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Waymo saved my life in LA. When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersec
by jjmarr 7mo ago
Waymo saved my life in LA.
When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.
In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over.
Most human drivers would've t-boned the car at 50+ km/h. Maybe they would've braked and reduced the impact, which would be the right move. A human swerving probably would've overshot into oncoming traffic. Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely.
Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
- Taek 7mo ago> Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall. This detail sent me, it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.
- himata4113 7mo agoThat's around 44.64 (0.18831) per month, no wonder ads are preferrable to companies over subscriptions! That's actually a lot for people that listen to music all day every day at work.
- kulahan 7mo agoGoogle was famously really resistant to ads at first. They wanted to do a subscription service of some kind, but honestly ads just brought in so much more revenue even back then that it was a nigh-inevitable decision. It produces a crazy amount of economy. I still loathe ads though.
- whatever1 7mo agoImagine your last thing in your mind being an ad about mongoDB.
- 0x3f 7mo agoI actually find those amusing because they just make me remember the 'web scale' meme.
- IshKebab 7mo agoIt's kind of wild how you have so many ads targeted at devs in SF.
- DetroitThrow 7mo agoThanks for that thought. Horrible.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- amelius 7mo ago> it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time. Oh, the self driving car business will get there, believe me. This is just the first iteration. Designed to get everybody on board with the idea.
- jmalicki 7mo agoI wonder if Waymo gets a cut. I also wonder if riding in a Waymo at the time signals that you're in a demographic that can afford a Waymo and thus get more expensive ads.
- georgemcbay 7mo ago> I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. You'll probably never forget that advertisement, which is an exciting business opportunity for Waymo. They could partner with Spotify and other media content partners so that the Waymo can generate an adrenaline-rush near crash experience when a premium advertiser's ad is playing. /s (hopefully)
- Analemma_ 7mo agoThis is one of those comments that made me laugh nervously. It's straight out of Ubik or another PKD novel, which probably means it's less than 5 years away from being real.
- ok_dad 7mo agoIf there’s a torment nexus to be built they’ll build it.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- selimthegrim 7mo agoMight be Orhan Pamuk or JG Ballard's mantle to be picked up
- ElijahLynn 7mo agoHow ironic that an Alphabet company, Waymo, only works with a competitor streaming music service, Spotify, and not their own, YouTube Music. I guess that shows how separate they are.
- casta 7mo agoIn January YouTube music worked fine when I took Waymo in Menlo Park.
- jjmarr 7mo agoThis was in September, so I'm happy to see the change!
- tialaramex 7mo agoThat's good news, if I can't use the Youtube Music I've paid for in the Waymo then I'm not going to put up with Spotify Ads instead, better to sit in silence (or use my headphones and my own music)
- fc417fc802 7mo agoCan you not steam arbitrary audio to it from your phone?
- svat 7mo agoI think it's also a privacy thing; you have to go into the Waymo app and “connect” your YouTube Music account (even though both have the same @gmail.com address), because otherwise the terms of service of one do not allow sharing data with the other without user consent. (Contrary to popular perception Google is very finicky about privacy, at least privacy as defined as conforming to the terms of service.)
- mort96 7mo agoCouldn't it just be a Bluetooth audio device? That way you could play anything you want, be it from YouTube, Spotify or your own music collection.
- AgentME 7mo agoWaymos have since added support for YouTube Music thankfully.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- cucumber3732842 7mo agoI think you're over-playing how decisively a Waymo will move and under-playing how decent the average human is. I've ridden in Waymos. They don't exactly slap on the blinker and move at the limit of traction like someone about to miss their exit. If cut off they absolutely will go full brake rather than perform any sort of spicy lane change or turn.
