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Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

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Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect autonomous cars to be have doubled down security against tinkering although I personally don't like that. The reason is purely public safety. If someone could re-program autonomous cars to slam into public crowds and places, imagine the havoc it can cause. A malicious actors can just walk in to parking garage, put in some wires and reprogram every vehicle they can get their hands on - imagine those sce…

You can already do that with existing cars(pretty much anything that has power steering, so last 30 years of cars) and yet you don't see people hijacking vehicles left and right this way(or any other way, you can cut someone's brakes in 5 seconds and yet it's extremely rare). I think this is a made up problem.

It's not about usual hijacking or rigging. It's about telling car to speed and slam into pedestrians if it sees large enough group of them, for example, and until that time it can just behave normally. Think of terrorists getting access to programmable robot that weighs over a ton, that can accelerate to 60 miles/hr under 5 seconds and it can identify objects in its surrounding.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#182
post #57

Q: "What's the primary design objective of the next-gen chip?" Mumbled Answer: "Safety." ...doesn't that mean the current-gen chip... isn't as safe as you want?

Are any cars ever as safe as you want?

Society has decided how to judge whether I am safe to drive, and I have passed the tests.

I worry that the laws on the books are insufficient to judge whether a computer is safe to drive. If Tesla already has plans to increase safety, I'd like to know how they judge it, where they think they are, where they'd like to improve, etc.

As a voter.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any one is doing this. This is the point Karpathy is making. Vision is essential and needs to be perfect and also has all the information to recreate the 3d environment. That's why lidar is not required and is expensive.

Vision is probablistic. You can improve your probabilities with more data and deeper nets, but the probability is never 100%. Inferring depth using triangulation of extracted features using vision is also probabilistic. Lidar gives you very rudimentary depth and positional data, but it is precise, and reliable, and the false positives are low. Lidar is not seeing the world as a series of probabilistic phantasms that…

I believe he claimed that they did have all of the sensors they need with hardware v2, and they had no need for LIDAR. We'll see if that's true. One thing that stood out to me is that he said they only need radar in front because you're only moving fast in that direction. Does that mean the cars will be susceptible to T-bone accidents?

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#184
Holy cow Elon said a lot of things that will drastically change the world in the next 2-3-5 years. I think it's very, very clear they've been doing a lot of stuff behind that scenes that nobody has given them credit for over these last 5 years. Everyone thought they were just throwing everything at the Model 3 ramp and doing nothing else, but it turns out the opposite is true.

At the end Elon said autonomy is basically their entire expense sheet!

Whether or not Tesla can pull it off is obviously going to be an enormous topic of debate with haters and lovers on each side.

This is super, super exciting. I'm going to grab the popcorn and enjoy watching Tesla try. Whether they succeed or fail I admire them aiming so high, and planning so far ahead.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pair it with a forward facing radar which is inexpensive and good at depth perception. Elon predicts all competitors will eventually drop lidar. He mentions it's expensive, but also not as good in a lot of cases (and all roads/signs are designed for vision). He argues that getting vision to work is a prerequisite for getting self-driving to work and once you have it working, lidar is worthless (and unnecessary).

Elon Musk is noted for his premature optimization. Case in point: both the Gigafactory (vastly overbuilt for the quantity of batteries actually produced) and the Alien Dreadnought (vastly overbuilt for the number of cars Tesla current produces...assuming that Tesla is ever able to get the fancy automation working). Boring Co digging a two-mile tunnel in West LA without bothering to learn how to pour concrete smoothly…

It's easier to optimize a working system than it is to get an optimized system working.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#186
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we implemented simple physical solutions such as wipers and window heaters in cars to maintain vision for drivers. What we didn't do was implement lidar to aid human drivers. Simple physical solutions are available if necessary for the cameras too. I don't have a tesla so I don't know what measures they use to keep the cameras clean but I'm sure they've thought about it and designed for it.

Great-grandparent comment suggests that they did not, in fact, design for it. Assuming the best is nice when you have no information, but we have information.

I'm not assuming the best, I'm assuming basics. We've just watched a presentation where Tesla put immense resources and talent into designing a state of the art vision processing chip. Do you think they're going to let it be rendered useless by not implementing simple physical measures to keep vision coming in from the cameras? (What measures are already there plus easy opportunity for improvement). Of course not. Such a line of argumentation is transparently bogus. I don't know why the top level commenter's autopilot turned off in the snow but trying to argue that that shows that snow renders cameras useless and makes lidar necessary is stupid. Sorry for the strong language but really, I don't know how else to put it.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They explain it in the software talk. In short, I think his thesis is: Lidar is expensive, and gives surprisingly limited data (just points of depth) and is like a crutch that will only get so far. It will not get you to full autonomy so why not spend the time and money on vision which will (as proven by humans). They also do use radar and ultrasonics (not visual spectrum). At some point your machine must be good eno…

One thing LIDAR can do that Tesla's ML vision software cannot is identify freeway dividers and trucks turning in front of the car. Once Tesla can actually handle those two extremely basic tasks maybe they can start talking about how vision is better than LIDAR. Until then, it's just more hot air, and that's not even taking into account Tesla's claims of using ML to predict the actions of uncontrolled independent agen…

They explained that in the talk to

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#189

The thing I don't get about Tesla is why they keep heaping more on their plate rather than just (for large values of just) re-doing the motive power bit. That alone is a massive challenge and it is not something they've licked at economies of scale that allow a $10K vehicle to be brought to market, which is what it will take to really make this a success. Every extra they tack on to the base product is one they will…

“diverting attention from the main problem they are dealing with, which may in the longer term leave open enough room for the competition to wiggle through.” Perhaps this is the intent rather than a side-effect.

Indeed, Musk has encouraged competitors from the start. I believe they open sourced a lot of their patents in an effort to encourage competition in the electric vehicle space.
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