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

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

#111

Post by aetherspawn »

Semirhage wrote: post #3
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...

When push-button elevators were installed, they worked. Can you imagine if the pitch had been, “sometimes this elevator will kill the odd person, thanks for helping us work out the bugs.” As a bonus, the actual working elevator might not emerge until decades after installation began, and the early models only worked on alternate Wednesday’s.

They’re still working out the kinks in the elevator in my old office; it spent 6 months of the year out of order every day being repaired, and numerous people got trapped in it. Eventually, people just stopped using it, even when it was “fixed”.. because it never really was.

It behaved like a chronic dud. A bad self driving car would probably develop the same reputation.

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

#112

Post by alkonaut »

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…

Right. Keeping in lane for 2 secs when you spill your coffee or the kid screams or you do something else that makes you lose your concentration for a short while is great.

I don’t need to sleep or work for an hour during a commute. Not now not tomorrow. I can drive the damn thing or at least watch it drive itself. And like mr Hotz I believe that’s what it will be like for decades to come. My prediction is flying cars before completely self driving ones. And not some novelty one person quadcopter. I mean the proper Blade Runner ones.

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

#113

Post by alkonaut »

xedeon wrote: post #84
21 wrote: post #40

So now we'll have weekend "hackers" downloading this open source software, tweaking it, and hurling their cars down the road at high speed. Great. The system also seems to have a single front facing camera. How will this detect for example a cyclist riding along the car and prevent the car from turning into him?

You seem to have pretty strong opinions without even actually taking the time to look into comma.ai and how it works. All it takes is 5 minutes to know that it actually uses the built-in safety systems in cars like ADAS, LKAS, ACC. Hence, they only support only specific make/models. It's not just the "single front facing camera".

But cars that have any cameras likely already have a front facing one. So if they support only cars that have other cameras it can use (and assuming now that autonomous driving requires camera/or lidar view) why do they even need the camera? Did he drive that civic autonomously without lidars and without it knowing what’s behind it?

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

#114

Post by rain1 »

commaai wrote: post #71
HALtheWise wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm... If you look in the actual lib/ directory where the work happens, you will see a bunch of high-performance C written in and generated by Acado, which is a very efficient optimization framework. It does look like there is a bunch of python logic for managing that controller, but a significant amount of work seems to have gone into performance optimization. I am curious how they prevent the Android GC from causi…

There's no Android GC, there's a Java GC. Python on Android isn't written in Java, it's CPython, written in C. Python has a GC as well, but we turn it off for the control loop processes. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/devel/selfdrive/co... Haters love to bring up the Python, but they never stick around long enough to explain exactly why it's a problem.

I think it's great that your code is open source. The other self driving cars are all based on secret code that the public is not allowed to inspect or audit. This is extremely worrying.

Having your code open source means that outsiders will notice flaws in it, try not to "push back" too much against them. Sometimes they will point out serious flaws that allow you to improve your code significantly, sometimes they will point out non-issues or simply be wrong about things. So instead you should embrace it and take the time to consider the feedback. The crowd is a valuable resource that you have, that closed source projects don't.

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

#115

Post by alkonaut »

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.

What’s wrong with good cruise control? Any modern car is already loaded with expensive cruise control, often with distance sensing, some times with lane assist etc. There is a huge market for this and a few players (such as Bosch Mobility) own the market. I don’t see why it’s a bad idea to try to enter this market as a startup. You don’t have to revolutionize or disrupt a market to have a viable product.

I think (like Hotz) that very good assist tech is the future, and dodgy self driving tech is a temporary fad.

Complete autonomy on geofenced highways may well be good enough soon that we can sleep or work for 90% of the commute because the autonomous system can give us 20 sec to take over when confused, rather than 1. And that can probably be solved with very cheap hardware (1-2 cameras, a front radar) compared to the huge expensive lidar and camera arrays you need for driving in complex scenarios.

So if someone can make a system that offers fantastic assist and limited but safe autonomy for 10% of the roads but 90% of the driving time - that’s not a bad thing.

