The light and often even the sign itself are typically considered informational aids rather than strict determinants of legality. The driver is expected to comply with all the nitpicky details of the law regardless of whether the bulb is burned out or the school schedule changes.

Needless to say, most people regularly violate some kind of traffic law, we just don't enforce it.

of course. i'm confident slowing down near a school is pretty intuitive for the vast majority of drivers, though.

Sure, but the context here is a discussion about how a computer can know all of these "intuitive" rules humans follow.

The answer is encoded in the map data in this case, but it's an interesting category of problems for autonomous vehicles.

Have you had the experience of riding in a Waymo making a left hand turn against incoming traffic -- and how it handles the eventual yellow light?

I was very impressed about the decision making in this situation. Seems very intuitive (at least superficially).

it wasn’t at first but I suspect they received a ton of feedback and fixed it.

in my estimation the robo driver has reached a median-human level of driving skill. it still doesn’t quite know how to balance the weight of the car through turns and it sometimes gets fussy with holding lanes at night but otherwise it mimics human behaviors pretty well except where they’re illegal like rolling through the first stop at a stop sign.

Now I’m imagining the Waymo Driver calling out to Gemini to determine "school hours" by looking it up on the Internet, and wondering about the nature of life.