Steam does it again

[Dweller_Benthos]

[smg id=9444 type=preview align=center caption="There was an error, then another error displaying the error."]

[PZ]

 

You sure they're not a Ubi subsidiary?   8-X

[fragger]

lol PZ

That error message is like a Monty Python thing :-D


"We apologize for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked".
...

"We apologize again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked".
...

"The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.
The credits have been completed in an entirely different style and at the very last minute."


[Monty Python and the Holy Grail, opening film credits]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvIKL_pTZFE

[Art Blade]

indeed, very UBI-esque

If an error occurs displaying the message stating there was an error displaying it, doesn't that mean that those errors annihilate each other so that there isn't an error occurring at all displaying it? 

nice one, D_B :-X

[PZ]

Indeed - a double negative is a neutralization event  8-X

[Dweller_Benthos]

Good thing the universe is still here I guess, that sort of thing might be it's undoing.

Did you notice how this is an actual page they have? Look in the address at the top: Home > Oops

[PZ]

 

I guess it is probably standard to put up an official page when you have to use a particular function so much  8-X

[Art Blade]

it's probably their "home" page. :-D

[Dweller_Benthos]

"Home" redirects here.

[Art Blade]

 

+1  :-X for your recent posts across the boards and for reporting those F'ing spammers -- I removed their posts and banned them.

[mandru]

Good thing the universe is still here I guess, that sort of thing might be it's undoing.

Speaking of the steady state we currently enjoy in our universe I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat over the thought that some egghead somewhere will toss a plastic toilet seat (proven to always be 15° F colder than the ambient temperature in any environment) into a vat of super chilled liquid nitrogen and thereby breaking the cosmos.  :(


I found this article to be of little comfort:

http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-gas-goes-below-absolute-zero-1.12146

[Dweller_Benthos]

So, having read that, I guess anti-gravity is a real thing? Cool, where's my flying car?

[Art Blade]

it's going to be rather cold inside of that car. :-()

[fragger]

Well, at least you'll save on air conditioning!

Don't even joke about flying cars. As it is, too many people can't control a vehicle in two directional planes. Don't give them a third one to cope with :-\\

[Art Blade]

well, it would introduce slam dunks to parking accidents. :-D

[mandru]

Flying cars would require specific and intensive user training, testing, and licensing and would require additionally that the vehicles meet standards that minimize the possibility of catastrophic mechanical failure.

More than flying cars I'm nervous of the current push to allow self-driving cars to take over the roads.  The thought of loss of privacy and personal information through having all of our vehicular travel registered and tracked by the government's computers particularly horrifying.  It's nobody's business that I went to Taco Bell at 12:00am and stopped at a 7/11 on the way home which cross referenced with my credit card purchases shows exactly what I bought during my outing.

For me that level of intrusiveness makes "Your papers Please!" seem like a cheerful wave of greeting from a random passerby during a peaceful walk in the park on a sunny day in comparison.

[Art Blade]

"Your papers please" sounds a lot better than "freeze, bitch, and gimme all your money!" :-D

[PZ]

 

[Dweller_Benthos]

From what I've heard, the few accidents that involved self-driving cars were the fault of the humans involved. So safety would probably be less of a concern once more of them are on the road, and for me, I wouldn't mind taking a nap on my way home from w@&k every day.

But the possibility (actually definitely going to happen, who are we kidding here?) of tracking every movement of the passengers in self-driving cars makes them less desirable. Then again, many vehicles now have GPS built in, which records wherever the car goes, so it's not much a difference.

[fragger]

All personal privacy considerations aside (and they most certainly bother me), I could just never get comfortable in a car that was driving itself. My biggest fear would be waking up from a nap while cruising down the freeway to see a blue screen of death in the split second before seeing the overpass pillar I'm about to hurtle into :-\\ I'm never even fully comfortable as a passenger in a car being driven by a fellow human. Only when I'm doing the driving myself am I fully relaxed. It's not that I don't trust anyone, it's just that I don't trust anyone :-() Not even myself at times.

I read that a test driver was killed because the camera governing the self-driving car he was testing couldn't distinguish between the milky overcast sky and the side of a pale-grey container truck turning onto the road ahead, reading the side of the truck as being the same as the open sky beyond and as such the collision-avoidance part of the system wasn't engaged (I think also that the trailer of the truck just happened to line up with the horizon as well). They still have a long way to go before they can iron out all the bugs and make it to any degree reliable.

