GeekNights Thursday - San Antonio Texas

MrPeriod

Tonight on GeekNights, we review the city of San Antonio, Texas. We were stuck there for several days after PAX South thanks to the blizzard in the northeast canceling our flights. In the news, Microsoft is giving everyone a free upgrade to Windows 10, though won't be supporting the pirates after that. In a word, it's confusing. Meanwhile, Musk and Kalanick both say (correctly) that self-driving cars will replace human drivers, but Lyft's Green panders to the luddites in insisting that this won't happen.

• The Cat Wash Reborn
• Riding the White Line

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pence

The cat wash. Perfect.

Rochelle

I think about that cheese plate I had at Las Canarias. I need to know what I had so I can try to replicate it.

Josh Bytes

For next year's PAX south you guys should really make a day trip to Austin. Plenty of stuff to do and Ladybird Lake which is the river that runs through downtown beats the crap out of the San Antonio river walk

Dromaro

Also; The Salt Lick. Purported to be the best BBQ in the nation and I've talked to enough souls who say that to make me believe it.

Luke Burrage

I liked "the best BBQ in Kansas City" better than "the best BBQ in Austin" but I can't remember where it was in Austin I ate.

Luke Burrage

Also, I'm with both Rym and Scott on the old people liking self-driving cars. Old people have never agreed with young people on technology, so history is with Scott. But I think self-driving cars are going to be amazing for old people, and they'll happily give up their driving licenses in return for robot slave cars.

Ilmarinen

Self driving cars will definitely revolutionize transportation and will most likely be near-universal once their affordable enough. However, I don't see them being legal or practical anytime soon without special self-driving roads, if only because of the lack of standardization of construction and conditions on non-military roads (ie highways). I hope I'm proved wrong, because they will make non-train mass transit much more ubiquitous and bring an end to car culture and all the problems it perpetuates.

Andrew

Kids born today will more than likely never have to drive a car.

Rym

While not practical for cost reasons just yet, the existing self driving cars TODAY are already better drivers than most humans in real world conditions.

blast flame

I think I agree with Rym about old people not necessarily being opposed to self driving cars. I mean think about pacemakers and cochlear implants - they mostly avoided an "evil cyborg technology" stigma among the elderly because the elderly are the group they help the most.

Starfox

Don't cochlear implants help little babies the most?

And Rym. Ellen Musk? I thought it rhymed with `tree cron`.

blast flame

I was under the impression that if you're born deaf then it's best to get them as a baby so the parts of your brain that process sound develop as normal but if you lose hearing later in life those parts of the brain that process sound have already developed so getting an implant also works well then.
However I'll fully admit to not being particularly knowledgeable on the subject so you might be right.

Churba

Rym said:

While not practical for cost reasons just yet, the existing self driving cars TODAY are already better drivers than most humans in real world conditions.

In places where they have good GPS connections and thorough LIDAR scans before those cars ever hit the road. If not, things are less "Home, Jeeves", more "DARPA Challenge." Also it's a clear day, because they flat-out don't work in the rain, or snow(Both for traction and because of the precipitation). But it can't be TOO sunny, or from the wrong direction, because that makes it hard for the car to see the colour of the light, apparently sunset and sunrise are particularly troublesome. Also a problem - Construction and roadworks, traffic redirection, some pedestrian interactions(For example, a cop waving traffic around an accident), Large open parking areas and multi-storey carparks.

They're better drivers, under ideal conditions, but ideal conditions are not nessissarily the norm. It'll be a while yet.

ninjarabbi

I'll be nice when this eventually eliminates drunk driving as a serious issue.

AaronC

I see automatic driving the way I look at ABS on cars. There are people who are better than ABS on dry pavement... race car drivers, motorcycle cops, people who train hard at driving can beat ABS on dry pavement.

Then there is ABS on wet pavement, no one beats it, it's just flat out better.

Automatic driving vehicles will be like this in a few years, better than just about everyone in ideal conditions and better than everyone in crappy conditions.

No one is arguing for ABS to go away now even though there were detractors initially.

I just want a system in place that allows me to take my crappy old offroad truck up to the mountains via the regular road system and not have to trailer it behind an automatic vehicle.

Churba

Pretty much. While we're led to believe that Self-driving cars are a lot closer than they are in reality, It's still coming down the pike, and there will be lot of situations where they're going to outperform the majority of drivers, the majority of the time.

AaronC said:

I just want a system in place that allows me to take my crappy old offroad truck up to the mountains via the regular road system and not have to trailer it behind an automatic vehicle.

Until we've got Self-driving cars that outperform human drivers basically all the time in any conditions, it's unlikely that human drivers on public roads will be banned. It may happen within our lifetime, but not till you're old and grey, and I'm old and weird.

ninjarabbi

Maybe not initially in most places, but I think when they are common place I can see being able to use a self driving car without a license. Maybe some basic training on how to use an emergency controls in case there is a malfunction.

AaronC, you just need an self-driving pickup with a little dunebuggy in the back.

Linkigi(Link-ee-jee)

Churba's actually underestimating how good Google's self-driving cars have gotten - they're at the point now where they can do things like interpret pedestrian body language if someone looks like they're crossing a street, and getting effective knowledge from live radar data. They can't see in heavy rain or snow, but humans have trouble with that to (only the robots are smart enough not to even try).

Of course, given the way people are much more forgiving for human error than machine error and the general order of things, the law is going to take a long time to get around to making self-driving cars standard. But that's probably going to happen in my lifetime and I'm super fucking excited about it.

Churba

I'm not underestimating, I'm repeating what Chris Urmson said in August last year. All of those things were pointed out as things that the Google self driving car simply couldn't handle at that point in time. Unless there's been some unbelievably massive improvements in the last eight months, which isn't entirely unlikely considering but still not the most likely thing, most of those current problems, rather than underestimations.

