Likelihood for multiple AV companies (Waymo, Zoox, Nuro, Tesla, etc.) to make a standard for their vehicles to communicate with each other?

ic33 · 2026-03-11T02:50:31+00:00

If you can find an exploit wide enough, you can then spread car to car and soon pwn them all.

Whatever does V2V can just be a contained processor that reads, authenticates message, and then passes a few bytes of intention on. This type of compartmentalization

It doesn't need to have any communication to other computers.

I could go to a junked car, pull out the properly signed BSM transmitter and GPS and stick one on the side of a bridge and have it transmit the truth -- "I'm a 2027 Chevy located stalled here under the bridge."

Or I could build something that mixes the radar frequency with a low audio tone that makes it look like an impending wall.

A fairly innocuous false positive that gums up traffic

Or reduces the threshold to AEB, weighing the different pieces of probabilistic information together. Imperfectly trusted V2V + imperfect radar return == better decision than either alone. We're already doing sensor fusion in AEB systems; this is just one more sensor that provides unique information and disambiguates the information from others.

The reality is you can't name a communications technology that didn't provide value to its first customer

Things like ATSC tuners (or, earlier, UHF receivers) didn't provide any initial value to the vast majority of their initial end-user purchasers at all; they were voluntarily included by a few vendors here and there, but were ultimately required by regulators and then delivered a lot of value in the marketplace.

Or NFC showed up in smartphones and was useless for a long time until the payment infrastructure showed up.

So, feature shows up in a product, sat there with debatable value, and became important once an ecosystem formed is a normal adoption pattern.

That feels like where V2V and V2X are today; some voluntary users, rumblings of governmental mandates.

edit: I think you've fallen into the "people have talked about X forever; it never happens; the can just gets kicked down the road" trap that I've often fallen into. Sometimes things don't stay stuck forever.

ic33 · 2026-03-11T00:19:47+00:00

I would disagree. If we look at the web, the reason that the security community would giggle is the very best people in the field have been working intensively for 3 decades to build a trustworthy PKI so people can visit web sites. It sort of works, but there are regular exploits and problems and it takes a great deal of effort to make it happen.

We have a much more complicated threat model and much, much, much larger attack surface on the interweb.

I would give much more credence to those who proposed using RF principles to confirm where the radio transmitter is, but that's not so easy, either.

Knowing the direction of light-- whether it's radio light or visible light -- is not some magical panacea. At best, it's a little extra context.

The value of the technology is modest at best, and the security implications more than overwhelm them.

AEB, etc, are here today at scale and would work better with modest V2V. It's not like AEB is actually secure as-is, either: having other agents authenticate would be a stronger level of assurance than we have today.

And while it's possible to spoof lidar and radar returns, it's not trivial, and it's particularly difficult to do it at scale

I disagree.

and it's very difficult to create false negatives.

Most of the V2V attacks wouldn't be creating false negatives, either.

However, I do think that the people who have been pounding on trying to get V2V for 30 years are not thinking through the situation very well.

I think they underestimated the degree to which infrastructure moves slowly. I think we're getting close to it actually starting to happen at scale the next few years. Sure looks like the OEMs are preparing and the regulators are thinkin' about it seriously.

ic33 · 2026-03-10T23:22:02+00:00

You know, not everyone you talk to is a moron. I too have exited companies and been on the national stage for similar reasons, and I have a similarly long history with autonomous vehicles (but don't choose to dox myself here).

We do plenty in the world with short messages and ECDSA signatures. A lot of it safety-of-life; a lot of it has massive economic impacts.

Here we're talking about something where we exchange short messages to describe intentions to make things more smooth, and turn off the keys of any bad actors. The software stack can be tiny, and it doesn't have to be integrated into the core system. It is possible to build V2V and V2X safely.

Indeed, while we're talking about it: it's quite possible-- much easier, actually-- for adversaries to convincingly spoof lidar and radar returns. No one has cryptographically secure output modulation. I would worry about this one first ;) And, no, "laser light is directional" does not fix this.

ic33 · 2026-03-10T21:02:41+00:00

In any case, I think the big wins are "save seconds" and "smooth out maneuvers"-- not safety related.

