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Comment by soligern | Hacker News Reader

That’s stupid. You could park a golf cart on the train tracks and it would shut down all train transport for hours. You could cut out a piece of the rail very easily (with an angle grinder) and it would cause dozens of deaths and shut down the line for weeks.

The right course of action is to make messing with automated cars like this a crime just like it is with the railways.

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Railways are a little different - for the most part (except at level crossings) they are operating on dedicated rights-of-way, and someone has to go out of their way to interfere with them.

A car on a public street is mixing it up with everyone else, and the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all. What if I wear a shirt that confuses their algorithms? Shine a light that does it? Drive, bike, or walk in a pattern that does it?

> ...the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all.

Putting cones out for no other purpose beyond stopping them moving seems to me unambiguously "messing with" them (though I don't think we need additional laws to address it.)

> someone has to go out of their way to interfere with them.

How is this thing with the traffic cones not "going out of their way to interfere"?

> the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all.

If you're deliberately jamming up traffic by any means, it's perfectly clear which side of the line you're on.

This is not wearing a shirt though. This is people deliberately causing disruptions by putting a traffic cone, universally recognized as a traffic warning, in front of the vehicles. A lot of regular people would think twice about what to do if they came back to their parked car with traffic cones around it.

> universally recognized as a traffic warning

Except a real driver can recognize when a cone should and shouldn't be there.

In fact, there's a "prankster" operating in Poland right now, who is sending the "stop immediately" radio signal to trains. All trains receiving it will automatically start braking. They were able to stop 20+ trains yesterday. Also, when they're not sending that signal, they're broadcasting the Russian national anthem on the emergency braking radio frequency...

>Poland's national transportation agency has stated its intention to upgrade Poland's railway systems by 2025 to use almost exclusively GSM cellular radios, which do have encryption and authentication. But until then, it will continue to use the relatively unprotected VHF 150 MHz system that allows the “radio-stop” commands to be spoofed.

https://www.wired.com/story/poland-train-radio-stop-attack/

Cutting a train track with an angle grinder isn’t the same as taking less than five seconds to put a traffic cone on a car.

It takes them 30 minutes in this video.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ISjDp5lL7_Q

It would take only a few moments to weld a metal traffic cone to a train track. Focusing on the exact timing to disturb the mode of transit is not relevant. There are always optimizations.

You could disable a diverter in 5 seconds with a sledge hammer.

Also your linked video is splitting along the length of the rail instead of cutting directly across it which would take minutes if not seconds.

> Also your linked video is splitting along the length of the rail instead of cutting directly across it which would take minutes if not seconds.

Watch how long it takes to cut the top of that rail. You must not have ever used an angle grinder before if you think you’re cutting train tracks in seconds.

It took me at least a minute to cut through a single leaf spring for a truck if not longer.

What’s your point though? You’re picking an arbitrary cutoff time based on what? The intention is still disruption.

Thirty minutes is nothing. We don’t classify severity of crimes based on how long they take to accomplish. A murder is a murder whether you shot a person once or spent hours carving them up.

I have used an angle grinder and it takes me about 10 seconds to cut through rebar. I would assume a rail is like 25 pieces of rebar put together so my naive assumption would be under five minutes.

There's a big difference in both material and size between rebar and rail track, but that's just an aside.

I believe the point being made is the difference in level of intent required and the known (or hoped for) outcome from the action.

Grabbing a traffic cone from a nearby construction zone and chucking it in front of an autonomous car at a traffic light is harmless to the health of everyone involved, but is a pain in the rear for many. Meanwhile, it makes a statement, and some chunk of everyone's annoyance gets directed at the autonomous car company.

On the other hand, cutting a section of railroad takes concerted effort and a lot of premeditation if the individual hopes to get away with it. More importantly - the person cutting the track hopes/expects to cause death and destruction.

The two actions are wildly different, and should be treated as such.

It’s not necessarily harmless. If that traffic jam blocks an emergency vehicle, people can die.

There’s been many cases of autonomous cars interfering in active firefighting (rolling slowly between equipment, stopping on hoses, etc).

Let’s get that taken care of, and not intentionally make things worse.

Some would view disabling the cars which are interfering with emergency services as “get that taken care of”, and attempts to roll out additional cars without fixing the bug as “intentionally make things worse”.

