Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a bridge to sell. Looking at the github repository code, comma is a joke.
> I have a bridge to sell. Sorry what's a bridge? I don't get the reference.
Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
101–110 of 151 posts
Re: Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
#102If you mean what you say: buy this thing, install it on your car, and use it daily. I dare you. Oh right, you'd never do that, because some tiny part of you knows that George Hotz was lying his ass off about his tech, and that you'd have to be a crazy person to trust such a flagrant liar with your life.
Yeah you're right. I want to buy it though, and then wait a couple of months before plugging it into my own car. I'm just saying you can't just dismiss the guy's ability because he comes across arrogant. He's proven he's a hacker, and now he's trying to prove he's a maker as well.
Maybe this Panda thing is engineered really well, and the money and reputation will get him to a point where he can run a nice company. Maybe not and this things get some people killed and he will be thrown in jail for building a recklessly unsafe product, I don't know. I don't own a car right now so all I can do is talk big.
Re: Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
He did a lot more than just jailbreak an old iPhone. The dude's good, who cares if he's arrogant? There's hundreds of big corporations manipulating media for financial gains. Are you gonna hate this guy just because he has a face and a personal reputation? Or are you going to watch with bemused interest as he successfully scales the obstacles and actually puts some nice products out there.
>who cares if he's arrogant? There's hundreds of big corporations manipulating media for financial gains. That's a hell of a non-sequitor
It is isn't it?
Re: Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
#104Comma.ai's autonomous driving software implements the main control loop in Python. It's full of memory allocations. The project is far from serious engineering.
Sometimes naively I believe that with enough hardware capabilities, lazy software can provide its function...
Re: Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the guy who was supposedly just a few weeks away from shipping a bolt-on smart cruise control module, then immediately canceled the entire thing when the NHTSA asked him some questions about its safety. He seems pretty sharp when it comes to technology, but I'm not sure if he's prepared to make actual products sold to regular people.
On the contrary, he seems to the the kind of person that knows about the bureaucratic nature of NHTSA and cut his losses.
Rules written in blood. If you aren't prepared for a bit of bureaucracy then you have no place being anywhere near this industry.
Re: Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
#106Hotz is quoted as saying in the article, "there are only three real competitors: Waymo, Tesla and us." That's total bullshit. There are so many companies seriously working on autonomous vehicles, such as GM Cruise, Auroa Innovation, Drive.ai, Zoox, Nuro.ai, nuTonomy, Varden Labs, AImotive, Ford, and Nvidia Edit, because George is on here: George, I want to like you, because I think your tech is really good (the stree…
I doubt Geohotz didn't do his homework before he made this conclusion. He went to CMU, Google and Facebook and had worked with the smartest professors/scientists/engineers in the field of AI before he founded Comma.ai. He's pretty much single-handed built a level 3 drive assist prototype within a year where other companies spent billions and many years R&D but not even came close to what he was originally intended to…
And yet he walked away from potentially billions in profits when he got asked some basic questions by the NHTSA.
Re: Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
#107Related, is anyone aware of an affordable OBD hardware simulator?
The ones I found are either pretty expensive (e.g. https://freematics.com/pages/products/freematics-obd-emulato...) or seem sketchy (e.g. https://de.aliexpress.com/item/OBD-simulator-OBD-development...).
I am also aware of https://github.com/carloop/simulator. However I would prefer a one piece solution. Any tips?
Re: Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
#108If you mean what you say: buy this thing, install it on your car, and use it daily. I dare you. Oh right, you'd never do that, because some tiny part of you knows that George Hotz was lying his ass off about his tech, and that you'd have to be a crazy person to trust such a flagrant liar with your life.
Yeah you're right. I want to buy it though, and then wait a couple of months before plugging it into my own car. I'm just saying you can't just dismiss the guy's ability because he comes across arrogant. He's proven he's a hacker, and now he's trying to prove he's a maker as well. Maybe this Panda thing is engineered really well, and the money and reputation will get him to a point where he can run a nice company. Ma…
His arrogance is orthogonal to the issue.
The issue is that he was obviously lying. He claimed he was weeks away from autonomous cars. If this was true, he would've sold the tech for a staggering pile of cash.
Instead, all the evidence looks like he thought he could solve the problem on his own, in record time. Then he made a pretty basic POC (able to handle a small number of very simple conditions). Then he realized he couldn't do it. And so he pretended that he'd solved a problem nobody else had, but wasn't going to share or sell the answer with anybody else because the government is bad.
Unfortunately, some people hate the government enough that they want to believe this. But it's a dumb story and an obvious lie. George Hotz does not have autonomous driving technology. He never did, and he never fucking will. He's a snake oil salesman.
Re: Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a comma plushie. He mentioned ICO, so cryptocurrency. Which with something of value like this behind it the comma "points" (tokens?) could be worth quite a lot if you're an early adopter.
EXACTLY. Sorry if I was unclear. ICO as a way to convert "Internet Points" into something of material value and reward users directly for contributions is incredibly fascinating to me.
It's not "internet points", it's simply a way to more easily measure how much data you've contributed to comma's database. Fundamentally, that data is only valuable to insurance companies, which are already willing to pay you ~$160 (in lower insurance rates) for a year's worth of driving data.
In theory Hotz could (and should) just pay you directly in $USD for your driving data, arbitraging a bit off the top before selling it to insurance companies.
But the genius of him "paying" you in cryptocurrency is that it will get you to give it away for free "points"! And to pay him for the hardware to do so! Because you think that a market might develop around these "points" where they will get bought up by a bigger fool, pumping up their value way beyond their fundamental value to the end consumers of this data - insurance companies.
These "points" have no other value or use, as they would not otherwise function as currency (store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account) unless Hotz decoupled point generation from car data generation and just started minting an arbitrary virtual currency.
Re: Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
#110As others have pointed out there are a TON of OBDII loggers on the market with price points down to It seems the real value for comma.ai is just collecting a huge amount of driver data and then selling it to Autonomous car makers or generating algorithms based or the data themselves. Either way, if that's the case why sell it for $88??? sell it at cost ($5) or even give it away for free and just quickly build a huge…
As I understand it users don't necessarily opt in to contributing data to comma's database. So there will be a large subset of hobbyists that just use it to monitor their own driving data privately - these are the users that comma needs to charge up front.
Plus, psychologically it feels like an investment with ROI in "comma points" for those who do contribute their data, with some vague promise of a reward later when someone (who?) decides to purchase comma points. So the upfront cost is justified.