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abhibeckert

@ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Will self driving trucks hit the roads with nobody on board or will they keep a human supervisor?

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  • It’s a mind-numbing boring task. How does one stay alert when most of the stimulus is gone? It’s like a real-life version of Desert Bus, the worst video game ever.

    Agreed. I don't see any chance humans will be continuously supervising trucks except as some sort of quality assurance system. And there's no reason for the driver to be in the truck for that - let them watch via a video feed so you can have multiple people supervising and give them regular breaks/etc.

    Human skills will deteriorate with lack of practice. Drivers won’t have an intuitive sense for how the truck behaves, and when called upon to intervene, they will probably respond late or overreact. Even worse, the AI will call on the human to intervene only for the most complex and dangerous situations. That was a major contributing factor to the crash of Air France 447: the junior pilots were so used to pushing buttons, they had no stick-handling skills for when the automation shut off, and no intuition to help them diagnose why they were losing altitude. We would like to have Captain Sullys everywhere, but AI will lead to the opposite.

    I don't see that happening at all. An passenger jet is a special case of nasty where if you slow down or stop, you die. With a truck in the rare occasion you encounter something unexpected, just have the human go slow. Also seriously it's just not that difficult. Right pedal to go forward, left pedal to go backward, steering wheel to turn and if you screw up, well maybe you'll damage some panels.

    The AI will shut off before an impending accident just to transfer the blame onto the human. The human is there to serve as the “moral crumple zone” to absolve the AI of liability. That sounds like a terrible thing for society.

    So you're thinking a truck sees that it's about to run a red light, and transfers control to a human who wasn't paying attention? Yeah I don't see that happening. The truck will just slam on the brakes. And it will do it with a faster reaction time than any human driver.

    With a fleet of inexperienced drivers, if an event such as a snowstorm deactivates AI on a lot of trucks, the chaos would be worse than it is today.

    Hard disagree. A snowstorm is a lot less problematic when there's no human in the truck who needs to get home somehow. An AI truck will just park until the road is safe. If that means two days stuck in the breakdown lane of a freeway, who cares.

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  • Here in Australia it's standard practice to use "how much profit did you make" as the basis for a fine against a corporation.

    Except we normally multiply that number by 3x or 5x in order to make it properly punitive.

    The upside is companies tend to obey the law. The downside is every now and then an honest mistake ends in bankruptcy. And in fact, most people fined are making a mistake, because why would any corporation take on that much risk intentionally?

    I'm OK with all the fines being a bit unfair. If you're incompetent then GTFO of the market and allow someone who does a better job to replace you.

  • How RCS on iPhone Will Make Texting Better for Everyone

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  • the world once again fell for google’s propaganda

    Not really — since so far nobody else has adopted RCS. And not many people use the Google one either.

    The Signal protocol is a defacto standard and on the path to becoming an actual standard. It's already the most widely used messaging protocol today except for perhaps Email... but email would only be larger if you include messages that were sent by bots. For human sent messages, Signal is the most widely used protocol in the world.

    And as part of the DMA in Europe, Meta (which makes up most Signal users) is opening up their infrastructure so that any other messaging app can send/receive messages to their users. Which would essentially make it a perfect replacement for SMS and definitely better than RCS. You won't have to use WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger yourself, to be able to securely contact anyone who does.

  • Tractor-trailers with no one aboard? The future is near for self-driving trucks on US roads

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  • But on the flip side, you also have to consider how much cheaper, well, literally everything, will be when it doesn't cost $30 an hour to move a product from one place to another?

    Everything will cost so much less that Universal Basic Income wouldn't need to be anywhere near as high as it is right now to be "living wage".

    Like it or not - self driving trucks are coming. We need to find a way to adjust to that. The timeline for when is probably not "when will the tech be ready" but rather "when will society be ready". I'm pretty sure if you deployed self driving trucks today, pitchforks would come out and those trucks would be blocked by civil disobedience.

    Slow it down too much though, and you'll put your whole economy at a global disadvantage. A first would country could easily become a third world one by refusing to allow autonomous trucks. Autonomous trucks already exist and not just on pristine highways — for example they're used on mine sites with no roads at all — https://thewest.com.au/business/mining/bhp-autonomous-trucks-collide-at-jimblebar-iron-ore-mine-in-pilbara-ng-b881139676z

  • Tractor-trailers with no one aboard? The future is near for self-driving trucks on US roads

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  • Have you heard of "pedestrian controlled" trucks? They're increasingly common. Here's one being used to move an airplane cargo container:

    They're usually small but these days some carry 15 tons and you just grab them by a handle and start walking. Often there's a lifting function (to load cargo onto/off of tall shelves/etc).

    You're not always limited to walking speed, some of them have a platform the operator can stand on to increase the speed.

    I could totally see those increasing in size, to the size of a full size shipping container maybe, and having a wireless control system instead of needing to stand right next to it (which could be dangerous). It'd have sensors prevent the operator from running into anything and the control would just be a pair of joysticks. Outside of the loading dock of a building, they'd be able to drive autonomously.

