Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Carnage Damn states and privacy laws!
ETA: after a quick search, in e.g. Austria it's apparently even illegal to own one, let alone use it! Most other EU countries seem to have more reasonable rules, basically "it's OK to have one but don't upload random stuff on the internet and if you are in an accident you must tell the other party and/or give footage to police", which seems fair enough (at least the last part).
Yeah. Here in Germany it can become quite weird because the courts state that you cannot do a continuous recording (and thus at least looping is mandatory) because you could then create a "movement profile" of someone.
The same courts also mandate a photo or similar for traffic violations (like running a red light, speeding,...) because, obviously, it could be anyone driving the car.
Doesn't quite square but, sure.
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@acrow said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@loopback0 Does it also detect motorcycles properly?
Seems to.
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@loopback0 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
My main car has the LED matrix headlights that can switch individual LEDs off in the main beam to avoid dazzling other vehicles while leaving the surroundings more illuminated. Works really well.
This exists? I'm genuinely impressed.
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@Rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Carnage Damn states and privacy laws!
ETA: after a quick search, in e.g. Austria it's apparently even illegal to own one, let alone use it! Most other EU countries seem to have more reasonable rules, basically "it's OK to have one but don't upload random stuff on the internet and if you are in an accident you must tell the other party and/or give footage to police", which seems fair enough (at least the last part).
Yeah. Here in Germany it can become quite weird because the courts state that you cannot do a continuous recording (and thus at least looping is mandatory) because you could then create a "movement profile" of someone.
The same courts also mandate a photo or similar for traffic violations (like running a red light, speeding,...) because, obviously, it could be anyone driving the car.
Doesn't quite square but, sure.
There is no inconsistency here. You should record, and keep stills or short clips of violations, but must not keep unlimited history. That's perfectly satisfiable set of requirements.
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@Bulb said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Carnage Damn states and privacy laws!
ETA: after a quick search, in e.g. Austria it's apparently even illegal to own one, let alone use it! Most other EU countries seem to have more reasonable rules, basically "it's OK to have one but don't upload random stuff on the internet and if you are in an accident you must tell the other party and/or give footage to police", which seems fair enough (at least the last part).
Yeah. Here in Germany it can become quite weird because the courts state that you cannot do a continuous recording (and thus at least looping is mandatory) because you could then create a "movement profile" of someone.
The same courts also mandate a photo or similar for traffic violations (like running a red light, speeding,...) because, obviously, it could be anyone driving the car.
Doesn't quite square but, sure.
There is no inconsistency here. You should record, and keep stills or short clips of violations, but must not keep unlimited history. That's perfectly satisfiable set of requirements.
You do not understand. They said that by doing continuous recording you could do a movement profile of someone (not the vehicle). You usually only have the backplate of a car, though, when using a dashcam.
But this backplate alone then does not suffice for fines because it's not personally identifiable.
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@Zecc said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@loopback0 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
My main car has the LED matrix headlights that can switch individual LEDs off in the main beam to avoid dazzling other vehicles while leaving the surroundings more illuminated. Works really well.
This exists? I'm genuinely impressed.
Yes, my new car has this as well. It also turns the lights into the direction you're driving which makes curves of the road more visible. It also automatically deactivates when within city limits.
Works fine for many situations but not on our German highways because usually there's an opaque divider between the two directions. And this type of headlight relies on a camera which sees the incoming headlights - which it can't see on the highway due to the divider. Not a big problem for incoming cars but truck drivers are hit directly by the beam.
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@Rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Works fine for many situations but not on our German highways
That's my experience with a quite a few of the "smart" features of modern cars.
I don't have this directional lights things, but I have the "regular" automatic high-beam switching and it works fine, except in the same cases as what you describe (and for the same reason), or when the road is a bit too twisty and you as a human can see the car coming but it's not perfectly in front so the camera doesn't. I also have road-signs (speed limits) recognition and it works fine except when there are temporary works or restrictions and the signs don't match what the GPS says and every km or so it switches back to what the GPS says instead of the true limit. I have lane detection and it works fine except when there are temporary lines for works and the system gets confused as to which line to follow. And so on and so forth.
