mongoosedadei

I work in a related field to this, so I can try to guess at what's happening behind the scenes. Initially, most companies had very complicated non-machine learning algorithms (rule-based/hand-engineered) that solved the motion planning problem, i.e. how should a car move given its surroundings and its goal. This essentially means writing what is comparable to either a bunch of if-else statements, or a sort of weighted graph search (there are other ways, of course). This works well for say 95% of cases, but becomes exponentially harder to make work for the remaining 5% of cases (think drunk driver or similar rare or unusual events).

Solving the final 5% was where most turned to machine learning - they were already collecting driving data for training their perception and prediction models, so it's not difficult at all to just repurpose that data for motion planning.

So when you look at the two kinds of approaches, they have quite distinct advantages over each other. Hand engineered algorithms are very good at obeying rules - if you tell it to wait at a crosswalk or obey precedence at a stop sign, it will do that no matter what. They are not, however, great at situations where there is higher uncertainty/ambiguity. For example, a pedestrian starts crossing the road outside a crosswalk and waits at the median to allow you to pass before continuing on - it's quite difficult to come up with a one size fits all rule to cover these kinds of situations. Driving is a highly interactive behaviour (lane changes, yielding to pedestrians etc), and rule based methods don't do so well with this because there is little structure to this problem. Some machine learning based methods on the other hand are quite good at handling these kinds of uncertain situations, and Waymo has invested heavily in building these up. I'm guessing they're trained with a mixture of human-data + self-play (imitation learning and reinforcement learning), so they may learn some odd/undesirable behaviors. The problem with machine learning models is that they are ultimately a strong heuristic that cannot be trusted to produce a 100% correct answer.

I'm guessing that the way Waymo trains its motion planning model/bias in the data allows it to find some sort of exploit that makes it drive through crosswalks. Usually this kind of thing is solved by creating a hybrid system - a machine learning system underneath, with a rule based system on top as a guard rail.

Some references:

1. https://youtu.be/T_LkNm3oXdE?si=_p499XuQeAlz9BYq
2. https://youtu.be/RpiN3LyMLB8?si=Rkihso_88VECLUXa

(Apologies for the very long comment, probably the longest one I've ever left)

This comment serves as a reminder that the normalized hatred directed at India/South Asia on Reddit is alive and well on Lemmy too

Officials want to be clear the man who is shot was never charged, never arrested and has fully cooperated with the investigation.

This is apparently something that needs to be said when talking about shooting unarmed people.

Not a fan of Musk at all, but Lidar is quite expensive. A 64 line lidar with 100m+ range was about 30k+ a few years ago (not sure how prices have changed now). The long range lidar on the top of the Waymo car is probably even higher resolution than this. It's likely that the sensor suite + compute platform on the waymo car costs way more than the actual Jaguar base vehicle itself, though waymo manufactures it's own lidars. I think it would have been impossible to keep the costs of Teslas within the general public's reach if they had done that. Of course, deploying a self driving/L2+ solution without this sensor fidelity is also questionable.

I agree that perception models will not be able deal with this well for a while. They are just not good enough at estimating depth information. That being said, a few other companies also attempted "vision-only" solutions. TuSimple (the autonomous trucking company) argued at some point that lidar didn't offer enough range for their solution since semi trucks need a lot more time to slow down/react to events ahead because of their massive inertia.

This is the case where the police union official said that the victim's life had "limited value" - https://publicola.com/2023/09/11/write-a-check-for-11000-she-was-26-she-had-limited-value-spd-officer-jokes-with-police-union-leader-about-killing-of-pedestrian-by-fellow-cop/

Is there a standard measure of how "understandable" an accent is? It is quite a subjective thing based on where one is from.

You mentioned India previously - there are 350 million English speakers in South Asia (with marginally varying accents) who can understand each other perfectly well. They may not, on the other hand, find it as easy to understand American accented English. Who should change?

I find German and Singaporean/Malaysian accented English easier to understand than most American accents, because they share phonemes with the languages I speak. Which is more understandable in this case?

The assertion I'm challenging is that there is a "correct accent" that is universally intelligible to all, especially for a language as widely spoken as English. I think the only way we can bridge this gap is to be better listeners. Realistically, it doesn't even take a couple of weeks to become comfortable understanding a different accent, probably much less if you pay attention. Personally, I find this issue to be very intertwined with the tolerance we have to develop to live in a multicultural society.

Dunno what world you live in. I have two different coworkers who specifically have been told they need to work on their accent. One is Kenyan and the other is Welsh.

You said you were American (though it's not clear if you work in America, so forgive the assumption) but if this was official feedback then it seems to be in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. There seem to have been successful lawsuits (example, example - see Brown and Brown Chevrolet, 2008) for the same.

What is the "correct accent" for English? Even within America there are so many. The southern accent is so different from the Minnesota accent. Most Americans will have difficulty understanding a Scottish or Irish person speaking with a strong accent, but I doubt anyone is going to tell them to speak differently. Given the plurality of accents, it's on the listener to adapt. Unless, of course, everyone is expected to speak with RP.

I agree that they'll be criticized either way, though it is debatable which would have the worst outcome.

That being said, the US was a major driving force for the creation of Israel, has armed and funded them since, and has protected Israel in the Security Council preventing any international check on their actions . So, most certainly, it was not the US's problem to begin with, but given US foreign policy for the past 70 years it is inextricably linked to the problem now.

I guess in katakana "gorogoro" would be ゴロゴロ, which when written vertically in two lines would look vaguely like 8/8? Just guessing...

And loads of mongooses too!

I'm sure you don't mean to offend, but the phrase "whole civilized world" being used to describe just the US + parts of western Europe is questionable at the very best.

Ah I see, thanks for the correction! (It also kind of demonstrates the problems I have with my own language :P)