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Better go against all of my better judgement and keep pushing forward because technology can never be wrong.
Good grief!
Indeed. Whenever you think people have reached peak stupid, something like this happens.
The guy driving off the bridge (through the bridge, technically) would have done so with or without Google.
It’s a map. Nothing more and nothing less. It is up to the driver to exercise THINKING and DECISION-MAKING while behind the wheel of their car. Anyone who says, “Well, this looks like I’m driving into the desert when I was expecting to head downtown … it’s probably fine!” is a candidate for an eventual Darwin Award.
Sure, it’s just a map now. But in the self-driving car future, it’s going to be slightly more critical.
Not a problem. Self-driving cars must be able to react to unexpected hazards in time. It is only humans that are incapable in that area.
To a self-driving car there is no difference between a bridge that washed away five years ago and a child that chases after his ball right this instant.
It has to recognize a problem and fucking STOP.
The guy driving off the bridge (through the bridge, technically) would have done so with or without Google.
It’s a map. Nothing more and nothing less. It is up to the driver to exercise THINKING and DECISION-MAKING while behind the wheel of their car. Anyone who says, “Well, this looks like I’m driving into the desert when I was expecting to head downtown … it’s probably fine!” is a candidate for an eventual Darwin Award.
I think the driving off a bridge thing is more excusable for the driver because appare
It’s a bit more than just a map, it actively advises you of the route to take from A to B. The old Rand McNally never did that.
I know of a few barely navigable “roads” that start out looking like perfectly normal narrow paved roads, but in the middle of the woods the pavement abruptly ends. If you can figure out where the dirt path is under the leaf litter you eventually reach pavement on the other side and intersect with a more normal road again. By the time it becomes clear that the road is more of a vagu

The guy driving off the bridge (through the bridge, technically) would have done so with or without Google.
It’s a map.
Well… yes and no. With a traditional map, one always wonders, even if just slightly, if they’re reading it correctly and that involves some thought. With Google Maps (and others) people simply assume it’s correct and seem more likely to follow it w/o thinking. Personally, I’ve never used a map app on my phone, but have used Google Maps to pre-check a route before leaving and sometimes even printing it out — but I always remain a little skeptical when reading it …

You’re about 15 years behind with that approach.
Sure, but I’m also not lost/stuck in the desert with, potentially, a broken axle, etc… Nor have I ever driven off a bridge.

Not sure what else has to happen before Google accepts changes made to their property.
A big enough lawsuit would do it. So would criminal charges, though sadly, that’s pretty unlikely to happen.
You know, for these fuckups it is _never_ theit fault, no matter what utterly stupid thing they did. May be one of the reason they are so incapable: When it is _always_ somebody else’s fault, then they can never learn from mistakes, because they do not make any.

I blame Google.
I blame stupid people. When I was a kid in the ’70s, and we had to drive across the county (sometimes job transfers, sometimes visiting distant relatives), my dad would get a current paper atlas and plan the route we would take. He would hand-write the distances, turns, and approximate travel times for each segment of road we needed to take. He would circle all of our planned rest, meal, and overnight motel stops. He would use a highlighter to mark the route on the map in order to make it easier for my mom to navigate while he drove undistracted by the need to reference the map. The two of them together were a well-oiled team.
We would drive a thousand miles or two, and we were NEVER lost. We would hit construction zones, detours, and all forms of diversions, and we would ALWAYS find our way back to our planned route using simple map-reading skills. It was a breeze.
Now we have people who, among stupid things like thinking “Low-key a pretty expensive fix” is an intelligent expression, can’t plan a trip or read a map. If some disembodied voice tells them to drive into the desert, into a lake, or off a pier, they do it without thinking, “would that be a stupid thing to do?”
NOTHING changes just because the map is electronic. Plan your trip, and tell Google Maps what your route is. It allows you to alter the displayed route and have it announce the turns and distances for that route.
YOU are responsible for where Google Maps sends you. YOU have the ultimate say in where you go.
This is marginally less stupid than literally driving into a lake [autoevolution.com].
Now I’m not very worried about my car, and I go some strange places, but I’ve had to keep going on some pretty strange roads at times and it has almost always worked when the nav says so so I have a bit of sympathy. I tend to be equipped to survive and walk out if I do get stuck so it’s not quite the same thing, but still I can see how you get there.

