6 ms·
Many years ago I was sitting at a red light on a secondary road, where the primary cross road was idle. It seemed like you could solve this using a computer vi
by dekhn 1y ago
Many years ago I was sitting at a red light on a secondary road, where the primary cross road was idle. It seemed like you could solve this using a computer vision camera system that watched the primary road and when it was idle, would expedite the secondary road's green light.
This was long before computer vision was mature enough to do anything like that and I found out that instead, there are magnetic systems that can detect cars passing over - trivial hardware and software - and I concluded that my approach was just far too complicated and expensive.
Similarly, when I look at computers, I typically want the ML/AI system to operate on a structured data that is codified for computer use. But I guess the world is complicated enough and computers got fast enough that having an AI look at a computer screen and move/click a mouse makes sense.
- ge96 1y agoIt's funny I'll sometimes scoot forward/rock my car but I'm not sure if it's just coincidence. Also a lot of stop lights now have that tall white camera on top.
- bozhark 1y agoLike flashing lights for the first responders sensor
- Spooky23 1y agoSometimes the rocking helps with a ground loop that isn’t working well.
- netghost 1y agoThere's several mechanisms. The most common is (or at least was) a loop detector under the road that triggers when a vehicle is over it. Sometimes if you're not quite over it, or it's somewhat faulty that will trigger it.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoFWIW those type of traffic cameras are in common use. https://www.milesight.com/company/blog/types-of-traffic-cameras https://www.milesight.com/company/blog/types-of-traffic-came...
- dekhn 1y agoIf I read the web page, they don't actually use that as a solution to shortening a red - IMHO that has a very high safety bar compared to the more common uses. But I'd be happy to hear this is something that Just Works in the Real World with a reasonable false positive and false negative rate.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoYes they do, it's listed under Traffic Sensor Cameras.
- jlhawn 1y agoThe camera systems are also superior from an infrastructure maintenance perspective. You can update them with new capabilities or do re-striping without tearing up the pavement.
- dktp 1y agoI cycle a lot. Outdoors I listen to podcasts and the fact that I can say "Hey Google, go back 30sec" to relisten to something (or forward to skip ads) is very valuable to me. Indoors I tend to cast some show or youtube video. Often enough I want to change the Youtube video or show using voice commands - I can do this for Youtube, but results are horrible unless I know exactly which video I want to watch. For other services it's largely not possible at all In a perfect world Google would provide superb APIs for these integrations and all app providers would integrate it and keep it up to date. But if we can bypass that and get good results across the board - I would find it very valuable I understand this is a very specific scenario. But one I would be excited about nonetheless
- Macha 1y agoDo you have a lot of dedicated cycle ways? I'm not sure I'd want to have headphones impeding my hearing anywhere I'd have to interact with cars or pedestrians while on my bike.
- Hasnep 1y agoLots of noise cancelling headphones have a pass-through mode that lets you hear the outside world. Alternatively, I use bone conducting headphones that leave my ears uncovered.
- apwell23 1y agoyes i bike on chicago lakefront up and down is like 40 miles for me. also biking on roads you should never count on sounds to guide you. you should always use vision. for example, making a left you have to visually establish that driver coming straight has made eye contact with you or atleast looked at you. can you share a example of how you are using sound to help you ride bikes with other vehicles on the road? are you maybe talking about honking? that. you will hear over podcasts.
- Macha 1y agoThe sound of a revving engine is often the first warning you have that someone is about to pass you and especially how they handle it is a good sign of how likely they are to attempt a close pass rather than overtake in the legal manner with the minimum distance.
- yunyu 1y agoThere is a lot of pretraining data available around screen recordings and mouse movements (Loom, YouTube, etc). There is much less pretraining data available around navigating accessibility trees or DOM structures. Many use cases may also need to be image aware (document scan parsing, looking at images), and keyboard/video/mouse-based models generalize to more applicants.
- chrisfosterelli 1y agoIronically now that computer vision is commonplace, the cameras you talk about have become increasingly popular over the years because the magnetic systems do not do a very good job of detecting cyclists and the cameras double as a congestion monitoring tool for city staff.
- y0eswddl 1y agoand soon/now triple as surveillance.
- VirgilShelton 1y ago[flagged]
- insamniac 1y agoNothing to hide for now.
- BlaDeKke 1y agoI don’t have a problem with the camera as much as with the system behind it.
- serf 1y agogo watch any movie about a panopticon for the (overdiscussed) side-effects of a surveillance state. Fiction works, but if you want to spend the evening depressed then go for any East/West Germany (true) stories. For it or against surveillance and I can understand, but just not understanding the issue? No excuses -- personal surveillance for the sake of the state is one of the most discussed social concepts in the world.
