened, or whatever and plan accordingly.
It actually wasn't really accurate to the day, anyway. There are a few days on either side of the solstice where the effect is basically the same for the viewer.
Something to keep in mind is that this isn't only useful for determining the exact date of the winter solstice, which they may not have even cared that much about. You can see roughly where you are in the year on either side of the solstice by looking at how far out of alignment the sun is on a given day. So it could be useful throughout the fall and even well into the winter for gauging the passing of time. People didn't need to plan day by day or even week by week, but they did need to do things in roughly the right part of the year.
People act like this is some unexplainable advanced technology, and anybody can just do this with a stick and some rocks.
Pre technology, the sky was very central to life. Sunlight, rain and snow dictated much of your life (and death), and you probably considered the sun, moon and five planets as gods.
You and I personally may not have kept track, but our local religious leader did, and maybe the even staged a ceremony at the winter solstice to ask the sun to make the days longer.
>and you probably considered the sun, moon and five planets as gods.
I find it strange that today knowing much more about sun and moon we don't consider them as gods. Today we know for sure they are the origin of all life on this planet and yet many cultures decided to go for an abstract intangeable entities instead of what is directly in front of us and can't be debated.
However if you live in the open, or have daily access to the open sky, after a while you are bound to notice.
We are so used to having a ceiling above us, so used to constructions blocking our view of the sky that this seems a feat.
I was the same till I got access to the sky. Then ... oh wait ... the sunset is shifting towards those landmarks every day. Oh wait, now its turning around to go the other way.
The total span of movement is so large, that its hard to miss unless you are on a featureless landscape or in the open sea.
I am super impressed by humans noticing and separating the planet's from the stars. Look at those stars they don't twinkle and they move funny. I guess the planets drew attention because of their brightness and by their lack of twinkle.
For very ancient people, it's the longest/shortest day.
After you notice that, if you want more precision, it's the day the Sun rises and sets most on the North/South. It's also the day things cast the largest shadow at noon. You will need some special device to get very precise on the sun raising position (like a pair of stones or something with a hole), and you won't be able to get precision on the shadow thing.
For more modern people, starting about only half a dozen millennia ago, it's the hour the Sun stops moving North/South within the stars and starts moving the other way around. You will need to look at it and take notes many times, and average things out to get any precision. Even more because you can't see the Sun and the stars at the same time, so you have to model them.
I’m sure you’d know that this was winter. If you line 2 sticks up with sunrise, and keep adjusting them every morning, eventually you’ll see that the sun stops rising further south and starts moving north again. You don’t need complex mathematics to work it out.
Every time I hear about tings like left-pad and is_even, I have to wonder... Are JS developers ok? There seem to be a lot of packages for extremely trivial things that nonetheless gets huge amounts of downloads
Many of these issues stem from the fact that Javascript doesn't have anything like stdlib or equivalents. I'm willing to bet money that most people can't write a bug free left-pad in Javascript on the first try without looking stuff up. Reaching for a dependency can make a lot of sense in that context.
I'm not a JS developer, so maybe they'd do it differently, but I'd probably do a bounds check, returning early if the target length is less than the input length, then create a string of spaces that is (targetlength - inputlength) long, and return them concatenated. Quick google shows theres a string.repeat method so probably use that (does that not count as part of an stdlib?).
Also, I'd bet money that most people couldn't write most things bug free on the first try without looking stuff up unless it's trivial
That's how I imagine most people would start, but unfortunately that will break on anything beyond basic ascii strings. Arabic, Hindi, Vietnamese, etc use diacritics, combining characters and so on, and this isn't even getting into the mess of emojis and their modifiers.
It would, I was not familiar with the specific package, more so commenting on the problem at large. Even coding problems that sounds fairly straightforward can be a source of many dragons if you don't have good tools to solve them.
How often would it matter? I can certainly write code that would cover all use case I was expecting and case bash all the scenarios. I’m sure I’d fall victim to edge cases.
If this was such a common use case that it warranted being in some sort of stdlib, then make a standard lib and make sure it can’t be deleted.
We’re generally fine and well paid. :) Frontend tooling churn is tiresome but the upside is that there is a lot of great tooling that more than makes up for any language deficiencies.
If my website got hugged to death, I would be very happy. If my website got scraped to hell and back by people putting it into the plagiarism machine so that it can regurgitate my content without giving me any attribution, I would be very displeased
Does anyone know if a Waymo vehicle will actually respond to a LEO giving directions at a dark intersection, or if it will just disregard them in favour of treating it as a 4 way stop?
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