Better go against all of my better judgement and keep pushing forward because technology can never be wrong.
Good grief!
We need to stop protecting people and let nature takes its course. If you can’t realize that turning from a paved road onto a dirt road in the middle of nowhere probably isn’t the route you should take, do we really want you as part of society?

Better go against all of my better judgement and keep pushing forward because technology can never be wrong.
Good grief!
Except in this case they weren’t just trusting technology, they were trusting all the fellow drivers who were taking the same route (not realizing they’d been mislead by the same technology). And that’s not a terrible idea, sometimes the crowd is wrong, but usually, the crowd is more right than you are. In this case it was a mistake, but in another case the road gets good again and you realize why all those other drivers thought it was a great shortcut.
That is how statistical models work: They give you _something_ from the training data that matched best. Whether this is actually useful, defective in non-obvious ways (for coding: security) or complete nonsense depends on the training data and the statistical model has actually no way to find out.
And that is why statistical models cannot be used for anything were correctness matters without competent and careful fact-checking the answers. That may well cause more effort than doing without that artificial m

And that is why statistical models cannot be used for anything were correctness matters without competent and careful fact-checking [ of ] the answers.
Indeed.
But this is Slashdot, so does correctness REALLY matter?
That is how statistical models work: They give you _something_ from the training data that matched best
That is not how they work at all. They do not contain their training data. They’re not databases. They’re not compositors. They’re generalizers. They learn concepts and the interrelationships. You can make an AI memorize things, but that’s an extremely inefficient way to do so, and generally training datasets are far larger than weights – and even where they’re not, you train based on eval_loss, not
Or to put it another way, to quote Sutskever: “It may look on the surface that we are just learning statistical correlations in text. But it turns out that to “just learn” the statistical correlations in text, to compress them really well, what the neural network learns is some representation of the process that produced the text. This text is actually a projection of the world. There is a world out there. And it has a projection on this text. And so what the neural network is learning is more and more aspe
Yeah, keep dreaming. Or rather hallucinating. ANNs cannot actually “learn” anything in the usual sense of the world. That is just a marketing lie.
But language is a INCOMPLETE model of the world. It doesn’t include those things “everyone knows that”. And yet those things are the most necessary to dealing with the world. This is (part of) why I think true AIs will need to be embodied. (If I’m right, once they learn to handle one body, they can generalize to handle other bodies, and then generalize to figure out things about those living in other types of bodies.)
The problem is that learning involves LOTS of mistakes. And it’s a lot cheaper to expe
Seriously? Are you stupid? I never wrote anything about them _literally_ containing the training data set (although that can happen for parts and _has_ happened).

