211–220 of 231 posts
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No, Tesla is nowhere near self-driving capability. Collecting a bunch of unsupervised data on its own is not that useful.
I just drove from Dallas to southwestern Colorado and back. Of that, I estimate I drove ~15% of the entire miles driven. The rest was the car driving itself.
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> 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…
We have autonomous trains on controlled lines, and yet they can't run in close formation, and they still need parking space.
Somehow they felt that they would simply "be the world's transportation" (their stated goal) based on a completely unproven technology.
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…
The United States is structurally incapable of large-scale public works projects. There are a lot of reasons for this and they aren’t particularly partisan, rather reflect how decisions are made. My guess is places like China and Singapore will have the first true deployments of self-driving, because they’re actually capable of building road infrastructure to support it when it isn’t fully level 5.
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The United States is structurally incapable of large-scale public works projects. There are a lot of reasons for this and they aren’t particularly partisan, rather reflect how decisions are made. My guess is places like China and Singapore will have the first true deployments of self-driving, because they’re actually capable of building road infrastructure to support it when it isn’t fully level 5.
Have you really forgotten the Hoover Dam?
The disfunctionality of the US at large-scale projects emerged in the 80s, possibly to do with both the creation of the modern Republican agenda by Ailes (divisive populism over bipartisanship, and preference of tax cuts over maintaining infrastructure), and the acceptance of the environmental movement by the Democrats. Maybe also by the illusion that the the demise of the USSR meant the "end of history" and the focus can turn from trying to get the US to be #1 to prying to get a bigger slice of the pie domestically...
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…
Autonomous driving to me seems a lot like the domain of robotic crowd navigation, and the crowd navigation research seems to show us that most of the methods suspected in-use by AV programs tend to fall apart under trivial thresholds of uncertainty/congestion. So, I'm less surprised that Uber didn't make much fundamental progress here, and more surprised that anybody else has done better. edit: I say this as someone…
Even the best tech today can only drive reliably and safely in good daylight weather conditions, with no chance of protests.
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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.
>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. Google/Waymo did a pilot - letting employees commute - and canceled because the system was too good and staff stopped paying attention. This is a clip, there was a longer clip and description in a Waymo CEO…
Most California weather driving is very mundane and boring. ...but the moment you throw an outside variable into the mix - the computer cannot identify objects, and therefore cannot predict outcomes.
We're still teaching them to recognize Stop signs. How are they supposed to distinguish between a floating plastic bag and a 5 year old child?
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Have you really forgotten the Hoover Dam?
The Hoover Dam was 85 years ago, the moon landing program was 50+ years ago, the interstate buildout was 40-60 years ago. The disfunctionality of the US at large-scale projects emerged in the 80s, possibly to do with both the creation of the modern Republican agenda by Ailes (divisive populism over bipartisanship, and preference of tax cuts over maintaining infrastructure), and the acceptance of the environmental mov…
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The Hoover Dam was 85 years ago, the moon landing program was 50+ years ago, the interstate buildout was 40-60 years ago. The disfunctionality of the US at large-scale projects emerged in the 80s, possibly to do with both the creation of the modern Republican agenda by Ailes (divisive populism over bipartisanship, and preference of tax cuts over maintaining infrastructure), and the acceptance of the environmental mov…
If it only emerged in the 80s, then it's hardly insurmountable.
See "This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful: The long, sordid history of New York’s Penn Station shows how progressives have made it too hard for the government to do big things—and why, believe it or not, Robert Caro is to blame" https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/ez0l93/this_is_why_y...
Of course the elephant in the room is money. The public doesn't seem to have enough money to do projects.
Why? Because structurally things cost a lot more than they used to do. ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/10/book-review-the-prices... -- http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-236-alex-tabarr... )
One big takeaway point - IMHO - is that there's no scale, no growth in construction. So there's no big market, no new frontier for optimizing it. Sure, there are always a few startups, but that's peanuts.
Where are the trillions of dollars allocated to get good at building things in this century/millenium? Umm, nowhere. (Or basically spent on iPhones, housing and healthcare.) So it's no surprise that everything is custom made, challenged in court, takes forever and costs all the funds available and some.