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WampaLord posted:For real. It is amazing how many people are staring at their smartphones while stopped at a light, and it's terrifying to think how many more are doing that while not stopped at a light.
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Apr 12, 2016 16:16
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How are u posted:Why do insufferable nerds always dream of a world full of autonomous self-driving cars?? Driving cars yourself is fun. gently caress the self-driving car crew. I'm the kind of nerd that still insists on driving a stick shift because it's fun, and probably will until it becomes impossible for me to buy/maintain one at any reasonable price. I love to drive and I'm not dreaming of anything, but at the same time cars are kind of a huge negative for society and there are a lot of benefits to autonomous cars over manually driven ones. Whether it happens in a decade or a century, manually driven personal transportation isn't going to be around forever. It's okay.
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Apr 12, 2016 16:24
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Nobody likes their commute. I love driving my car, but being able to put on autopilot when there's traffic is fantastic. E: I could reasonably be described as an insufferable nerd, though. Fair cop.
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Apr 12, 2016 16:30
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How are u posted:Driving cars yourself is fun. Untrue
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Apr 12, 2016 16:37
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I don't need a self-driving car, though. I would also accept a driver.
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Apr 12, 2016 16:38
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A Buttery Pastry posted:100% of the crashes I've watched happen were due to the driver looking at their smartphone. I've noticed more and more that I have to tap my horn to get the driver ahead of me to notice that the traffic light has turned green. My brother was on a deserted street behind someone at a stoplight once and just out of curiosity let the guy sit there after the light had turned. He never moved. He sat there through an entire light cycle, completely oblivious. I absolutely guarantee these people are looking down at their phones and paying no attention to the world around them.
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Apr 12, 2016 16:41
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MikeCrotch posted:Calico is actually an interesting topic for this thread, since it definitely seems to have been set up along the lines of the 'thanatophobe silicon valley STEMlord' trying to beat ageing and death. I work in biotech and Calico raised a lot of eyebrows when they started out by splashing a ton of money and making a lot of noise about trying to cure aging, without going into any specifics about how they are going about it. See: Google Health, as well as the charity (I've forgotten its name, but Wavy Gravy headed it) created because Google technology could surely revolutionize charitable works. Fantasies of technological ~disruption~ turn out to prove that highly-educated computer people aren't omnicompetent. Who could have guessed? See also 43AndMe, which turned out to be violating FDA marketing restrictions.
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Apr 12, 2016 16:41
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How are u posted:Why do insufferable nerds always dream of a world full of autonomous self-driving cars?? Driving cars yourself is fun. gently caress the self-driving car crew. Because driving in this isn't fun: 
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Apr 12, 2016 16:47
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Subjunctive posted:That's not a hard computer vision problem, and training data isn't scarce. Classification is well-understood, you could configure it to only hit certain breeds of dog. An unknown thing on the road should be avoided, just as by humans, but the set of unknown things will drop quickly over time. A car is moving in variable weather conditions without much time to react. Come on, this isn't easy. And consider the consequences of putting something in the "ok to run over" category and the usability consequence of excessive caution.
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Apr 12, 2016 16:53
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Brannock posted:Because driving in this isn't fun: This is more of an argument for more and better public transit than self driving cars tbh. All car traffic isn't the 405 or whatever this monstrosity is, and it isn't always driving from set point A to set point B as efficiently as possible.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:00
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Rhesus Pieces posted:This is more of an argument for more and better public transit than self driving cars tbh. All car traffic isn't the 405 or whatever this monstrosity is, and it isn't always driving from set point A to set point B as efficiently as possible. Yeah, but American suburbia isn't going to transform itself into denser satellite towns actually serviceable by bus/rail overnight.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:03
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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asdf32 posted:A car is moving in variable weather conditions without much time to react. Come on, this isn't easy. The computational requirements aren't trivial, but the curve of hardware looks more than sufficient (see NVIDIA's recent announcements). A human is also moving in such variable conditions, without the benefit of additional sensors, and with worse reaction times. It's not easy in the sense that you can't grab it from GitHub or order it from Newegg, but it's not hard in that object classification has been proven to work well on a wide variety of domains. AIUI, dealing with road markings (and lack there of) plus signage is harder. Improvements in camera resolution will help with that and with moving back the effective sensing horizon, but it's probably not enough to juice the hardware. Or maybe I'm totally wrong, and there's something inherent about the way lampposts cast shadows that fucks the whole thing, but I haven't heard of anything like that. I used to work with some top-tier computer vision people, I'll see what they say. Those consequences are the same as for more or less conservative human drivers. Swerve around a thing on the highway, or decide it looks like cardboard and go over it? Autonomous cars are likely to be a fair bit more fuel efficient too, I think.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:08
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So...should I make a thread for autonomous cars? I'm starting to think so. If so, in what subforum?
