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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

As a small data point - the streets of the Sunset are being inundated by self-driving cars. They're well behaved and mostly pretty effective from what I can see, but I'll see literally 10 or 15 of them most times that I walk my dog (and they're out all night too). Primarily Waymo's vans and Cruise's Bolts but a number of others too. It's striking since overall traffic volume is down so much but there are just a ton of these guys collecting data.

(Edit; My word choice made it sound like I'm complaining, but it's all good with me. Would rather have these looking for me at intersections than the typical distracted driver.)

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Since so many of them showed up in the Richmond I learned that my dashcam can see their 1550nm lasers, so they look like strobing party cars: https://youtu.be/56G34udNTfQ (one at the beginning and a second at 3:10 that you can also see reflecting off storefronts and parked cars)

At least I assume it's 1550nm based on https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160291134A1/en

Pretty sure both cars you mentioned in that video are Cruise, which is why you're able to see them as it's 905 nm. Your patent links to Google, but they don't make the cars in your video.

If you take a left on Arguello, and then right on Fulton, you won’t hit all the stop signs on Turk

Your dashcam is CMOS. It is not capable of sensing 1550nm, see i.e. [0]. I've worked with 1550nm sensors, they use different material.

[0] https://www.ir-photo.net/image/standard_camera.png

> I learned that my dashcam can see [..]

Given it was night, I'm impressed with the quality of your dashcam footage, mind sharing what make/model you have?

It's a mini0906-PRO (Novatek chipset) with a 24mm circular polarizing lens. I got it for the 60FPS support.

>It's striking since overall traffic volume is down so much

That's interesting. Ex-urban Boston intersecting with a couple of small cities, I basically don't immediately see material differences relative to pre-pandemic. Maybe a little less traffic congestion on the major roads? But certainly not "much less." (Which I find a bit surprising given how relatively little I go out but that's what I see.)

Pre-pandemic, there'd be 2-3 hour long periods with stop-and-go traffic inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening on Fresh Pond Parkway (2/3/16) in Cambridge.

I'd say that traffic is easily 30-50% of pre-pandemic levels now. Afternoon backups in front of my house are almost entirely gone and morning backups are quite a bit lighter and shorter.

Certainly the opening weeks of the pandemic, way back in late March of 2020, traffic was virtually nonexistent in my part of the USA; just outside of Portland in Oregon. And then traffic picked up just a tiny bit, but for months it was a cyclist's paradise; miles and miles of roadway open and very little traffic. For most of the summer it was an absolute delight. We're pretty much back to normal now.

I commute ~50mi into the Boston area daily. The volume is definitively down enough that the usual backup spots are no longer guaranteed backup spots except at the peak hour whereas before it was probable to hit a backup at those spots at any hour between 2pm and 6pm. My friends who ride the T say it is similar.

There was spectacularly little volume during the opening weeks of the lock-downs in March. It was like Tuesday volume becamee Saturday of a long weekend volume but without the downside of Saturday drivers generally driving slow because they're not commuters on those roads.

I wonder how much this is impacted by people avoiding the T like the plague?

I'm nowhere near the T. I'm about an hour west of Boston. And there's essentially no public transit out here. Based on looking at parking, commuter rail use looks extremely low but that shouldn't affect local traffic during the day that much (though some of it may admittedly be people who aren't otherwise in Boston offices).

What are the implications for you and your dog being scanned/captured by self-driving cars during these tests? Is biometric data usually discarded from these datasets before further processing and storage? Do you have any right to control your data or restrict its usage?

This is my favourite question! I don't think the stuff you described is any problem legally; lidar scan data and pictures from public places, not published, kept for a legitimate purpose (vehicle safety and training) should be fine.

But it's not a big step to turn these things into continuous scanners of the real world. Now every car can be a Street View car.

You could have them check parking lot occupancy, see whether storefronts look busy, scan license plates, measure foot traffic, do recognition on pedestrians and cars, enable real-time-ish "look around" in maps, scan for wifi networks or other signals, report weather conditions, and just generally act as massive mobile data collection network. They can bring the kind of invasive surveillance we have on the Internet right to your doorstep. There is a huge amount of money to be made.

The data might end up being more profitable than the rides.

I don't think there are any laws preventing any of this right now. We're going to need regulation eventually.

i think it would save a lot of headaches if legislation was drawn up today. it's not as if surveillance isn't possible already and doesn't happen. its an issue that's ripe for legislation. prevention is the best cure.

Solid disagree. Digital privacy has devolved into a luddite movement for privileged people who have nothing better to do than convince the less privileged that they'd be better off dealing with actual crime than allowing the nebulously constructed idea of their digital privacy to be violated.

There's nothing wrong with protecting the privacy rights of individuals when the largest companies in the world are running robot cameras down all of our streets.

there is some merit to your argument, by giving up some privacy we have created huge amounts of wealth for ourselves. But we can still fear a dystopian reality where ai and cameras will be used to create files on everyone.

