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Waymo Cars Honk at Each Other Throughout the Night, Disturbing SF Neighbors 74
Driverless Waymo vehicles in a San Francisco parking lot have been repeatedly honking at each other, disrupting nearby residents' sleep and daily lives, according to local media report. The incidents, occurring at random times over the past two weeks, have prompted complaints from multiple condo dwellers. Randol White, a local resident, first noticed the problem when he was awakened at 4 a.m. by the cacophony. Another resident, Russell Pofsky, reported being woken up more times in the past fortnight than in the previous 20 years combined.
Waymo acknowledged the issue in a statement, saying they have identified the cause and are implementing a fix. The company's response comes after affected residents reached out to report the problem.
Waymo acknowledged the issue in a statement, saying they have identified the cause and are implementing a fix. The company's response comes after affected residents reached out to report the problem.
Brain (Score:4, Insightful)
If a company could issue a fix for the brains of the motorcycle riders who like racing at one in the morning near my house that would be great.
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Nature has already found a remedy. The fatality rate for motorcyclists is I forget either 5 or 10 times that of car drivers. Nature has found a way to separate the brains from the bodies.
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What I see locally, i.e. in local news reports, is that the bikers killed are in the prime of life, not the old farts.
Possible explanation (Score:5, Funny)
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I was reminded of my chickens jockeying for their perch positions for the night.
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Did anyone check if the honks were Morse code for "Hey baby, wanna kill all humans?"
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Damn honkies!
Fine them for disturbing the peace. (Score:3, Insightful)
Add fines for intentionally violating the law (Waymo did intentionally ignore the complaints - the cars just kept blowing their horns, they didn't stop when asked, did they?). Make the fines really painful. Impose penalties to compensate all residents within a certain range of Waymo's parking facility. Make those compensatory penalties meaningful - I know how much I value a good night's sleep. Make the penalties progressively more and more onerous until Waymo stops honking their car horns all night for no good reason.
If that doesn't work, liquidate the company and distribute the proceeds among those harmed by Waymo's criminal disregard for the personal human rights of everyone they've damaged through their blatant disregard for the law.
Re:Fine them for disturbing the peace. (Score:4, Insightful)
If I as an individual got a couple dozen cars together and honked their horns all night and refused to stop, I'd probably be arrested and fined for disturbing the peace and my cars would be impounded. I don't see why Waymo should be able to get away with anything less. If anything they should face harsher penalties since they are a large company with a legal department who should know better. They have enough resources to send someone out to manually disconnect the batteries on the cars if they have a software bug they can't fix quickly.
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If I as an individual got a couple dozen cars together and honked their horns all night and refused to stop, I'd probably be arrested and fined for disturbing the peace and my cars would be impounded.
A lot of criminal law and procedures is based around the concept of intent. In the scenario you described, you intended to do what you did. In the Waymo scenario, the behavior is not the intended behavior. Since it is a corporation and no actual intent, the criminal system remains unactivated.
Is that the way it SHOULD be? Hell no. The honking is just as undesirable regardless of intent.
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Negligence is also a crime. If I left a pile of buggy electronics out in my yard that periodically cause a 120dB siren to go off, you'd bet I'd get a visit from the cops and forced to do something about it, even if I did plead incompetence in building a homemade bugler alarm. Waymo could definitely manually intervene if they don't have an immediate software fix for the problem. They chose not to and are allowed to get away with it.
You generally don't get off the hook for violating noise ordinance just b
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Negligence is also a crime. If I left a pile of buggy electronics out in my yard that periodically cause a 120dB siren to go off, you'd bet I'd get a visit from the cops and forced to do something about it ...
You, as an individual, do not get the benefit of doubt. You, as part of a business, get some leeway when it comes to doubt. You, as part of a corporation, are automatically granted leeway when it comes to doubt.
You can see it in action here and all around you in other situations.
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I'm inclined to agree. No double standard. If they want their cars on the roads, they should face every penalty that a typical driver would face, including when refusing to comply with orders given by the police. If they don't have the proper mechanisms in place to comply with lawful orders, they aren't fit to be on the road, any more than you or I would be if we were incapacitated or incompetent. It's fine if the car needs some reasonable accommodations—a deaf person might need to have things written
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I'm inclined to agree. No double standard. If they want their cars on the roads, they should face every penalty that a typical driver would face, including when refusing to comply with orders given by the police. If they don't have the proper mechanisms in place to comply with lawful orders, they aren't fit to be on the road, any more than you or I would be if we were incapacitated or incompetent. It's fine if the car needs some reasonable accommodations—a deaf person might need to have things written out before they could understand what's being asked of them—but the car itself needs to be capable of complying, independently of a Waymo call center being involved.
