Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything

Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by thaumasiotes on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @12:48PM (#43015754)

Long before any use of LLMs, OsmAnd would direct you, if you were driving past Palo Alto, to take a congested offramp to the onramp that faced it across the street. There is no earthly reason to do that; just staying on the freeway is faster and safer.

So it's not obvious to me that patently crazy directions must come from watching people's behavior. Something else is going on.

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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by smackeyacky on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @01:38PM (#43016485)

In Australia the routes seem to be overly influenced by truck drivers, at least out of the cities. Maps will recommend you take some odd town bypass when just going down Main Street is easier.

I imagine what you saw is some other frequent road users making choices that get ranked higher.

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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by RicoElectrico on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @03:10PM (#43017722)

OsmAnd doesn't use traffic data. You can enable traffic map layers by feeding a reverse-engineered URL, though.

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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by thaumasiotes on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @03:26PM (#43017910)

I'm not talking about use of traffic data. In the abstract, assuming you are the only person in the world who owns a car, that route would be a very bad recommendation. Safety concerns would be lower, but still, there's no reason you'd ever do that.

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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by bobthepanda on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @06:31PM (#43019735)

safety concerns would probably actually be higher since the most dangerous places on roads are areas where traffic crosses and conflicts (the road you cross to get from the offramp to onramp)

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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by therein on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @02:06PM (#43016886)

> if you were driving past Palo Alto, to take a congested offramp to the onramp that faced it across the street

If you're talking about that left turn into Alma with the long wait instead of going into the Stanford roundabout and then the overpass, it still does that.

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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by HomeDeLaPot on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @10:32PM (#43021559)

I've seen this type of thing with OsmAnd too. My hypothesis is that someone messed up when drawing the map, and made the offramp an extension of the highway. But I haven't actually verified this.

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