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I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

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Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#111

Post by mikeryan »

jowday wrote: post #12
rmason wrote: post #5

I'm in Michigan and I've watched the auto industry close up for a long time. I've got friends at the Big 3. GM decided it was better to put an adult in charge of Cruise. Someone they trusted and they thought had a clue on tech. Turns out it didn't work well. GM learned the hard way the founder was the best CEO of Cruise. There's a lot they do not understand about how startups and Silicon Valley work.

If anything, I got the impression Dan had a pretty good handle on the technical aspects of Cruise and the path forward for the company, and that the GM CEO fired him because she didn't like what she was hearing from him. Dan wanted to pursue expanding Cruise robotaxis, while Mary Barra wanted to find ways to integrate Cruise's technology into consumer GM cars - that's not how Cruise/Waymo/Zoox-style robotaxis work, a…

GM was also ready to get into bed with Nikola which was an obvious pile of bullshit even before the Hindenburg report. I’d not want to be the one holding the bag there while management scrambles to catch up. Probably the best for him to get out now.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#112

Post by paganel »

bluGill wrote: post #32
walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

My problem with cameras is as a human I'm well aware there are things that I can't see and so i rely on faith. I've driven in dense fog trusting that nobody else would be stupid enough to do the same (fortunately taillights can be seen through fog, but not many other dangers that normally are not on the road, but if so they are dead). I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear. I…

> I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear

Not sure how to say it, but try to never do that going forward, please, for your sake and for the sake of the others who share the same road with you. Yes, driving "blind" for one second, maybe two seconds (even though it's uncomfortable for me at this point) from time to time is not the end of the world, particularly if you're driving straight and you had "scanned" the road in front of you beforehand, but driving while "trusting" in others will get you into accidents. Never drive faster than you can see.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#113

Post by AlwaysRock »

shrubble wrote: post #28

I have a great deal of skepticism concerning fully-autonomous cars, TBH. There are just too many corner cases around weather and sensing, etc., not to mention insurance and other regulatory hurdles. Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense wh…

It's a bit frustrating because if all calls were mostly autonomous we could likely have less traffic deaths within a few years. Self driving cars are already great at making snap judgements. Better than most humans. They also make a lot less stupid mistakes than humans do.

The edge cases are the hard part. A human knows what to do when a random construction worker or cop is directing traffic. Self driving car? Not so much.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#114

Post by AlwaysRock »

kingforaday wrote: post #4

Generally asking. How does something like this get top three spot on HN? Submitted 30 mins ago and first comment 4 mins ago by a user whose only submission is this. Just curious on the mechanics.

People like self driving cars and news about that space.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#115

Post by onethought »

waffle_maniac wrote: post #84
ahmedalsudani wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about the resolution, but the sensor is rather large. Resolution isn't nearly as important as being able to see clearly in low light. Re: dirty windshield. Humans see through those, and we have windshield wipers if visibility is impeded. I'm still excited about the LIDAR possibilities but vision alone has done a remarkable job.

> I'm still excited about the LIDAR possibilities but vision alone has done a remarkable job. Not for Tesla. So many interventions. So many situations where the car actively tries to kill the driver and pedestrians.

But it's not finished. Have you asked Cruise testers how many interventions they have had to do in equivalent drives as Tesla FSD Beta?

It's strange to me that Tesla who are building this in the open are criticised for being dishonest. Meanwhile ALL the competitors are closed door private development and some how we should trust them more? In an industry that is known for deceitful behaviour.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#116

Post by epgui »

kelnos wrote: post #87
epgui wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound like behaviour that is made safer just because a human is at the wheel.

I don't think that was the parent's point. These things could be made safer with other detection technologies beyond plain cameras. A human driver can make a conscious, nuanced decision to make these "faith-based decisions", but a computer may not be able to. So perhaps it might just completely refuse to drive in those situations if all it has is a camera, but it can't see anything due to fog or terrain, even if it w…

It's really not clear to me what gives a human the nearly-magical ability to make decisions that a computer could not possibly make.

If anything, I think we've seen that computers are much better than humans at making decisions in an ever-expanding set of narrow contexts (eg.: chess, go, protein folding...). It's not so much a matter of "can a computer do it better", it's more a question of "when are we going to figure out how to break down the problem in a way that a computer can solve much better than a human".

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#117

Post by fieldcny »

madamelic wrote: post #97
kelnos wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder if, deep down, Tesla's decision is rooted in aesthetics. The cars with all the crazy sensing equipment on them are ugly as sin. That really doesn't jive with Tesla's brand at all. A more charitable interpretation may be aerodynamics; making those worse would reduce the car's range. Both of those reasons are of course flimsy, if true: form cannot always come before function.

> I do wonder if, deep down, Tesla's decision is rooted in aesthetics. I've always read it as Tesla trying to do a paradigm leap. It seems everyone in self-driving knows you can do it pretty well with a huge variety of sensors, but what if you got extremely good at only camera-based then added in the new sensors. Basically, if you can establish that the very worst case works, you can add in more sensors to go beyond…

Just to state the obvious, that assumes other sensors are net additive.

I’m not sure how valid an assumption that is, they could wind up just adding complexity and creating noise.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#118

Post by hnburnsy »

andrewia wrote: post #96
sanguy wrote: post #81

Cruise has been a disaster inside GM for awhile now with a lack of progress to bring Super-Cruise to all models all across the US. They have had several tenders for the data required to build out the Super-Cruise maps but these have all been a disaster as clear the critical knowledge is gone.

From what I know, GM Super Cruise is unrelated to Cruise LLC. GM has been developing Super Cruise on their own since 2013, and the system relies on a forward-facing camera and 3 radars (front and blind spots) to navigate the road. It links the camera's lane recognition data to 3D road maps stored onboard to anticipate the road ahead. It's also restricted to limited-access roads where pedestrians aren't a concern. Cru…

Thanks, that is confusing, was just going to ask if super cruise uses lidar. I see the answer is no.

So who is the CEO of super cruise and isn't "super cruise" better than "cruise"? I see "ultra cruise" (with LIDAR) is coming soon. Geeeesh.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#119

Post by ironman1478 »

vardump wrote: post #109
ironman1478 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of that camera data is labeled for distance measurement use cases?

Because cars (generally) move, probably most of it. You can compare successive frames and make predictions.

I think Tesla actually used radar data to provide ground truth for this. So they don't even do that to generate ground truth. What happens if things have the same relative speed when doing the labeling? Or low light conditions? How do you account for per part variation in lens and sensor designs and how it messes with your predictions?

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#120

Post by chrononaut »

paganel wrote: post #112
bluGill wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with cameras is as a human I'm well aware there are things that I can't see and so i rely on faith. I've driven in dense fog trusting that nobody else would be stupid enough to do the same (fortunately taillights can be seen through fog, but not many other dangers that normally are not on the road, but if so they are dead). I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear. I…

> I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear Not sure how to say it, but try to never do that going forward, please, for your sake and for the sake of the others who share the same road with you. Yes, driving "blind" for one second, maybe two seconds (even though it's uncomfortable for me at this point) from time to time is not the end of the world, particularly if you're driving…

> I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear

For others left wondering what this meant, I think GP meant "I often drive with [the sun] in my eyes at dawn/dusk .."

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