News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days. Parent comment

Re:Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pen... by angry-sw-dev on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @11:53PM (#21769365)
In 1995 having a domestic phone call, placed on a wired line, drop due to line issues was effectively inconceivable -- it simply would never happen. In 2015 we were in a time when it happened all the time, people simply accepted that voip was often unreliable.

In 2019 the idea of a vehicle around you simply stopping because its driver doesn't know how to handle a situation is extremely rare.

I suspect that by 2039 it will be far more commonplace, shrugged off as just a fact of life that electronic drivers fail on a regular basis and need to pull over and wait either for intervention or conditions to change.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pen... by rightbyte on Thursday December 12, 2019 @01:50AM (#21769814)
True ... I kind of forgot how reliable analogue tone switching were. Someone cut of the wire once in the road. It's like I see more and more cars stuck at the roadside. Atleast in the 90s the drove until they started to smoke.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pen... by scarejunba on Thursday December 12, 2019 @05:30AM (#21770793)
Is that actually true? My parents had phones around then and they've always had this habit where they say "Hello! HELLO!" At the shortest momentary pause in the conversation.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pen... by wccrawford on Thursday December 12, 2019 @08:36AM (#21771681)
No, we had calls drop often enough when I was a kid. But we didn't live in a big city, and it wasn't surprising to us when it happened.

It happened about as often as it happens to me with a cellphone when neither party is moving between towers and has decent coverage.

We expect cell drops because of a technology constraint, even in big cities. Likewise, I think the parent poster is right that we'll expect it more once it starts happening more.

[ Parent | on HN ]