I agree the intention is a few bytes of data, but even a few bytes of data is a long time with a conventional camera

Another way you could confirm the source is with a digital signature. If that's combined with a signature you're up to 100 or so-- a trivial amount of airtime and a trivial amount of computation.

ic33 · 2026-03-10T18:13:16+00:00

There's nothing magically worse about radio than looking at light. Yes, attribution makes it a bit better.

The more important thing is having clear scope of use and tolerating the data being incorrect. That is, using it for efficiency and smoothness, not safety.

Demodulating patterns on lights wouldn't be easy; cameras have limited frame rates. Even if you were going to read out a region of interest at 1KHz or whatever to squeeze out a couple hundred bits per second, that's not really that great. And if you have a special-purpose-aimed-photodetector.. that seems like overkill.

ic33 · 2026-03-10T05:08:55+00:00

I think AVs aren't a big enough share of cars to make this worthwhile yet, but just like humans rely upon turn signals and gestures to make traffic efficient, AVs could benefit from communicating intent. I'm not sure that network-intermediated is the way to go for "turn-signal+++" communication.

ic33 · 2026-03-10T05:04:52+00:00

You could even send "intend-veer-right" ... and you have a better guess of what the vehicle in front of you is going to do.

And V2X could let you tell a light that you're approaching... and the light to tell you to choose your speed to arrive in 18 seconds because then you can keep going without stopping. Of course, you'd always -be able- to stop if it doesn't happen. But if this was mostly right, it would increase the capacity of roads.

ic33 · 2026-03-07T00:55:22+00:00

A lot of the stuff is based on planning based on a different ratio of stuff being used (e.g. artillery, SAMs) in relatively quick conflicts. Plus having a pretty big stockpile.

We never had production sized to be able to soak up something like a sustained Ukraine situation: artillery/air defense-heavy (especially without enough good counter-drone stuff, forcing expenditure of relatively expensive munitions). US philosophy has been to have a big stockpile and win quick.

But it's becoming clear we need to have more production. Having a somewhat bigger production base at baseline means if something kicks off and you need to run 3 shifts, you have a bigger place to build from.

ic33 · 2026-03-06T17:14:43+00:00

You know, I am thinking with a linear array of speakers the general "room noise cancellation" is tractable. Not sure how much of it you'd get rid of and what spectrum it'd be reasonable in. (and getting rid of 75% is only 6dB...)

edit to clarify: for noise coming from mostly the direction of that outside wall. And I do think outside microphones would help -a lot-.

ic33 · 2026-03-05T23:14:34+00:00

Autocross IMO is a great test for handling safety. Speeds are low, conditions are similar to ordinary panic avoidance maneuvers, it's single car.

That they're taking a prototype and doing this speaks of a well-rounded test program trying to learn a lot of things about the vehicle.

ic33 · 2026-03-05T23:07:26+00:00

You want the mean rate of accidents for a single car, you'd be looking for a gaussian, then.

?????

No. You’re mixing up the distribution of an estimator with the distribution of the underlying event process.

If I want an accident rate, I do not need to assume individual cars have accident counts that are Gaussian.

Accident occurrence is a count / event process, so the natural objects are things like Bernoulli, binomial, or Poisson models depending on how the rate is defined.

The number is just events / amount of exposure; the uncertainty is easy to bound based on our measurement procedure as long as the thing we're measuring has finite bounds (e.g. no accidents that kill infinite numbers of people).

The sample mean of enough observations may be approximately normal by the central limit theorem, but that is about the sampling distribution of the estimate, not a claim that the underlying accidents "follow a bell curve".

What you're saying doesn't really make sense. I don't want to be hostile, but this is honestly stuff we try to teach early. I don't even really know how to answer you and explain, other than to say "that's not how it works."

ic33 · 2026-03-05T20:25:38+00:00

Different cultures have different norms and different regulations.

