George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars • Hacker News Board

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#51

Post by commaai » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 2:07 AM UTC

dchichkov wrote: post #48

commaai wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask our users if they feel similarly about it not being useful. https://slack.comma.ai

Yes, I understand that. And my perspective is different from your users. It is that of someone who is seeing (and attempting to help) big automotive companies. Companies in the shadow of Waymo, that had recently reached $135B valuation. It is also that of someone, who had been hacking code for medical equipment at 13, some 25 years back. Do as you wish. edit : correction. out of your project we are probably having mo…

Waymo's valuation is based on hype. They have no revenue.

We aren't trying to help big automotive companies, they are our competition. We are trying to disrupt them.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#52

Post by rileyphone » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 2:10 AM UTC

jrace wrote: post #42

yters wrote: post #32

Brilliant! Pure AI is a dead end street. Turing machines cannot increase their minimal Kolmogorov sufficient statistic, so will always be unable to learn more information than is put into them originally. Humans are the only known information creators, and so only hybrid human/AI systems can work in the real world.

>Humans are the only known information creators What do you think whale-sounds and bird-songs are?

Obviously entropy!

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#53

Post by BugsJustFindMe » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 2:17 AM UTC

asteli wrote: post #30

Here's the low-level controller for Comma AI's self-driving software. Lateral and longitudinal control, as well as actuator command are contained within. Their low level control is done in Python, on top of Android, on a smartphone. No further comment, your honor. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/devel/selfdrive/co...

It sounds to me like you don't understand how little performance you actually need for this kind of stuff. People have been writing effective autopilot software for decades using hardware that wasn't even particularly fast at the time and may as well be a pile of sand today. What exactly do you think that that code needs to do? I promise that Python on a new smartphone can do way more now than we could do 20 years ago on a Pentium in C or C++. You're lucky if any of your sensors emit at even 100Hz.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#54

Post by sebastianavina » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 2:19 AM UTC

asteli wrote: post #30

Here's the low-level controller for Comma AI's self-driving software. Lateral and longitudinal control, as well as actuator command are contained within. Their low level control is done in Python, on top of Android, on a smartphone. No further comment, your honor. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/devel/selfdrive/co...

What? thats enough redundancy for a space station

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#55

Post by sebastianavina » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 2:20 AM UTC

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #8

What would the point of current self-driving car systems be? If you can't take your attention off the road anyway, it's basically a glorified, expensive cruise control.

nah, if the android board fails, you get the plus of loosing the control of your vehicle...

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#56

Post by dchichkov » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 2:27 AM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #43

dchichkov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example that I like to give is a downed power line . This is something that happens often . Try solving it with rigorous physics.

A purely physical approach is just a design paradigm in how to use other sensors (with or without ML), having this means uncertainty would be correlated with momentum and anything causing doubt (a power line down) would mean reducing the internal energy of the system to give ability to either stop to a halt, enter a safe configuration or assess the situation deeper/differently to decide. So far what we see about Tesl…

The problem is, you'd be hitting all these pesky corner cases, with some of them requiring active avoidance - downed power lines, water on the road, vehicles on fire, other traffic participants. My guess, it is hard to engineer a system that could handle the long tail of making decisions under uncertainty with "purely physical approach". You'll run out of complexity budget.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#57

Post by raslah » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 2:28 AM UTC

Shank wrote: post #15

> If the driver looks down or away from the road for two seconds, a visual warning will appear on the Eon’s screen. After four seconds, the driver will hear an audible alert. And after six seconds, the system will disengage and begin to slow down. The biggest use of some kind of driver assist system is something that can keep me going straight and at a constant speed on a relatively open road while I twist open a bot…

precisely what i was thinking.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#58

Post by ams6110 » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 2:35 AM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #7

aurizon wrote: post #2

Sour grapes? I recall when push button elevators were installed. The union insisted an operator was still needed - who asked you 'what floor?' and then pushed that button. Without operators, western, and indeed all global civilization would come to an end...

What would the elevator operator do if the elevator got stuck between floors, or kept going past the selected floor? Was there a hand brake for the elevator that only they could use?

They probably couldn't do any more than they could do when the manually operated elevator got stuck between floors.

I think the real reason that elevator operators stayed on for a period of time is the same reason that some older people sometimes reject new technology, such as smartphones or in-home digital assistants, even when it ostensibly makes a lot of things easier. The same thing probably happened with push-button elevators. People didn't want to have to think about pushing buttons when they were used to just stepping into the elevator and telling the operator what floor they needed, or more likely the operator already knew.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#59

Post by dchichkov » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 2:37 AM UTC

mchahn wrote: post #44

dchichkov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example that I like to give is a downed power line . This is something that happens often . Try solving it with rigorous physics.

Well, usually driving over one with rubber tires causes no problem. One in the air would be detectable, no?

It is hard to even recognize it. On the road it looks exactly like a crack. For a case of a low hanging one - it is invisible by LIDAR or radar, on the camera the difference between a regular one and a low hanging one is very subtle.

And the requirement is not just braking action, like with a railroad crossing it is active avoidance.

https://www.pge.com/en_US/safety/electrical-safety/what-to-d...

My point is - corner cases like these tend to create "IF" statements in a "pure physics model" that is used for decision making under uncertainty. And engineering such models without "ML fad" is difficult.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#60

Post by raslah » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 2:42 AM UTC

Driver assist is a good way to get people comfortable with automated driving. The only way autonomous vehicles will ever really show any benefit is if communities, municipalities and eventually, governments start rolling them out en masse and incentivising their purchase; SDVs driving together is the only way to finally eliminate traffic related deaths and make travel smooth and fast. As long as you have computers trying to predict and/or respond to erratic human behavior, you're fighting a losing battle; it doesn't matter how many times you rehearse it you'll hit a certain plateau where the correct decisions simply can't be determined.