Everything below applies equally to whether you’re talking a biological or non-biological system:
Rei is hallucinating here. This entire post is a bizarre conflation of what the natural biological NNs do, and what the massive networks of simple functions in ANNs, called “neurons” by loose analogy to biological neurons, actually do. Or how biological systems are organized, and the massive but flat and homegenous structure of deep learning systems. The type of hierarchical feature extraction that is the rule in natural NNs is entirely absent in all deep learning systems which is why image recognition syst
As one expert in the field said, it knows what the right answer should look like, but that’s not the same as knowing what the right answer is.
And the flaws are inherent, because what’s its trained on is “the internet,” most of which is bullshit, propaganda, and outright lies. And the first “L” in “LLM” is for “large,” which really means “massive.” The training data is so vast it isn’t possible to vet even the smallest portion of it. There’s no possible way to build an LLM A”I” without the majority of its tr
On Wikipedia: I find it disturbing people still think of Wikipedia as a useful source of factual information despite their ridiculous enforcement of silly policies.
I’ll use it to look up a movie star or other bullshit that doesn’t matter but never for anything where facts are important.
On a non-controversial subject, it’s useful to find references to actual sources (which must then be assessed for whether or not they’re useful, of course). But yeah, that’s about it.
Yep, that nicely sums it up. It will come up with something that looks like the right answer, whether it is or not because it simply cannot tell the difference. The bad-quality training data is certainly a major factor as well. Although I doubt it is the only one.
Contrary to popular myth, LLMs trainers do NOT just treat all data on the internet as equivalent.
Once again, surprise surprise, experts in their field aren’t morons ready to be put in their place by random commentators on the internet.
Experts in the field are either pointing out the limitations and warning people to not take anything at face value, or so full of shit they’re more ridiculous than the LLMs.
Mostly, they’re experts at raising money from investors.
l “find a URL for XXX”
You apparently seem to think it’s a database. *facepalm*
If you want a database doing keyword lookups, the tool you’re looking for is “Google”. Artificial intelligence – right there in the name – is about having the ability to reason.
TL/DR:
Database + keyword search: insane amounts of info, exact answers, but dumb as a rock
LLM: less info, and inability (at present) to assess its own level of confidence (without some very processing-intensive tricks** which you won’t find on a public in
look out the window when you’re driving.
Dateline 2123: The ship was lost and all aboard died due to a flaw in the Galactic Position System….
Looking out the window is more of a Springfield thing.
I didn’t read the article but according to legend, Easler decided to stay. Kids, this is how Shelbyville Nevada was founded!
Should not be allowed a driving license. Driving a 2 ton vehicle comes with a certain responsibility and an expectation of the driver having at least a small amount of common fucking sense.
Today they just screwed their own cars, tommorow maybe it’ll be “Oooh, that looks like an on ramp … hey why are all those cars heading towards me and honking!”

Should not be allowed a driving license.
People this stupid should not be allowed out of the home without a keeper.
Can’t be sure without knowing the exact road, but what frequently happens is that one of these roads can be paved for the first mile, for example because there is a power line right of way that maintenance needs to reach, and then it turns into a dirt or gravel road. You can be merrily going down the paved road and all of a sudden, no more pavement. If there is a long line of cars behind you, maybe you figure it’s only unpaved for a mile, because turning around appears impossible.
However, “Nevada’s fierce desert” is a quote from someone who has never been there. This time of year, it’s totally nice. The only problem that occurs is that there is no water.
But the Mohave is in southern California … near Los Angeles.
The 1996 tragedy of the Death Valley Germans [wikipedia.org]
The blog of one of the searchers [otherhand.org]
Iirc there was also a gps glitch that had tourists driving into the water in Hawaii a few years ago.
As if they didn’t notice the giant blue wet thing they were approaching.
Love my paper maps. BLM and the Forest Service produce some good ones, Quadrangle maps are also handy.
BLM publishes paper maps? Between riots?
lol, thanks, I’m here most nights, the tip jar is near the bar.
These people couldn’t read a map to save their lives.

“so we assumed this was going somewhere…”
You know the old saying. When you assume, you make an ass out of me and an ass out of you!
All over europe. Used imaps (or whatever that pos os called),
google maps, tripadvisor, etc. Theyey are all horribly imaccurate:
– “according to the map we are in the ocean”
– highly reviewed restaurants that did not exist
– routed on foot even though there was a metro right at our dest.
– routed on metro lines that were still being built
etc.
Pathetic. But they don’t care, because: CLICKS!
I’ve had a lot of success with OsmAnd Maps. It’s free, at least the version I use, and works off-line. The paid versions are just extended functionality. I’ve never needed them. Here’s a link, if you’re interested:
https://osmand.net/ [osmand.net]
These were all mobile phone based or also those that come embedded into cars? Just out of curiosity.
Remember, these people votes. I don’t want mandatory voting.
I have a household member who wants to take the Google “Saves Gas” routes.
Even when they’re stupid.
And Google has no idea what kind of vehicle she drives.
And it adds 50% travel time.
And the road is too rough for the vehicle’s ground clearance.
And there’s no cell coverage there.
“But it saves gas!”
“No, seriously it doesn’t – that doesn’t even make sense.”
“BUT IT SAYS RIGHT HERE!”
What’s not “green” is dealing with all the nth-order effects.
Julian Jaynes had good scholarship on how humans are susceptible to The Voice of Authority.
About 20% of Americans can resist it.
The rest vote.

