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No one can read this article yet it is instantly upvoted to the very top of HN. Goes to show how discussion forums like this one just serve to amplify people's existing biases rather than actually educate them on anything new.
The Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively little progress towards fully autonomous cars despite a huge amount of investment. The most shocking detail: > Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-t…
Even on identical systems, different parameters will create totally different outcomes.
Maybe it has 'sudden movements' because it's actually a lot after and designed to react to things that Waymo would just plow right through. Maybe they're using crappy non-production sensors. Maybe they are entirely relying on instruments and not indirect data like GPS. I have no idea really, other than to say, these are very sophisticated systems and given the obvious opacity of the work ... it's going to be hard to tell what's what.
Clearly, we should aim for a less ambitious goal: ultra-compact self driving vehicles on dedicated and physically separated lanes, where cars cannot be encountered unless it's their fault, similar to bike and tram lines. This could increase city trafic capacity by an order of magnitude in congested central zones and suplement public transport in suburban, dispersed areas that cannot be properly served by buses. And i…
> dedicated and physically separated lanes We already have trams.
It's a moonshot, and the first to get it right will make far more than $2.5B in revenue.
What I've never understood is how you're going to get a car to understand a construction worker or cop doing hand signals without artificial general intelligence. Why even bother with the car until you've figured that out in the lab?
I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…
Would nobody sell them such tech or do they think anyone who solves this problem will put Uber out of business?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a weird take. How come Tesla gets to be a technology company but Uber is a services company?
One company builds a ride hailing app while the other builds one of the premier, high-performance EVs in the world with significant levels of driver assistance, over the air updates, and world-class onboard perception that industry incumbents readily admit is "years" ahead of their own development. How exactly would you characterize the comparison?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how setting up an entire new parallel road network all over the world is "less ambitious". Some of the best funded cities in this country aren't even able to lay a few miles of fiber for broadband internet.
Well, it would be the same network, with some road space dedicated to cars being repurposed for public transit. Cities do this all the time for buses.
I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…
I love rail but we'll probably see some kind of self driving before we get high speed rail between any of SD, SF, LA, or Vegas.