    The job of "driver" would be replaced by just a team of people who load / unload the cargo and plan/supervise the truck. And I don't think it's far away at all - we're already seeing it with smaller cargo loads (is 15 ton all that small?).

  • Google fires more workers after CEO says workplace isn’t for politics

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  • You only get ahead by shipping a product, and getting a project approved is largely politicking

    Yep - I had a friend who worked for three years at Google, none of the products he worked on ever shipped and eventually he gave up on ever receiving a good salary (bonuses/stock options/etc are supposed to be most of the pay, but you only get that by working on a successful product)

    They have ten major campuses worldwide that focus on product development, but only one of those actually ships products regularly.

  • Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps

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  • The porn industry is, in fact, extremely hostile to AI image generation. How can anyone make money off porn if users simply create their own?

    Also I wouldn't be surprised if the it's false advertising and in clicking the ad will in fact just take you to a webpage with more ads, and a link from there to more ads, and more ads, and so on until eventually users either give up (and hopefully click on an ad).

    Whatever's going on, the ad is clearly a violation of instagram's advertising terms.

    I’m just hoping I can communicate the danger of some of the social media platforms to my children well enough. That’s where the most damage is done with the kind of stuff.

    It's just not your children you need to communicate it to. It's all the other children they interact with. For example I know a young girl (not even a teenager yet) who is being bullied on social media lately - the fact she doesn't use social media herself doesn't stop other people from saying nasty things about her in public (and who knows, maybe they're even sharing AI generated CSAM based on photos they've taken of her at school).

  • Apple AirPods are designed to die: Here’s what you should know

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  • In less than two years, the rechargeable lithium-ion battery found in your AirPods is due to die an untimely death.

    Bullshit. I got four years out of each of my pairs and I used them several hours a day. Also replacing the battery when it does wear out is is something like 50 bucks. Sure, you can't do it yourself but Apple will give you a refurbished pair, and they will recycle your old battery.

    And they provide free recycling for all their products — you're basically paying for it to be recycled when you buy AirPods and any that go into landfill that's entirely the customer's fault.

    No wired headphones I've ever owned lasted even close to that long - the cable eventually fails with several hours per day of swinging around and being packed tightly into your pocket.

    That said, I've switched to bone conduction headphones now, and will probably never own another pair of airpods unless they go down the same path.

  • The Biggest Deepfake Porn Website Is Now Blocked in the UK

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  • Oh is see it is the porn site itself blocking the uk visitors

    Sure. A little more to it than that though.

    AFAIK the UK most likely said "this content is illegal, if you don't remove it, we'll go all Kim Dotcom on your ass" and it's entirely up to the website operator how they want to respond to that. They could fight it like Kim did... might not end well though.

    Any large website with user uploaded content receives notices like that routinely (including Lemmy) and most of them respond by deleting the content itself, because it's usually pretty nasty shit or else it wouldn't have got the feds attention. It's treated the same as malware/spam/etc.

    For whatever reason, these ones chose to take the entire website offline if necessary.

  • Help me understand Voice Recognition tech

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  • I work in a field with HIPAA protections.

    Definitely need to be careful then.

    is this kind of software considered “AI”?

    The best voice recognition is based on AI — yes.

    Before AI, voice recognition existed but it was generally pretty shit and really struggled with accents, low quality microphones, background noise, people saying things that don't strictly make sense. E.g. if you say "We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it." a good AI might replace "burn" with the word "cross"... it will at least have the capability to do that, wether or not it will would depend on your settings - is "accuracy" about what someone said or what someone actually meant? That's configurable in the best systems.

    Does the tech learn to recognize my voice better over time?

    Old software did. These days systems work so well that would just add cost with zero benefit. Good speech recognition will understand your speech perfectly as long as your microphone is decent and "learning" wouldn't help much with that one potential problem area.

    Some speech systems do learn in order to recognise/identify people (for example, a voice assistant might use it to figure out who "me" is in a command like "remind me to do get milk when I get to the shops". And a good transcription service will recognise different people talking in a single recording, and provide an appropriately annotated transcript. That's about the extent of "recognising" your voice, it doesn't generally learn from you over time.

    Is this all a black box?

    Kinda yeah. The researchers paid a huge number of people in third world countries to compare recordings to transcriptions, and make a "correct / incorrect" judgement call. Then fed all of that, and a whole bunch of other things (it's believed every YouTube video ever uploaded might have been involved...) into a very complex model.

    Tweaks are made but it's just too much data (OpenAI says they used 680,000 hours of audio) to fully get your head around all of it. A bit like trying to understand how the human brain recognises speech — we have a broad idea but don't really know.

    Does it use my recordings to learn to understand other’s voices? How can I take precautions such that no one except me hears the things I transcribe?

    Check the privacy statement for the service. They might, for example, send your recordings to be assessed for accuracy by employees/subcontractors. AFAIK (not a lawyer) that would be a breach of HIPAA.

