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The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

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Re: The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

#51
post #45

"[comma.ai} was functionally superior and theoretically safer than the ten legacy manufacturer systems" A journalist on record saying "theoretically safer" literally makes my hair stand up on end.

Even better, "The system worked, sometimes better than everything on the market."

Oh boy, I just gotta have a self-driving system for my car that can sometimes work really well!

Re: The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

#52

There's 2 possible reasons. 1) It really is near vaporware just being shown off in perfect conditions to seem exceptional. 2) It actually does work that much better with only $1000 worth of hardware and responding would give away the secret sauce. I don't give much credit to the theory that they didn't see this coming and were caught flat-footed by the sudden requirements. Oh and: Final speculation: there’s a reason…

I have yet to see the simplest proof that comma ai work is just a cute trained NN over a camera, piped to basic controls, with some potential creative ideas (in a conf, hotz mentioned working on time based depth inference instead of the traditional stereo camera setup). I'm biased for conservative companies, I have no idea what they're doing and how much resources. Maybe they're doing something at the same level. I b…

Actually all my money was on google, i expected them to drive into the scrapfield, after the car companys and Tesla pushed each other into a early market situation and upped Legislation, kicking themselves out of the market, with a carnaggedon. But they backed out, because their managers want the chicken to exist before the egg. So, why not bet on the outsider?

Re: The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

#53
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no indication that those were related to not following existing food production regulations...

There's no indication, period, but it would be one of the safer assumptions.

No, it's just a wrong assumption. They're still selling the pre-made liquid, they just stopped their bars and powder products proactively, even though they couldn't reproduce the issue in testing. Do you even know anything about their production methods?

Re: The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to see the simplest proof that comma ai work is just a cute trained NN over a camera, piped to basic controls, with some potential creative ideas (in a conf, hotz mentioned working on time based depth inference instead of the traditional stereo camera setup). I'm biased for conservative companies, I have no idea what they're doing and how much resources. Maybe they're doing something at the same level. I b…

Actually all my money was on google, i expected them to drive into the scrapfield, after the car companys and Tesla pushed each other into a early market situation and upped Legislation, kicking themselves out of the market, with a carnaggedon. But they backed out, because their managers want the chicken to exist before the egg. So, why not bet on the outsider?

I liked Google's approach a lot. It seemed justly dimensioned, came out of Thrun DARPA success, had years and millions of miles of testing. What's not to love. Also G has the lever to accelerate and change tech if their old approach is obsolete.

Sad they went silent since a year or so.

I said it in other place, including HN, I don't consider Hotz an outsider, but mostly glorified hacker (his attitude with institutions and media don't help me clear this impression); and I don't think hacker mentality bodes well with this task.

Re: The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

#55

There's 2 possible reasons. 1) It really is near vaporware just being shown off in perfect conditions to seem exceptional. 2) It actually does work that much better with only $1000 worth of hardware and responding would give away the secret sauce. I don't give much credit to the theory that they didn't see this coming and were caught flat-footed by the sudden requirements. Oh and: Final speculation: there’s a reason…

Or, you know, the gigantic field of possibilities between those two things: it works a little bit under some conditions. Fortunately for us and unfortunately for Hotz's ego, regulators look down upon things that work a little bit under some conditions when they also happen to control two ton metal cages capable of traveling at 120mph. > it's [the] NHTSA that remains behind the curve in evaluating the myriad different…

The one fatality with Autopilot happened because the system worked too well, the driver came to trust it when he shouldn't have. The shittier the Comma one is, the more in-the-loop the human has to be, and risk compensation becomes less of a factor.

Re: The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

#56
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't given any government requirements, with the the possible exception of the FHMVSS rule that you can't remove the rear-view mirror of the car. The NHTSA Special Order asked only for documentation of extremely basic test plan stuff (road, speed, weather, and traffic limits for the device, along with user documentation).

The Special Order might be of the "we're looking for a justification to fine you and issue a recall" type, which it looks like they often are.

People have a lot of theories about what this letter meant, but the people on HN who have actually worked with NHTSA orders say the order means just what it says it means, and that NHTSA is pretty reasonable to work with.

Certainly the questions in the order --- I posted them on the first thread about the comma one --- seemed pretty basic and reasonable.

Re: The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3M+ in investment and Atlas over here would rather shrug than hire a lawyer and someone to put together quality management systems? Bulllllllshiiiiit.

Or maybe they'd rather just start selling their product immediately in China?

China has the same level of regulation as other industrialized countries. If it doesn't pass in the US it won't pass in China either.

Re: The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

#58

> Hotz's initial tweets suggested his move was in response to an inquiry from NHTSA, stating that he "would much rather spend life building amazing tech than dealing with regulators and lawyers," well, this is not some stupid web-app that can't harm anyone even if it tried (except from maybe overheating your smartphone). This can kill people, i can't seriously buy dangerous stuff from somebody that says something lik…

> Producing food without following proper hygiene regulations? Disrupting the medicine-industry by testing your headache-pills on your customers (those regulations are only slowing us down!)?

It would have been even worse than that because it could have potentially killed other people, too.

Re: The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

#59
What this article tries its damnedest to elide is the narrative-wrecking fact that Holtz, confronted with a standard request to demonstrate that his product meets regulatory standards, took his ball and went home. /Exactly/ why he threw a tantrum is anyone's guess -- but there doesn't seem to be any real good possibility. Either his product couldn't meet standards and this is an attempt to obfuscate that inconvenient fact, or he withdrew a working product because he was so affronted by the fact that the NHTSA dared challenge him -- hardly a defensible, or confidence-inspiring, behavior.

Re: The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

#60
I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can't apply Silicon Valley disruption to every industry because most software has a failure-rate that would be considered appalling in any real engineering discipline.

And building a control system that can follow a perfectly black asphalt road with bright yellow and white lines between the lanes isn't even 1% as difficult as building a system that can actually be relied upon to safely convey its passengers under less ideal circumstances.

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