The Mystery of the Unfamiliar Photograph

Consider the following photograph.

Or how about this creepy one?

You're probably thinking that someone was having a little bit of fun with double exposures. But a long time ago, these photos were presented as evidence of ghosts.

Spirit photography began in the early 1860s. Patrons would sit for their photograph and the picture that developed would include additional ghostly figures, often draped in flowing cloth. The photographer would assert that these were "spirit extras" or ghosts of deceased relatives.

One such photographer, Édouard Isidore Buguet, was tried for fraud in the 1870s. He confessed to using double exposures. And authorities obtained the props that he used:

The police seized all the paraphernalia in the studio of Buguet and took it to court. Amongst it was a lay figure and a large stock of heads. These with dolls and assistants at the studio took turns as inspirations for Spirit extras.

And yet, his victims continued to believe they had experienced something supernatural. In his book, A Magician Among the Spirits, Harry Houdini notes that:

Witness after witness—journalist, photographic expert, musician, merchant, man of letters, optician, ex-professor of history, Colonel of Artillery, etc., etc.—came forward to testify on behalf of the accused.

Shockingly, this type of photographic trickery continued for decades. As late as the 1920s, people like author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were still publicly professing a belief that cameras could capture images of the supernatural. But skeptics like Houdini pushed back, making efforts to debunk various forms of Spiritualism. To demonstrate that spirit photographs were hoaxes, Houdini produced his own, like this one where he convenes with the "ghost" of Abraham Lincoln.

Today it's obvious that these kinds of photos are fakes. As cameras became more prevalent, people became more familiar with them and with effects like double exposures and lens flares.

But the mystery of the unfamiliar photograph lives on. Earlier this month, the Pentagon released a collection of declassified files related to reports of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Public figures like Bill Maher have expressed a belief that aliens are involved. While skeptics like Michael Shermer push back, noting that "absolutely nothing stands out beyond the usual blurry photographs, grainy videos, artist reconstructions, and countless stories about weird things in the sky and in space."

Similar to how difficult it was to understand the first superimposed photographs back in the 1860s, it's hard to understand the optical illusions that are a part of air and space travel today. Pilot and astronaut Scott Kelly has discussed just how challenging it can be:

In my experience of flying over 15,000 hours in 30 something years in airplanes and in space, the environment that we fly in is very conducive to optical illusions...
 
My brother Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and also now a U.S. Senator, shared a story with me about an experience he had years ago that when he was the commander of STS 124; they were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the Space Shuttle and they see something in the payload bay and they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt—they couldn’t quite figure it out—and they were potentially going to have to go and do a spacewalk to retrieve it. But before they did that my brother grabbed the camera and they took a picture of it, and when they blew up the picture they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay; it was actually the International Space Station that was 80 miles away.
 
There are cases where pilots have rendezvoused on a buoy because they thought that was their wingman. It’s just a very very challenging environment to work, especially at night.

In another hundred years, will people look back and laugh at how anyone ever thought UAP footage represented aliens? I think that's likely. It's also likely we'll be on the edge of yet another unknown frontier, with another set of unfamiliar photographs that we don't yet fully understand.

Halfway Through the 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet

In March 2022, software developers Jeff Atwood and John Carmack made a $10k charity bet on the following proposition:

By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.

Carmack bet that we would have level 5 cars by 2030. This means cars that are fully autonomous and able to drive everywhere in all conditions.

Atwood bet against, writing:

To be clear, I am betting against because I think everyone is underestimating how difficult fully autonomous driving really is. I am by no means against self driving vehicles in any way!

Four years later, just over halfway through the bet, it looks like Atwood has a good chance of winning.

The Blackout

Driverless taxis currently operate at SAE level 4. Their service is restricted to specific areas within certain cities and they aren't fully autonomous. Whenever a Waymo robotaxi gets into a situation it can't figure out, the car requests "remote assistance", where a human call center agent advises the vehicle on how to proceed. There are roughly 40 cars to every human assistant. Half of these remote workers are located in the Philippines.

In December, a power outage in San Francisco caused Waymo's fleet of robotaxis to stop mid-traffic for hours, blocking roads and obstructing emergency vehicles. Waymo's post mortem indicated that while their cars can navigate through disabled traffic lights, they sometimes request confirmation before proceeding. During the power outage there was a backlog of confirmation requests which left many cars frozen in place.

This problem could have been much worse if there had been more driverless taxis on the road—there are currently only about 800 to 1,000 Waymos in operation in San Francisco.

"Edge Cases"

Self-driving vehicles continue to fail in numerous other ways.

