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Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

tomverbeure.github.io

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Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#291
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered why adding more sensors to a self driving car was such a big deal. Yes, it makes the cars more expensive but at some point, these parts will get mass produced and they will be cheap as hell. The more data a car has, the better it should drive.

Once you add sensors you can't promise buyers that their car with less sensors will be just as self driving as the car with more sensors. So adding sensors is a big deal for Tesla, because they are in the market of selling a promise of self driving.

Maybe that's a harsh lesson in making promises that can't be delivered?

Or, more likely, no lessons will be learned and people will still trust what the company says in the future for arbitrary reasons.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#292

The author of this article doesn't understand how continuous improvement in software works ... Saying that it will "never" work is myopic. Never bet against Moores Law or Elon! As a Tesla M3 owner (in Europe where we don't have FSD yet) I cannot wait to have it for long road trips on highways where I want to relax and have a "copilot" do some of the "thinking" & driving for me. Yes, there are still some instances of…

"It's only a matter of time" means nothing. It was only a matter of time in Cesar's age before we got supercomputers and planes. Tesla is near the bottom of the pack on self-driving tech, with no real hopes of going beyond the level 2 self-driving of FSD, which is objectively worse than just driving yourself. There are already multiple companies with either actual self-driving fleets (e.g. Waymo) or limited use cases…

"near the bottom of the pack"

Are you _trying_ to make people not take you seriously? No one has the kind of tech Tesla unveiled back at Autonomy day, which is still state of the art technology wise. 100w for that much NN compute was a genius move to manage to get the talent in to build and to get early. Now that they've had more time to develop the tech, FSD is looking better than ever and in a few years Tesla will be licensing this around for a pretty penny. Eventually governments might even mandate it considering the comparative danger of human drivers.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're so wrong. do more research. Driving on a geo-fenced area is much much simple than what Tesla is trying. Eventually they can do that as well without problems if they can't generalise.

Sure, but "we're trying something harder" doesn't mean anything. Waymo is succeeding at a well defined, useful form of driverless tech. They will probably be able to extend this, maybe slowly, to more and more cities. Tesla is failing at everything they're promising, and not delivering anything useful along the way (FSD as it exists today is more dangerous and more demanding than regular driving).

You're comparing a warehouse to a train even talking about Waymo.

FSD has no limit. Recently it has been tested around in Europe and Asia, and the existing tech basically "just works" because sensorily and thought-wise it's made to function like the common meatbag between the seat and the wheel, just better.

No, making the skyscraper 100 meters higher isn't going to make the train less relevant even though the tracks aren't all built yet.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The universal approximation theorem disagrees. The question is how large the network should be and how much training data it needs. And for now it can only be tested experimentally.

The universal approximation theorem does not apply once you include any realistic training algorithms / stochastic gradient descent. There isn't a learnability guarantee.

There's no theorem that SGD is insufficient. So, as I said, it's empirical.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#295
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ford’s Blue Cruise is hands-off in mapped highways. Waymo is driverless. Musk is really getting away with all the hype for what Tesla cruise control delivers.

Ford's Blue Cruise is not hands-off on mapped highways, only on portions of some highways where curves are shallow. And it can suddenly demand you take over in a failure mode that completely disables itself forcing you to instantly take over in a split second. Also it still kills people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgFPW5esM04

> And it can suddenly demand you take over in a failure mode that completely disables itself forcing you to instantly take over in a split second.

Like FSD, too, you mean.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#296
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how little you can trust these people even though you would expect that the CEO of NVIDIA has a reputation to maintain.

Did you forget the crypto and nft hype train presentations that Jensen did ~2 years ago?

Bear in mind he was selling shovels to the miners, not shilling coins, I think?

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "works in limited cases" is absolutely not enough, given what it promises. It drove into static objects a couple of times, killing people. Recent videos still show behavior like speeding through stop signs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGOo06xzCeU&t=990s Meaning that it's really not reliable enough to take your hands off the wheel. Waymo shows that it is possible, with today's technology, to do much much bette…

It's not enough for robotaxis yet, and Tesla doesn't claim that it is. They just think they'll get there. What they do claim is that with human supervision, it lowers the accident rate to one per 5.5 million miles, which is a lot better than the overall accident rate for all cars on the road. And unlike Waymo, it works everywhere. That's worthwhile even if it never improves from here. Fwiw you can take your hands off…

> It's not enough for robotaxis yet, and Tesla doesn't claim that it is. They just think they'll get there.

"By 2019 it will be financially irresponsible not to own a Tesla, as you will be able to earn $30K a year by utilizing it as a robotaxi as you sleep."

This was always horseshit, and still is:

If each Tesla could earn $30K profit a year just ferrying people around (and we'd assume more, in this scenario, because it could be 24/7), why the hell is Tesla selling them to us versus printing money for themselves?

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#298

They should teach Tesla’s “autopilot” (and its FSD upgrade) in business schools. Turns out you can sustainably push up company valuation on vapourware. You have to wonder if Tesla’s autonomous driving technology was actually ever meant to turn into a product. Or whether it is mostly a tool to justify the lofty Tesla stock price. I very much doubt that it is technologically ahead of its competitors.

Fake it til you make it is a fundamental principle of startups. We just don’t usually see it at such a vast scale. There’s a timeline where Theranos was acquired for 9b by UnitedHealth if they could keep the grift alive juuust a bit longer and Elizabeth Holmes ascends to the tech firmament permanently while her enablers congratulate each other. Tesla has even more and deeper financial and branding defense mechanisms.…

> Elizabeth Holmes ascends to the tech firmament permanently while her enablers congratulate each other.

Holmes and at least some of her supporters still ardently insist, to this day, now that everything is out of the bag, the "pulling filing cabinets in front of doors to specific labs on FDA inspection days so they only see the labs we want them to" crap, all of it, that she, and humanity, have been robbed of the truly magnificent biomedical advances that Theranos was just about to solve.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#299
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think your "automatic driving" argument is wishful thinking See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaticity It’s a well known phenomenon.

I don't dispute that people get used to driving, but I think arguing that "driving" requires the same amount of effort as "not driving" is a more specious claim

> I have to do a mild safety intervention maybe once a week .... (yes I still pay attention)

Except by your own admission you're not "not driving." You're monitoring the car, except without any physical feedback loop with your hands and feet. The only difference in mental load is the physical control of your limbs to do minor speed and direction adjustments. YMMV but I just find that less taxing than vigilantly monitoring a piece of software because I know how that sausage is made.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#300
post #131

I have FSD v12 and for my drives, in my part of the country, I have to do a mild safety intervention maybe once a week (like, getting closer to another car than I'm comfortable with) sorry other people are having different experiences, but FSD is a significant quality of life improvement for me. Nothing is nicer than getting in the car after a long day and letting it chauffeur me home. (yes I still pay attention)

Still paying attention? With a "chauffeur" you don’t have to, that’s the point. Isn’t that a obvious?? Also you’re not personally responsible if your chauffeur has an accident. The Elon miracle, he scams you, but you still defend him and pretend like you’re happy with the scam. "In less than a year you’ll be able to get from New York to San Francisco during your sleep". That was in 2016. 8 years later, he says "robot…

> It’s a world scale Stockholm syndrome.

There are a lot of those these days.

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