Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division • Hacker News Board

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#51

Post by Philip-J-Fry » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

misiti3780 wrote: post #23

quickthrowman wrote: post #7

Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated. Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months? The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, b…

I don't think Tesla will have L5 in 2021, but the FSD videos on youtube are pretty impressive no ?

They're impressive when they're on a straight road. But I think it's very concerning just how noisy and low resolution the data the cameras are working with is. You can watch some of the videos and the car won't recognise other traffic until it's literally within 20 meters of the car. The 3D positions of the cars are jumping around constantly. It will get the speed of traffic wrong and try to turn straight in front of someone that would cause an accident. Yes it's Beta but it's still a huge huge huge way behind what Elon claimed it would be by now. And he's doubled down on the current hardware being all that's required.

I am 100% unconvinced that Tesla can get anywhere with their current system. I don't see how their low resolution cameras can get the necessary information for Level 5 autonomy. It almost feels like a reckless brute force approach to the problem. "Just let AI figure it out". Every autonomous vehicle company is going to be using some sort of machine learning but they're going to be feeding in huge amounts of data. Waymo for example is using multiple LIDAR scanners to build up an accurate 3D model of the world surrounding the car. That's what you need. Not what is effectively guesswork by an AI.

We still don't have truly reliable face detection even after decades of research and we're supposed to believe that a car can reliably drive itself on shitty low resolution cameras alone.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#52

Post by heymijo » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #15

quickthrowman wrote: post #7

Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated. Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months? The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, b…

Do you have a link to Elon's FSD claim? He definitely uses ambiguity to his benefit (eg "soon", "by fall/winter/spring/summer" (in which year?)), but I haven't heard anything about Tesla being L5 by the end of 2021.

This feels like bad faith. Musk has been making these claims every year since 2016. His coverage of these claims on HN is regular and thorough.

I went ahead and Googled one for you from 2020:

Tesla will be able to make its vehicles completely autonomous by the end of this year, founder Elon Musk has said.

It was already "very close" to achieving the basic requirements of this "level-five" autonomy, which requires no driver input, he said.

- July 2020

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#53

Post by nradov » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 9:22 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #29

rkalla wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

> but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? I love these wildly over-the-top exaggerations. When was the last bridge you saw without a barrier to prevent going off the edge? What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do? Remember it's projecting and predicting the road ahead, even around corners and in the dark - so being…

The human driver's two eyes still have a wider dynamic range than any current affordable video camera. This makes a huge difference in difficult lighting situations like looking into the sun.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#54

Post by okareaman » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 9:22 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #28

okareaman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Mountain View where Waymo tests their cars so I would observe them quite often. I sat a railroad crossing with one, thinking about what could go wrong. What if the signal didn't work, but you could hear the train coming and see it way off to the right or left if you looked. Are Waymo cars listening for trains? Or are they looking at railroad guards only? I suppose they could program the train schedu…

In addition to obeying all railroad crossing signals, I'm certain the Waymo Driver has the concept of trains built in. The long-range sensors on the vehicle would project the probable path of the train and determine if it was safe to proceed along the car's planned route.

I'm not certain the Waymo Driver has the concept of trains built in, but what if they did? How good is it? I applied at Waymo and found out they don't do well in the rain. What if they train is splashing up water in front of it? I'd like to know how it deals with falling rocks, which is a problem in California. Would they tell me or lie about self-driving, like some well known spoke persons do? What are the hackable weaknesses of Waymo? Have they tried to have visual and computer hackers fool the car and send it the wrong way? It just seems to me it's going to take awhile, maybe decades in my amatuer opinion.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#55

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 9:24 PM UTC

rkalla wrote: post #9

quickthrowman wrote: post #7

Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated. Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months? The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, b…

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

I think you’re right. For the AI we have today, it’s the equivalent of 1990. My guess is that as sensor arrays improve, wireless networks improve and quantum laptops are available in 2040 or so.