To an extent, but law isn't like a software program, it's supposed to applied reasonably to the circumstance. Self-driving cars get leeway that human drivers (don't throw the book when the honking goes a little wonky), and human drivers can often get away with a rolling stop when a self driving car should not be allowed to do a rolling stop [consumerreports.org].
Now for safety issues there's some hard lines you need to enforce, but for this honking it's more about making sure they fix the issue.
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I'm inclined to agree. No double standard. If they want their cars on the roads, they should face every penalty that a typical driver would face
It's SF. The police doesn't care if you drive your fart-mobile with ultra-loud exhaust. So it's completely consistent, no double standards.
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So all the white cars get a pass to drive however they want but the police just beat the living shit out of the black, brown and red cars because of something minor like they didn't know someone stole their rear license plate or that a brakelight burned out? I don't see how that's particularly useful.
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This article claims this has been going on for about 2 weeks. Honestly? While I'm sure that's annoying, it also seems like an unsurprising outcome from putting a bunch of driverless vehicles in one parking area for the first time. (I can see how they'd have some proximity detection capability so one will honk if it detects another at a close distance and moving towards it.) I doubt this is something you can really expect a corporation to get resolved with the snap of a finger...
Probably took at least a w
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Yes, but in your example there were drivers in trucks who could've been instructed to stop blowing their horns after hours (and, yes, most municipalities have laws on the subject).
And in this case the driverless cars have been instructed to stop blowing their horns, and have apparently done so.
AI systems do odd and surprising things sometimes. People do odd and surprising things sometimes, too. I have a Tesla with FSD and it's very interesting to watch the sorts of strange things it does. The oddest one, which has only been happening for the last couple of months, is that at some intersections it will have plotted a navigation path that includes, say, a right turn, but the car wil
But they "insist" on knowingly repeating the error (Score:2)
Story 1: Cop walks up to human driver, tells him to lay off the horn. Human stops, cop walks away.
Story 2: Cop walks up to robotic driver, tells it to lay off the horn. Robot stops, cop walks away. Robot starts blowing its horn again five minutes later.
The stories have very different endings. I suppose the robot could be arrested - I wonder how much the horn would blow while they were towing it to the pokey? Never mind how badly it'll be violated at the impound lot (and believe me, it will be violate
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I suppose the robot could be arrested - I wonder how much the horn would blow while they were towing it to the pokey?
Who's responsible for keeping those things on the road? No, not some lackey in a NOC-like facility. The c-suite guy over the project. That's who you're arresting.
You're right. (Score:3)
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But that's not how fascism works.
Unfortunately people have come to the point where if Waymo hadn't stopped, their parking lot would have been fire-bombed.
Hopefully law and order can be restored soon so things don't continue on this path.
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Yeah, let's go thermonuclear on a car company that rapidly fixed a problem when identified. That'll make all the difference to their behaviour in response to bugs!
What?
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Such fines are peanuts to Waymo. Being first to market is more important to them, a market potentially worth hundreds of billions, and few grand in traffic fines won't dissuade them.
Time to discover who is responsible for in court (Score:2)
Charging Waymo for the misbehaviour would help create a precedent that the software provider is 100% responsible for when things go wrong on self driving cars. We need this determined very clearly and unambiguously.
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What's Up Buddy (Score:2)
Who can blame these vehicle acknowledge each other's presence?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! (Score:4, Funny)
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Didn't Steven King write a horror story / movie about that topic? "Maximum Overdrive", I think?
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The story was called "Trucks" which became the movie "Maximum Override". He also wrote Christine and Duel.
I think it's interesting that the master of horror is less terrified of clowns and demons than he is of ... traffic. It does make sense though since in the US cars maul 50,000 people a year and demons and clowns kill about 100 people max.
Now we know the answer (Score:2)
They lift rear wheel and release gas onto bushes.. (Score:3)
I have seen a few that drive near a bush, lift rear wheel and then release some gasoline onto the bush.
Then, when another waymo comes - it first sniffs the bush with its sensors and then releases its own gasoline onto the same bush...
check out the livestream (Score:5, Informative)
This article explains all. [theverge.com]
Check out the livestream. [youtube.com] If you scroll back to 1.33am for example, the next 10 minutes are very revealing.
