Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by add-sub-mul-div 851 days ago
Yeah, there's nothing akin to a software update that would cause the entire fleet of human drivers to start driving badly or unexpectedly all at once.

We also know how to hold individuals accountable for independent accidents. We know we won't get justice when people will inevitably start to get killed by standard corporate greed, incompetence, enshittification.

3 comments

> there's nothing akin to a software update that would cause the entire fleet of human drivers to start driving badly or unexpectedly all at once.

All, no. Enough to make a difference, easy.

  Black Friday in February!  In-Store offer only!
  $99 Playstation 5 to first 100 customers at each Walmart location!
You can bet there will be a significant increase in people driving badly. edit: Make it Taylor Swift tickets, and you can increase the size of the frenzy.
Not even a cheap console or taytay tickets needed. I once had a lady with 5 kids in the car go to ram me when I went around her to get into the car park while she was waiting in line for the KFC drive through. Nuts lol
I imagine this can be remedied by slow rolling non critical updates out so that the entire fleet doesn't get upended by Bobby Tables at once. You could trivially observe the daily change in accidents/collisions/whatever and adjust fire
Works great until the problem condition is not evenly distributed in place and time. Imagine that the release goes out in June but can’t handle icy roads; or the release goes out and can’t handle leap years; or it goes to cars in Iowa but has a problem interpreting ocean mist.
That remedy already applies to massive profitable services like Google and Facebook, yet they still have outages caused by sloppy configuration pushes.
I notice, when e.g. it rains enough for long enough, a lot if people get annoyed and start driving badly. You get some kind of contagion where everybody gets annoyed and tired because all other drivers are annoyed, tired assholes. Sometimes it even persists after the bad weather, especially if there was gridlock and/or end of workday. Humans do have a (lighter) version of collective bad driving.
that's one reason crash traffic happens and stays for hours after the original reason for the traffic to happen in the first place is gone. I remember reading that one person applying their brakes too hard can have a knock on effect causing a traffic pattern to emerge for a long time after the initial braking ever occurred.
Yeah, I wish this was emphasized more in driving school. I wonder how much traffic could be reduced just by making people conscious of their traffic-causing behaviors. (for example, using your brakes to slow down when there is nothing in front of you and others behind you)