my friend bought a ride from a waymo for shits and giggles. i was actually intrigued about how the car made decisions on its own and sorta nerd sniped me to learn more about machine learning (not llms).
there’s probably some evil thing the self driving car companies are doing that im not aware of, but I was just interested in the ML aspect.


Are you sure they don’t already have more rigorous controls? I took my driving exam in a small town middle of the nowhere and can now legally drive anywhere, even major cities with traffic.
I would never trust a self driving car which passed ONLY that exam.
They fail basic driving skills that would fail a student driver, and are immune to the coercive controls that other drivers face, such as fines, loss of license, and jail time.
And would you like to make a comparison to people? I see people do shit that would “fail basic driving skills” every goddamned day, and sometimes its me doing them.
Given how bad humans are at maintaining attention, the standard that self-driving be perfect is a little silly. The standards debate should START at “no worse than the average driver.”
The whole point of self-driving cars is to remove human error. Yes, I do expect them to be perfect, or what’s the point?
Well, there you go. A self driving car DOES remove human error. However, it replaces it with computer error. Now what? I´d think it’s reasonable that if computer error is less than human error, then we are in a better position.
To err is human. To really foul things up requires a computer. - ancient proverb
Even if these things are ‘perfect’, as long as they’re sharing the roads with human drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, there’ll always be some random shit happen that they’re not programmed for.
Eventually, all the things you need to do to mitigate such things just brings you to the solution being trains.
Agreed. Trains are peak civilization. Personal automobiles suck no matter who or what is driving them.
I agree with the comparison to people and how poorly people drive.
There is probably a lot of confirmation bias in my low opinion of self driving cars, because we don’t have them here and the only stories that make the news are failures.
Quotes from CEO’s saying that keeping them out of bus lanes is too hard don’t help. Nor do self aggrandising lies about their abilities.
They do have a lower accident/harm rate than human drivers, but my point of view comes from a c/fuckcars perspective. I live in a car centric society, and have three and need a fourth (5 people, 3 teenagers going in different directions) which is fucking ridiculous. I would rather see public transport be reliable and accessible.
My city has made steps forward recently; all public transport is 50cents, all the time. The problem is we have to drive 20-35 minutes to park, to use the public transport.