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Apr 12, 2016 17:10
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ADTRW would seem a natural fit.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:16
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Brannock posted:Because driving in this isn't fun:
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Apr 12, 2016 17:19
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Disabled people who can't drive, children and adolescents, and the elderly find themselves cut off from most of the community's life because they can't get from their homes to yoga classes, after-school meetings, churches, doctors' offices, and so on. Poor people can't get jobs because there's no way to get from their neighborhoods to the places that are hiring. This is more legitimately the kind of thing that needs to be addressed by public transportation, though. Yeah, it's possible to dream up scenarios where we have fleets of autonomous taxis running around and servicing people wherever they happen to be, but realistically that's not going to happen. And the problem with autonomous cars as a solution to the transportation struggles of poor people is that car ownership is unbelievably expensive, and if you don't make a lot of money it's one more thing that can lead to unexpected and disastrously large expenses.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:25
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Paradoxish posted:Yeah, it's possible to dream up scenarios where we have fleets of autonomous taxis running around and servicing people wherever they happen to be, but realistically that's not going to happen.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:32
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Paradoxish posted:This is more legitimately the kind of thing that needs to be addressed by public transportation, though. Yeah, it's possible to dream up scenarios where we have fleets of autonomous taxis running around and servicing people wherever they happen to be, but realistically that's not going to happen. And the problem with autonomous cars as a solution to the transportation struggles of poor people is that car ownership is unbelievably expensive, and if you don't make a lot of money it's one more thing that can lead to unexpected and disastrously large expenses. Public transportation (other than the dedicated things like para-transit) doesn't go door to door, and for people with even moderate mobility issues that means it's just not effective for shopping or a number of other things. Zipcar-like services with autonomous vehicles could be a huge boon for a lot of people, and I don't know why they would be any more far-fetched than the existing Zipcar service. All it has to do is drive itself to my house when my reservation starts. Even private sharing becomes more plausible: Arsenic and I can split the costs of a car even if we don't live nearby, and it can go to whichever of us needs it. Autonomous vehicles aren't likely to reduce the cost of car ownership by very much, but there are a lot of people who do have cars, want the independence, and shouldn't be driving themselves.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:33
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Frankly, I think we'll see widespread adoption of self-driving cars before we see adequate public transportation in Silicon Valley. It's a hugely complicated infrastructure project for which there's no political will, no money, and NIMBYs would block everything even if there was. They've been trying to bring BART to the South Bay for like 10 years now and it's still not clear if they'll get as far as Fremont.
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Apr 12, 2016 18:57
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e_angst posted:The kinds of stuff you are talking about is decades away at best, and the scenarios you are envisioning may not even occur in our lifetime. Feasibility isn't swayed by how awesome something would be, or else we would all be riding around in jet packs. Trying to argue that market forces cause everything to once something is adopted is foolish, especially if we have no clear idea what the end product will actually look like. Liquid Communism posted:Truck goes in the field. Corn goes in the truck. Truck goes on the road to the co-op or silage site. blugu64 posted:Explain how my emissions grandfathered car only affects me, or are you denying that man made global warming is real? I do think that "a handful of cars still polluting too much" will be seen by the public as less of a threat than "a handful of cars crashing too often". How are u posted:Why do insufferable nerds always dream of a world full of autonomous self-driving cars?? Driving cars yourself is fun. gently caress the self-driving car crew. On the other hand, playing video games and reading, two things you could do in a self-driving car, are both very fun. Cicero fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 12, 2016 20:30
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Subjunctive posted:Public transportation (other than the dedicated things like para-transit) doesn't go door to door, and for people with even moderate mobility issues that means it's just not effective for shopping or a number of other things. Zipcar-like services with autonomous vehicles could be a huge boon for a lot of people, and I don't know why they would be any more far-fetched than the existing Zipcar service. All it has to do is drive itself to my house when my reservation starts. Even private sharing becomes more plausible: Arsenic and I can split the costs of a car even if we don't live nearby, and it can go to whichever of us needs it. Cars only seem like a better solution because we have spent decades and infinity billions of dollars ensuring American is a car first nation at the expense of public transportation.
