Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

electrek.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 498 posts

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#431

Post by smallnamespace »

digler999 wrote: post #218
erikpukinskis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof that so-called autopilot systems are a danger to the public would be evidence that they perform worse than the average driver. I haven't seen such evidence, what are you referencing?

so we should wait till a statistically-significant percentage of people die before we tell everyone, "yep, definitely dangerous. Lets add some regulation" ? I wonder if they could shut him down on the basis of car insurance requirements and the legal definition of "driver". If "driver" is defined as the "person" inputting control commands, then either you dont consider the computer a person, and then nobody is legall…

The NHTSA has been a strong proponent of self-driving technology and has gone out of its way to make sure there is a path to doing it legally, without pulling the legal 'gotcha' that you described here.

The device would probably be SAE Level 2, and should be regulated as such.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#432

Post by eanzenberg »

stale2002 wrote: post #329
saosebastiao wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you measure the safety of autonomous cars by counting the miles they travel, and not counting the miles that they intentionally avoid or defer to a human, you have succeeded in creating a metric that looks like it's useful for comparison, but is actually completely meaningless. It's like measuring typing speed while ignoring typos. Until autonomous vehicles are subject to the full spectrum of conditions that hum…

Not true. Lots of accidents happen in "good" conditions because humans suck at driving. The way you compare, is you give a self driving car to a person, and compare actually usage for that person, and see if owning a self driving car increases or reduces accidents for that person. Being perfect only half the time is still revolutionary.

>>humans suck at driving

Proof?

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#433

Post by jahewson »

kefka wrote: post #312
smallnamespace wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem with that model is that if the product ends up being unsafe and someone dies, it becomes the regulator's fault that they failed to prevent an unsafe product from being marketed and sold in the first place. Heads will roll. We as a democratic society decided awhile ago that the benefit of knowing a car product was probably safe outweighs the frictional burden of testing them before they can be sold. There'…

If that was true, then they could have left off the "or else, pay $21k/day for noncompliance". I've seen plenty of big-companies use forced compliance to kill smaller and more agile upstarts. I remember the tactics used to kill most butcheries and local meat shops. Same games, with onerous and idiotic requirements of "compliance" that the big guys can do. Of course, the big companies got legislation to enforce their…

When he kills a bunch of people in China, you're going to feel silly about having made this comment.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#434

Post by dpark »

komali2 wrote: post #405
sangnoir wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you expand on how they are an inherent danger, rather than a possible danger? I do not believe those words ( inherent & possible ) are in any way mutually exclusive. They might even mean the same thing when describing a latent danger. So I do not quite understand the basis of your challenge. Also, I'm not parent poster.

My understanding of inherent might not be right, then. I think of it as "it is definitely a danger, and thus can only be described as dangerous," which I would argue is not mutually exclusive with possible but is mutually exclusive with "not always dangerous and maybe even anti-dangerous." So what I mean is, the autopilot could turn out to be safer than manual, in my mind, so how is it "inherently" dangerous.

A swimming pool in your backyard is an inherent danger. That doesn't mean anyone will be injured or killed, but a deep body of water with sheer walls is inherently dangerous.

It would nonetheless also be accurate to describe it as a possible danger, because the danger only manifests in certain circumstances.

> So what I mean is, the autopilot could turn out to be safer than manual, in my mind, so how is it "inherently" dangerous.

That could well be the case but I don't think it eliminates the inherent danger. Maybe it's less dangerous, but cars on the road are just kind of dangerous in general.

I think it's also very generous to assume that the early auto pilot car systems we have today are necessarily safer than human drivers. Emergency braking is almost certainly a net gain. Self driving might be or might not be. A self driving add-on cooked up by geohot? I'm doubtful it's yet gone through the kind of engineering rigor we'd expect of a system like this.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#435

Post by jahewson »

idsout wrote: post #206
brianbreslin wrote: post #22

Something seems fishy to me. Cruise which GM bought for $1B a few months back was working on similar tech. Having only raised $3M he could have EASILY sold his tech/team to Chrysler or Ford or Hyundai, or any other car company for $100M and made his investors super happy and himself very rich. So why "quit" when the feds ask you to deal with regulations that involve passenger safety. Its not like he had to spend $20M…

He posted the answer to this on Twitter: "Would much rather spend my life building amazing tech than dealing with regulators and lawyers. It isn't worth it." Money isn't everything to some people. He has the true hacker ethos.

True hackers ship.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#436

Post by rasz_pl »

luisivan wrote: post #162
izqui wrote: post #157

Today, I can only paraphrase George's harsh bulling destructive feedback he gave us on our startup: George, "that wouldn't work" :)

And days before that I was with him in a fundraising dinner and we were like besties. Sociopaths. (Edited to reflect the point more politely)

>And days before that I was with him in a fundraising dinner and we were like besties. Sociopaths.

Are you suggesting people should be rude to you when your product is shit?

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#437

Post by ceterum_censeo »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #427
ceterum_censeo wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a secondary discriminating sensor, but the latest Autopilot 8 upgrade retasks radar to be "a primary control sensor without requiring the camera to confirm visual image recognition": https://www.tesla.com/blog/upgrading-autopilot-seeing-world-...

Indeed. And I absolutely do not trust them on it. Their radar hardware just isn't good enough to reliably do that.

Ditto. It also seems strange to be able to retask their radar from secondary to primary control.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#438

Post by eanzenberg »

chadgeidel wrote: post #274
WhitneyLand wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of things are susceptible to misuse. That doesn't invalidate them unless they are in fact misused. Moreover I don't see how you can conclude on a whim what's possible to estimate and what is not. Given these things take expertise in the relevant field and more than just casual analysis. Finally, it's not like there is a small margin of error. Can you even really comprehend 30,000 deaths every single year caused…

I would absolutely consider speeding up R&D to save that number of lives. I'm 100% behind self-driving cars. I think self-driving cars will eventually reduce the number of road deaths significantly. I don't think the case has been made yet that today's tech will reduce the number of road deaths. I don't think it's unreasonable to be skeptical of the claim "this works great, trust me".

I'm very skeptical from no-name nobodys like Hotz running comma-ai and very non-skeptical of companies like Tesla.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#439

Post by eanzenberg »

jtmarmon wrote: post #97
patcheudor wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i understand where you're coming from, but there is a counter argument to what you're saying, which is that although there may be some dangers to things like the comma one and tesla autopilot, their release may save more lives than they edanger, having a net positive to humans. humans are pretty bad at driving

I hate this bullshit argument that 'humans are pretty bad at driving.' Yes there's a wide distribution of driving skill levels, and this is dependent on the cars people drive and their maintenance records. But please don't lump me in the same bag as obviously shitty drivers, of which I've seen scores of.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#440

Post by phjesusthatguy3 »

phasmantistes wrote: post #223

I love this paragraph of the Request: > The singular includes the plural; the plural includes the singular. The masculine gender includes the feminine and neuter genders; and the neuter gender includes the masculine and feminine genders. "And" as well as "or" shall be construed either disjunctively or conjunctively, to bring within scope of this Special Order all responses that might otherwise be construed to be outs…

It didn't spell out what the definition of 'is' is, though.
Post reply on HN