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The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry

thedrive.com

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

#81

Post by sorenjan »

agumonkey wrote: post #54
Pica_soO wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Also G has the lever to accelerate and change tech if their old approach is obsolete.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 institution…

Isn't Google's approach dependent on expensive LIDARs and high resolution 3D maps [0], or have they changed that? I don't see that kind of system scale well.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk

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

#82

Post by agumonkey »

Pica_soO wrote: post #77
agumonkey wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Also G has the lever to accelerate and change tech if their old approach is obsolete.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 institution…

Actually, that is a very humanistic point of view. There are third-world countrys where a margin of life-loss is considered "acceptable". And sorry, but Teslas approach, seems to be a similar hacky "Wing-it with PR-Guns blazing".

About the first point, do countries where such acceptable risk still exist really need self driving vehicles that early ? Could be delayed a bit.

About the second point, see my above comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841767

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

#83

Post by shadowshadow »

tptacek wrote: post #56
shadowshadow wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The questions were reasonable, but the cover letter was very negative.

Could you point me to comments with first hand NHTSA experience? I didn't see any.

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

#84

Post by agumonkey »

sorenjan wrote: post #81
agumonkey wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 institution…

Isn't Google's approach dependent on expensive LIDARs and high resolution 3D maps [0], or have they changed that? I don't see that kind of system scale well. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk

I've read LIDAR cost was dropping fast, it was expensive at the time and as a short production item; nowadays it's even small.

About the 3D mapping you're probably right, I somehow expected it not to be a deep problem.

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

#85

Post by tptacek »

shadowshadow wrote: post #83
tptacek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The questions were reasonable, but the cover letter was very negative. Could you point me to comments with first hand NHTSA experience? I didn't see any.

The cover letter was very "do not blow off the NHTSA". One commenter who had experience with NHTSA provided examples of orders they sent other companies with similar language.

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

#86

Post by noonespecial »

teddyh wrote: post #3
noonespecial wrote: post #2

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 was really hoping it was actually a C64 reference, namely: "where the 'drive' goes"... ,8,1 Actually, the drive number is the “8”; the “1” is a flag which means to load the program to the same address in memory it was saved from, instead of to the default BASIC program start address.

That's what I was saying. When you use the drive(8), it automatically goes where its supposed to(1).

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

#87

Post by agumonkey »

sorenjan wrote: post #80
agumonkey wrote: post #47

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…

> in a conf, hotz mentioned working on time based depth inference instead of the traditional stereo camera setup This sounds like structure from motion, SfM, which isn't new at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_from_motion

Sure, nothing is new in that field. Space did all that decades ago, except their habits are just not "idiomatic silicon valley".

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

#88

Post by dexterdog »

agildehaus wrote: post #68
bertiewhykovich wrote: post #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…

There were major problems with every demo I saw of the product. In one video, the camera lost tracking of the road due to lighting conditions not being favorable for contrast. In another, Hotz seemed far too amazed that the car properly took a gentle bend in the highway. Confidence is not something I would assign to his product. Or any product that is a camera-only lane-follower. That Holtz caves at the slightest tho…

Where was it established that it was camera-only? My understanding was that it used the existing sensors with the camera.

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

#89

Post by noonespecial »

jimjimjim wrote: post #20
noonespecial wrote: post #2

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…

bonus points for mention of c64 LOAD " ",8,1 or even more old-school LOAD " ",1,1

1,1 !? - Oh hell no. I'm not waiting around for your stupid tape. Get a floppy drive like the cool kids.

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

#90

Post by Kadin »

stale2002 wrote: post #66
bertiewhykovich wrote: post #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…

Well, maybe the reason is that these regulator requests costs tons of money to fulfill because no, you cannot you give simple laymans answers to the questions, you need a team of lawyers to do this work, because everything you say in these "simple" requests can and will be used against you. And perhaps there are better uses of their time, and better regulatory environments where they can release their product. Maybe…

The request is well within the realm of what anyone who wants to produce a product that could well endanger the lives of a lot of people needs to be able to deal with. It was the very minor ante required in order to play at a very high-stakes table.
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