- jjmarr 7mo ago> If cut off they absolutely will go full brake rather than perform any sort of spicy lane change or turn. Essentially, a meat driver was waiting at a stop sign to make a turn onto the main road. I was in a Waymo driving on the main road and did not have a stop sign. When we were 10 meters away from the intersection, the meat driver suddenly started to enter the intersection. I have no idea why. Full brake would've hit the other car in the driver's side door at 40 km/h. > under-playing how decent the average human is. I got to SMFC in CSGO which means I'm in the top 3% of players in clicking on heads within 500 ms of them appearing on my screen. I have never reacted as fast as that Waymo did.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo agoTo be fair, we are not provided with the sensors to swerve safely. If we had some sort of 360 constant recording in the car (on screen?) it would be safer for humans to swerve. Instead we have to move our head, which is cheaper but lacks info. That's why we now have rear cameras
- hammock 7mo agoWe have rear cameras because people DONT move their head. And because regulations have made cars way taller than they need to be, meaning there is a big blind spot close to the ground
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo agoI mean, even in low cars you cannot see a small enough kid walking behind your car. That's why you back slowly. Back when I just got my driver license, there is a big lesson many drivers go through (in Italy) which is you back off a parking and there is an obstacle that's so low that cannot be see through the back window and it's small enough that cannot be seen through the mirror. You hit it and if you followed the "go slow part" you only damaged the paint. So I'm not opposing the ideas of rear cameras, but I'm totally against tall cars, because you cannot see kids IN FRONT either now.
- rootusrootus 7mo agoI hope you are misremembering. Swerving is most often the wrong choice, and I would be disappointed if Waymo were opting for that. By far the best option is to panic stop. Human or robot, physics is a harsh mistress and swerving is more likely to make you lose control and end up in a much more unforgiving wreck.
- worldsayshi 7mo ago> swerving is more likely to make you lose control Even if you're not a panicky human but a optimally regulated control system?
- rootusrootus 7mo agoThe optimally regulated system doesn't know the road conditions that well. When the road surface is more slippery, it has the most profound effect on lateral friction, way more than braking.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- amluto 7mo agoThe Waymo driver can measure the speed and the acceleration of the offending car and calculate, within at most tens of ms, its range of likely future trajectories. And it can calculate its own likely trajectories under maximum braking. And it can track exactly where all obstacles are that would matter if it swerves. All at once. And it can execute that emergency lane change with the control input that is least likely to cause a loss of control and most likely to successfully avoid the other car. It even has processing power to spare to keep playing that Spotify ad!
- BugsJustFindMe 7mo ago> The optimally regulated system doesn't know the road conditions that well. I'd like to introduce you to what autonomous cars were already able to do in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khX0UCqcR3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khX0UCqcR3M
- cco 7mo agoThankfully they've now shipped their own product, YouTube Music. And Google Pay, imagine my surprise back in 2021 when I signed up for Waymo and realized I had to manually type in my credit card. No Google Pay??? C'mon y'all, you're Alphabet!
- rhizome 7mo agoGoogle only hires the best of the best.
- mlboss 7mo agoIts is corporate fiefdom. Everybody trying to one up other executives to show impact instead of working together towards a unified goal. The bigger the company the more we see this phenomena. Nobody gets promotion if you just used existing internal service.
- lern_too_spel 7mo agoNext thing you know, they're going to add Alexa support before Assistant/Gemini. The PMs at Alphabet are famously incompetent. Another example from the archives: Google wrote the original official Twitter app for Android instead of letting Twitter do it themselves. It wasn't to help the Android platform because multiple third party Twitter apps for Android already existed.
- cush 7mo ago> Waymo saved my life... Unfortunately the Waymo only supported Spotify I chuckled
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- zx8080 7mo ago> Waymo saved my life in LA. When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road. > ... > Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall. What?! Is this a generated comment?
- andrewflnr 7mo agoI believe it is, in fact, humor.
- jjmarr 7mo agoHere is a photo I took inside of the Waymo outside of an Erewhon. Going to Erewhon and experiencing the $20 Hailey Bieber smoothie was on my brother's bucket list and riding in a Waymo was on mine. https://files.catbox.moe/jdjwy5.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/jdjwy5.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/mh4ivw.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/mh4ivw.jpg I have included EXIF data in an attempt to prove this really happened and I'm not an AI commenting bot.
- kcrwfrd_ 7mo agoWhat was the verdict on the smoothie?