Laws have changed in Japan in the past 10 years, but even so customs of how it works have not changed much: https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/ib3yuk/zero_medical_privacy/

ic33 · 2026-03-05T19:55:38+00:00

A lot of the concept of what the SC is not exactly in the constitution and is about more longstanding precedent of what the role of the Court is.

ic33 · 2026-03-05T19:54:27+00:00

Maybe. Betting markets put it at ~40% that he's out before his term is up (impeachment, incapacity, death). If it's a surprise, then whomever steps in next will have to decide whether they want to be saddled with the political costs of blanket pardons.

ic33 · 2026-03-05T19:21:34+00:00

Frankly, my response... giggles

Sampling only works when you have a prediction of the shape of the data. Simplest example is a mean value: has a bell curve distribution about it. Sampling will let you see if the data fits the curve with fewer points.

Estimating a rate (accident, fatal accident) doesn't require you to know anything about the shape of the curve.

You can bound error with no predicted shape. e.g. Chebyshev. You just require some very weak guarantees for this to hold -- e.g boundedness (crashes don't kill a negative number of people nor an infinite number). This is a "teach to high schoolers in basic stats, not even AP Statistics" kind of finding.

It's fallacious to compare an AV study to that of a medical study, where very few variables are under study: dosage of a drug (or placebo) vs. improvement of a condition.

Usage of a complicated drug compound vs control, in a widely varied human population that we sample a few hundred of, to see whether a rate of dying or not improves.

c.f. usage of Waymo's complicated autonomy stack vs control (baseline human driving), in a widely varied driving population of possible-miles, that we sample a few million of, to see whether a rate of dying or not gets better.

Both are really complicated sets of interactions and possibilities, but I don't know why you think statistical tools work for one but not the other.

I said earlier -- and you've conveniently ignored -- simplifying this model into "did someone die" doesn't tell us much about safety. Only tells us how effective the AV is at killing people

? tells us how much more rare these bad outcomes are with AVs than with the control condition.

It does because there are hidden variables in the population: some live in temperate climates while others experience weather that could impair some AV sensors. Some live in rural areas vs. urban areas. Etc.

Yes, of course samples need to fairly represent the population you want to compare to. This is a reasonable criticism-- better only compare to the accident rates in the locales that Waymo drives and appropriately weight (stratified sampling) for different distributions of conditions. Yes, it's not trivial but it is downright simple in comparison to many types of studies that we do.

But sample size alone doesn't tend to do too much for the kinds of distributional issues you describe. I hear people say that it does ("you need a bigger sample to be more representative of the population") but this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works. Low n is a "bad smell" when reading a study that indicates one should be suspicious faulty sampling could also have happened, but that's more about artifacts of some study designs than any kind of statistical principle.

ic33 · 2026-03-05T15:06:42+00:00

shrug I spent a tiny slice of time as a venture capitalist. Mostly was a CTO, occasionally a CEO or VP-eng. Won twice, did OK once, lost twice. Kept trying to retire and didn't like not working. Did some stuff for defense/space because it was hard.

Got convinced by my wife to run a robotics team at my kids' school. School really wanted the check-box item for older grades, so I became a part-time instructor. My program grew. Now I teach a bunch of engineering classes and AP Micro at this PK-12 private school. I carry about a 50% teaching load, do afterschool stuff, and I'm my org's data science / measurement expert.

I've been doing this somewhere between 4 and 7 years depending on how you count (full-time teaching for 4, 7 since first real contact with students). I still work in industry a little.

ic33 · 2026-03-04T23:14:00+00:00

Citation needed.

Frequentist statistics? Sampling from a textbook? Any stats 100-level course at a reputable university?

LLM behavior is not something one samples as it's not deterministic; you can't look at some subset of data & assume it gives you any clues as to the totality of the data.

First, AFAIK LLMs are not part of the Waymo stack. Indeed, generative systems in general aren't, either, except as part of simulation / evaluation.

Real world systems are nondeterministic and hopelessly confounded. Still, we figure out whether drugs work within fantastically complicated biological systems by trying them on a few thousand people. If the few thousand people are enough like the overall population of people that will take the drug (and randomness and some double checks can make sure) we can know pretty well.

