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Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

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Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#301

Post by rpcope1 »

compostable wrote: post #35
Mistletoe wrote: post #3

Sometimes I miss the carburetor.

Did you ever have to stand outside in the winter, in ice and show, with the hood propped open, spraying starting fluid into the carburetor, and manually holding the throttle open, so that your engine could get to the proper temperature? Did you ever floor a car and have the engine shut off because there was too much fuel? No thanks, I don't want to go back to those days!

I don't think we have to go back to carbs with manual chokes (not that it was all that bad anyways), but frankly an electronic TBI like GM put on the very last generation I small block Chevy engines (with wasted spark ignitions instead of a distributor) would have been a good place to stop (as they're dead simple to work on and program unlike a lot of newer FI setups, and overcome the major problems with carbs like needing altitude and temperature compensation).

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#302

Post by noir_lord »

ygra wrote: post #216
r_smart wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been learning WPF, and I want to shoot myself. It looks pretty, and is very flexible, but it's just so much damn typing. Plus the errors you get out of it are often pretty useless. Maybe my brain just doesn't get it, but the documentation makes me crazy too. I just hate everything about it.

WPF is a huge change from "traditional" UI frameworks like Windows Forms or Swing. It requires some rethinking and to get the most out of it you should really do things the WPF way in many (not all) cases, even though other options appear to work (they're just more work in the end and less flexible). The documentation is actually fairly good in my eyes iff you're only writing applications. As a library and custom con…

I came to WPF having not touched WinForms for nearly a decade and I fell in love immediately.

Once you accept that reactive data models are the 'correct' pattern things become so much simpler.

Throw in JSON.net and QuickType (amazing if you haven't seen it, feed it JSON or JSON Schema and it outputs correct code to serialize to from JSON in about 25 languages pretty much idiomatically (for C# it uses JSON.net for TypeScript interfaces and if you want it runtime validation).

It's a remarkably stable way of hoisting an API.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#303

Post by chipotle_coyote »

forapurpose wrote: post #266
samstave wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a tangent, but still germane to the thread: Why arent their efforts to create "autonomous only" traffic managment scenarios, where people drive into a given, known area, and the area then takes control of managing the traffic and vehicles. Such that you relinquish control of the vehicle to that area's control system, with your destination stated and then your vehicle is managed accordingly. For example, a parking…

That seems to match the right tool (AI driving) to the right job (well-defined, well-controlled situations). I seem to recall that similar ideas go back to the early 1990s, at least, for highways: Drive your car to the entrance ramp, plug in your destination, and the autonomous system takes it from there. But for many of these things, such as the Bay Bridge or a highway, it seems like there is a simpler solution: Put…

I suspect it's never been tried because the cost necessary to get from where we are now to there outweighs the potential benefit compared to more conventional transit solutions, carpooling, etc. Once automated driving gets to a point where it's possible to implement "autopilot-only" lanes (and doing so gets past the sociopolitical hurdles), I suspect those will come into play too, though.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#304

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

tcoff91 wrote: post #123
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(no judgement) Given that you've never worked in the field, what makes you think that?

It has a long history of use in Aerospace and military applications.

That's a reasonable starting assertion, I guess, but all kinds of things have long histories of use without precluding the validity of using other things. Sometimes things get used because of inertia. Sometimes things get used because people who don't really know the difference say things like "we definitely must use X" (historically X might be a megacorp technology company like SAP or Oracle or IBM) despite Y being just as good or better.

For instance, did you know that Windows XP has a long history of being used in military embedded devices that store user data (on a writeable, obviously, FAT32 file system) where the way you turn them off is to just cut the power? I shit you not. I've seen state-of-the-art Navy-used sonars where the internal computer was running Windows, and you would transfer data off of the internal hard drive by FTP over Ethernet, and it had no on/off switch, just power or no power.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#305

Post by rconti »

nomel wrote: post #207
snowwrestler wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. That can be life or death. In fact, "Apple isn't ready to engineer phones at a life-or-death standard" was a fairly common critique of the iPhone in the early days. In response, Apple ran a little PR campaign around their radio engineering efforts--they had a web page that showed all the cool-looking rooms for testing radios, which…

> The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. An iPhone handling an emergency call is an exceptional use case. A car driving is not an exceptional use case for a car. A life and death scenario is occurs every few minutes, or continuously for something like a mountain road, if something like brakes, limited throttle, or steering were to fail. But, I would, naively, assume that…

Is a Tesla steer-by-wire? No.

It seems you have to prove that failure of these hack-y systems would lead to the disastrous result you postulate.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#306

Post by rconti »

vvanders wrote: post #204
devy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the infotainment system caused the MCUs to reboot while someone traveling "130mph on San Mateo Bridge" and that caused the break system to segfault due to unconventional way of loading parts firmware, it might be a life&death situation, easily. Examples in that threads go on, literally hundreds!

Well, you can reboot the system while driving(both console and dash), nothing special happens other than the AC turning off for a brief period of time. Brakes, wheel, throttle all respond normally. Source: Done this a few times to clear bad map data or occasional glitch.

Doesn't surprise me -- a couple of times my new 3 has had nothing on the display but it's still happy to let me put it in gear and drive away, and the display pops up within a second or two.

To be sure, it's a bit unsettling, and I wouldn't be thrilled about it deciding to not work for a day or two, but, in a way, it makes me MORE comfortable that the vehicle control systems function as expected.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#307

Post by mvpu »

Let's look at the facts: a) Tesla is the most shorted stock in history, b) 1000s of hackers are working hard to break things like this, c) if it was possible to break it and damage the company someone would have done it already. This just feels like an disgruntled employee.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#308

Post by rconti »

mfarris wrote: post #295
rsync wrote: post #191

The most disturbing part of this, for me, is this line in the very first tweet: "... caused almost the entire fleet to reboot loop ..." I am not interested in being part of someone's fleet . The fact that they use this language at all to describe an end-user who has purchased an automobile suggests that their expectations and my own - of what it means to purchase and operate a car - are in deeply (possibly dangerousl…

"Fleet" is longstanding car industry lingo. Not something Tesla dreamed up to keep you under their boot. Source: Father worked in car industry. All of my neighbors, too. Pretty much everyone I knew and then, eventually, me... albeit tangentially.

Parent is not objecting to the term; he's objecting to the implication that all of these dependencies and connections make the car more akin to something you rent rather than own, which is a legitimate concern.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#310

Post by justAnotherNET »

taurath wrote: post #267
badbug wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different priorities. The goal isn't to make beautiful software. The goal is a system flexible enough to meet the users needs. I also think it is a cultural. See SAP's blog entry "Why users might think their SAP user interface is crumby" https://blogs.sap.com/2015/09/15/why-users-might-think-their...

Also see: JIRA

I honestly despise JIRA.
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