Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

Post by erik_seaberg » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #164

xdavidliu wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument doesn't make sense. The purpose of this site is to discuss articles and other things. A prerequisite to discussing an article is to read more than its title. Sure, "real journalism" is good to have, but given that posts like this are allowed, what fraction of commenters in threads like this will sign up and support non-corporate journalism, and what fraction will clutter up the thread with uninformed co…

The argument doesn't make sense to you because you assume every other person on the site isn't willing to pay for news. However, there is a 3rd option: you could just not participate. There is nothing in the HN rules that dictate you must participate in everything posted here. By HN design, if such sites aren't useful to the HN community, they wouldn't be regularly upvoted. However counter to that, every week you see…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

yholio wrote: post #155

FreakyT wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Autonomous cars solve that in the same way an personal automobile currently does, albeit removing the inconvenience of actually driving. The problem with autonomous cars as compared to rail is that autonomy doesn't solve the other fundamental problem of cars: congestion. If I waved my magic wand and replaced every car in the bay area with a self-driving one overnight, roads would still clog at rush hour.

As long as human drivers are still in the mix, no, self-driving cars will not solve congestions. But fully self-driving cars could improve road efficiency by an order of magnitude. There is no need for trafic lights, they can drive in very close formation, they don't need parking space nor search for parking. Additionally, an inherently safe trafic system doesn't require 2 tons of steel around you for protection. The…

Post by vaccinator » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 5:18 AM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #28

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…

Post by debug-desperado » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 7:10 AM UTC

taf2 wrote: post #101

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile.

I bought an iRobot and I really think if they incorporated a camera it could be significantly better. There are obvious things it picks up and gets stuck in like shoelaces and power cables. Obviously a vacuum is not self driving but it’s a similar problem and at least my casual observation is that proximity sensors along won’t solve real world navigation because we need some kind of inference to understand what the i…

Post by cycrutchfield » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 7:34 AM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #196

cycrutchfield wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, according to Karpathy. The cars upload data (typically still images) which are then labeled by humans and used as training data to improve the models.

The impression I got from GTC a few years ago was that they're probably doing synthetic graphics simulations, based on edge cases identified by real world data. You don't really need 1000x real examples of a scenario, if one still image provides enough information for you to mimic it in simulation. (E.g. toppled barrel, weathered paint color and reflective stripe, in front of exit guard rail)