My main concern is how such a system will deal with unforeseen but complex traffic events. A collision-avoidance system may make the car take action to avoid another vehicle only to drive the car into a third vehicle that has appeared from a blind location which a human could anticipate but a machine couldn't. A human driver - a competent human driver - can react on instinct and can draw on years of experience to take the correct course of action, and even preempt potential trouble altogether by interpreting developing traffic situations on the fly and by having an understanding of human behaviours. For example, when I'm on the road I don't just keep tabs on other vehicles around me, I watch the drivers' heads as well. I can tell when they're thinking about making a lane change before they do it and plan accordingly, I can spot a distracted driver and give them a wide berth, and I can recognise potential situations before they unfold. There is always the totally unexpected or unforeseeable of course, which was what brought me and my motorcycle down a few years ago, but I could have been involved in many more accidents over the years - the only reason I wasn't was because I am constantly on idiot-alert, I never stop scanning and I never assume that every other driver on the road is going to do the right thing. Expecting the unexpected is beyond the capabilities of a computer system.

Sometimes the solution to a traffic situation is not what immediate logic would suggest. For instance, there can be times when applying more power is the better solution than emergency braking because of prevailing circumstances that a robotic, camera-controlled system could never interpret. Computer systems don't have imaginations and they can't think abstractly. They don't have an instinctive understanding of human nature, nor do they have the ability to reason out future consequences of actions. A human brain can w@&k pretty quickly in an emergency and think, "If I do this now, the result will be this, and there will yet be this consequence". I have avoided a few accidents not just by taking a particular course of action but by instinctively understanding the chain of future consequences that would follow that action. A computer cannot think, "What if...?" They can't think three or more steps ahead.

The only way an automated system of transport can w@&k safely is if every single vehicle on the road is automated. As long as there is a mix of cybernetic and human input, there will always be a potential for disaster. To be workably safe, it has to be all or nothing.

[PZ]

I'm with you fragger  :-X To me, having an automated car would be like having an automated bot posing as me to reply to topics in our forum.

[Art Blade]

there might be advantages, too. For the blind, being able to drive around in your own car would be awesome. Unless they hop into the wrong car and head off into the wrong direction..

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yes, all vehicles have to be computer controlled or it's not worth bothering with. Even barring the accidental human actions, there's always the jackass who would be out there just to mess with the computer cars, and probably causing accidents or deaths because of his jackassery.

Another solution would be separate lanes, with barriers to keep them separate, from the rest of the traffic where only computer controlled vehicles can travel. Sort of like the car pool lane, only as soon as you drive onto it, the computer takes over. To avoid any of the above mentioned jackassery, it would have to be a totally separate lane with barricades keeping the traffic using it from mixing with the human controlled traffic. That, of course, will never happen.

I also wasn't aware that these cars relied on cameras to drive? I was hoping they'd have some kind of radar-type device that tells them how close various objects are. Too many things can go wrong with cameras, like, maybe, I don't know, getting mud splashed on the lens?

[fragger]

@D_B I looked into it a bit more. There is a radar involved as well, but apparently in this case it seems there was a double whammy - the camera couldn't distinguish between the truck and the sky, and the radar software somehow equated the height of the truck with an overhead road sign and ignored it. So both systems failed. It was a one in a million, but a one nonetheless.

Originally I'd read that it was a milky sky and a pale-grey truck, but other places where I've since looked up the story say a bright sky and a white truck. But he net result was the same.

Here's one account of it:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/30/12072408/tesla-autopilot-car-crash-death-autonomous-model-s

Tesla has also claimed that drivers still need to keep their hands on the wheel in order for the autopilot to keep operating. Which begs the question: What's the bloody point then? ????

That's at this early stage of the game though. Presumably, when the technology is up to snuff, the fully "hands off" autopilot will eventually be introduced. Being a control freak when it comes to piloting vehicles, I'm still not comfortable with the idea...

[Dweller_Benthos]

Having read that post, I can see what happened now. The truck was crossing the road in front of the car and the car drove under the truck. Many trucks I see lately have side panels that cover the open area under the trailer so there is less open space. This sort of thing would probably have prevented this crash, as the car would have seen it as a truck. I'm not sure if these panels were added for this reason, or just for aerodynamic reasons, I can't imagine they were added so the small number of self driving cars would be able to distinguish them as trucks, so probably to keep the air resistance down, or for a place for motorcycles to bounce off of instead of travelling under the wheels (yeeek!).