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Apr 12, 2016 20:33
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cheese posted:This is a real loving stretch man. You have to create pretty narrow conditions for a self driving car to be what enables a person with a disability to stay independent, largely because when you lose the ability to drive a car, you often lose the ability to do things like get in and out of a car, or the mental capacity to be out and about without an aide. IIRC the AARP is gung-ho about self-driving cars precisely because it would help with mobility for a lot of the elderly.
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Apr 12, 2016 20:37
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cheese posted:This is a real loving stretch man. You have to create pretty narrow conditions for a self driving car to be what enables a person with a disability to stay independent, largely because when you lose the ability to drive a car, you often lose the ability to do things like get in and out of a car, or the mental capacity to be out and about without an aide. "Disabled" is a lot bigger category than "you can tell at a glance something's missing".
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Apr 12, 2016 21:10
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cheese posted:This is a real loving stretch man. You have to create pretty narrow conditions for a self driving car to be what enables a person with a disability to stay independent, largely because when you lose the ability to drive a car your vision got bad because you got old which kinda happens, or your reflexes got bad, or you have some chronic injury. My girlfriend does occupational therapy, and her patients are a constant stream of people who can manage their lives but shouldn't be driving (even ignoring medication). Many people who have a license and a visual impairment self-limit their driving, such as daytime only and no weather.
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Apr 12, 2016 21:20
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Cicero posted:Vision loss. Arsenic Lupin posted:Nonsense. I'm disabled, and I sometimes take medications that dull my reaction time. On those meds, I'm still perfectly capable of shopping at the grocery store or holding conversations; I just don't trust myself to drive. See also people who have seizures, or vision problems, or take meds that warn you shouldn't drive, or just plain never learned to drive. My mother-in-law, at 80, is still sharp as a tack, but she doesn't trust herself to drive on the highway any more.
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Apr 12, 2016 21:47
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cheese posted:You would still need to be able to have the mobility to get in and out of the car, and the vision, fine motor skills, cognition and computer literacy to input instructions and deal with any issues. Also you don't necessarily need to see at all to input instructions. Google has some pretty solid voice input tech.
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Apr 12, 2016 22:05
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robot car drives onto the train tracks and kills you
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Apr 12, 2016 22:08
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Subjunctive posted:The computational requirements aren't trivial, but the curve of hardware looks more than sufficient (see NVIDIA's recent announcements). A human is also moving in such variable conditions, without the benefit of additional sensors, and with worse reaction times. It's not easy in the sense that you can't grab it from GitHub or order it from Newegg, but it's not hard in that object classification has been proven to work well on a wide variety of domains. AIUI, dealing with road markings (and lack there of) plus signage is harder. Improvements in camera resolution will help with that and with moving back the effective sensing horizon, but it's probably not enough to juice the hardware. Not a good idea to put cardboard on the run over list as it may not be empty and may in fact be a box containing car batteries or some other thing that's going to ruin your day. But I'd be more interested anyhow in how something like a plastic bag blowing across lanes might be handled.
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Apr 12, 2016 22:30
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Cicero posted:That's still probably hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people in the US if you include old people who shouldn't be driving but still do because they have to to get around.  Look, I concede that a perfect self driving car would be a good tool for some people. I'm not convinced its a huge number, I'm not convinced that technology is gonna be ready anytime soon, and I'm not convinced that most of those people wouldn't be better served by a public funded transportation service. I AM convinced that we will all be long dead before the US Government takes away our ability to drive human controlled cars. I am sure of this because loving America.
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Apr 12, 2016 22:45
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Please start a separate thread for Transformers chat.
