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Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

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Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#491
> China has a law in place that mandates all electric cars send real time telemetry to their government servers - model s/x/3, NIO cars and any other electric car if they're driving already complies with that law to be road certified. don't be surprised if that becomes a mandate in other countries

Free software cars when?

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day that still doesn't really answer the question: "Do companies save money by mistreating employees?" I don't think you can answer that question by just looking at Tesla.

I'm not sure that's quite a fair way of wording that (legitimate) question. The whole company seems to be operating in the "burning the candle at both ends," not just the workers at the bottom. Also, it's not just "saving money" but pushing super hard to accomplish something extraordinary, i.e. generating new revenue, not just reducing costs. Additionally, the workers are partially compensated via stock options, so t…

”Additionally, the workers are partially compensated via stock options, so they share in the success of the company even if not through higher wages alone.”

I wonder if the constant burnout and churn keeps employees from vesting and thus ever collecting much if anything in stock?

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#493
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were that easy to setup tech-based infrastructure, we would have had positive train control implemented years ago.

You're right. We should all just give up. I mean, heck. If it were that easy to start a unicorn... But seriously - I am not saying its easy , I'm just surprised that we haven't made much (publicly known about/announced) efforts along these lines. I mean, we have TCP down pretty good - if we are simply thinking of cars as packets, a lot of the math should exist to ensure collision-less delivery?

Well TCP doesn't do collision avoidance, it's a link layer thing. And on Ethernet, it is collision detection on the shared medium. Wireless does avoidance due to the hidden terminal problem.

Neither of these models is really analogous to cars on the road.

But applying collision detection and exponential back off in road traffic is a "fun" thought experiment.

A more apt model would be critical sections and semaphores from concurrent programming. Which is named after a collision avoidance scheme used to control trains. And we all know how difficult concurrent programming can be. I don't want traffic with deadlocks, starvation, busy waiting or live locks.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#494
post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such thing does exist? I thought traffict light only time-based on no sensor involved.

Depends on the area but yeah many intersections use sensors (cameras, sometimes under the road pressure sensors, etc) to make anywhere from subtle to extreme changes based on traffic patterns. The under the road pressure sensor has been around for decades. When I was a kid there was one light that, when you drove over the pressure sensor, it wouldn't really do much. But if you backed up and drove over it again it mus…

As a sibling comment noted, it's not a pressure sensor [1] but an induction loop.

The Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_loop#Vehicle_detecti... has fairly extensive details on modern implementation.

[1] These do exist for weight-in-motion systems, however.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree completely. Hard real time is possible with Linux, we use it for sub millisecond control of Traffic Lights. The only issue we ever hit is proving that the code running is the stuff we expected to run.

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…

Well this would mean collaboration between autonomous car manufacturers to build a common protocol. And this does not fit with their business model of getting massive investment on the grounds of potentially being the first player on the market.

I don't think there is any possibility of large scale autonomous driving without a shared control infrastructure. Autonomous driving will only work as long as autonomous cars are a small minority.

As soon as they stop being in the minority, some shared control infrastructure is necessary.

Case in point: 4 cars arriving in a no-lights 4 way intersection simultaneously will cause a deadlock. A tie breaking scheme requiring some form of communication is necessary.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#496
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Typ…

I'd like to know more about this, can you recommend some good places to learn about it?

The actual principal is simple, your classes have private properties which contain the thing, you use get/set on public properties and on the set you raise a property change event (that's declared via an interface).

WPF binds to those objects and when you change the thing via a public property the change notification is fired and the UI updates.

Docs you want are MVVM and particularly INotifyProperyChanged.

https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/explain-inotifypropert...

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon nearly brought the newly merged X and Confinity to its knees during a critical period in its development by 1) insisting on the "X" brand when Paypal was more popular with users, and 2) insisting on Windows over Linux despite the protests of his tech team. Soon after he was ousted and Thiel was made CEO. Interesting to see he's still pushing Windows. Source: Paypal Wars by Eric Jackson

read this book too. The insistence on Windows blew my mind, given his "reputation" as an engineer.

The argument (at the time) was that Windows C++ tools were better than anything on GNU/Linux of the time. Also, in most non-CS fields (aka "real" engineering fields ahem) Windows, for better or worse, is still heavily entrenched. I have mixed feelings on this, as I am a Unix junky but it requires a lot of arcane knowledge to be effective, which many folk don’t have the wherewithal to acquire.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive been picturing the rail problem for some time as well. Not just for cars, but also for cargo... just have a constant gondola-like conveyer that detaches a platform from the line to slow it enough to allow for cargo to get on, then re-zip-it backinto the line and speed it along, de-rail it once it hits its exit/location... ideally though, in cities, there would be no surface streets and all cars would have their o…

> What would SF look like if a superstructure was built above all streets and all pedestrian and bike traffic was moved up there? The street level would be dark and storefronts would become difficult to access. If the stores moved up to the 2nd floor (a massive transformation of real estate, probably greatly reducing available living space), what would go on the first level? Not many people would want to live in the…

It's not a pure hypothetical, large parts of contemporary Chicago were built up a level.

The results are mostly "garden apartments" which are damp, dim, and slightly less expensive.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#499
post #8

Why is this interesting or surprising? Of course almost all challengers have hacky tech under the hood because they don't have the resources. Winning from that position is possible not because of generally better tech but by delivering something that the incumbents don't. Remember the demo of the first iPhone (vs the huge expertise of Nokia). Or how Microsoft won the desktop starting from a single user, cooperative m…

there are 2 kinds of startups: those with shitty software, and those with shitty software and customers

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#500
post #335

I used to work at SpaceX on the team that did a piece of software called "WarpDrive". It was a massive monolithic ASP.NET application, with large swaths done with ASP.NET WebForms and a slow frontier of ASP.NET MVC gradually growing when I was working there. This application was responsible for practically everything that ran the factory: inventory, supply chain management, cost analysis, etc. Elon is a big Windows f…

The majority of the professional world runs on Windows. There are many advantages: (1) Stable platform that's backward compatible over long periods of time. (2) Very good rapid application development tooling, e.g. Visual Studio which is probably still the best IDE overall. (3) A huge trained developer base making it easy to recruit. Same goes for IT personnel. (4) A huge pool of software, custom dev firms, etc. (5)…

I don't agree with most of it (except that VisualStudio is a really good product). Windows is a consumer platform for playing games and having fun at home. It is also very expensive in corporate/server space. I have seen backwards compatibility broken many times (drivers no longer supported), it doesn't even support other arch than x86 and it is bloated.
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