by voidUpdate
4 subcomments
- > "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?
- > we are now implementing fleet-wide updates
That ~1000 drivers on the road are all better trained on what to do in the next power outage is incredible.
There will always be unexpected events and mistakes made on the roads. Continual improvement that is locked in algorithmically across the entire fleet is way better than any individual driver's learning / training / behaviorior changes.
- No one seems sufficiently outraged that a private company's equipment blocked the public roads during an emergency.
- How is this mode not a standard part of their disaster recovery plan? Especially in sf and the bay area they need to assume an earthquake is going to take out a lot of infrastructure. Did they not take into account this would happen?
- I suspected this. They were moving, but randomly to an observer. I’d seen about 2 out of maybe 20 stopped Waymos navigating around Arguello and Geary area in SF Saturday at 6PM. What was worse was that there was little to no connectivity service across all 3 main providers deeper in the power outage area as well - Spruce and Geary or west of Park Presidio (I have 2 phones, with Google Fi/T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon).
- The blog post makes no mention of the cellular network congestion/dropped packets that affected people during the power outage. I had bars but was unable to load websites for most of the day. Were Waymos unaffected by the network problems, or were request timeouts encompassed in the word “backlog” used by the blog post?
- Interesting that some legacy safety/precaution code caused more timid and disruptive driving behavior than the current software route planner would've chosen on its own.
- Pardon my being under-informed, but does anyone know why Civic Center, the Presidio, the Park, and the Golden Gate were all dark the longest? Was there some separated municipal circuit they were on that was restored last as it was more complicated? Entered the thread thinking there would be more discussion on the actual architectural mishaps of the grid here rather than those of Waymo alone.
- Sending power outage context to the vehicles does not seem like enough of a response. I hope at least they have internal plans for more. For large, complex systems, you want multiple layers of protections. The response feels way too reactive when they could use this incident to guide improvements across the board.
- The way all Waymos are updated to learn from this incident reminds me of Pluribus.
- Do Waymo’s have Starlink or another satellite based provider backup? Otherwise, what do they if cell service goes down and they need to phone home for confirmation?
by cantalopes
0 subcomment
- I find always find it kind of funny when an article starts with "At [company], our mission is to be the world’s [the product outranking competitors in its domain]".
I mean, come on, unless you really are a nonprofit trying to save the planet or something (no, building a better X is not saving the planet), your mission is to get rich and raise into a monopoly in your field
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Related context:
Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342412
- Tesla FSD would never have this issue according to Elon Musk.
- [dead]
- [flagged]
by Papazsazsa
0 subcomment
- The symbolic irony of this situation is almost too rich to bear.
- >The situation was severe enough that the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management advised residents to stay home, underscoring the extraordinary nature of the weekend’s disruptions.
Waymo cannot point to this as an extenuating circumatance when they where a major contributing factor.
by joshribakoff
0 subcomment
- This reads to me, an angry resident, as an AI generated article that attempts to leverage the chaos that they caused, for marketing purposes — not as any sort of genuine remorse — underscoring why we shouldn’t be banning AI regulation in the USA.
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