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.
George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars
121–130 of 147 posts
Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars
#122I think that this being marketed as anything other than the next generation of cruise control is a lie. Don’t get me wrong, for that it’s absolutely great. I would pay for this kit (if my car was new enough to actually have software for it) just for the ability to be able to eat a sandwich on the way to work or cruise down the boring parts of E6 or I-10 in a more relaxed, reclined position. I think Hotz is wrong abou…
A reliable and smarter cruise control can save so many lives. I think we’re trying to jump the gun sometimes.
The number of highway deaths is insane. If software just augmented humans better and saved those people/animals we’re coming out ahead as a civilization.
Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that glorified cruise control actually exists. Real self driving cars, on the other hand, only exist in inspirational videos.
Or on dedicated tracks.
A 24/7 transport system that gets you to the last mile and is cheap is an impressive achievement.
Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars
#124But it's fine for a lifestyle business I suppose. You can market to them and sell them over-priced odb2 fit-bit-for-your-car dongles. Until Honda or whoever comes out with a "good enough" consumer grade "auto-pilot" (whatever that means these days because you still have to watch the car like a teenage driver), you'll loose a huge swatch of users right there who are only spending time on it to be on the cutting edge of tech and to look cool for their friends. Once it becomes a blender, those users will leave and go on to the next thing that grabs their attention in a banner ad. Or else people will get bored, loose interest after the first few joy rides with their friends. I'd imagine retention would be difficult in a business like that which takes a lot of sustained effort and engagement from the users.
The only possible path forward in this market is to partner with an OEM (car manufacture vroom vroom), have access to users, or make some kind of must-have tech that you can then con one of the real big money backed self-driving companies into buying. I've seen a bunch of web apps popping up lately that offer to annotate your training data, those seem like a lot better pump and dump tech companies than this dashcam that plays Pandora and runs some cool python PID controller.
Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars
#125This guy is all talk and represents one problem with Silicon Valley. There are a lot of people now who can talk the talk and get the attention needed to get money but with no ability to deliver. Stop giving him attention until he actually shows something that matches even a little bit of what he is promising. People who know what they're doing technically are deeply aware of the issues with their technology. Anyone i…
You are aware we are giving away open source software that will control your car, right? It's online today! And it's on par with the best systems money can buy, Tesla Autopilot and GM Super Cruise. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot No ability to deliver?
> Hotz has been teasing a $1,000 after-market kit called Comma One that would let customers transform their dumb cars into smart, self-driving ones. But after a sternly worded letter from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last year, Hotz abandoned those plans
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-selfdriving-safety-idUSKCN...
Sounds like you have a nice demo in a controlled known environment. It's a far way off the promise made previously about building a self driving car, a claim which is now being retracted. Best of luck turning it into a product. Watch out for those edge cases.
Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Unlike crash safety, crash and burn, topple etc, there are no open tests or third party certifications that can verify that car model X is subjectively this safe and passes this scenarios.
The big cos are notoriously secretive and throwing a lot of marketing money to create hype.
I’m just glad that certain states have allowed such cars to be tested on the streets.
We have to start somewhere.
Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars
#127Earlier 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.
Lack of type safety and static analysis tools. You can't apply formal verification to it. I wouldn't sit in a car in which any safety critical component was driven by python. Hopefully you would also not be able to get it certified for road use. I happen to know people that work on these problems for German automotive companies. This wouldn't fly there. I truly hope that solid engineering wins out over these approach…
Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars
#128Here'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...
As much as I love Python, you need realtime processing for this kind of things. You can't have a slow language with gc pauses and no way to guaranty execution time for a given operation.
Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's not a statically typed language for the most part, which brings in an entire class of bugs of its own. It's also an extremely mutable language. Great for scripts, but there is a reason why most large companies start bolting on types on whatever dynamic language they started with.
Most production languages that nominally do some static typing aren't statically very safe - certainly Java, Go, C/C++ are rife with runtime errors. After the required testing to eliminate those, it's not clear Python is significantly different. Edit: also, Python does eagerly signal type errors, unlike say Javascript or C, so you don't get silently wrong answers. C is the default language in auto industry. . Yeah, t…
Statically typed languages are mature and you have no excuse not using them if your doing anything that approaching a need for reliability. Cars do, social cat pictures, not so much.
Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars
#130Brilliant! 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?