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Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

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Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla self-driving is better than a bad human driver. There are loads of bad human drivers on the road. Someone has to be liable, but I don't really care if it falls to Musk or a Musk simp. I do care if we kick yet another key technology out of the US only to have to rent it back years later when someone else picks up the torch. Let's not do that.

Is it actually better than a bad human driver? (And what’s your metric for ‘bad’ — tired, drunk, distracted, a teenager who just got their license but didn’t actually practice enough?) Because I’ve watched enough videos of people having to quickly override Full Self-Driving in ordinary situations that I’m really skeptical that it’s better than most drivers. I’d be willing to say that in practice FSD usage is small en…

Every time one of these threads come around I search youtube for a FSD video and qualitatively evaluate what comes up.

If you google FSD fail compilation, you'll get a FSD fail compilation. You can do the same for humans.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#192
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit, full stop. We live in a society with deep dependency chains on technology we can't possibly understand as individuals, that much is true But all of those technologies are subject to independent auditing and regulation to make up for that lack of verifiability on an individual level. It is technologically feasible to apply that kind of standard to computer technologies, and in fact I would argue that it's mu…

why do you think if we can not understand the dependency chain, the regulators and the auditors can?

The entire point of an independent audit is to throw an expert at the technologies in question at the point of the supply chain they are tasked with auditing in order to better understand it than a layperson could and make an assessment that provides the public with the benefit of their expertise. Not everyone can be an expert on everything, but experts can check each other's work and report on it publicly.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's...a thing. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss

why is it being applied to a tesla whistleblower post though

It's being applied to Tesla's behaviour, not whistleblower's.

As in Tesla's official policy is to gaslight you and gatekeep the information.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, Tesla has already shown the world how to make commercially viable EVs. That's a torch the risk averse legacy auto manufacturers can take up, now that Tesla has done the derisking. Now someone needs to prove out self-driving, even at the risk of some short-term reputational harm. I don't think people realize the life-saving potential in solving this problem.

> I don't think people realize the life-saving potential in solving this problem. They shouldn't be harming lives to pursue this.

[deleted]

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#195
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every customer complaint about unintended acceleration of Teslas was proven in court to be the fault of the customer confusing the pedals. The accelerator pedal has two independent sensors measuring input - they both have to agree, and no input on the brake pedal must be detected for the vehicle to accelerate. They go a step further. They use their cameras to detect the environment and significantly slow down acceler…

Would you have a link to that? I'd be interested to look. As a side note, I've never heard of confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car, so if Telsa's get people to confuse them enough to bring them to court, it's probably bad design. Edit: The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates 16,000 accidents per year in the United States occur when drivers intend to apply the brake but mistakenly apply…

> As a side note, I've never heard of confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car, so if Telsa's get people to confuse them enough to bring them to court, it's probably bad design.

I think this is media bias. The media picks up accidents involving Teslas far more often than they do other manufacturers. The national news will even cover Tesla recalls when it's just an over-the-air software patch with zero known real-world impact), and similarly despite that there are ~25K vehicle fires per year, you only see them in the media when a Tesla is involved. In particular, confusing pedals is pretty common, particularly among very old drivers.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#196
post #6

Gatekeep, gaslight, girlboss The official policy to deprive customers and victims of information as much as possible is shocking from the standpoint of being flagrantly, cynically customer-hostile to the point of probable illegality, but it's right out of both Musk's normal playbook and that of his erstwhile colleagues at e.g. Paypal For me, cars cross a very key danger threshold, which I express like this: "I am tru…

I'll go a bit further... Do we really need computers on four wheels? Can't we just have simple electric vehicles without all the high-tech? No distracting screens, no computer for other than just governing the electric engine, no fancy car locks, and so on.

I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle. Honestly, it seems to me that is absolutely unnecessary tech, ridiculous.

I'd like to have a vehicle like the ones 15 or 20 years ago but electric: analog indicators, physical buttons, etc. And a car that you can actually REPAIR by yourself without having to be an electronic engineer or something alike.

There was a post about someone that owned a Tesla car and managed to repair it (if I recall it correctly) for under 500 bucks when Tesla was trying to charge above 10000 USD.

All this high-tech also means that we're doomed and at the mercy of car companies for any kind of maintenance. It seems that we're heading to the same dead end as with mobile phone industry: zero control over them.

If that's the bright future that awaits us, I'll take public transport as much as I can.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the software. They are trying to make due without the kind of sensors that are required to properly sense the immediate environment (LIDAR)

This may surprise, but LIDAR is a very recent innovation and virtually zero percent of cars (particularly historically) are LIDAR equipped. Binocular vision has a pretty impressive track record.

It might also come as a surprise that the the lack of a LiDAR, and famously disabling the radar directly relates to Tesla’s poor self driving performance compared to the actual leaders in the area like Waymo and Cruise.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't tail any car in general. There's a lot more 'real' braking out there than 'phantom' braking.

in most commutes, if your tailing distance is too much, someone will else will come in front of you.

if you think about the speeds involved, a single additional car in front of you on the freeway (or even any additional cars) adds pretty miniscule time to the total commute.

Let's compare a few situations. In the baseline you're tailing the car in front of you with a focus on not letting anyone cheat and get in front of you, let's say 50 feet away. Your commute is 30 miles, and in this frictionless sphere of traffic you're going 60mph the whole time. You get to work in 30 minutes flat.

In the second scenario you're following the 3-second rule[0]. This would put you ~285 feet behind the car in front of you. Let's say over the course of your commute 20 cars move in front of you. If the average car length is 15 feet, and they all are 50 feet away from each other, when all 20 cars are in place you're a net -(20 * 65) feet away from the original car, or 1300 feet total. At 60 mph that adds ~15 seconds to your total commute time.

Well worth having an easier time avoiding a potential crash IMO! Also has the benefit of helping prevent traffic to begin with[1]

0: https://driversed.com/trending/what-safe-following-distance.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#199
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every customer complaint about unintended acceleration of Teslas was proven in court to be the fault of the customer confusing the pedals. The accelerator pedal has two independent sensors measuring input - they both have to agree, and no input on the brake pedal must be detected for the vehicle to accelerate. They go a step further. They use their cameras to detect the environment and significantly slow down acceler…

Would you have a link to that? I'd be interested to look. As a side note, I've never heard of confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car, so if Telsa's get people to confuse them enough to bring them to court, it's probably bad design. Edit: The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates 16,000 accidents per year in the United States occur when drivers intend to apply the brake but mistakenly apply…

>confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car,

I remember NASA thought so. So I just posted it, thanks for the post idea!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077149

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#200
post #55

IMO Tesla would be better if they focused solely on making good EVs, rather than also trying to become the leader in self-driving. I get that they're trying to create a wider moat against their competitors, but if their self-driving software are found to have systematic failure modes in them as these internal docs seem to suggest, then that could very well do more harm to their reputation in the long run.

Elons point on cars being worth 5x as much with self driving shouldn’t be dismissed. If a car that costs $25,000 to manufacture all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week automatically, how much is that car now worth? So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation.

Elon doesn't actually believe that Tesla cars are about to quintuple in value now, any more than he did 7+ years ago when he first started saying it; that's just marketing BS.

> So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation.

Yes, and most Gamestop investors think the company is going to be the next Amazon. Buying a popular meme stock doesn't make their predictions right.

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