[HN Gopher] Waymo acknowledges its vehicle hit a San Francisco c...
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       Waymo acknowledges its vehicle hit a San Francisco corner store cat
        
       Author : bryan0
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2025-10-31 20:42 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.sfgate.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.sfgate.com)
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740161
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763267
        
         | c420 wrote:
         | The second link got flagged for who knows what reason
        
       | anon7000 wrote:
       | Good thing humans never ran over a beloved pet :)
       | 
       | Jk, I think my family alone had about 5 animals die to humans
       | driving cars. (Very rural area with a mostly quiet road. A number
       | of these were stray cats, can't really control where they go.)
       | 
       | "Kill a Waymo! Save a cat" Kill a human save a cat? The outrage
       | is misdirected
        
         | lm28469 wrote:
         | Humans don't have 360 degree lidar with 2000 times the compute
         | power we used to send people on the moon though
        
           | AlotOfReading wrote:
           | Incredibly, you're underestimating the computational power of
           | both autonomous vehicles and human brains. A modern
           | smartphone is more than 2000x the Apollo Guidance computer. A
           | Waymo is significantly more powerful than that. A human brain
           | is tens of trillions of times more powerful than the AGC,
           | assuming somewhat low estimates.
        
             | lm28469 wrote:
             | Unless your head can spin 360 degrees at 1000hz it doesn't
             | matter if your brain is "more powerful" in some abstract
             | measure
        
               | ricardobeat wrote:
               | How does that help seeing under the chassis/wheels?
               | 
               | That extra power might mean seeing something move in your
               | peripheral vision, _intuit_ that it might be a cat,
               | predict its path in space, and that it may have put
               | itself under the car because that's something cats
               | usually do. The LiDar achieves nothing compared to this.
        
       | guywithahat wrote:
       | > the robotaxi company has acknowledged the death but stopped
       | short of claiming responsibility
       | 
       | Which is probably accurate, cats are notorious for darting into
       | traffic, and in this case the cat ran under the car while it was
       | pulling away. While I would like autonomous vehicles to be better
       | than us, the responsibility lies in the store owner who let their
       | cat play in the street
        
       | cut3 wrote:
       | A waymo ran over my skateboard so it makes sense they run over
       | skateboard sized animals
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-31 23:02 UTC)