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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

The run part: I think they're a young overseas resident who panicked. They returned and handed themselves in to police at the scene.

A lot of younger foreigners have no idea what to do in an accident and in their home economy can face retribution, extortion, sometimes at the hands of police. In Australia, you stay, you help the victim, you report the accident. That's the law. In theory all drivers should know this but you get a year on your homeland licence before having to sit a local road rules exam.

I have nothing to add regarding self driving. Well I do: I think it's been misnamed and oversold.

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> I think they're a young overseas resident who panicked.

Ok, I need to call this out. Unless I missed something, there's nothing to suggest that the person involved is an overseas resident.

> but you get a year on your homeland licence before having to sit a local road rules exam.

P-plates suggests she's doing a local driving licence. If you area foreigner from quite a few countries you just show your existing driving licence and get a Vic one without any exams and without p-plates.

They're likely going on this, which in local media usually implies they're fleeing back to a home country: "Sakshi Agrawal has been granted conditional bail, despite police protesting she poses a flight risk."

And/or from another local article:

"The 23-year-old, who is on a bridging visa, was released on bail despite concerns from police prosecutors she could flee the country."

"The court heard that Ms Agrawal, whose driver’s licence had previously been suspended..."

You're right the linked article doesn't mention it.

If you search the drivers name and Tesla, other articles do claim that she is not a citizen or permanent resident of Australia and is there on a bridging visa.

Which is exactly what I did: I had read other local news stories about her initial court appearance where a police case was raised she might be a flight risk.

> Ok, I need to call this out. Unless I missed something, there's nothing to suggest that the person involved is an overseas resident.

Just based on the picture I'd be pretty confident she is. I find it fairly easy to pick out young people from Asia who are recent immigrants based on their dress and hairstyles.

> I find it fairly easy to pick out young people from Asia who are recent immigrants based on (...)

racial stereotypes. FTFY

Not sure what people find wrong about this. Yes, a fashion change in immigrants sure happens for many reasons. But going the other way - from "I see a person" to "she's a recent immigrant" is harmful stereotyping because you will be wrong. Doing that under a post going from "probably a recent immigrant" to "she probably did a hit-and-run because of driving culture and environment of where she's from" is just fuelling racial BS.

She's young, she panicked, she came back. She is from another culture and I knew she'd been reported a flight risk from abc news reporting iirc.

Your point is well made. I probably wouldn't post given a second run.

I'm with you on the fashion bit but I'm a recent immigrant (to Australia, as it happens) and the driving culture here feels a lot saner than where I'm from. Being asked for bribes, ignoring pedestrian lights and crosswalks, queuing across and blocking intersections, etc.

Is that a controversial observation?

No, that's not controversial. The controversial thought chain is: she looks foreign, therefore she is foreign, therefore she learned the bad foreign driving culture, therefore she ran from the accident. It may well be true! But those are assumptions posted only because of the photo / her name. If it was my photo, we wouldn't end up with this thread.

It's more cultural than racial.

The 23 year old wearing the Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt driving the expensive car with custom plates just screams young immigrant with rich parents.

I'm not making any claims that there something wrong with being an immigrant, they're just easy to pick out.

> overseas resident

> recent immigrants

A recent immigrant, by definition, cannot be an overseas resident (at least not by normal definitions of 'resident').

Ignorance is no excuse for not following the law

It is, however, an extenuating circumstance.

I hope you don't write software with that kind of logic. You cannot follow a law that you are ignorant of. The word you're looking for is "no defence". Even that is debatable, subject to the reading of relevant applicable laws. Let's leave laws to lawyers and judges, shall we?

>In Australia, you stay, you help the victim, you report the accident. That's the law.

I don't think Law is much different in any country, maybe in some countries it is not respected due to the possibilities of retribution/extortion you mention.

It's easy to make low effort quips about the letter of the law but we all know that even in the first world customary practice can be far more nuanced than the letter of the law. And the gap only gets wider from there.

> I think it's been misnamed and oversold.

Yep. I marvel at the "Machine Learning AI ad algorithms" that try to sell me junk. I get 3 (three!) emails a day from aliexpress about stuff i already bought ... from aliexpress. Same thing with Amazon. I bought a, lets say "toaster" from amazon, and for the next 6 months every weird amazon ad on the wide internet and every time i hit the amazon home page it's trying to sell me toasters.

I don't even see it like "it's like a child, it finds something interesting and repeats it" because even a child gives up after a week. maybe a lot of people don't see "AI" as "old tech" - even though some of the first real "advances" - and i say that with a wry smile - were documented 40 years ago or more.

