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Any data to back this up besides Musk saying his approach's the best?
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/07/elon-musk-calls-lidar-a... https://youtu.be/fNgEG5rCav4 > Anthony Levandowski, former Google/Waymo engineer, now backtracks on lidar and says, ”Elon is right.”
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More important than simple probability is the “expectancy value”, which is roughly spoken (and cumulatively) the probability multiplied by the effect when the probability comes to pass.
I'm confused what this comment is saying - are you just trying to say that someone getting killed by a car is really really bad? If so, I agree. I've never heard of "expectancy value" in my life - it's definitely not a standard probability term.
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Sometimes I am speechless. You’ve just made public transport less efficient on several axis.
Speechless? Where I live we have full size public buses that are frequently only carrying one or two people. In fact if I had a nickle for every time I've seen a completely empty light rail train in the middle of the day in Denver, I'd be a rich man by now. Public transport in the vast majority of the US is a failure. In Colorado Uber and Lyft probably haul 10-100 times more people every day than ride our public tran…
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Any data to back this up besides Musk saying his approach's the best?
I mean, when musk says this he gives data to back it up - that humans manage just fine with visual systems, and that lidar is really expensive.
Humans have the biology for visual systems, and constant training, and it still takes us almost a decade to fully process distance properly. (This is why children will run in front of moving vehicles--they can't actually tell how far away they vehicles are.)
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800 hires a year means ~15 people starting every week. Every one of those 800 positions likely received hundreds of resumes, which needed to be sifted through. Then you need to have calls with each candidate, narrow down the pool further. Then all the onsite rounds. For an initial team of 200 that is an impossible task.
The "initial" 200 people don't hire the next 800, they hire the next 1. Then the 201 people hire the next 1, and the 202 hire the next one, and so forth.
Or that most companies are willing to hire people who aren't perfect candidates because a fair amount of internal training is expected. Hiring only unicorn candidates who already have the perfect qualifications and don't need any training/onboarding is a peculiarly Silicon Valley phenomenon.
When I proposed this to nVidia engineers, fairly high up, they argued that if humans could do it with two eyes, they could do it in 3 years. It's now 5 years later.
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From what I’ve heard about the Airbnb and Lyft layoffs, many people who were affected were actually high performers who were paid well but working on projects that were deprioritized by upper management. Laying off these people allowed them to satisfy their budget cuts while laying off relatively few people. Continuing to hire sounds strange, but if the offers are lower the company will still save money. Pausing the…
I don't know how this makes any sense. Engineering is the only way to automate things to allow a business to scale sublinearly. Why layoff high performing engineers when you can reassign them to problems where the goal is to automate things enough to reduce costs to below the cost of keeping them around. Any high performer should be able to create enough value within 6 months to pay the salary for the hole year. If a…
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> I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. How do you explain actual self-driving cars on the road? I find this attitude confusing as it seems to not jive with empirical reality. I agree that we should focus on mass transit, but Waymo drives hundreds/thousands of miles without driver intervention.
There aren't any self driving cars on the road that don't have a safety driver, and the ones that are out there get confused all the time. The Uber one had a software dev turn off the lidar sensor to test the computer vision at night and it ended up killing a woman crossing the street.
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Speechless? Where I live we have full size public buses that are frequently only carrying one or two people. In fact if I had a nickle for every time I've seen a completely empty light rail train in the middle of the day in Denver, I'd be a rich man by now. Public transport in the vast majority of the US is a failure. In Colorado Uber and Lyft probably haul 10-100 times more people every day than ride our public tran…
Why are you comparing your scheme to a defunct system, then? The cities in Europe I’ve lived in, and the cities in Asia I’ve visited, haven’t had that problem at all.
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I’ve always been extremely dubious about the “self driving to save lives” angle for one very specific reason: we already know how to save lives. Slow. The. Cars. Down. Oslo managed to get their car deaths down to 1 in 2019. 1, in a city of 600,000. Los Angeles killed 240 that year, or 36x more per capita. And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives…
It's a cost benefit calculation. Sure we can make everyone go 25mph, but how much does that slow down commerce? It's a tradeoff people aren't willing to make. They'd rather sacrifice a few lives than take three hours to get 75 miles. But the self driving tech allows us to get much safer while still going at normal speeds. Or maybe allows us to be equally safe at higher speeds. Either way it's a win.
Secondly I find it disturbing that discussions around acceptable traffic fatalities focus on unnamed and unspecified people as the apparently acceptable fatalities in pursuit of shorter commutes. I think this let’s a lot of people push off that moral calculus as something that happens to other, lesser, people. See: the reactions once people realized that Uber’s self driving car had killed a homeless woman. A better question is “what is the acceptable level of risk for you and your family to accept in return for faster commutes?”
Finally, don’t underestimate the feedback effect. High speeds are only economically necessary, if they even are, because we’ve chosen to design cities in a way that assumes high speed car traffic. Continuing to focus on keeping traffic going just puts off very necessary and politically difficult discussions about public transit and housing density. We could setup a society where 25mph in the cities works just fine, but we’ve made the explicit choice not to, and continue to reinforce that.