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

#116

Post by jacksmith21006 »

raslah wrote: post #60

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 tr…

Disagree and think it does the opposite. It can never be done safely and with the crashes and deaths it gives what Waymo is doing a bad name.

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

#117

Post by magic-chicken »

commaai wrote: post #31
jaredklewis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disputing your claim, but how did you determine the comma Ai system was on par with that of autopilot and super cruise? In general, are there any standardized tests for self driving cars, like car safety ratings but for the driving part? Basically, is there even a way to measure how good a driving system is?

Not really. It's mostly subjective, but a good metric is time between user action needed. We did 2 hours of press demos on highways without a single one. (usually it's about an hour) In addition to us, we have a community of users on slack with thousands of miles of experience with each system. I think most would generally agree with the quality assessment. You'll also find a bunch of YouTube videos comparing them.

So you test the system with human drivers for a few miles, and if none of them dies then it's secure ? You actually rely on the subjectivity of uninformed users to assess the reliabilty of a safety-critical system ?

>> Not really. It's mostly subjective.

No. The quality of a safety-critical system is not subjective.

>> I think most would generally agree with the quality assessment.

You are not qualified to make that claim, and neither are your users.

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

#118

Post by sverige »

regulation_d wrote: post #110
Semirhage wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When push-button elevators were installed, they worked. Can you imagine if the pitch had been, “sometimes this elevator will kill the odd person, thanks for helping us work out the bugs.” As a bonus, the actual working elevator might not emerge until decades after installation began, and the early models only worked on alternate Wednesday’s.

This might be a valid point if the current system of driving wasn’t already killing millions of people per year.

"Millions" is an overstatement. Annual deaths worldwide are around 1.25 million. And deaths in the U.S. have declined significantly from their peak in the '70s.

All of that begs the question of whether autonomous cars will save lives. It is always asserted that it will "because humans are such bad drivers compared to computers," but there's no actual, real-world data to back up that claim. Oh yes, some of these vehicles have been tested with millions of road miles, but that is far from the scale of billions or trillions of road miles on every kind of road under all conditions where people travel currently.

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

#119

Post by wilsonnb2 »

rain1 wrote: post #114
commaai wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no Android GC, there's a Java GC. Python on Android isn't written in Java, it's CPython, written in C. Python has a GC as well, but we turn it off for the control loop processes. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/devel/selfdrive/co... Haters love to bring up the Python, but they never stick around long enough to explain exactly why it's a problem.

I think it's great that your code is open source. The other self driving cars are all based on secret code that the public is not allowed to inspect or audit. This is extremely worrying. Having your code open source means that outsiders will notice flaws in it, try not to "push back" too much against them. Sometimes they will point out serious flaws that allow you to improve your code significantly, sometimes they wi…

> But the software that enables the semi-autonomous driving is free to download. Hotz says this allows him to sidestep the regulatory issue, though it’s unclear whether NHTSA would agree. “We aren’t selling any products that control a car,” he says. “We are giving away free software, and software is speech.” (A spokesperson for NHTSA did not respond to a request for comment.)

Sounds like they're just using open source to avoid liability and side step regulators. I love open source, but I do not think it's being used for benevolent reasons here.

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

#120

Post by rain1 »

wilsonnb2 wrote: post #119
rain1 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's great that your code is open source. The other self driving cars are all based on secret code that the public is not allowed to inspect or audit. This is extremely worrying. Having your code open source means that outsiders will notice flaws in it, try not to "push back" too much against them. Sometimes they will point out serious flaws that allow you to improve your code significantly, sometimes they wi…

> But the software that enables the semi-autonomous driving is free to download. Hotz says this allows him to sidestep the regulatory issue, though it’s unclear whether NHTSA would agree. “We aren’t selling any products that control a car,” he says. “We are giving away free software, and software is speech.” (A spokesperson for NHTSA did not respond to a request for comment.) Sounds like they're just using open sourc…

Yow! Shows how naive I am. Thanks for the reply..
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