    AFAIK some Apple speech recognition features are HIPAA compliant. Look that up to verify it but in general iPhones and Macs Apple have AI speech processing hardware on the device allowing fully local processing... but not all features are done locally and in some cases they may transmit "anonymised" (useless if you speak someone's name...) speech to employees/contractors to improve the software. That can be disabled in settings.

    Amazon and OpenAI do everything in the cloud but have fully HIPAA compliant versions of their services (I assume those are not cheap...)

    You could try open source models — I don't know how good they are in practice.

  • Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge

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  • That knowledge is mostly trivial. 7/10 repairs a regular Joe could do. Or worse comes to worse you can take it to a mechanic of your choosing.

    That's not true anymore. Modern cars have really complex problems that even mechanics struggle to fix. Especially when it's a software problem... usually those problems just never get fixed.

    As a software developer (not an automotive one) my take is the fix is to have everyone be running the same software, so that fifty thousand dollars diagnosing and fixing a problem for one car will result in it being fixed for all cars. Spread the cost out like that and it's affordable. Otherwise it just won't get fixed at all.

    Should we go back to basic cars? I think so yes... but then I ride a motorcycle that doesn't even have water cooling or a battery. But most people aren't like me. They want lane keeping cruise control/etc.

  • Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge

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  • Do you want Elon to be able to cover his ass after a dozen people die

    Absolutely - because Elon is dumb enough to do that.

    Um - when people die, it gets investigated and retroactive ass covering is a darwin award waiting to happen.

  • Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge

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  • or is it something I’ll need to worry about for weeks/months

    Try years. For example the 2020 Takata airbag recall... wouldn't be surprised if there's still a hundred million cars around the world that haven't been recalled. If you don't live in a first world country, it wasn't even possible to get parts for the fix until recently.

    Even if the fix was smaller, there aren't enough mechanics in the world to check/update/test a significant percentage of cars quickly, and manufacturers share components so that can easily happen.

    And the biggest time sink for a recall is often not the repair, it's all the time spent with humans scheduling/testing/documenting the recall. Only way to speed that up is with automation/OTA updates.

  • Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge

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  • If it's a safety system, it might be "have the car taken to the dealership on a flatbed truck". Also, some people don't live near a dealership.

    Like it or not, all modern cars are connected - for the maps if nothing else - and if a car is capable of an OTA update, I say do it. I don't see how a dealership adds anything other than cost which will always discourage updates from being made at all.

    And I actually think physical updates are easier - connect a laptop to the ECU, and you're done. It's generally only OTA updates that use code signing/etc.

  • Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge

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  • Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge

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  • It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation

    Um, what city do you live in? Can I live there please? Not many skilled drivers around here.

  • Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge

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  • Should be protocols put into place for cars that need to be followed for a software update.

    Protocols are in place. We can argue over wether or not those are good enough, but the car industry is incredibly heavily regulated.

    Those protocols include certain systems being designated as "critical" and significantly more testing is required to change them. Some changes can only be made after an entire year of testing by a third party auditor including crash tests, emissions tests, etc.

    Updating the map to inform the driver that a police officer is standing around the next corner with a radar gun? That can be done OTA with zero testing (and yes, my car does that). That's not a critical system, it's an important safety feature. If the car ahead of me is going to slam on the brakes the moment they see the officer... I want to know it's likely to happen ahead of time - might even slow down myself. ;-)

  • Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge

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  • Fuck an OTA update too, I don’t want that either

    Yeah no - you're dead wrong about that. My oldish car has an annoying glitch where it occasionally goes into limp home mode. The workaround makes it pretty clear this could be fixed with a software change (or even just a non-vague error code would be nice...) - but my car can't do OTA updates and also it's old enough it doesn't really have software so a recall would be hideously expensive.

    It's not a safety problem, so wouldn't rigger a recall. When it's under warranty, they fix it... but sometimes it takes several attempts with multiple thousand dollar parts replaced on suspicion before finally finding the one that caused it, when it fails out of warranty... either live with the issue or sell the car for spare parts.

    if an OTA update was possible they would absolutely do that. The ones that fail under warranty must be costing them a fortune.

    But the real issue is recalls are expensive, and ultimately the car buyer pays for them. Car manufacturers are not charities, they will either raise prices to cover the cost of a recall or they will go bankrupt to avoid doing a recall. There is no other option on the table.

  • The Taylor Swift Album Leak’s Big AI Problem

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  • I think people are making too much of it.

    Humans lie (or get things wrong) all the time and we have always had to be careful what content we trust. AI doesn't change that in the slightest. If anything it potentially makes it easier to fact check things since we can now quickly and easily use a language model to compare a statement to related trusted content.

    Tools like the Bot Sentinel are improving at a rapid pace lately https://botsentinel.com/

  • The Taylor Swift Album Leak’s Big AI Problem

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  • You're allowed to read four articles per month for free. After that the notification becomes a paywall.