California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD • Hacker News Board

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#261

Post by PartiallyTyped » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

giobox wrote: post #257

rsynnott wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our ‘cameras’ are also so much better than any camera that could be put in a car (by most though not all metrics) that there is no real comparison.

By which metrics are human eyes outperforming “any camera that can be put in a car today”? This seems unlikely in almost any domain, given the much wider dynamic range camera sensors can capture - cameras can see into spectrum we simply can’t (infrared, UV…) and operate at much lower levels of light than a human eyeball while retaining full color vision using really cheap tech. They also don’t get tired or worse with…

They can also "see" much further than the average human can [1].

The only way I could imagine that we are superior to phone cameras is stabilisation, something that could be resolved with vertical integration that informs the sensors and image processing units about forces being applied to the vehicle (though this is coming from somebody outside the field so take it with many grains of salt).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKMBx6x-lOI

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#262

Post by simonh » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

725686 wrote: post #141

simonh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teslas don’t have LiDAR, which is used in all the best self driving systems.

He was talking about humans.

In which case he’s even more wrong. Humans use a whole mess of different senses while driving, including hearing, the inertial sensitivity in the inner ear, touch to feel vibrations and from the car and the wheels on the road. Plus we have a huge amount of contextual information about the meaning of what we are seeing from life experience outside driving, which no Tesla that currently exists can ever have.

It’s a clever bit of snark, but absurdly wide of the mark. If that’s actuary what the Tesla engineers think, no wonder they’re failing by their own criteria so completely.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#263

Post by LegitShady » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #63

endisneigh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price hikes). Gridlock won’t be a problem. Yes, this is why traffic is so minimal in the top 10 MSAs in America.

It just means prices are not high enough. Make it $100 to travel at rush hour on a particular stretch of road, and congestion will go away very quickly.

you will simply kill the businesses and housing for anyone living nearby as a side effect. It's not an effective solution because it ignores actual second order effects. Just like toll roads, it will push traffic to other paths while making people who rely on that stretch of road end up paying more.

I live in a city where they decided parking downtown was too cheap because people were parking for too long. The effect was massive drop in business EVERYWHERE downtown. Why would I travel there to pay $25 to park while I shop? I'll just go shop elsewhere, where parking is free, and too bad so sad to the shops that go out of business because policy makers don't understand second order effects.

Now downtown is filled with empty parking and empty stores.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#264

Post by treis » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

warning26 wrote: post #25

endisneigh wrote: post #16

Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock - pointless in the end. The induced demand would outweigh the benefits. States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure changes with dedicated bus lanes and prio…

You’re getting downvoted but you’re not necessarily wrong. I love the idea of self driving vehicles and I’m excited about them, but I harbor no illusions about them fixing traffic. The key question I would ask to self driving proponents is this - if you waved your magic wand and suddenly changed every car on the road to self driving…how would that impact traffic? At the very least traffic wouldn’t decrease . You coul…

It really depends on if we continue down personal car ownership or not. If not, then you can get pretty close to double throughput by appropriately sizing cars and lane splitting. Most trips are just the person without significant baggage. That can be handled by something like this:

https://electrek.co/2022/07/25/nimbus-one-50-mph-electric-ve...

Which is small enough to split lanes and double capacity.

It's also possible that with smart driving cars effectively everyone would be using an Uber like service. That makes it much easier to combine trips and put people into 4-12 sized car buses. If that comes to pass then going from mostly 1 person cars to that would multiply capacity many times.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#265

Post by TheLoafOfBread » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

rich_sasha wrote: post #193

725686 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was talking about humans.

Humans don't have lidar either.

And birds don't have jet engine, yet nobody is trying to replicate flight by wing flapping as a bird.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#266

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 4:55 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #239

acover wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it different than kickstarter? Genuine question. Is it because Tesla is a large company and should have self funded it?

Any Kickstarter is obliged to be very explicit about the risks. They're required to have a section in the pitch dedicated to what might go wrong, and Kickstarter itself has text everywhere reminding you that rewards are not guaranteed. Tesla, on the other hand, never acknowledges the very real possibility that your extremely expensive vehicle never sees full self driving.

The sale page is pretty explicit about what you’re buying and has this note:

> The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.

Also, at this point, my experience with the FSD package in my 2020 Model 3 is that it is not misleading to call it a “FSD beta”: in specific predictable situations it has problems with maneuvers but, over the last month or so, it’s continuously gotten better at making full trips without disengaging.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#267

Post by dinkumthinkum » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

theCrowing wrote: post #229

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your examples work against you, I think. So, in 20 years we have some incremental improvements. I think ‘82 - ‘02 was a bit more dramatic than your example. AGI requires crossing a barrier that we don’t really know is realistically possible with the type of technology we have currently. There are a lot of pop crap radio now, WoW just released another expansion, the latest iPhone has some pretty forgettable features c…

The jump from 134,000 (82) to 9.5 million (02) transistors was a significant one, but it's nothing compared to the leaps and bounds made when transitioning to 20 billion transistors (2022). It's a staggering difference that truly demonstrates the magnitude of the advances made in the last 20 years. The 80s and early 90s were computational winters.

I think you should go back Patterson’s book. The benefits of Moore’s law ended and then what happened? I think what you are trying to suggest flies in the face of all conventional wisdom of computer hardware.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#268

Post by dinkumthinkum » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

jimkleiber wrote: post #94

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Do you find Uber and Lyft to be affordable or a financially sensible means of regular transportation?

One of the main costs is labor. Another is fuel. Get rid of labor and if fuel gets cheaper (I assume electricity, because it can come from more sources than gas, will get cheaper over time), then I assume these services will be cheaper. Plus, car ownership is not that cheap either.

Car ownership is a lot cheaper than Uber. It’s not even a question. You could buy an overpriced car that you can’t afford with a high interest rate and it would still be much cheaper. I think you need to go back to first principles on this one.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#269

Post by rafael09ed » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #258

ghaff wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can not buy into all of a manufacturer's marketing puffery and still like a product on balance.

Puffery has specific meaning here and making objective statements doesn’t qualify. You can’t call a 3’ log 5’ and say it’s just puffery.

You can call a 1.5" by 3.5" plank a 2x4

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#270

Post by flaviut » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #76

lotsofpulp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is one and the same. There will be no political will to invest in quality public transit unless there is lots of pain in using comfortable and convenient individual vehicle transit. Paying $100+ for a trip will make people support bus and train and bicycle infrastructure investments. Keep driving costs down at $0.60 to $1.00 per minute or per mile, and it makes sense to use your own car, which then means it makes…

in practice this doesn't make sense since people are broke. you're be punishing them for no reason, they would continue to drive on more and more congested roads, take longer to get to their destination and you wouldn't raise enough to build out public transit. everyone loses. well, actually, I guess rich people paying $100 a ride on underutilized roads would win. great for them I guess. this is already the status qu…

Make use fees explicitly progressive: pay a fee to use the road, and then at the end of the month, the bottom 25% get back 150% of the average fee, middle 50% get 100%, top 25% get 50% back.

Drive less than average and you're making a profit regardless of where you are on the scale.