It's complete and utter snake oil. There are some cute toys that AI/ML can do, i can clone certain voices passably, for instance. There's "deepfakes" where a screenshot is enough to maybe fool someone not wearing their glasses at 3 meters, on a smart phone screen. There's obviously the AI in video games, etc.

But we're a good 25 years out from a truly autonomous, road-worthy, self-driving human transport.

Someone will always have to "look over the shoulder" until then.

The day i can hire a private self-driving taxi/limo to pick me up at my house and drive me to an arbitrary location, at any time of day or year, is the day i start to tinfoil my house to prevent the grey goo from coming inside.

edit: i should note that i would ab-so-loutely love a car service that was cheaper than hiring a limo for a week, if you can even do that. If the car is driving by itself, i can sleep while it gets from interesting place in the US to interesting place, and spend most of my time awake documenting and photographing and interviewing people, rather than hating interstate 10, 20, and 40; which is how most of my "road trips" for the past 20 years have gone. I've traveled this country "a lot", and i rarely have cute stories about places i've been to because i've either been completely wiped and just slept there somewhere, or i was in a hurry to beat the sun/state police/whatever through the state. I'd love to spend a few weeks in wyoming and montana and wisconsin, but if i have to drive it, the only thing i'll publish is a couple of shots of mountains, the kids posing in front of some tourist trap, and that's about it.

I passively consume, yet nearly universally ignore and eschew all "AI" news.

Where AI has made really great advancements is all the stuff that you can memorize.

Like GitHub Co-Pilot reurgitating John Carmack's source code. Also, stochastic language models have reached the point where they seem like magic, e.g. automated YouTube subtitles and translations, or text to speech. But that all works by memorizing word fragments (CTC) and/or memorizing sentence fragments (n-Gram).

> But we're a good 25 years out from a truly autonomous, road-worthy, self-driving human transport.

It sounds like your reasoning goes like this: my interactions with things which are supposedly AI are bad. Self-driving cars are also some form of AI, therefore self-driving cars must be bad and or far away too.

Did I understood you right?

The problem with that logic is that there is nothing in common in implementation/architecture/incentives between the things you mention and self-driving technology.

Nobody, well nearly nobody, tries to implement self-driving cars in a blackbox “AI” fashion. What I mean is that we don’t just throw sensor data at a neural network, then squint and say “i recon it is going to drive well now”. That would be madness.

Most approaches break down the problem into sub-problems covered by sub-systems. The sub-systems are fed information with known error properties and engineered to the specifications. The failure modes are painstakingly traced through and documented. Then in turn assemblies of these subsystems and the whole are reasoned similarly. Fault trees are drawn, the operational domain is considered. The reasoning why the engineers think the system is safe and have the right redundancies in place is more complicated than the code itself.

Some of these sub-systems are implemented using what one would call “AI”. Particularly in the object recognition domain that seems to be the state of the art. But the failure modes and shortcomings of these systems are considered and reasoned about the same way you would do the same with a good old-fashioned kalman-filter based sub-system. It is known that they are going to fail in various situations in various ways. The trick is to engineer the whole system such that it still remains safe despite these sub-systems having these characteristics.

I’m not saying that we will have safe self-driving soon. What i’m saying is that you can’t reason about self-driving cars by saying “commercial entity X is spamming me with bad marketing crap. People talk about AI behind said marketing crap. Therefore self driving cars are far away.”

>But the failure modes and shortcomings of these systems are considered and reasoned about the same way you would do the same with a good old-fashioned kalman-filter based sub-system.

My personal definition of what constitutes "AI" includes emergent behavior as a prerequisite. To lack emergence is to be a programmable logic controller.

Do these systems you're talking about exhibit emergence?

If so, how can you possibly reason about their failure modes?

They don't, that's why they came up with general AI (good luck with that) vs specific AI (machine learning), so they can keep milking VCs for money via buzzwords.

The self driving car won't be human like - merely a set of algorithms using trained networks to solve problems.

> Do these systems you're talking about exhibit emergence?

What is your definition of emergence? I found this one on wikipedia:

“In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.”

If i go by this then yes such a system exhibits emergence. The whole has the property of driving the car while the parts alone don’t. But so does an elevator: neither the winch, the cable, or the shaft lifts people up alone, but the whole of it together does.

> If so, how can you possibly reason about their failure modes?

Same way you do it about an elevator? Its “just” much more complex because the operational domain is much more complex.

The controller in an elevator is deterministic in its behavior.

Purported AI is not.

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