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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

#191

Post by SheinhardtWigCo »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #31
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…

I would not take Elon and Tesla at face value. While they are currently going all in on cameras, I wouldn't put it past them to 180 and decide "turns out we need new hardware, and we're going to eat the cost considering our revenue and market cap." They recently filed to test new millimeter wave radar equipment operating at 60GHz [1], so I wouldn't say they're married to vision only if it turns out vision only isn't…

The cost of retrofits will eventually be covered by the $6-12k everyone has paid for "FSD", if they can drag this out until solid-state LIDAR is cheap enough. And meanwhile they get to book that revenue as pure profit.

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

#192

Post by mdorazio »

kelnos wrote: post #99
jowday wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the AV space, so I guess you’ll just have to trust me. I assume Cruise internals look very similar to the internals at other AV companies, which I think is a safe assumption. >The sensors and automation decisionmaking is going to be identical, and that's where the hard parts are. Sensors will be very different. LIDAR prices are coming down but we’re still a while off from incorporating it into consumer vehi…

> Automotive decision making will also be extremely different. Modern robotaxis rely on very high detail HD maps that are continuously updated. It’s impossible to scale that nationwide in a way that would work in a consumer car. What are the challenges here? Is it simply the different scale required on the backend to handle tens (hundreds?) of millions of privately-owned cars, vs. that required for orders of magnitud…

I also work in the industry. You've got a couple misconceptions here about how AVs actually work. First, virtually all processing to determine what to do on the road is done locally, in real-time. Relying on internet connectivity would be a safety nightmare. This means you have to pre-train your models to deal with everything in a geofenced area before the car starts driving there. Hence the need for very high detail maps of the areas where robotaxis are going to run. Second, the concept of L3/L4/L5 driving doesn't quite match the reality of how things are playing out. Due to the limitations and cost of deploying current-gen self-driving systems, AV companies are designing vehicles to be L4/L5 within a specified design domain. That means a specific set of roads under specific weather conditions, light conditions, etc. Then those design domains will slowly expand until one day, years from now, vehicles are actually what the public now thinks of as "L4/L5" and at that time it will be possible to deploy the tech for privately owned vehicles. Until then, you're looking at commercial fleet vehicles in specific use cases only (robotaxis, automated heavy duty trucks, farming equipment, etc.)

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

#193

Post by bluGill »

andbberger wrote: post #184
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 don't wish to come within 100km of you as a pedestrian

If there is anything about what I wrote that is unique to me it is that I'm honest enough to admit to them. Everything I wrote applies to everyone who drives more than a few km in their lifetime. They might not happen everyday, but they happen to everyone on a somewhat regular basis.

I really wish transit was better. Even in cities that have what we call good transit, it is still bad enough to too many people drive. (Note, the above issues with human drivers apply to bus and tram drivers.)

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

#194

Post by nielsole »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #191
toomuchtodo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not take Elon and Tesla at face value. While they are currently going all in on cameras, I wouldn't put it past them to 180 and decide "turns out we need new hardware, and we're going to eat the cost considering our revenue and market cap." They recently filed to test new millimeter wave radar equipment operating at 60GHz [1], so I wouldn't say they're married to vision only if it turns out vision only isn't…

The cost of retrofits will eventually be covered by the $6-12k everyone has paid for "FSD", if they can drag this out until solid-state LIDAR is cheap enough. And meanwhile they get to book that revenue as pure profit.

> they get to book that revenue as pure profit.

Wouldn't you have to keep that on your books as liability in the same height as the income you had from the sale (as the true cost is not yet known)?

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

#195

Post by toomuchtodo »

nielsole wrote: post #194
SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of retrofits will eventually be covered by the $6-12k everyone has paid for "FSD", if they can drag this out until solid-state LIDAR is cheap enough. And meanwhile they get to book that revenue as pure profit.

> they get to book that revenue as pure profit. Wouldn't you have to keep that on your books as liability in the same height as the income you had from the sale (as the true cost is not yet known)?

They do, they recognize the revenue at FSD milestones, not all upfront.

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

#196

Post by andbberger »

bluGill wrote: post #193
andbberger wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't wish to come within 100km of you as a pedestrian

If there is anything about what I wrote that is unique to me it is that I'm honest enough to admit to them. Everything I wrote applies to everyone who drives more than a few km in their lifetime. They might not happen everyday, but they happen to everyone on a somewhat regular basis. I really wish transit was better. Even in cities that have what we call good transit, it is still bad enough to too many people drive.…

you should be driving slow enough that your braking distance matches your line of sight. I think most people do, especially in dense fog.

there are plenty of cities with great transit, just not in the states

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

#197

Post by jklinger410 »

sonofhans wrote: post #105
jklinger410 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can safely assume most of the major players have thought through ideas like this and abandoned them for good reasons I'd LOVE to hear the reasons why this system won't work. If it is something other than all the big car companies refuse play nice with each other I will be SHOCKED.

Let’s assume your proposal — wires in the road to aid lane-keeping — works perfectly. What does it get us aside from lane-keeping? That’s far from the hardest problem. It doesn’t account for stopped vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, deer, or any of the other things human drivers commonly encounter and avoid without fanfare. Even if we imagine some sort of car-utopia where only AV vehicles are allowed on your perfect r…

> What does it get us aside from lane-keeping?

Corner identifying, light changing, cross-walk identifying, speed limits, addresses. Not to mention, if the car can't mistake a hunched over person on the side of the road as a curb (because the curb identifies itself) it makes everything else easier to identify. More computation can be freed up to identify things that ARE NOT KNOWN if there is something that IS known.

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

#198

Post by bluGill »

andbberger wrote: post #196
bluGill wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is anything about what I wrote that is unique to me it is that I'm honest enough to admit to them. Everything I wrote applies to everyone who drives more than a few km in their lifetime. They might not happen everyday, but they happen to everyone on a somewhat regular basis. I really wish transit was better. Even in cities that have what we call good transit, it is still bad enough to too many people drive.…

you should be driving slow enough that your braking distance matches your line of sight. I think most people do, especially in dense fog. there are plenty of cities with great transit, just not in the states

People slow down in dense fog, but they slow down to see taillights distance which isn't enough for anything unlighted. People don't slow down for sun glare - that would be dangerous as the car behind you isn't - instead they assume there is nothing there, or they can figure out something is happening from the other lanes that aren't in the sun glare.

Even in cities you consider to have great transit there is room for improvement.

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

#199

Post by SheinhardtWigCo »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #195
nielsole wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they get to book that revenue as pure profit. Wouldn't you have to keep that on your books as liability in the same height as the income you had from the sale (as the true cost is not yet known)?

They do, they recognize the revenue at FSD milestones, not all upfront.

The milestones they've been using are bullshit - trivial and/or half-baked feature releases (e.g. stop sign and traffic light recognition) that are not reflective of the real challenges in shipping vision-only L5 autonomy. They already recognize half upfront, which is nuts.

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

#200

Post by olyjohn »

epgui wrote: post #116
kelnos wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 figu…

> 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.

IMO, it's 16+ years of life experience that a computer doesn't get. Sure we train computers on what things likely are in pictures, and where they are on some sort of map. But that gives zero context into the 50,000 other things going on at any moment in a busy street.

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