I would belive they're getting better at effective knowledge from live radar data, though I'd be interested to know how they solved the problem differentiating terrain features from other stationary obstacles with their radar, which was noted as a rather tricky problem.

Luke Burrage

People are more forgiving of human error only because it's easy to know who to forgive. If someone done fucked up, they can be fined or punished or forgiven, or they are already dead. If a machine makes a mistake, it's time to start pointing fingers at manufacturers, programmers, designers, technicians, maintainance, etc. Forgiveness normally only goes one deep. Past that first fuckererup, the human forgiveness subroutine just shuts down.

HMTKSteve

I am curious to know how self driving cars react to other self driving cars. Do they work the same in large groups? Will they have spectrum problems (think too many WiFi routers in close proximity) with too many cars using the same frequencies for important sensors? Will we have issues with competing algorithms cause traffic problems as they try to outguess each other (think high speed stock trades).

sK0pe

In the demographic of the varied old people I had as clients over 8 years or so (lots of old people have pets), about 33% of them knew more about technology than 50% of people under 20 years of age.

The ones that strived to take care of themselves and not live with other old people were well informed and used their extra time to use the Internet for education. Sure they weren't amazing but knew how to use the Internet more than parents, young couples and teenagers.

I worked with a 72 year old Veterinarian who's main hobby was keeping up with technology he was the only guy that could hold a sensible conversation about technology.

Point being there are technologically aware progressive old people too. The 67% of old people that were ignorant were very set in their was refused to think outside of the box.

Andrew said:

Kids born today will more than likely never have to drive a car.

Well they don't, not even in the US you guys all drive automatics.

Churba said:

Rym said:

While not practical for cost reasons just yet, the existing self driving cars TODAY are already better drivers than most humans in real world conditions.

In places where they have good GPS connections and thorough LIDAR scans before those cars ever hit the road. If not, things are less "Home, Jeeves", more "DARPA Challenge." Also it's a clear day, because they flat-out don't work in the rain, or snow(Both for traction and because of the precipitation). But it can't be TOO sunny, or from the wrong direction, because that makes it hard for the car to see the colour of the light, apparently sunset and sunrise are particularly troublesome. Also a problem - Construction and roadworks, traffic redirection, some pedestrian interactions(For example, a cop waving traffic around an accident), Large open parking areas and multi-storey carparks.

They're better drivers, under ideal conditions, but ideal conditions are not nessissarily the norm. It'll be a while yet.

This stuff is based on the basic implementations thus far.
What they are leading up to is when there are multiple cars on the road that can take an input of the surroundings and transmit the new inputs to close by cars. If two cars are converging at a cross section, the cars will know what is going down both sides of the streets, their relative speeds and the speeds of the cars around them plus pedestrians on both roads.
Not too far fetched but my imagination is quite positive.
GPS is not always required either (if you have a starting location, keep a data connection with other cars, traffic lights, signposts, street signs that also emit their own data). GPS is an old tech approach / work around the live networked information I feel is more logical.

LIDAR looks like it works 100% in snow and rain based on the Mercedes implementation.

Nukerjsr

Dromaro said:

Also; The Salt Lick. Purported to be the best BBQ in the nation and I've talked to enough souls who say that to make me believe it.

Salt Lick is incredible. Even at the airport in Austin, it's fucking amazing. In Austin I've only had BBQ from their and Stubbs, but I still want to try Franklin's, Black's, Lambert's, and Blue Ox is possible.

On the note of Self-Driving Cars, I was watching the newest Last Week Tonight segment. When we get more of these vehicles, how would it affect the police department? Would they have to override the self-driving to catch speeding criminals? If we lessened the overall amount of traffic incidents and mistakes, does that mean we can remove most highway officers? How will this change the state's over-reliance of troopers giving traffic tickets to bring income? Self-driving car changes so many of the paradigms with traffic, insurance, the police, and emergencies vehicles. The police really come to mind with how much infractions can interfere with your life. Even the necessities of having a driver's licenses or prerequisites to owning one. (I seriously know too many people my own age who do not own a driver's license. And a majority of them live in places without any public transportation)

Starfox

Nukerjsr said:

Salt Lick is incredible. Even at the airport in Austin, it's fucking amazing. In Austin I've only had BBQ from their and Stubbs, but I still want to try Franklin's, Black's, Lambert's, and Blue Ox is possible.

I've had BBQ that makes Salt Lick look like Oscar Mayer. I'm serious. But I'm not really at liberty to talk about it.



Sorry. Just know that it exists.

Matt

You think that old people want their freedom, and to drive wherever they want. They don't. They become old and crotchety, using their feebleness as an excuse to force family into visiting them. If they had a robot car, they would lose their magical guilt trip powers. Most old people already have things like senior transport buses that would take them all over town, yet refuse to use them. Also, there is going to be a long period where robot car is going to come at a price premium. Fogeys on fixed incomes won't be able to swing it.

I really hope I am wrong, but I see this technology taking longer to roll out than most of you do.

I also got a good chuckle out of "Ellen" Musk.

ninjarabbi

Self-Driving rascals.

HMTKSteve

There is a split between the guilt trippers and the independence fanatics.

ninjarabbi

The Mason-Dixon line?

sK0pe

I hope self driving cars become like the vehicles depicted in iRobot where essentially you jump in and the car moves as fast as possible with other cars to the destination, as if you were catching a train from your house to your destination, express.

MATATAT

I can't wait for self driving cars to get to the point where they can effectively "zipper" from an on ramp. I imagine it's as bad elsewhere as it is in Seattle but holy shit people don't understand that concept at all it seems like.