Think about it — most software is deployed cloud first these days, but one of the most complex computing tasks we have is relying on some black box computer.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#56

Post by ErikVandeWater » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 9:25 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #29

rkalla wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

> but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? I love these wildly over-the-top exaggerations. When was the last bridge you saw without a barrier to prevent going off the edge? What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do? Remember it's projecting and predicting the road ahead, even around corners and in the dark - so being…

> When was the last bridge you saw without a barrier to prevent going off the edge?

That's a disingenuous question. Many bridges have wooden guards that will prevent you from going off if you make a small mistake, but not a large one.

> What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do?

Humans can move their head, and block the sun with a hand, hat, or sunshade in the car. Humans have two eyes so if one is obstructed, the other may still get good vision.

> so being blinded by the sun isn't going to cause it to swerve wildly off course and off the bridge - it can continue to use the data it had before being blinded (just as you do).

Unless it's an incredibly well-trained AI, it may mistake lens flare for oncoming traffic, or a pedestrian. Car AI is not at the point where it has common sense to assume that lens flare is incorrect information.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#57

Post by mrtksn » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

ecpottinger wrote: post #33

okareaman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Mountain View where Waymo tests their cars so I would observe them quite often. I sat a railroad crossing with one, thinking about what could go wrong. What if the signal didn't work, but you could hear the train coming and see it way off to the right or left if you looked. Are Waymo cars listening for trains? Or are they looking at railroad guards only? I suppose they could program the train schedu…

In in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, a dad and his son were killed driving a car across a railway crossing with no gates. The dad (driver) was on his phone at the time and it is believed the phone blocked his view of the train and he was talking to much to hear the train. The person he was talking to said they were talking like normal and suddenly the phone cut off. Computers probably can not be worse that the people alrea…

People are great at some things that computers suck and computers are great at some things that human suck.

Machines doing horrible mistakes that no conscious person would ever do is problematic because we don’t have reliable error correction methods for that kind of mistakes.

A FSD car will never accidentally press acceleration pedal whey trying to press the brakes or loose control when trying to read an SMS. Instead it will mistake a bird for a train, hit and run someone and it would be like “something slowed me down, are my batteries degrading?”

How do you deal with a driver that fails to understand what’s going on?

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#58

Post by grecy » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #34

grecy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? I love these wildly over-the-top exaggerations. When was the last bridge you saw without a barrier to prevent going off the edge? What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do? Remember it's projecting and predicting the road ahead, even around corners and in the dark - so being…

"Blinded by the sun" is an understandable failure-state when you design a driving system that's reliant on cameras. From https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/feds-autopilot-was-acti... : "Theoretically, it should be possible to detect the side of a truck using cameras. But it's not always easy. In some lighting conditions, for example, the side of a trailer might be hard to distinguish from the sky behind it."

How many of the 100 daily fatalities on the roads in the US do you think are caused by drivers not "seeing clearly"?

The goal of an AI driver isn't no crashes. The goal is less crashes than human drivers.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#59

Post by thrwyoilarticle » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #29

rkalla wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

> but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? I love these wildly over-the-top exaggerations. When was the last bridge you saw without a barrier to prevent going off the edge? What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do? Remember it's projecting and predicting the road ahead, even around corners and in the dark - so being…

>What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do?

Self driving software tends to have very poor object permanence.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#60

Post by heavyset_go » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

theluketaylor wrote: post #38

rkalla wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

The edge case that I always go to on why truly autonomous vehicles are decades+ away is winter driving. Lane markers and road signs disappear. Slush and salt spray constantly obscure sensors. Winter driving as a human driver requires an entirely different approach and Waymo hangs out in the Arizona desert where there is basically never any inclement weather.

That, and construction, detours and city driving. In the latter, driving contexts can change without a second's notice, without any signs, markings or signals denoting the change. You learn what those contexts are from experience and understanding of what are ultimately complex social situations, and a shared understanding between you and the people around you.