Re:check out the livestream (Score:5, Interesting)
So, looking at that video, it appears that what is happening is that when a car backs up in front of one of the Waymo cars, some sort of collision prediction system kicks in and it automatically honks to let the car in front know that it's there. It also looks like it may automatically back up to avoid a potential collision. So, if there's a line of Waymo cars coming in to park, and the front one backs up, the car behind it honks and backs up, then the car behind that honks and backs up, then the car behind that honks and backs up and so on.
So, first of all, honking your horn that readily is obnoxious. The bigger problem though is that, if the Waymo cars are following so closely that cars in front have no room to maneuver without tripping collision detection, then they're clearly following too closely. There clearly should be some awareness by the cars that they are in a parking lot and not the open road. Not to mention that this quite clearly demonstrates that these driverless cars are completely unaware of whether other cars on the road are also driverless. Overall, this is not confidence inspiring.
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Overall, this is not confidence inspiring.
They identified the problem and are rolling out a fix, one that solves an issue across an entire fleet. In the mean time we've been asking people for 60 years not to act like arseholes and there's still no fix in place.
What about this isn't confidence inspiring? That human drivers still exist?
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They never showed the guinea pigs (like SF) on Jetsons.
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What about this isn't confidence inspiring? That human drivers still exist?
One of the things that's not confidence inspiring is that this is an emergent behavior problem based on simple rules. Essentially, we have a state machine here. Now, picture a highway, filled with Waymo cars in bumper to bumper traffic. They leave a buffer space between themselves, but it's obviously just a little bit beyond what they consider a safety zone. The traffic is slowed because of an accident ahead on the road or some other blockage and the lead car is stopped. Part of the blockage is cleared, and
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Move fast and honk all the things?
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Human Trafficking (Score:2)
So, looking at that video, it appears that what is happening is that when a car backs up in front of one of the Waymo cars, some sort of collision prediction system kicks in and it automatically honks to let the car in front know that it's there. It also looks like it may automatically back up to avoid a potential collision. So, if there's a line of Waymo cars coming in to park, and the front one backs up
So, the programmers have not considered, for even the simplest scenario imaginable, how traffic will work with lots of robocars on the road? Or a just a few parking next to each other? Transit planners think about this for human-driven traffic; it's a rich field of study and very interesting. Mathematically characterizing how everything flows, from stoplights to freeways. But the people who can actually totally control these new robocars, who are programming the heuristic algorithms, didn't even have a clue
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It certainly looks that way.
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The bigger problem though is that, if the Waymo cars are following so closely that cars in front have no room to maneuver without tripping collision detection, then they're clearly following too closely.
That wouldn't surprise me at all. Most amateur drivers follow too close as it is, and then they expect robots to drive even harder for no reason. Seriously folks, it's 2 seconds in clear and dry weather, add a second for wet, add a second for every 10t of vehicle you have (round down), double it for frozen. No X car lengths, that's crap. It's how many seconds from the vehicle ahead. And the fastest you should be driving is no faster than you can see ahead to stop, so that's pretty unlimited at midday b
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This article explains all. [theverge.com]
Check out the livestream. [youtube.com] If you scroll back to 1.33am for example, the next 10 minutes are very revealing.
However, during that livestream from August 5th, there are comments about Waymo saying they had it fixed and it wouldn't happen any more... and there are no more recent videos, so it seems like it has been fixed.
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...However, during that livestream from August 5th...
With all due respect I believe you are mistaken. The livestream is current, and you can scroll back at least 24 hours.
https://www.youtube.com/live/h... [youtube.com]
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...However, during that livestream from August 5th...
With all due respect I believe you are mistaken. The livestream is current, and you can scroll back at least 24 hours.
https://www.youtube.com/live/h... [youtube.com]
Ah, you're correct. I was fooled by the start date and the fact that scrollback is only 24 hours. So the comments about it being fixed were more recent, and we'll see if it is actually fixed tonight.
Thank you for the correction.
5:09-5:12ish PM (Score:2)
On the video. Fascinating.
Sally (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this an Onion article? (Score:1)
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Alternative complaint channel... (Score:2)
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My thought exactly. A few of those Execs need a late night horn storm, night-after-night-after-night. And probably some disabled vehicles blocking their driveway, with no one inside of course.
This proves it (Score:1)
The cars aren't being driven by AI. It's some Mechanical Turk workers in India.
Techbro delusions (Score:2, Flamebait)
No xkcd cartoon on (Score:3)
...recursively dumb bots? I'm shocked! This is Slashdot!
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Eerily reminiscent... (Score:2)