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Apr 12, 2016 22:51
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Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is facing a class action lawsuit for organizing and participating in a price fixing scheme (namely the agreement of all uber drives to charge the same base fares and to all also charge surge fares according to the formula which Kalanick invented). The judge denied Kalanick's motion to dismiss the case . The legal reasons behind the case are kind of interesting (they are suing Kalanick at least in part because he is a driver for Uber and thus part of the conspiring driver class) but the decision is just generally amusing There's a citation of the Silk Road case to shoot down Kalanick's argument that he cannot be a part of a conspiracy because all of the drivers and passengers independently entered into the contracts for rides: quote:Sophisticated conspirators often reach their agreements as much by the wink and the nod as by explicit agreement, and the implicit agreement may be far more potent, and sinister, just by virtue of being implicit. Recently, for example, in United States v. Ulbricht, the Government alleged that defendant Ulbricht had organized an online marketplace for illicit goods and services called Silk Road. See United States v. Ulbricht, 31 F. Supp. 3d 540, 546-47 (S.D.N.Y. 2014). In ruling on motions in limine in Ulbricht, Judge Forrest rejected the defense's argument that transactions among Silk Road's users gave rise to "only buy-sell relationships and not conspiratorial behavior" or, at most, to "a multitude of discrete conspiracies." United States v. Ulbricht, 79 F. Supp. 3d 466, 481 (S.D.N.Y. 2015). Instead, Judge Forrest noted that the Government charged the defendant with sitting "atop an overarching single conspiracy, which included all vendors who sold any type of narcotics on Silk Road at any time." Id. at 490. In the instant case, Uber's digitally decentralized nature does not prevent the App from constituting a "marketplace" through which Mr. Kalanick organized a horizontal conspiracy among drivers. Which leads right into... quote:Recent jurisprudence on vertical resale price maintenance agreements does not, as defendant would have it, undermine plaintiff's claim of an illegal horizontal agreement. See Def. Br. at 15. In Leegin, the Supreme Court held that resale price maintenance agreements — e.g., a retailer's agreement with a manufacturer not to discount the manufacturer's goods beneath a certain price — are to be judged by the rule of reason, unlike horizontal agreements to fix prices, which are per se illegal. See Leegin, 551 U.S. at 886, 907. The Court cited various "procompetitive justifications for a manufacturer's use of resale price maintenance," id. at 889, and concluded that although this practice may also have anticompetitive effects, the rule of reason is the best approach to distinguishing resale price maintenance agreements that violate the antitrust laws from those that do not. See id. at 897-900. Basically a manufacturer setting minimum prices for downstream retailers can be legal. But Uber has repeatedly said it doesn't actually sell anything and is instead just an app connecting customers with independent drivers. So they may have just forced themselves into having to choose between being unable to claim that exemption or admitting on the record that they are a transportation company - an admission which would really damage their argument that drivers are independent contractors. Also amusing: quote:As to market definition, plaintiff defines the relevant market as the "mobile app-generated ride-share service market." Am. Compl. ¶94. Plaintiff alleges that Uber has an approximately 80 percent market share in the United States in this market; Uber's chief competitor Lyft has nearly a 20 percent market share; and a third competitor, Sidecar, left the market at the end of 2015. Id. ¶¶95-97. Plaintiff then explains that traditional taxi service is not a reasonable substitute for Uber, since, for example, rides generated by a mobile app can be arranged at the push of a button and tracked on riders' mobile phones; riders need not carry cash or a credit card, or, upon arrival, spend time paying for the ride; and riders can rate drivers and see some information on them before entering the vehicle. Id. ¶104. Indeed, plaintiff claims, Uber has itself stated that it does not view taxis as ride-sharing competition.
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Apr 13, 2016 01:08
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I have a feeling Uber is going to end up being a pretty big counterexample for the "ask forgiveness, not permission" culture that's taken hold in the Valley in the past few years. Of course, in their case it's more of a "gently caress you, laws" culture, but it if this lawsuit lands it will be interesting to see what the fallout will be on a lot of startups that have found their market niche in gray areas where the law hasn't caught up with technology.
Baby Babbeh fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Apr 13, 2016 |
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Apr 13, 2016 01:37
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Shifty Pony posted:Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is facing a class action lawsuit for organizing and participating in a price fixing scheme (namely the agreement of all uber drives to charge the same base fares and to all also charge surge fares according to the formula which Kalanick invented).  Thank you for the explanation.
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Apr 13, 2016 02:06
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Subjunctive posted:The computational requirements aren't trivial, but the curve of hardware looks more than sufficient (see NVIDIA's recent announcements). A human is also moving in such variable conditions, without the benefit of additional sensors, and with worse reaction times. It's not easy in the sense that you can't grab it from GitHub or order it from Newegg, but it's not hard in that object classification has been proven to work well on a wide variety of domains. AIUI, dealing with road markings (and lack there of) plus signage is harder. Improvements in camera resolution will help with that and with moving back the effective sensing horizon, but it's probably not enough to juice the hardware. I understand the algorithms may be good it's just the complexity and variety of circumstances encountered by cars is almost overwhelming, difficult to plan for, and as difficult to test and verify. In terms of image processing while driving you have rapid movement plus every weather/light scenario imaginable and almost any conceivable object/animal/vehicle might be an obstacle. In terms of project scope that's pretty much as hard as it gets. Which is why I'm highly skeptical of any near term timelines or extrapolations based on early results.
