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George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

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Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#101

Post by agumonkey »

dchichkov wrote: post #56
agumonkey wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A purely physical approach is just a design paradigm in how to use other sensors (with or without ML), having this means uncertainty would be correlated with momentum and anything causing doubt (a power line down) would mean reducing the internal energy of the system to give ability to either stop to a halt, enter a safe configuration or assess the situation deeper/differently to decide. So far what we see about Tesl…

The problem is, you'd be hitting all these pesky corner cases, with some of them requiring active avoidance - downed power lines, water on the road, vehicles on fire, other traffic participants. My guess, it is hard to engineer a system that could handle the long tail of making decisions under uncertainty with "purely physical approach". You'll run out of complexity budget.

it's certainly full of dimensions. I may be a ideal-extremist here, and business probably doesn't like being overly cautious, but at least that would be a vehicle I'd trust no to endanger anybody (in or out), even if it looks underperforming compared to autopilot~.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#102

Post by agumonkey »

xedeon wrote: post #81
agumonkey wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant waymo because they have a less commercial approach compared to Tesla (which might taint this engineer view [or not]) I believe the only way out of the security pit is to double down on rigorous physics and not rapid ML

Waymo is the pinnacle of commercialized FSD. Have you seen their ads with actors? Tesla does ZERO marketing.

Waymo is taking their sweet time, Tesla is aggressively talking about autopilot. Far from Zero.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#103

Post by gcbirzan »

cozzyd wrote: post #33
mieseratte wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting tidbit: Hotz actually means thief in a few languages. You've piqued my inner language geek, but cursory Googling / Google Translate hasn't given me any luck. What language(s) would that be?

‎hoţ (pronounced hotz) is Romanian for thief. Not sure what the etymology is but it could be a Slavic loan word. Edit: looked it up... Unknown etymology. I guess if you count Moldovan as a separate language then it means thief in at least two languages...

I found https://blogulblog.wordpress.com/z-postari-pe-alte-teme-ling... which lists it as coming from Romani. However, I find that a bit weird, as it's čor – hoț. The first letter being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_affrica...

So, yes, cioara could come from there, but not sure how you get from there to hot. And, DEX lists cioara as coming from the Albanian sorrë.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#104

Post by wbl »

oldgradstudent wrote: post #64
juliangoldsmith wrote: post #8

What would the point of current self-driving car systems be? If you can't take your attention off the road anyway, it's basically a glorified, expensive cruise control.

The difference is that glorified cruise control actually exists. Real self driving cars, on the other hand, only exist in inspirational videos.

Or on dedicated tracks.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#105

Post by Jack000 »

commaai wrote: post #72
maym86 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think OP's point is about the latency from all the layers. At 70 mph, where 100ms is 3m, this is a problem for a control system.

Human latency is about 250ms.

I think that's not a fair comparison - a digital control system needs much finer time slices to compete with human reaction time. A control system that worked off of webcam images at 4hz would be a jittery mess, or just very slow if using a Kalman filter.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#106

Post by amelius »

sametmax wrote: post #86
asteli wrote: post #30

Here's the low-level controller for Comma AI's self-driving software. Lateral and longitudinal control, as well as actuator command are contained within. Their low level control is done in Python, on top of Android, on a smartphone. No further comment, your honor. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/devel/selfdrive/co...

As much as I love Python, you need realtime processing for this kind of things. You can't have a slow language with gc pauses and no way to guaranty execution time for a given operation.

You should also mention the GIL here (Global Interpreter Lock).

https://realpython.com/python-gil/

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#107

Post by dozzie »

nodnyl wrote: post #68
asteli wrote: post #30

Here's the low-level controller for Comma AI's self-driving software. Lateral and longitudinal control, as well as actuator command are contained within. Their low level control is done in Python, on top of Android, on a smartphone. No further comment, your honor. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/devel/selfdrive/co...

As someone who has had a bit to do with safety critical software in agricultural machinery, and I am sure to any one in any other regulated industry this sounds crazy. The regulation in many industries for software that can kill is onerous, python on Android for any safety related code in other industries would be the punch line of a joke.

> [...] to any one in any other regulated industry this sounds crazy.

This sounds crazy even to a person who makes living from running software on commodity hardware (x86/x86_64). Android does not sound like a hard real-time OS. I've seen it hang up in a fsckin' coffee machine! I don't want it at the center of two tons of steel that move 100km per hour.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#108

Post by amelius »

brokenmachine wrote: post #66

I'm personally very happy that homemade self-driving tech would be illegal to use on the road in my country.

How about a small startup selling that tech? Would it be legal to use?

Curious, what kind of regulations does your country have in place?

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#109

Post by fulafel »

woolvalley wrote: post #76
commaai wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no Android GC, there's a Java GC. Python on Android isn't written in Java, it's CPython, written in C. Python has a GC as well, but we turn it off for the control loop processes. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/devel/selfdrive/co... Haters love to bring up the Python, but they never stick around long enough to explain exactly why it's a problem.

Because it's not a statically typed language for the most part, which brings in an entire class of bugs of its own. It's also an extremely mutable language. Great for scripts, but there is a reason why most large companies start bolting on types on whatever dynamic language they started with.

Most production languages that nominally do some static typing aren't statically very safe - certainly Java, Go, C/C++ are rife with runtime errors. After the required testing to eliminate those, it's not clear Python is significantly different.

Edit: also, Python does eagerly signal type errors, unlike say Javascript or C, so you don't get silently wrong answers. C is the default language in auto industry. .

Yeah, this is a bit of whataboutism, certainly it would be nice if the state of the art in production languages was closer to the ideal of statically verified... Haskell and Rust are in the right direction, and would be clearly superior in this regard

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#110

Post by regulation_d »

Semirhage wrote: post #3
aurizon wrote: post #2

Sour grapes? I recall when push button elevators were installed. The union insisted an operator was still needed - who asked you 'what floor?' and then pushed that button. Without operators, western, and indeed all global civilization would come to an end...

When push-button elevators were installed, they worked. Can you imagine if the pitch had been, “sometimes this elevator will kill the odd person, thanks for helping us work out the bugs.” As a bonus, the actual working elevator might not emerge until decades after installation began, and the early models only worked on alternate Wednesday’s.

This might be a valid point if the current system of driving wasn’t already killing millions of people per year.
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