- jjmarr 7mo agoHe said it was overpriced but bought it again from a different Erewhon so I assumed he liked it (Canadian understatement). There's apparently a quality gap between locations. The pre-Waymo one was from Erewhon Grove and was freshly blended. Erewhon Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive premade a bunch of them and left them lying around for a while before selling. My brother's theory is that Erewhon Grove customers are people who legitimately wanted a smoothie and Erewhon Beverly Hills customers just want photos with the smoothie since it was very popular on Instagram at the time. Most surprising fact was despite being a licensed product, it was better than the best non-licensed smoothie (coconut cloud). Licensing deals should make the product worse because the royalties cut into the product margin. The company cuts costs or doesn't take creative risks as a result. But somehow Erewhon resisted these pressures when designing the Hailey Bieber smoothie. We had a discussion about why that was the case but couldn't come up with an answer.
- int0x29 7mo agoNearly got T-boned in a Lyft in LA. I am lucky to still be alive as the driver was not aware and should not have been driving. Where available I've stopped using human driven rideshare.
- hattmall 7mo ago> Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely. Do you drive a lot? I feel like humans take evasive actions like this all the time.
- intrasight 7mo agoSome do and some more successful than others.
- pfannkuchen 7mo agoYeah I have done similar evasive maneuvers a bunch of times. Also people run stop signs constantly, a competent defensively driving human may have just not started driving forward yet when they saw the other car driving towards the stop sign with some speed. I’m not sure of the exact timing in the story but I’ve waited at a stop sign when I saw another car driving towards the intersection many, many times, and a small percent of the time they don’t stop. Which isn’t to say that the average driver wouldn’t have hit it, it’s just not obviously superhuman.
- jjmarr 7mo agoIn this case, the other car didn't run the stop sign. It waited at the stop sign like it was making a turn, then suddenly entered the intersection when the Waymo was 5-10 meters away, despite not having the right of way. Maybe they were trying to commit suicide-by-Waymo?
- refulgentis 7mo agoThey support YouTube Music now, thank god
- kqr 7mo ago> when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road. I vaguely recall reading at some point that this is something human drivers learn to do around robot cars because the robots are so timid. Is that still the case, was it never the case, or has it stopped being the case? If it's still the case, one could argue that if you were not in a robot, the situation would never have occurred in the first place! (On the other hand, if you were both in robots, maybe it also wouldn't have...)
- socalgal2 7mo agoI can almost guarantee, given the way no traffic laws are enforced anymore in LA and so many cars are breaking them that cutting off a waymo car in dangerous ways, because you know it has the attention and reflexes to yeild, will be a new thing.
- everyday7732 7mo agoIf it becomes a new thing, it would be fairly trivial for Waymo to respond by sending footage of incidents involving reckless driving to local authorities. To prevent over-reporting, they could even make a system which logs number plates and only reports it if (for example) the same car is involved in incidents 3+ times in a week.
- socalgal2 7mo agoWaymo supporting music services at all is stupid to me. They should just let you bluetooth your phone and play your own music. I don't want any of those services. I want my own music.
- MagicMoonlight 7mo agoBut think of the shareholders and their tasty dividends
- rhizome 7mo agoIf the CEO isn't juicing market cap 110% of the time, the board will prosecute them and they will go to JAIL!
- haspok 7mo agoWhy do you even want music? There is a large group of people (maybe even the majority?) who, as soon as they get in a car, MUST immediately turn on the radio or some kind of extra noise source. Is this some kind of a Pavlovian reflex? I'm always amazed by this, as my car is one of the few places where I have actual control over my environment (unlike on public transport, or at my workplace, or even in my home - neighbours can be noisy...). We are living in a sea of unwanted noise, bombarded by constant ads and "music", so it is nice to have a place of "quiet".
- Milner08 7mo agoIt maybe a surprise to you, but many people actually enjoy 'music' and don't find it to be just noise.
- shmel 7mo agoThere are even people who listen to music at home! They even buy expensive speakers just for this purpose =) I listen to music pretty much all the time except when I talk to other people and sleep.
- array_key_first 7mo ago
- johnbarron 7mo agoGreat reaction time from the Waymo. But a 50 km/h side impact in a 5 star crash-rated Jaguar with curtain airbags is not "saved my life" territory, more like an insurance claim. The fact that you instinctively framed it as a near-death experience is Waymo most impressive engineering achievement.