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Apr 13, 2016 02:31
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These are the exact legal dickings I love and I hope Uber gets ruined for it, "Oh you thought you were clever and could define yourself out of the responsibilities of a seller or employer? Then congratulations you get the protections offered to neither."
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Apr 13, 2016 03:06
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It is really really important to remember that in a motion to dismiss all facts are assumed to be against the one making the motion. The purpose is to determine whether a legal cause of action exists, even if everything the plaintiff alleges is true is actually true. That's why I didn't quote much of the discussion about the allegations as in a motion to dismiss decision the court presumes as true all but the most outlandish of claims. Uber/Kalanick also has a lot of money to spend on lawyers and can drag this out. But there are tea leaves to read and the Judge throwing Leegin right back in their face is definitely not a good sign, nor is the snarky comment about Uber's council walking from their office to the court if they think that is a valid replacement for a car ride. Arsenic Lupin posted:
It gets better. The antitrust case against Apple regarding their ebook price fixing is precedent in the NY federal court in which the Uber case was filed. That is not good for Uber/Kalanick because it basically unambiguously says that a lot of pre-Leegan precedent is still applicable post-Leegan, including findings that say that hub and spoke pricing agreements (with a bunch of supposed competitors organizing a fixed price by all agreeing with a third party) are always illegal. The decision is not ambiguous about it and quotes old Supreme Court precedent: "any conspiracy “formed for the purpose and with the effect of raising, depressing, fixing, pegging, or stabilizing the price of a commodity . . . is illegal per se,” and the precise “machinery employed . . . is immaterial.” ". It also includes this wonderful quote quote:Apple’s initial argument that its agreement with the Publisher Defendants was procompetitive (an argument presented principally in an amicus brief adopted wholeheartedly by the dissent) is that by eliminating Amazon’s $9.99 price point, the agreement enabled Apple and other ebook retailers to enter the market and challenge Amazon’s dominance. But this defense — that higher prices enable more competitors to enter a market — is no justification for a horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy. As the Supreme Court has cogently explained: Higher prices enticing more drivers to enter the market is the explicitly stated reason behind surge pricing. (Is it strange that I enjoy reading court opinions?) Shifty Pony fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Apr 13, 2016 |
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Apr 13, 2016 04:39
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Subjunctive posted:When you say "self-driving car" do you mean level 4 autonomy? I'm an autonomous vehicle booster for sure, but that seems pretty aggressive. The level of autonomy where I hop in the driver seat, take a nap, and wake up at my destination. But I forgot to tell the car where to go so it just took me to my most frequented destination, work, instead of the store. SurgicalOntologist posted:You need to take into account the fact the many accidents involve multiple vehicles. 185 accidents per 100 million miles could easily mean 300 vehicles involved in an accident per 100 million miles. So, it could easily be a similar rate. (although that could be the actual statistic and you misstated it/I misinterpreted it). Also with such a low probability event that difference is nowhere near statistically significant even taking those stats at face value. If the true accident rate is 1.85 per million then there's still a 40% chance of getting 3 or more accidents in a sample of 1 million. Good public transportation would probably be cheaper, safer, and more efficient than robot cars. But that would be a public service and most of America hates that. Heck, anytime I see a new bus line or metro line be planned in Houston, the locals protest against it. Enough car talk. Tom is dead anyways. Where are all the dying unicorns? Deadly Ham Sandwich fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Apr 13, 2016 |
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Apr 13, 2016 05:22
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Discendo Vox posted:Please start a separate thread for Transformers chat. Agreed, I'll work on an OP this week. PM me stuff that you think should be in it.
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Apr 13, 2016 14:45
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WampaLord posted:For real. It is amazing how many people are staring at their smartphones while stopped at a light, and it's terrifying to think how many more are doing that while not stopped at a light. You'd be amazed at how easy it is to drive while using a smartphone because of how well peripheral vision works for the minimal amount of events happening on the road. And if you shift into park at a stoplight, it's legal in some states to use the phone!
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Apr 13, 2016 15:00
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mastershakeman posted:You'd be amazed at how easy it is to drive while using a smartphone because of how well peripheral vision works for the minimal amount of events happening on the road. And if you shift into park at a stoplight, it's legal in some states to use the phone! gently caress you. Stay off the goddamned roads.
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Apr 13, 2016 15:29
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