I expect there will be political and law enforcement pressure to use those autonomous vehicles to scan for "Amber Alert" license plates.

The police are gonna be real annoyed when someone figures out how to make an OBD2 dongle or app that automates the "report/confirm a cop" portion of Waze

In person retail attribution and re-marketing! the next billion dollar ad tech startup. lol.

Though maybe if Google does it themselves they could actually make it work.

That's a fair question that I don't have an answer for. The Google Maps cars all blur faces (I'm sure in post processing) for their public data sets but I assume they haven't taken the time to do that with the self-driving ones. I guess GM and Google have tons of unflattering videos of my pandemic-self wearing the same clothes on multiple days in a row while I mutter to dog and my Airpods.

Right. It would be a small jump for Google to start using profile data on people to figure out who they should hire and who they should not.

Wonder in what way that influences the learning process, when all the algorithms are learning from each other.

Now I’m imagining an adversarial network of vehicles straight out of Mad Max & Death Race...

Now that would be a cool competition. Self-driving cars dropped into a random locale, it would be a no-holds-barred race to the finish line/battle royale. No human drivers means so safety concerns!

For this, train the cars in DC.

Clearly you haven't driven in some European cities — and I'm sure there are places that can top that :-)

As do I. I wonder in particular if there's a possibility that the (I presume) ML behind these things can start to distinguish human from machine drivers, how quickly that determination might be made, and react accordingly.

It'll be interesting when the characteristics of the cars are known. Eg you can cut in front of a Tesla and it'll stop, but dont do the same for a Chevy.

Same here, panhandle area. I walk the dog 1-1.5 hrs during the day, half hr at night. For years it was just the Cruise cars, but since last summer the Waymo vans/suvs started showing up and now it feels like they're constantly passing by. Late at night it's especially noticeable because of the lack of traffic.

It's the perfect time to test. Less civilians to hit, winter weather, still good data to use.

"winter weather" is a stretch

Heh I mean SF winter. So you know, slightly cloudy with a bit of water on the ground sometimes.

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuTP4-0VoAAl-vd?format=jpg&name=...

A SF native, are you?

A solid competitor for the stupidest quote of all time. Even winter in San Francisco is massively warmer than basically anywhere in my home country. Summer is absolutely baking.

Certainly not. The average summer day in San Francisco is foggy, windy and cold. Coat weather all year.

Actually nice (>80F, sunny) days in San Francisco are rare.

"Baking" days, are more like once in a decade.

> Summer is absolutely baking.

No it isn't? The average July daily high in SF is 67 degrees. That's absurdly cold for summer, there's basically nowhere south of Alaska in the Northern Hemisphere that stays that cold in July.

There isn't a single SF climate. It changes radically between, say, the Financial District and the Sunset.

Similar here in Menlo Park. We are near Willow and 101, where the temp can easily be 10 degrees cooler in the summer than it is just a couple of miles away in downtown.

Not really relevant to the extreme stupidity of the quote. In a cold winter, it would snow.

Do you guys really not understand the concept of humorous hyperbole. At first I thought you were the same commenter who posted above but apparently there are two of you!

- Oscar Wilde

I always heard it attributed to Mark Twain

The Twain quote comes up every time people talk about SF weather, figured I might poke fun at it at the price of some karma

Or Keith Hernandez if you ever watched a Mets broadcast while they were playing the Giants.

Thanks for data point. How is it interacting with the self-driving cars? I'm concerned that a lot of thought has gone into experience for the passenger of self driving car, but much less for the rest of general public. Feels like they missed an opportunity to improve driving experience for rest of us as well with some more signals or communication between vehicles.

In my experience as a pedestrian - they're extremely cautious, which I appreciate.

For most human drivers, I'll wave them through intersections if I'm on the far side and crossing will slow them down substantially -- partially out of sympathy for driving through slow crosswalks, partially out of self-preservation as drivers are often impatient and chomping at the bit to get through.

With the self-driving cars, they really creep up to the intersection so I never really consider waving them through (and I have no idea how they'd react). They're very good about not entering intersections when I'm approaching and they wait until I'm all the way through as well, so in my experience, they're very cautious. It's nice too since where I am in the sunset has random blocks with 4-way stops adjacent to 2-way stops, which is fairly dangerous for human drivers but the robotaxis handle those without issue.

This is why I can't wait for self-driving cars to take over. They are sooo much safer for me as a pedestrian.

They could almost make cars tolerable in the city. Almost.

No better time for autonomous driver software to practice driving than when the streets are relatively empty. (Obviously, eventually they'll need to handle full traffic, but the current situation is probably good training wheels for that.)

This isn't the case in 2021. Driving empty streets is pretty easy, and the crazy corner cases that urban density requires is the whole pt of testing in San Francisco.

I think it's more likely that waymo's commercial product in sf will prioritize neighborhoods like the sunset (poor transit connectivity, easy driving).

San Francisco post-covid is gonna be so weird. Just electric scooters and Weymos. Like no parking, we just turned that into outdoor dining.

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