141–150 of 498 posts
Nobody who is familiar with George is surprised by this. It's unfortunate that his ego has a scapegoat, however. I guess this time he couldn't find anyone on IRC to finish the hard parts for him and let him take the credit.
> I guess this time he couldn't find anyone on IRC to finish the hard parts for him and let him take the credit. I feel like there is some backstory here I've never heard.
He's currently throwing a temper tantrum on Twitter, and all because the NHTSA wanted to ask him a few questions about the product (you can see it here: https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special... ). Like, how dare the government try to have basic standards for multi-ton hunks of metal hurtling down the highway without human input. I've been trying to convince people lately that Silicon Valley isn…
If you read the letter, it's a lot more than "answering a few questions". He gets two weeks to provide an enormous amount of detailed information about the product, I assume under threat of legal consequences if any of it contains an error, interspersed with lots of reminders that they can and will close down his business if they feel like it.
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True but he said he planned to release the product by end of year... surely he at least had drafts of this information. The letter even said estimates were OK.
Look, I don't want to belabor the point but a laundry list of shit to submit isn't as easy as copy-paste from one document to another unless you don't actually care about answering the question and want to get mired in back and forth of "more information needed" or "answer unsatisfactory" when the only grading criteria (NHTSA) is behind closed doors. A lot of people here are assuming just by turning in "some answers"…
If this list surprises you then you probably shouldn't be in the self driving car business.
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Exactly. The NHTSA memo seems extremely reasonable to me. If you're going to put to market a product where the smallest malfunction could easily kill many people (both those using your product and those around them), answering a couple regulation questions seems like a small hurdle to pass. Nothing here is saying "we want to shut you down", it's saying "we want to make sure you pass the most basic safety standards".…
I feel $21,000 fine per day sounds pretty like "we want to shut you down". He never presented comma.ai as an autopilot but as a very smart line assist and adaptive cruise control.
The government appears well aware of this hand waving garbage that companies are trying with "it isn't really autopilot, keep your hands on the wheel wink." This is exactly government's job and is a fabulous example of a government reacting to ongoing events that have proven that so-called autopilot systems are inherently a danger to the public at this stage.
I'm just amazed at what a bad name that is. "Comma One" ... Did they never think that it would be called the The Coma One after even the slightest inevitable incident? Or that a segment of people will be innocently misspelling it as "Coma" everywhere? and how quickly it could catch on? It's so obvious it seems almost Freudian ...
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> Do I think Hotz has a viable product? Yes. (A comment over at Jalopnik linked to a Tweet where an actual human rider / journalist experienced the Hotz vehicle and was quite impressed) Journalists being shown demos in controlled circumstances are a notoriously unreliable source of information about the viability of a product.
Oh come on, do you understand the concept of journalism? It's a reporting profession. It's not goddamn PR.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do I think Hotz has a viable product? Yes. (A comment over at Jalopnik linked to a Tweet where an actual human rider / journalist experienced the Hotz vehicle and was quite impressed) Journalists being shown demos in controlled circumstances are a notoriously unreliable source of information about the viability of a product.
Oh come on, do you understand the concept of journalism? It's a reporting profession. It's not goddamn PR.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12492856
I'm really not overly negative about new things but this was predictable.
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I tweeted a joke yesterday that the Engineering Society had changed it's slogan to 'Move fast and kill people', I'm pretty happy that NHTSA has its feet solidly planted on terra firma and requires a bit of process around releasing something as important as self driving vehicles. The more software becomes mission critical the more we will need level headedness and quality rather than tantrums.
Not mission critical, rather life critical. I've worked on several life critical systems as a security researcher, helping to develop controls in tightly controlled environments to keep people safe. Work on software controlled switches in industrial machines mostly. As I've followed these developments and those of Google and Tesla I've been wondering at times if I live in some alternate universe. The level of diligen…
The degree of care that went into the e-stop design of the lathe and mill controller and the number of checks and tests of the fuel estimation software are stuff that I'm (hopefully justified) proud of, that's not stuff to cut any corners with. In both cases that took me longer than Hotz claims to have spent on creating the whole self driving car code, there is no way you can do this safely with that mentality. It is absolutely irresponsible to take that attitude towards systems like this, life is not a video game with 3 more lives if you lose this one (or cause others to lose theirs).
He's currently throwing a temper tantrum on Twitter, and all because the NHTSA wanted to ask him a few questions about the product (you can see it here: https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special... ). Like, how dare the government try to have basic standards for multi-ton hunks of metal hurtling down the highway without human input. I've been trying to convince people lately that Silicon Valley isn…
If you read the letter, it's a lot more than "answering a few questions". He gets two weeks to provide an enormous amount of detailed information about the product, I assume under threat of legal consequences if any of it contains an error, interspersed with lots of reminders that they can and will close down his business if they feel like it.