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Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

nytimes.com

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Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#281

Post by ams6110 »

ptero wrote: post #262
jacquesm wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This so reminds me of the discussion about fire from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. The challenge of a self driving car is to get it to drive by itself, not to try to make it look good and to solve a whole pile of engineering problems that have had everybody in engineering looking at them since as long as we have the profession. Making gadgets and making a self driving car require a different mind-set. The fir…

Apple often tries to re-engineer the thing they develop.from the ground up. Seems it started this way on Titan, too, then scaled back and decided to focus on the main problem: safely getting around. Nothing wrong with this I think. On reinvented wheels, early ideas rejected today may get a second life later, e.g. spherical wheels for moving in very constrained environments.

I can't see spherical wheels working well. They would have a smaller contact patch on the road surface than a standard wheel, and consequently less traction.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#282

Post by ldev1 »

ralfd wrote: post #260
enjo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palm OS apps were using swipe to scroll for several years before that. As far back as at least 2002. That doesn't take away from what Apple did. They really took all of the best ideas (and in many cases hired the engineers who made them in the first place) and put them into one incredibly tight and delightful package. Just about every individual feature can be traced to Palm, Symbian, or a host of other systems... bu…

>> when I was watching the keynote live, and Jobs swiped his finger to scroll, I audibly gasped. > Palm OS apps were using swipe to scroll for several years before that. As far back as at least 2002. I don't know how good Palm OS was at that time, but the contrast between the iPhone and the rest of the industry was blinding 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMzg70MIZCo

> the contrast between the iPhone and the rest of the industry was blinding 2007

Totally:

No third party applications, none. So no SSH client.

Browser, compared to Nokia, was utter shit.

Screen resolution was mediocre at best.

Fixed storage - only 4 GB, meanwhile I had all my mp3 collection in two memory cards for my Nokia phone.

IT COULDN'T EVEN RECORD VIDEO, what. the. hell. Let alone changing ringphone to mp3. MMS? No.

No copy/paste, but I guess it's alright because it couldn't multitask anyways.

---

When I saw how many iPhones Apple sold I audibly gasped, was not yet that cynical and didn't expected people being so dumb. And got never ending hate for dumb people - they just set back phone development at least 6 years back (I'm pretty sure if people like 2bitencryption wouldn't exist - I would be living in Mars now).

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#283

Post by freehunter »

robertlagrant wrote: post #213
freehunter wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today I learned that poor rural farmers are living lives of luxury. Such a luxurious life in areas with no cell service, no high speed internet, and a several-hour streetcar ride into town to get groceries. So glad to know that food stamps, welfare, and homemade methamphetamines qualify someone for luxury living. Jesus fucking Christ this thread is cancer.

It's really not. Calm down and don't pick up on one minor point and reply with a giant response. Obviously no one else thinks that cars are unnecessary.

No, it really is. So far I've seen people saying buildings older than "a few decades" should be torn down to move them closer to street car lines, people calling that "urban renewal", people saying that the problem solves itself because all young people are moving to cities as a rule, people saying self-driving cars will never work and every road should be replaced with street cars that lead to busses that lead to trains, but for the rural population the median solution wouldn't work so they'd have cars of course, but you wouldn't need them because you would just tear down your home and move to the city. Oh and also farmers are rich, but at the same time farmers have to move to the city.

Every single person in this thread lives in a big city and never stepped foot on land that didn't have a sidewalk next to the road. We're not talking "minor points" here, we're talking about 46 million Americans who don't have cable internet or cell phone reception, but somehow public transport will work there or we'll just force them to move.

I knew HN was a bubble but god damn, this is some next-level shit if you can just pretend 15% of the country doesn't exist.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#284

Post by freehunter »

lmm wrote: post #248
freehunter wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trains are great at moving people to train stations. Buses are great at moving people to bus stops. Cars are great at moving people to their homes and businesses. When millions of Americans live in rural or suburban areas, what do you think is easier? Extending rail and bus routes to within walking distance of every house, or convincing everyone to move to a city? The answer is neither, and that's why cars exist. Her…

> When millions of Americans live in rural or suburban areas, what do you think is easier? Extending rail and bus routes to within walking distance of every house, or convincing everyone to move to a city? The answer is neither, and that's why cars exist. My generation is moving into the cities where we can live without cars, no convincing needed. > Here's one that isn't a trick question: is it more efficient to buil…

>My generation is moving into the cities where we can live without cars

If you think that's true for every Millennial across the country, you're crazy.