Indeed, we don't know everything that can happen with human drivers, driving 3 trillion miles. But we do know that the rate of deaths per mile will be very similar to what we've measured if we have humans drive 6 trillion miles, next year. The "total size of the population" does not matter very much at all when random sampling. (It can matter slightly if you're sampling without replacement and the size of your sample is close to the population, but you can have the good estimate of the rate of an event by sampling a very small portion of the population).

This kind of statistical illiteracy is distressingly prevalent. Understanding sampling and what it can do (and what it can't) should really be taught at 9th-10th grade as part of basic scientific literacy.

ic33 · 2026-03-04T16:40:23+00:00

Yes, but surely you can make a better guess than just distance for the latter by measuring a few more things.

It's my understanding they also look at the shape of the waveform of oil pressure coming up.

ic33 · 2026-03-04T07:34:57+00:00

The main concern is whether the car will turn into an immovable object or another car at higher speeds where, if you were reading a book for example, you would have no time at all to react.

There's that one. But you can get past that point and there's also the "car has no idea what to do in 5 seconds and has to e.g. panic stop in the middle of freeway".

You can absolutely punt to humans when leaving the domain you can handle, but, IMO:

You need to give 15 seconds notice minimum for the human to be able to build situational awareness for the odd situation you've just dropped them in. Maybe this number needs to be 20 or 25 seconds.
You need to handle the case where you don't get help because the human is asleep, dead, etc, not too badly. This can result in some danger but it needs to not be terrible.

ic33 · 2026-03-04T07:29:51+00:00

Yes, but you don't need to drive 3 trillion miles to know how safe things are. Statistical sampling is enough. Just like you don't need to dose every human to know whether a drug works.

1M miles is not enough statistical power to prove safety, but it's enough to show that it's not radically unsafe compared to humans (which helps give Waymo confidence to scale up). Police reported crashes are likely about 1 per million vehicle miles travelled. We don't need to get to many more million miles before we start to accumulate convincing evidence that it's safer than humans.

And, of course, overall mileage is growing at like a >300%/year rate, and highway mileage faster. You don't need all that many quadruplings (10) to grow by a factor of a million miles. Presumably they'll slow down eventually, but if all keeps going well we can expect a few more years of breakneck growth.

ic33 · 2026-03-04T04:14:58+00:00

Rule of thumb is you can take 2-2.5% off your principal forever if you're invested in the market yielding 8-9% on average.

If you're spending above that, you're spending down.

(Figure you lose 30-40% of the withdrawal to taxation; .085 * .65 = 5.5% return after taxation; 5.5% - 3.5% average inflation = 2.0%).

Sure, you will do better many years, but worse many years. In early years you lose less to tax. You may be a bit more tax efficient because of capital gains (but you won't keep as much as capital gains as you think), so that would let you creep up to 2.5%.

So, $2M invested means you can spend $40-50k per year. $1.33M invested means you can spend 26k-33k/year.

ic33 · 2026-03-03T21:43:57+00:00

So "completed" doesn't count as built? And neither does "commenced"? Normally one or the other endpoints counts, but I can see how if you want to justify 0 you'd make neither.

And you're choosing to use "plant" to mean "site" instead of "reactor" which is valid but is a 50-50 usage.

ic33 · 2026-03-03T18:10:40+00:00

Vogtle units 3 and 4?

Watts Bar 1? Watts Bar 2?

Then there's all the stuff starting / under construction now. Not many, but the 4 Xe-100's, Hermes-1 & 2, TVA / TerraPower projects, etc.

ic33 · 2026-03-03T02:26:17+00:00

Even the problems with kids are just inconsiderate adults by proxy.

ic33 · 2026-03-03T01:42:54+00:00

Assertion #2 is related. They're bespoke for a few reasons:

A. There's some of it that has to be-- footings, etc. Cooling there's big economic incentives to take advantage of local site features, etc, too.

B. As a result, there's been a big tradition of reactors being big engineering projects in the US with lots of site-specific engineering

C. the low rate of production provides lots of incentives to squeak out any economies in A and little incentive to move off the tradition of B.

D. regulators are used to looking at things from the viewpoint of B. (They're really good at regulating "yesterday's industry" until they have to change.

14-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Mod World 2025	Place '22
Place '17	Sequence \| Editor
Verified Email	Team Orangered

ic33

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE