The remote control claim never made sense anyway. "There is no computer driver, it's all fake, they're paying teams of drivers in India" only sounds plausible to anyone who's never encountered lag in a video game.
> Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad.
That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?
>That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?
Their earlier blog post has screenshots (?) of the UI that the "fleet response" people have access to. It seems to be a video feed combined with yes/no questions, along with some top-down UI to direct where the vehicle should go.
Their claim is talking about latency, not bandwidth. What you're talking about is throughput, which can usually be solved by throwing more money at the problem.
You can stream video with milliseconds of latency, provided you have enough bandwidth for the video stream. Videoconferencing and cloud gaming both work on this principle.
That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.
It reminds me of the claims that your phone's microphone is always on and feeding your conversations to Facebook so they can serve you ads, even when the app is closed.
Anyone who has experience with apps, permissions, or even basic reverse engineering or network activity monitoring would realize that this couldn't be true without someone having found evidence.
Yet even on HN you find die-hard believers that it's true. I think these stories tickle the conspiracy theorist part of some people's brains and they want to believe it's true. If it's true, it means they were smart enough to see through the facade unlike the other sheep in the world.
> I think these stories tickle the conspiracy theorist part of some people's brains and they want to believe it's true.
It's more than just that, there's also the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, i.e. we talk about something and then notice it mysteriously suggested to us on YouTube or whatever. And then assume this was causal rather than coincidence.
I got that yesterday, though I can't even remember now what the video or the topic of discussion was.
Interestingly, the round-trip latency from the West Coast to continental Asia isn't nearly as long as I'd assumed (60ms to 250ms, depending on who's measuring).
Not nearly fast enough for real-time highway remote operation IMHO, but surprisingly fast. That's what I get for underestimating how fast light and electric fields can go.
netsharc|13 days ago
I've mentioned to a friend that humans are monkeys, but which are capable of building an Internet. But maybe plenty of us are closer to monkeys...
Noumenon72|13 days ago
> Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad.
That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?
gruez|13 days ago
Their earlier blog post has screenshots (?) of the UI that the "fleet response" people have access to. It seems to be a video feed combined with yes/no questions, along with some top-down UI to direct where the vehicle should go.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
AlotOfReading|13 days ago
xnx|13 days ago
I wouldn't be surprised if actions required agreement between decisions by two independent RAs.
fragmede|13 days ago
meatmanek|13 days ago
That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.
Aurornis|13 days ago
Anyone who has experience with apps, permissions, or even basic reverse engineering or network activity monitoring would realize that this couldn't be true without someone having found evidence.
Yet even on HN you find die-hard believers that it's true. I think these stories tickle the conspiracy theorist part of some people's brains and they want to believe it's true. If it's true, it means they were smart enough to see through the facade unlike the other sheep in the world.
ben_w|13 days ago
It's more than just that, there's also the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, i.e. we talk about something and then notice it mysteriously suggested to us on YouTube or whatever. And then assume this was causal rather than coincidence.
I got that yesterday, though I can't even remember now what the video or the topic of discussion was.
shadowgovt|13 days ago
Not nearly fast enough for real-time highway remote operation IMHO, but surprisingly fast. That's what I get for underestimating how fast light and electric fields can go.