>that's a "don't do that then" problem.

Oh, okay. Just don't do that. Gotcha. Pretty simple. Just don't have a job, just don't go to work, I'm sure I can afford to move to Manhattan after I quit my factory job in Springfield IL because it was too far off the rail line.

>but they shouldn't be allowed to spoil it for the rest of us.

Holy shit. Just... holy shit.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#285

Post by mhb »

eloisant wrote: post #232
tambourine_man wrote: post #36

“From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior without a steering wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or augmented reality into interior displays. The team also worked on a new light and ranging detection sensor, also known as lidar. Lida…

Apple is good at taking something that works but in a clunky way, and make it clean and perfect for consumers. Not to be first to market. There were smartphones before the iPhone, and there were mp3 players before the iPod. If Apple is to reproduce the successes they had they will release a driverless car a few years after the competitors but it will finally be the one that "just works", without the clunky design and…

And, if it's electric, you'll have to replace the power cord every year or two because strain reliefs are aesthetically offensive.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#286

Post by jacquesm »

ams6110 wrote: post #281
ptero wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple often tries to re-engineer the thing they develop.from the ground up. Seems it started this way on Titan, too, then scaled back and decided to focus on the main problem: safely getting around. Nothing wrong with this I think. On reinvented wheels, early ideas rejected today may get a second life later, e.g. spherical wheels for moving in very constrained environments.

I can't see spherical wheels working well. They would have a smaller contact patch on the road surface than a standard wheel, and consequently less traction.

And then there is stronger braking to be considered, which almost always is some kind of disk brake which you can't do if there is no shaft to mount one on. Which means the spherical wheel system would have to be oversized to compensate for lack of such a shaft even if it would work to drive the car. Magnetic wheels have other interesting problems that would need to be solved such as when two cars get close to each other the wheels would start to attract or repulse depending on their orientation.

This is mostly likely not something that could be rolled out even in a concept car with present day technology unless there is some kind of trick that I'm not aware of. Halbach arrays are not without problems if you allow them to be unconstrained in all dimensions.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#288

Post by ams6110 »

skywhopper wrote: post #266
iiiggglll wrote: post #182

> Even though Apple had not ironed out many of the basics, like how the autonomous systems would work, a team had already started working on an operating system software called CarOS. There was fierce debate about whether it should be programmed using Swift, Apple’s own programming language, or the industry standard, C++. Wow. Few things guarantee success like starting off a project with a good old-fashioned language…

I'd say the choice of language you write your OS in is a pretty important one. There should be a fierce debate about such things.

If you're talking about the actual vehicle motion control systems, they probably should have been looking at what languages avionics companies use, not what their app developers are familiar with.

You'll need languages and operating systems that are battle-tested (literally) in hard-real-time fault tolerant systems.

Swift should never have been on the whiteboard for something like that. It's never been used in that scenario.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#289

Post by syockit »

thomasjudge wrote: post #280
oblio wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their cloud platform is the same thing: trying to not get pushed out by Amazon and Microsoft. Google Cloud is about ensuring that those two have competition and can't somehow pull an EEE. Extreme scenario: vast majority of world's online businesses are hosted on AWS and Amazon for whatever reason creates their own AWS ad service and forbids or undercuts Google AdWords for everything hosted on AWS.

"EEE"?

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

This is the first time I've seen it shortened to an acronym.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#290

Post by 60654 »

jacquesm wrote: post #240
tambourine_man wrote: post #36

“From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior without a steering wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or augmented reality into interior displays. The team also worked on a new light and ranging detection sensor, also known as lidar. Lida…

This so reminds me of the discussion about fire from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. The challenge of a self driving car is to get it to drive by itself, not to try to make it look good and to solve a whole pile of engineering problems that have had everybody in engineering looking at them since as long as we have the profession. Making gadgets and making a self driving car require a different mind-set. The fir…

Hah, yes. Glad to see others were weirded out by that too. It's so strange to see people seriously discussing how to redesign the trimmings, when nobody even has an existence proof that fully autonomous navigation _is even possible!_

And it's not like robotics research hasn't been working on this problem for half a century now. It's a hell of a hard problem that one can't just product-design their way out of.

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