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Comment by ResearchCode | Hacker News Reader

Still waiting on those autonomous cars.

Unlike many other software development tools, I've found ChatGPT to be useless so far.

What have you tried? I personally have used it for writing tests (and ideas for tests), to explain some old convoluted legacy code, to generate easy-concept functions like rect/rect collisions, rect/curve collisions, turning an in memory tree into html text, etc. All things I could do in 5 to 10 minutes, but ChatGPT does it in 5 seconds.

I've also used it to generate the floorplan of several commercial buildings, the jobs needed to keep those buildings operating, people to fill those jobs with varying ages/names/appearances and the relationships between all these people (only here things started breaking down). All this as background for a game I'm developing, this task would have taken significantly more time for me to do manually.

They clearly won't replace autonomous horses.

I saw three autonomous cars driving around my neighborhood in just the past week, all with nobody at the wheel.

(Totally unrelated) I wonder how an autonomous car would navigate my narrow dead end road. The road isn't wide enough for 2 cars to pass, so whenever 2 cars pass each other on the road, 1 car needs to pull off onto the shoulder to make room.

I have a feeling an autonomous car would take up the whole lane, and not be smart enough to pull off onto the shoulder. Meaning both cars would be stuck there unable to pass each other.

I really hope these "nobody behind the wheel" cars at least have someone monitoring / controlling them remotely when they get into confusing situations.

After the first one got stuck, don’t you think a programmer would teach it to do exactly what you suggest? Usually before deploying them somewhere, they have safety drivers take them up and down every road at least once, and sometimes dozens of times.

If by self driving car you mean a car that can only drive itself after a programmer specifically resolves whichever breaking problem it had (which may or may not occur after your life has ended DUE to this very problem), then I guess they are here!

I’d say they’re here when the probability of being injured, at every level of severity, is less than that of a human driver, and the occasional “oops we’re stuck in a weird situation” problems (which happen to human taxis too) are similarly infrequent and tolerable enough that people consider the minuscule risk of inconvenience worth the ride.

It's not self driving if the programmer needs to fix it every time it makes a mistake. I don't think you got my point.

If the fleet drives a million miles between such events, is that good enough for you?

No, because it's not self driving if it needs to be programmed to fix the mistakes it doesn't even realize it is making.

How is that any different from a human driver?

Maybe humans aren't self driving. I don't care about that.

Not even for satisfying your curiousity?

It has but not helped me work.

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