That’s completely fair. Let’s work on that, with the required many times increase in efficiency for public transportation to work in cities made for cars, instead of blocking traffic. One approach for the increase in efficiency is automation. I would like to know what their approach is. As this, and interviews have shown, they have no approach or real goal.

Protest is a political tool. If blocking traffic raises awareness (as it has done here) then I think that counts as working on it. We're not going to get cars off the road by writing letters to our senator or donating a few hundred dollars to a political campaign (we've been trying for decades). Maybe aggravating the general public into realizing the fragility and selfishness of the tech industry's "solution" will get people to reevaluate funding for public transportation. I doubt it, because I've become deeply cynical about human nature, but I also see that the roots of progress often comes from surprising places. Like refusing to ride at the back of the bus. Or dumping tea into a harbor. Or putting a traffic cone on a robot. Keep it simple, don't hurt anyone, make your point. We can argue about the efficacy of their tactics but at the end of the day they're trying something.

> If blocking traffic raises awareness

From the article,

> protest against the city being used as a testing ground for this emerging technology.

What awareness are they raising, exactly? Are you/they suggesting that people in the Bay Area don't know that these driverless cars exist? Or is it that they're fragile/not complete yet? This is a genuine question, because I, obviously, don't understand.

I see this similar to someone laying in the road, blocking human drivers, and saying they're raising awareness of the fact that drivers can be blocking if someone put effort into blocking them. I don't get it. Help me.

From where I sit, there's a general perception that driverless cars ("tech") will reduce traffic accidents and fatalities and be an overall significant positive improvement in transportation (source: partner is lifer at city DOT and is pro-driverless cars). There's a corresponding trust that companies/process/regulations wouldn't allow the deployment of driverless vehicles unless they're a safe and mature technology. And a similar lack of understanding of how mature the technology actually is (given mainstream hype from Musk etc). So a demonstration that extreme anti-social behavior will currently result, not from edge-case conditions that would be dangerous even for a human to be driving in, but from a simple hack that literally any miscreant could pull off in seconds and successfully run away from without any risk to themselves, might be sufficient to raise awareness that we can't trust creators of these vehicles or the larger system to do adequate testing before deployment, and that in fact the vehicles are already deployed widely enough to inflict transportation blockages with a minimum of miscreants and effort by same.

> but from a simple hack that literally any miscreant could pull off in seconds and successfully run away from without any risk to themselves

Without any risk to themselves, or anyone else.

I don't think anyone will see this point of "not enough testing", when a car should not continue with a stop sign, road cone, or human on the hood, under any condition. I think most everyone will see this as expected and desired behavior, with a clear demonstration of safe handling of a dumb situation caused by some angry idiots.

Here's a question for anyone with this perspective: What should a fully tested, fully qualified, car do in this situation?

I see the "correct" answer as: immediately disable automation, and prompt a human for remote control.

What's your "correct" answer?

This is all opinion that could only be settled be a poll of those who became aware of this situation. I'm having trouble finding any, but this one from NY [1].

[1] https://observer.com/2014/12/majority-of-new-yorkers-want-pr...

> Here's a question for anyone with this perspective: What should a fully tested, fully qualified, car do in this situation?

Okay, fine: it should deploy an embedded all-purpose maintenance drone to exit the vehicle and move the cone to a safe and out-of-the-way location.

It's a good thought experiment, and I think goes to show that we can't really have Level 5 Autonomous Vehicles without an embedded all-purpose maintenance drone. I mean the dream is for humanless robotaxis to drive themselves to their next fare, right? They shouldn't need a human to come out in order to remove a harmless 5-pound object. I mean how about any number of other things that might happen onto its hood? A plastic bag, or a half-eaten happy meal? These are routine urban annoyances that require 15 seconds of attention and an eyeroll at most.

They are very different grades of steel. Track is over twice the yield strength of rebar from your home center and through-hardened. Rebar is mild steel and can't be hardened (maybe case-hardened). It's the difference between cutting water and ice :-).

>You could park a golf cart on the train tracks and it would shut down all train transport for hours

If a golf cart picks a fight with a train moving at speed, I guarantee you the train will win.

Yes, and then traffic will be halted for hours while the incident is investigated.

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