Last September in Phoenix, Waymos got stuck in flooded streets. Of course, some human drivers may do this as well, but you can warn people about dangerous levels of flooding and most are able to avoid problem areas. Because of the nature of machine learning, you can't just tell the robotaxis to watch out for flooding. Waymo's solution was to temporarily suspend service of all cars in the Phoenix area.

In December, a Waymo drove into an active crime scene in LA. Several police cruisers had their lights flashing, police had weapons drawn, and officers were yelling at the Waymo to leave the area as it slowly drove within a few feet of a suspect who was lying on the ground.

In January, a Waymo drove down the light rail tracks in Phoenix while a light rail car was approaching. And in March, in two separate instances in Austin, a Waymo stopped within railroad crossing gates, just a few feet away from a passing train.

Last month in Austin, a Waymo got stuck after trying to make a u-turn and ended up blocking an ambulance that was responding to a mass shooting.

The cars have also gotten stuck driving in circles, taken unexplained detours into parking garages, and trapped passengers inside.

These types of situations are often referred to as "edge cases". An edge case is a set of extreme conditions which can cause unexpected failure in a system. This isn't a very fitting description though, since obeying police officers and not driving on train tracks are fundamental driving requirements. So is understanding what a school bus is.

School Bus Failures

Waymo has been struggling for months now trying to get its cars to stop illegally passing school buses that have a flashing stop sign extended.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a probe into Waymo last October after one of its cars passed a stopped school bus in Atlanta. Waymo issued a recall and stated that it had repaired affected vehicles in November. But the problem persisted and as of early December there had been 20 similar incidents at the Austin Independent School District. The school district hosted a half-day event in mid-December to try to help Waymo collect data to fix the issue. But by mid-January at least four more school-bus-passing incidents had taken place. And another incident occurred in March.

There is also an open investigation for a separate incident in which a Waymo struck a child near an elementary school in January.

If a human driver continued to rack up repeat offenses of not stopping for school buses, their license would be suspended. This hasn't happened yet for Waymo, perhaps because people believe these cars will eventually be safer than humans.

Safety

Waymo claims to be "already making roads safer." Their data show a reduction in injury-causing crashes and fewer airbag deployments when compared to human drivers in similar driving areas.

But even though Waymo's cars have driven more than 100 million miles, that's not enough to make statistically meaningful conclusions about fatal crash rates. According to a RAND Corporation study:

... fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their safety in terms of fatalities and injuries.

So far, most of the miles driven by AVs have been at low speeds on urban roads in moderate climates. Waymo has only recently started offering freeway service. Occupant fatalities are more likely at higher speeds, so a new edge case on freeways could quickly negate their safety gains.

Current safety numbers ignore all of the recent close calls. The next time a Waymo goes beyond a railroad crossing gate, it could derail a train. The next time a Waymo drives past a stopped school bus, it could run over a child. The next time there's a major power outage, Waymos stuck in traffic could prevent a fire truck from getting to a fire. If an event like this occurs, it would be tragic but unsurprising.

AVs also introduce unique dangers. Remote assistance is a potential attack vector. Waymo's remote human assistants aren't able to directly control vehicles, which limits risk. But other companies like Tesla allow remote control. Will malicious actors ever be able to hack the remote assist functionality? Or the over-the-air software updates?

The Future

I'm skeptical that level 5 self-driving cars will be available by 2030. There are currently too many unhandled situations that require remote assistance. Waymo is under multiple federal investigations. And a particularly bad accident could cause a major setback. It's hard to picture how we could possibly get to fully autonomous vehicles in less than four years.

Reading the Rails Credential File Directly

Maybe you've got a lightweight Rack application or Ruby script where you want to be able to read sensitive data from your encrypted Rails credentials without having to load an entire Rails app. Rails.application.credentials won't be available. But if you've got ActiveSupport installed, you can use ActiveSupport::EncryptedConfiguration:

require 'active_support/encrypted_configuration'

credentials = ActiveSupport::EncryptedConfiguration.new(
  config_path: 'config/credentials/development.yml.enc',
  key_path: 'config/credentials/development.key',
  env_key: 'RAILS_MASTER_KEY',
  raise_if_missing_key: true
)

credentials.config
# => {key_one: "abc", key_two: "def"}

credentials.key_one
# => "abc"

Both key_path and env_key are required parameters, but only one will be used depending upon where you store your decryption key. The env_key is used if present, otherwise the key_path is used. When Rails loads credentials, it first looks for an ENV variable called "RAILS_MASTER_KEY" before looking for an env-specific file at "config/credentials/#{environment}.key" or master file at "config/master.key".