For some of those (like road signs recognition) it doesn't really matter that much because they're just information. For others (high beams), it means you're seen as an ass by (and possibly endangers) the other users. And for some (lane detection), it's actively annoying to you. So that means that for each system, you have to learn when it does and doesn't work, and how to disable it/counteract accordingly.
My point isn't that those systems are broken, they work pretty well overall and usually they fail in somewhat predictable ways (when you're familiar with them), but rather that for most of them they don't truly work well-enough to entirely allow you to take your mind off that task. Which IMO makes a huge difference -- a system that works 100% of the time is something you can entirely forget about, whereas one that works 99% of the time is still something that you have to keep in mind, even if most of the time it's just to think "ok, the system is working."
(I'm struggling to find a system that works 100% of the time because they are stuff that I have totally forgotten about! I just remembered about the automatic darkening of the rear-view mirror, that one works perfectly for me. I'm sure there are many others... basically everything that we take for granted and never think about!)
So yeah, those are good but... still not perfect!
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Works fine for many situations but not on our German highways
That's my experience with a quite a few of the "smart" features of modern cars.
I don't have this directional lights things, but I have the "regular" automatic high-beam switching and it works fine, except in the same cases as what you describe (and for the same reason), or when the road is a bit too twisty and you as a human can see the car coming but it's not perfectly in front so the camera doesn't. I also have road-signs (speed limits) recognition and it works fine except when there are temporary works or restrictions and the signs don't match what the GPS says and every km or so it switches back to what the GPS says instead of the true limit. I have lane detection and it works fine except when there are temporary lines for works and the system gets confused as to which line to follow. And so on and so forth.
For some of those (like road signs recognition) it doesn't really matter that much because they're just information. For others (high beams), it means you're seen as an ass by (and possibly endangers) the other users. And for some (lane detection), it's actively annoying to you. So that means that for each system, you have to learn when it does and doesn't work, and how to disable it/counteract accordingly.
My point isn't that those systems are broken, they work pretty well overall and usually they fail in somewhat predictable ways (when you're familiar with them), but rather that for most of them they don't truly work well-enough to entirely allow you to take your mind off that task. Which IMO makes a huge difference -- a system that works 100% of the time is something you can entirely forget about, whereas one that works 99% of the time is still something that you have to keep in mind, even if most of the time it's just to think "ok, the system is working."
(I'm struggling to find a system that works 100% of the time because they are stuff that I have totally forgotten about! I just remembered about the automatic darkening of the rear-view mirror, that one works perfectly for me. I'm sure there are many others... basically everything that we take for granted and never think about!)
So yeah, those are good but... still not perfect!
Few months ago my car was in the shop and I was on a loaner. The loander car had all of those features and I had all of them turned off after driving with it just one night. Jesus those things are annoying as hell. Especially the on-off of the high-beams. On my route home I was a fucking stobe light.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I don't have this directional lights things, but I have the "regular" automatic high-beam switching and it works fine, except in the same cases as what you describe (and for the same reason), or when the road is a bit too twisty and you as a human can see the car coming but it's not perfectly in front so the camera doesn't.
Yeah, my previous car had this.
The matrix lights seem much better at seeing other vehicles and also react more quickly. I don't recall it dazzling someone in this scenario.
It's not perfect but it's good enough. People don't get it right everytime either.@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
rather that for most of them they don't truly work well-enough to entirely allow you to take your mind off that task.
Which is fine. The driver should be paying a slight amount of attention to whether the automated system is working or not.
Maybe not actively but more as a reflex.@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I just remembered about the automatic darkening of the rear-view mirror, that one works perfectly for me.
Considering how simply those work I can't imagine a scenario they work incorrectly, but I'm sure someone will find one.
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@loopback0 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
The driver should be paying a slight amount of attention to whether the automated system is working or not.
You hang out here. You know how well this works in real life.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I also have road-signs (speed limits) recognition and it works fine except when there are temporary works or restrictions and the signs don't match what the GPS says and every km or so it switches back to what the GPS says instead of the true limit. I have lane detection and it works fine except when there are temporary lines for works and the system gets confused as to which line to follow. And so on and so forth.
And of course that's where, in my experience, French police like putting their traffic cameras.
@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I'm struggling to find a system that works 100% of the time because they are stuff that I have totally forgotten about!
I've got automatic switch between day lights and dimmed lights based on environment light, which works very well. I only manually turn on lights when entering a tunnel, as the automatic system is a bit slow to react there.
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@PleegWat said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I've got automatic [system ...] which works very well. I only manually [override it in this specific case...] as the automatic system is a bit slow to react
Thank you for proving my point
@loopback0 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Which is fine. The driver should be paying a slight amount of attention to whether the automated system is working or not.
I'd agree, but actually that's only true for as long as the system isn't working well enough. As shown by some other systems that do work well enough that we've entirely forgotten about them.
Do you remember how you had a starter on cars and you had to progressively turn it off as the car heated up? I'm pretty sure a car enthusiast 30 (?) years ago would have told you that even though you've got automatic starter you should always pay a slight amount of attention to it in winter etc. See how that turned out nowadays and how many people even know what a starter is.
Or how you had to lock all doors when leaving the car rather than just pressing a button? Or manually fold the side mirrors if you were the type of person to care about that (or were parked in a tiny space)? There are many systems that truly Just Works, and in the same way as programmers one generation ago told you that every user should know assembler (hey, for once we have a computer analogy when talking about car rather than the other way round!), car people once thought that knowing how to change your oil was an absolutely mandatory skill.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Do you remember how you had a starter on cars and you had to progressively turn it off as the car heated up? I'm pretty sure a car enthusiast 30 (?) years ago would have told you that even though you've got automatic starter you should always pay a slight amount of attention to it in winter etc. See how that turned out nowadays and how many people even know what a starter is.
I fully understand what a starter is (have even replaced one), but I have no idea what you are talking about here.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Do you remember how you had a starter on cars and you had to progressively turn it off as the car heated up?
A choke? I've never driven a car with one but I do remember them.
Was there some time when a car was fitted with both automatic and manual chokes, or did the manual choke just go away? I'm sure it's the latter in which case the scenario isn't the same. There's nothing to check.
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@Dragoon uh... maybe it's not called a starter in English...? Wiki seems to call it a "choke valve." A system that increased the flow to the engine when it's cold, which you had to engage in order to not stall.
As the engine got warmer you could turn it off (on one of my car, not doing so would cause the engine to stall at some point, but the car was essentially a pile of broken pieces at that time so it's probably not indicative of how the system was supposed to work...).
I don't think any regular car built in the past 15? 20? years has had it as a user-controlled device (it still exists, of course, it's just that the user never has to care about it).
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Ah, yeah. You only see those on carbureted vehicles, fuel-injection doesn't need it (well, does it differently). I think most cars in the US dropped manual chokes in the 60-70s in favor of electric chokes, but I am not a car guy so I could be wrong there.
Anything without a battery will still use manual chokes (so most of your small engines) and most of the tractors/backhoes/etc... that I have used over the years have all had manual chokes on them.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Dragoon uh... maybe it's not called a starter in English...? Wiki seems to call it a "choke valve." A system that increased the flow to the engine when it's cold, which you had to engage in order to not stall.
As the engine got warmer you could turn it off (on one of my car, not doing so would cause the engine to stall at some point, but the car was essentially a pile of broken pieces at that time so it's probably not indicative of how the system was supposed to work...).
A choke valve decreases air flow into the carburator (hence the name "choke"), meaning that when the cylinder starts sucking in air / fuel mixture it will take less air and thus create more of a partial vacuum in the carburator. This allows gasoline to evaporate in sufficient quantity (because it's not at the right temperature) to combust and keep the engine running, at the expense of lower combustion efficiency and extra soot formation. Once the engine and carburator get hot enough you no longer need that partial vacuum to evaporate fuel, the latent heat in the engine does it instead.
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@Dragoon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I think most cars in the US dropped manual chokes in the 60-70s in favor of electric chokes
Last car I saw with a manual choke was a Hyundai Poney around 1986
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@HardwareGeek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Light turns green for driver B, who proceeds into the intersection. Driver A runs red light and hits B. A is totally at fault, but B could have avoided the crash by not assuming the intersection is clear and actually looking for any cars that might be approaching the intersection are not stopping.
Heh heh. Back in the late 90s when I drove a 1989 Chevy Caprice Classic, it was a boat and stood out. We had a problem in the area of people running red lights when turning left. My wife and I ran a campaign of driving right at those people with our car while honking the horn. It actually seemed to make a difference.
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@Dragoon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Do you remember how you had a starter on cars and you had to progressively turn it off as the car heated up? I'm pretty sure a car enthusiast 30 (?) years ago would have told you that even though you've got automatic starter you should always pay a slight amount of attention to it in winter etc. See how that turned out nowadays and how many people even know what a starter is.
I fully understand what a starter is (have even replaced one), but I have no idea what you are talking about here.
I was imagining something like this:
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Dragoon uh... maybe it's not called a starter in English...? Wiki seems to call it a "choke valve." A system that increased the flow to the engine when it's cold, which you had to engage in order to not stall.
I don't remember these on cars but definitely on mowers and other gas powered lawn tools, where you often still find them, because carburetors.
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@Dragoon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I think most cars in the US dropped manual chokes in the 60-70s in favor of electric chokes, but I am not a car guy so I could be wrong there.
The only car I ever drove with a manual choke was a 1974 pickup. It also opened the throttle a little as it closed the choke, which occasionally useful for things other than starting the engine, when you needed higher RPM while your foot was still on the brake, such as starting without rolling backward when you were stopped on an uphill grade.
@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
A system that increased the flow to the engine when it's cold, which you had to engage in order to not stall.
It decreases the flow of air, increasing the fuel/air ratio, making it easier to ignite. Edit: 
, of course.
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@HardwareGeek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
The only car I ever drove with a manual choke was a 1974 pickup.
The first car I drove was a 1981 absolutely base model Ford Fiesta, and that had a manual choke but that wasn't at all difficult to deal with if I remember right. Overall, it was a fun car to drive as it was really light; yes, it's engine was small, but it still had plenty of acceleration. The only thing actually wrong with the car was that it only had 4 forward gears so you couldn't go much over about 75 mph without a helpful long steep hill to go down. And it quite liked to rust…
I don't think we'll see much of a return of manual chokes on any engine large enough to power a car. Emissions regulations (and the engine management systems they effectively mandate) have stopped that.
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@dkf said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
it only had 4 forward gears
But how many reverse gears did it have?
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@Zerosquare said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Were they careful enough to ask "does anybody here know
what quadratically meansabout Schlemiel the Painter" beforehand?
:spanner:
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@loopback0 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Was there some time when a car was fitted with both automatic and manual chokes
I've had a car with manual choke, but it would turn itself off once the engine was warm enough.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I have lane detection and it works fine except when there are temporary lines for works and the system gets confused as to which line to follow.
Or snow. They all stop working when there's the slightest bit of snow anywhere.
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@acrow Speaking of which, this morning's tally:
Temperature: -8 degC
Forecast day minimum: -12 degC
Number of times junior slipped and fell while walking 100m to the car: 2
Number of bicycles spotted on the road: 4
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@acrow said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Or snow. They all stop working when there's the slightest bit of snow anywhere.
Or even water. Mine fails in one of the tiny country road next to my home when there are water puddles on the side (there is no lane marking at all on that road, but with the puddles it thinks there is one about 1m from the edge of the road -- since the road isn't wide enough to drive 1m away from its edge, it's very annoying).
Mind you, on highways on the whole the system works pretty well and I'm glad I have it for long boring trips.
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@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I don't remember these on cars
I do. Which means either that my
is bigger than yours (because I drove older cars), or that your is bigger than mine (because you already forgot about them)! 
The first car I owned had one, and I remember how the very first time I drove it I didn't know about it (well I had learnt about chokes, but in the nervousness of getting my own car I forgot), and thus looked like an idiot as I couldn't get the car to start (it was in the middle of winter). The car was that of an old aunt who couldn't drive anymore, so it was just a couple of uncles/parents to witness that. Not sure if it was better or worse than if it had been a random car seller. Probably neither, since I'm likely the only one to remember that event.
Though part of why it probably didn't matter is also that I managed to break the rear windscreen before having even started the car! For some reason I had a few boxes to carry on that trip and I loaded them in the back of the car, but wasn't careful and when closing the bonnet the rear window hit one of the boxes and shattered. Which was already mortifying ("hey auntie, many thanks for your car and oops I've already broken it!") and annoying (I basically called the insurance company to give them the registration number of the car and at the same time make a claim), but even worse was that on this specific make the rear window was also what was holding the bottom part of the bonnet (where the registration plate and lights are). There were struts to link it to the body, but without the window they didn't hold anything. So I had to drive without rear lights or registration plate.
Yeah, not the best way to start being a car owner.
but definitely on mowers and other gas powered lawn tools, where you often still find them, because carburetors.
Yes, all my gas powered tools have one such setting. I think there is even a standard icon for them, something like a diagonal line with a dot between two short parallel segments? (which is slightly different from the symbol for the normal "on" position)
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I think there is even a standard icon for them, something like a diagonal line with a dot between two short parallel segments?
ISO 7000 strikes again!
@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
(which is slightly different from the symbol for the normal "on" position)
That would be "hand throttle". There are other symbols intended for "engine on", "engine off", "preheat", "engine start", etc, but I've never seen them used.
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@TwelveBaud Ah, that's a representation of the butterfly valve that restricts the airflow — shown half-closed.
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I don't remember these on cars
I do. Which means either that my
is bigger than yours (because I drove older cars), or that your is bigger than mine (because you already forgot about them)! Could be. I think it's like how there are still lots of manual transmissions over there but mostly manuals over here. They just weren't around as long here.
For easier, more convenient driving, automatic chokes; first introduced in the 1932 Oldsmobile, became popular in the late 1950s.
Thinking about it, I remember seeing it on cars from, like the 1960s.
but definitely on mowers and other gas powered lawn tools, where you often still find them, because carburetors.
Yes, all my gas powered tools have one such setting. I think there is even a standard icon for them, something like a diagonal line with a dot between two short parallel segments? (which is slightly different from the symbol for the normal "on" position)
Yep.
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@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Thinking about it, I remember seeing it on cars from, like the 1960s.
I don't remember any of my parents' earlier, 1960s-era cars having a manual choke (but I never drove any of them). Only that one, low-end, imported pick-up that didn't have an automatic anything.
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Waymo simulated real-world crashes to prove its self-driving cars can prevent deaths
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Waymo says its autonomous vehicles would prevent or mitigate the vast majority of deadly crashes.
With millions of people dying in auto crashes globally every year, AV operators are increasingly leaning on this safety case to spur regulators to pass legislation allowing more fully autonomous vehicles on the road.
Yeah, but from the CDC:
Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) Are Most Affected
The crash death rate is over three times higher in low-income countries than in high-income countries.
There were no reductions in the number of crash deaths in any low-income country from 2013 to 2016.
LMICs only account for 60 percent of the world’s registered vehicles but more than 90 percent of the world’s crash deaths.
