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

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131–140 of 147 posts

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

#131
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 No. Evolution created RNA, DNA, all kinds of animal languages, both sound- and chemical-based.

Any proof this is true? Sounds like conjecture to me.

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

#132
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

First, lidar is not a silver bullet and are still very cost prohibitive. Look at Mobileye and Supercruise which are both pretty good and only use radar, cameras and HD maps.

Second the camera is for the vision system and comma.ai hooks in the car via CANBUS to interpret the OEM radar signals.

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

#133
post #94
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

None of these built-in safety systems is design to work without a human driver having the actual responsibility. This is why e.g. ACC is a "comfort" system but not a "safety" system. Even systems like AEB don't come with a guarantee. They just might help.

>None of these built-in safety systems is design to work without a human driver having the actual responsibility

You are exactly right! which is why NEITHER comma.ai, Tesla's Autopilot, Nissan's Propilot, and GM Supercruise are being marketed as such i.e. only as L2/Partial Automation at the moment.

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

#134
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is the pinnacle of commercialized FSD. Have you seen their ads with actors? Tesla does ZERO marketing.

Waymo is taking their sweet time, Tesla is aggressively talking about autopilot. Far from Zero.

Send me a link to a Tesla Autopilot video or graphic brochure that is produced by the Tesla marketing team. I'll wait..

Meanwhile there are a few of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HrN12WG-2Q

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wasn't implying that static types solve everything, they just make things n+1 better and remove a class of bugs. 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.

What about Erlang?

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

#136
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 1980's the backup flight control software for landing the space shuttle ran on a HP-41 calculator, though they never had to use it AFAIK, with the multiple redundant onboard computers.

That's not what I found online: the devices running customized SW were apparently used as personal calculators by the crew and they would have also used them for manual calculation in case their flight computer had a problem. They weren't connected to other shuttle computers, were they?

I found multiple stories/blogs with recollections like this one from Smithsonian including the use of calculators on early missions before laptops were used:

https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/calculator-han...

I remembered reading it in the newspapers at the time which would have probably make the reports generally pre internet (or pre newspapers on the internet) in the 1980's. Of course I could be remembering it wrong or it could have been a HP calculator ad.

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

#137
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is taking their sweet time, Tesla is aggressively talking about autopilot. Far from Zero.

Send me a link to a Tesla Autopilot video or graphic brochure that is produced by the Tesla marketing team. I'll wait.. Meanwhile there are a few of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HrN12WG-2Q

what about musk tweets about it and vehicle presentations about autopilot 2 ?

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

#138
It seems likely that autonomy will not be first adopted by the US but instead in the 'wild west' of BRICs - Brazil, Russia, India or China.

Also maybe in a country small, rich, authoritarian, and organized enough to build infrastructure around it and limit liability like Singapore or Luxembourg.

And oh look, a cheap and open source solution that gets you started in CommaAI. I think they (or a fork of them) are quite good candidates for the first system to reach one trillion miles driven. There will no doubt be carnage. But the benefits of self driving are going to be first on display outside of US markets.

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

#139
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human latency is about 250ms.

I think that's not a fair comparison - a digital control system needs much finer time slices to compete with human reaction time. A control system that worked off of webcam images at 4hz would be a jittery mess, or just very slow if using a Kalman filter.

I agree it's not a fair comparison. Your analogy, though, confuses latency and throughput.

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

#140
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...

No safety relevant code is written in Python. All the safety relevant code runs real-time on a STM32 micro (inside the Panda), it's written in C and it's placed at the interface between the car and the Eon. This code ensures the satisfaction of the 2 main safety principles that a Level 2 driver assistance system must have: 1- the driver needs to be able to easily disengage the system at any time; 2- the vehicle must not alter its trajectory too quickly for the driver to safely react. See https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/devel/SAFETY.md

Among the processes that runs on the Eon, you can find algorithms for perception, planning and controls. Most of it is actually autogenerated code in C++ (see model predictive controls). Python code is used mainly as a wrapper and for non-computational expensive parts. To use functional safety terminology, the Eon functionality is considered QM (Quality Management). This means that any failure in delivering the desired output at the right time is perceived as bad quality and has no safety implications. So, how often those algorithms deliver the wrong output because some parts are written in Python? How often because RT isn’t enforced? Negligible. Pretty much all the mistakes of a level 2 driver assistance system are due to the quality of the algorithms, the models, the policies etc… There is a long way to go before changing the coding language will be the lowest hanging fruit to improve the system. Until then, using the simplest and most agile coding language (given performance constraints) is probably the best way to maximize quality.

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