I have a household member who wants to take the Google “Saves Gas” routes.
Even when they’re stupid.
A friend of mine has a dad who had a variation of this. He read an article once that UPS was able to save a few million dollars a year in fuel costs by making their truck routes make right turns wherever possible. So, he did the same.
Nevermind that even $10 million a year to UPS is less than 0.1%.
Nevermind that UPS trucks make dozens, if not hundreds, of stops daily, so optimizations involve reordering deliveries to optimize the turns.
Nevermind that “making three rights” to make a left eliminates any saving
Am I the only one who checks the entire route on Google Maps before I jump in my car and go on a trip like that? I like to familiarize myself with the route and have a general idea of the direction, roads, turns, etc. I even pull up street view sometimes to have a look at certain things like intersections.
And of course have a paper road map (either printed off google, or a real map) in the car.
It’s not like these guys were just trying to find an address in an unfamiliar neighborhood. This was a major road trip they were on. The moment the road turned to a gravel trail they should have turned around. If I were one of those drivers I’d be too embarrassed to talk to the media about it.

The moment the road turned to a gravel trail they should have turned around.
Exactly. Their problem is evaluation of road condition for their vehicle. For these people a printed map or getting familiar with the route beforehand would have similarly failed. They would trust that the thin line on the map has to be an ok road (otherwise they wouldn’t put them on the map, would they?) and don’t care about anything else.

The moment the road turned to a gravel trail they should have turned around.
Or even just stopped to look at the map, and notice, “Hey, this is a long way from the correct route! Maybe I should take some time to get back on track.”

Am I the only one who checks the entire route on Google Maps before I jump in my car and go on a trip like that?
I’ll plan my route using Google Maps for every unfamiliar trip. I’ll look at the actual satellite view and compare it to what Maps is telling me.
Apparently, reading a map is a lost skill. It’s shocking.
Yes for sure.
Me too. I even zoom way in to see if the road is a highway, divided highway or freeway, or whatever. We have tons of tools these days, if we would use them.

If I were one of those drivers I’d be too embarrassed
I guess we just don’t understand #tiktokLIFE
Thinking again about it, I agree with you that preparing the way is a lost ability (I do it myself, though I don’t use cars, I prepare my city trips on OSM, and make a quick sketch on paper about the road crossings I need to follow; I expect nobody else is doing this anymore). My friends enter their cars, set their destination on a mobile phone and just listen to instructions. For the people in the story here it’s a combination of this absence of preparation, absence of critical mind (excess of trust in the
>If Sandy Valley was the closest city
wow.
In all these years, I’ve never heard “Sandy Valley” and “city” in the same sentence before . . . 🙂
While there is a “back way” into Vegas through Sandy Valley, I-15 has to be *insanely* bad, with serious pileups, before it makes any sense.
hawk
I’ve been down worse roads* on a Series 1 and it’s still tip-top condition. Maybe I’m just a Gen-Xer who can map read and drive (and turn back in a very narrow space, when necessary)??
* yes: sand, mud, snow and rear wheel drive, but I’m not bragging 😛
Everyone with a fucking droid phone and an ATV is out in the desert hitting those trails, and Google is thinking they’re roads. I’ve had MULTIPLE times where Google Maps wants me to cut across the fucking desert on a jeep/ATV trail to get from I-40 to I-15. Anyone who knows that specific area east of Barstow knows that it’s bad enough with sand that even the actual roads occasionally get closed due to sand washout. To take such a trail in a non-offroading vehicle is almost suicide.
Google maps has gotten worse over time. First, why does it keep showing me alternate routes that are substantially slower than other routes? Why does it switch my navigation automatically to different routes without my permission? Why does it route me through less direct and slower paths to my destination? You might say that google maps has always been this bad, but I disagree. I have noticed that this has been happening far more often after or around the time of the pandemic, around 2020.
Did all the trapped drivers get out and dance in a TikTok video? At least turn lemons into lemonade, people!
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