- ericd 1y agoThe Lives of Others is a great one about the Stasi.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
- TeMPOraL 1y ago> But I guess the world is complicated enough and computers got fast enough that having an AI look at a computer screen and move/click a mouse makes sense. It's not that the world is particularly complicated here - it's just that computing is a dynamic and adversarial environment. End-user automation consuming structured data is a rare occurrence not because it's hard, but because it defeats pretty much every way people make money on the Internet. AI is succeeding now because it is able to navigate the purposefully unstructured and obtuse interfaces like a person would.
- avereveard 1y agoAnd the race is not over yet, adversaries to automation will find way to block the last approach too, in the name of monetization
- VirgilShelton 1y agoThe best thing about being nerds like we are is we can just ignore this product since it's not for us.
- sagarm 1y agoRobotic process automation isn't new.
- alach11 1y agoComputer use is the most important AI benchmark to watch if you're trying to forecast labor-market impact. You're right, there are much more effective ways for ML/AI systems to accomplish tasks on the computer. But they all have to be hand-crafted for each task. Solving the general case is more scalable.
- poopiokaka 1y agoNot the current benchmarks, no. The demos in this post are so slow. Between writing the prompt, waiting a long time and checking the work I’d just rather do it myself.
- panarky 1y agoIt's not about being faster than you. It's about working independently while you do other things.
- ssl-3 1y agoAnd it's a neat-enough idea for repetitive tasks. For instance: I do periodic database-level backups of a very closed-source system at work. It doesn't take much of my time, but it's annoying in its simplicity: Run this GUI Windows program, click these things, select this folder, and push the go button. The backup takes as long as it takes, and then I look for obvious signs of either completion or error on the screen sometime later. With something like this "Computer Use" model, I can automate that process. It doesn't matter to anyone at all whether it takes 30 seconds or 30 minutes to walk through the steps: It can be done while I'm asleep or on vacation or whatever. I can keep tabs on it with some combination of manual and automatic review, just like I would be doing if I hired a real human to do this job on my behalf. (Yeah, yeah. There's tons of other ways to back up and restore computer data. But this is the One, True Way that is recoverable on a blank slate in a fashion that is supported by the manufacturer. I don't get to go off-script and invent a new method here. But a screen-reading button-clicker? Sure. I can jive with that and keep an eye on it from time to time, just as I would be doing if I hired a person to do it for me.)
- stronglikedan 1y ago> I concluded that my approach was just far too complicated and expensive. Motorcyclists would conclude that your approach would actually work.
- nerdsniper 1y agoMy town solved this at night by putting simple light sensors on the traffic lights so as you approach you can flash ur brights at it and it triggers a cycle. Otherwise the higher traffic road got a permanent green light at nighttime until it saw high beams or magnetic flux from a car reaching the intersection.
- pavelstoev 1y agoIt was my first engineering job, calibrating those inductive loops and circuit boards on I-93, just north of Boston's downtown area. Here is the photo from 2006. https://postimg.cc/zbz5JQC0 https://postimg.cc/zbz5JQC0 PEEK controller, 56K modem, Verizon telco lines, rodents - all included in one cabinet
- dgs_sgd 1y agoIt’s funny that you used traffic signals as an example of overcomplicating a problem with AI because there turns out to be a YC funded startup making AI powered traffic lights: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/roundabout-technologies https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/roundabout-technologie...
- MrToadMan 1y agoAnd even funnier in that context: it’s called ‘roundabout technologies’.
- elboru 1y agoI recently spent some time in a country house far enough from civilization that electric lines don’t reach. The owners could have installed some solar panels, but they opted to keep it electricity-free to disconnect from technology, or at least from electronics. They have multiple decades old ingenious utensils that work without electricity, like a fridge that uses propane, oil lamps, non-electric coffee percolator, etc. and that made me wonder, how many analogous devices stopped getting invented because an electric device is the most obvious way of solving things to our current view.
- seer 1y agoIn some European countries all of this is commonplace - check out the not just bikes video on the subject - https://youtu.be/knbVWXzL4-4?si=NLTMgHiVcgyPv6dc https://youtu.be/knbVWXzL4-4?si=NLTMgHiVcgyPv6dc Detects if you are coming to the intersection and with what speed, and if there is no traffic blocking you automatically cycles the red lights so you don’t have to stop at all.
- rirze 1y agoI don't know the implementation details, but this is common in the county I live in (US). It's been in use for the last 3-5 years. The traffic lights adapt to current traffic patterns in most intersections and speed up the green light for roads that have cars.