Crash injuries place a major economic burden on LMICs.6,7 It is estimated that LMICs will experience approximately $834 billion dollars (in 2010 USD) in economic losses from 2015–2030 due to fatal and nonfatal crash injuries.
So not sure that the US with its ~33k deaths on ~350million people (and ~250million cars) is really selling the safety case that much.
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@Dragoon When a self-driving vehicle safely, and comparably fast as human driver, makes it through Delhi or Calcutta in the rush hour, it will be ready. Until then they are just toys.
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@Bulb I'd settle for navigating all the roadworks on the D1.
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@blek That would certainly be an important milestone, but it is an excellently marked road with orderly traffic in comparison. And still a well developed country too.
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@Bulb said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Dragoon When a self-driving vehicle safely, and comparably fast as human driver, makes it through Delhi or Calcutta in the rush hour, it will be ready. Until then they are just toys.
I agree with you, but OTOH it's probably worth remembering that 20 years ago the idea that most people in India or Africa would have a mobile phone and use it for payments was ludicrous, and yet that's happening.
So while I can't really see how autonomous cars could ever reach that stage in the next 20 years, I have to remember that predicting the future is hard.
Filed under: 2015 is long gone, where is my hoverboard?
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Bulb said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Dragoon When a self-driving vehicle safely, and comparably fast as human driver, makes it through Delhi or Calcutta in the rush hour, it will be ready. Until then they are just toys.
I agree with you, but OTOH it's probably worth remembering that 20 years ago the idea that most people in India or Africa would have a mobile phone and use it for payments was ludicrous, and yet that's happening.
So while I can't really see how autonomous cars could ever reach that stage in the next 20 years, I have to remember that predicting the future is hard.
Filed under: 2015 is long gone, where is my hoverboard?
But cell phones were a solved problem, and it was just a matter of reducing manufacturing costs. The western world was moving on to smart phones at the time, while the feature phones were reaching a price point where feature phones were within their monetary grasp, so it was fairly predictable that by 2007 cell phones were in widespread use for payments and communications in the 3rd world, just not smart phones.
Self driving cars doesn't exist yet. It's a hard problem to solve, because they need to navigate a chaotic system with unpredictable actors. Even the "see the world" problem hasn't been solved properly yet.
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@Carnage I'm not sure cell phones were a solved problem in 2001, especially when it comes to wide-spread data usage (internet access and the like) in remote areas. But in any case, you can just push back 5-10 more years if you want a clearer picture. By 1990, cell phones definitely were not a solved problem, even in large Western cities, and anyone saying that 25-30 years later they'd be a staple of even 3rd-world countries would have seemed fanciful. The 2G standard dates from 1991, and so does the lithium-ion battery. And of course, Internet was still to get out of academia.
1G phones probably were to modern phones what modern "self-driving" cars are to true self-driving cars. A promising system with some hints of what could be, but still hugely removed from the actual solution of the problem.
Again, I'm not saying self-driving cars will be a thing everywhere (or even anywhere) in the world in 20 years (or even 30), but rather that anyone saying that they're sure they won't be is a fool.
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@remi I didn't say they won't get there. They almost certainly will, sooner or later, until the civilization collapses. They just still have a long way to go.
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@Bulb said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
sooner or later, until the civilization collapses.
I feel it has already happened
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Carnage I'm not sure cell phones were a solved problem in 2001, especially when it comes to wide-spread data usage (internet access and the like) in remote areas. But in any case, you can just push back 5-10 more years if you want a clearer picture. By 1990, cell phones definitely were not a solved problem, even in large Western cities, and anyone saying that 25-30 years later they'd be a staple of even 3rd-world countries would have seemed fanciful. The 2G standard dates from 1991, and so does the lithium-ion battery. And of course, Internet was still to get out of academia.
1G phones probably were to modern phones what modern "self-driving" cars are to true self-driving cars. A promising system with some hints of what could be, but still hugely removed from the actual solution of the problem.
Again, I'm not saying self-driving cars will be a thing everywhere (or even anywhere) in the world in 20 years (or even 30), but rather that anyone saying that they're sure they won't be is a fool.
I worked in the field from 2005 or something, cellphones were in widespread use in Africa and India earlier than most people think and it was pretty clear they would be. Just not of the smart variety, but they were used for payments anyway. Phones doesn't have to be smart for such systems.
Hell, in India people even used number of ringtones to communicate things without cost (something that annoyed the hell out of the operators).
3G also came there pretty fast, granted it was after the trailblazers of the western world, but not much later.
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@Carnage said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
people even used number of ringtones to communicate things without cost (something that annoyed the hell out of the operators).
They should have seen it coming. That side-channel trick must be as old as telephony itself, and was widespread in other countries back when calls were costly.
Filed under: I will neither confirm nor deny I had considered doing something similar to remotely control devices with cellular connections.
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@Zerosquare said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Carnage said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
people even used number of ringtones to communicate things without cost (something that annoyed the hell out of the operators).
They should have seen it coming. That side-channel trick must be as old as telephony itself, and was widespread in other countries back when calls were costly.
Filed under: I will neither confirm nor deny I had considered doing something similar to remotely control devices with cellular connections.
I know of a few projects that did use that as a control channel.
To combat the problem, the operators asked my company to make it possible to charge for calls that didn't start.
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@Carnage well if anything that's just showing that widespread adoption and major technological change can be even faster than what I said. But you still have to show how large-scale mobile phone reliance in 3rd-world countries was correctly predicted (and not just by a couple of random people, but by some widely-accepted industry forecaster) 15 years earlier (1990).
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Carnage well if anything that's just showing that widespread adoption and major technological change can be even faster than what I said. But you still have to show how large-scale mobile phone reliance in 3rd-world countries was correctly predicted (and not just by a couple of random people, but by some widely-accepted industry forecaster) 15 years earlier (1990).
You started at 2000, that's where I'm arguing from. I'm not going to follow your moved goal posts for my first point. My entire point was that by then, cell phones were an existing technology, and easily predicted by people in the business. Autonomous cars are evidently not there yet.
By your moving of goal post, it's a different argument and yes, before cell phones were an existing and commonplace technology, it was hard to predict. It is however, mostly just an extension of already existing technologies. Wireless communication wasn't anything new even in 1990.
Self driving cars is something entirely new, that has been worked on for as long as cell phones have. And it's still not solved, while cell phones are everywhere. I've said before that I do not believe we currently have the technology to make it properly, there needs to be a new element added in the mix to get it all the way. Those last 5-10 % are a bitch to get working in this case.
I remember self driving cars being touted as something that might be publicly available in 10-15 years sometime mid nineties by researchers that worked on it back them.
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@Bulb said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Dragoon When a self-driving vehicle safely, and comparably fast as human driver, makes it through Delhi or Calcutta in the rush hour, it will be ready. Until then they are just toys.
I'd settle for the Roundabout of Death.
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@remi I agree that predicting the future is hard. But autonomous vehicles have a big hurdle that mobile phones don't - if they malfunction they will kill people. Even if they kill fewer people than would be killed by human drivers in the same journeys - already a big challenge, humans are very good at avoiding collisions - there will be thorny questions of liability and responsibility.
They're also in a different problem space, where dealing with unexpected and unknown circumstances is necessary. Not just in terms of conditions (what does it do if a tyre blows? if a deer runs into the road? if a lane is temporarily coned off ? if there is a flood?) but also in terms of interacting with other vehicles, piloted by humans. How does an autonomous vehicle get onto a roundabout at rush hour when no gap is large enough to be 'safe'? How does it deal with tailgaters, undertaking, nobody leaving a safe gap in front, roads parked up on both sides so you have to negotiate a passing place?
So although it would be foolish to write it off completely, I will be very surprised if I see fully autonomous vehicles in general use even in developed countries with proper road markings by 2040.
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