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Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

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Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#311

Post by nmfisher »

azylman wrote: post #253
deeeeplearning wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to pay your execs and engineers insanely bloated Tech salaries on Taxi profit margins. It's a bubble ready to pop.The guy saying they will profitable in the next year is delusional.

"The guy" - the CEOs of both companies? You're essentially stating that the CEOs of Uber any Lyft are lying to their investors, which is a crime. That's a serious accusation and some actual evidence is needed.

No, he's stating the CEO is delusional. It's not a crime if you honestly believe what you're saying.

(Oversimplification, of course. I'm fully aware of corporate obligations around market disclosure, profit forecasts, etc).

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#312

Post by jfoster »

gotostatement wrote: post #246
jfoster wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do develop an internal model for the behaviour of machines, though. Examples: Elevators where the doors take extremely long to close on their own. Elevators where the doors close too soon after opening. Elevators where the limb sensors are not very responsive. Cars that take a couple of tries to start in cold weather. Automatic doors that are a little bit slow to open. Etc.

but those dont happen at 60+ miles per hour

Okay, let's use another example: lifts don't move until the doors are closed. If the lift thinks the doors are open, it won't move. If it did, it would be an out of control situation just as quickly as a car misbehaving at 60 mph is. The expectation is that autonomous cars must be cautious.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#313

Post by yihsiu »

boh wrote: post #280
mlboss wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere that there are different levels of "tech" company. A truly tech company would work without any human intervention for multiple days without breakdown. A non-tech company involves human in every tasks required for work. Most of the companies fall somewhere in between. Ride services/Food delivery company cannot function without humans.

So I guess SpaceX, Tesla, Intel, Apple aren't tech companies.

Agree with this rhetorical question. What mlboss said should just be "automated company" not necessary a tech company.

With that definition, it's also unreasonable to me that 100 years ago, there wasn't any tech company

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#314

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #166
mikesabbagh wrote: post #160

This self-driving system promise keeps getting delayed! It looks to me this is a case of a donkey led by a carrot on a stick (investors are the donkey here). What I never understand is what happens when a new situation that the system did not previously train for happen? what if this situation is deadly? Will all the Uber cars decide to jump off a cliff because of a wrong signalization or bad weather? What will the T…

> What I never understand is what happens when a new situation that the system did not previously train for happen? This happens to human drivers all the time, and humans are really bad drivers even in situations that have happened before. I fully expect AI drivers to be safer than human drivers.

> I fully expect AI drivers to be safer than human drivers.

Don't you know the rules of AI claims? You always add "in 50 years" to every statement.

The biggest problem is accountability: who pays when someone dies. Once that is worked out, it'll have a shot.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#315

Post by minwcnt5 »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #275
justapassenger wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon is waiting on the line 1 with some promises.

You can see lots of videos filmed by Tesla car owners (not by Tesla) showcasing exactly how the Tesla full self driving beta is doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8IQFb3JeEo It's not perfect, but it keeps better with every release. They are ahead of everyone else by a long shot.

As far as I can tell all the videos have a licensed driver in the front left seat. I don't know how anyone can call that "full self driving", let alone ahead of other players.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#316

Post by woeirua »

howlgarnish wrote: post #310
bo1024 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't prove that the technology is ready or safe. It only proves that Waymo thinks it's a worthwhile gamble. This is the same place where Uber's self-driving car killed a person with no repercussions to the company.

It's obviously ready and safe enough for Waymo to roll it out (and they've been a lot more conservative than Uber here). As for safety, all we really need is for them to be safer than the average human driver. As evinced by the ~40,000 road deaths every year in the US, that's really a pretty low bar. I'd even argue that full autonomous is/will be less risky than halfway houses like Tesla Autopilot where neither side…

That’s actually a high hurdle to clear. Looking at fatalities per hundreds of thousands of miles driven humans are insanely good at driving. Using the 2018 NHTSA number of 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles driven, avg speed of 60 mph, 20 predictions per second, that equates out to an autonomous system can make a fatal mistake on average about every 120 billion predictions.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#317

Post by ablekh »

kovek wrote: post #281
ablekh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my guess is correct, it seems that you have missed a chance to work on relatively popular AS/400 servers ... :-)

Could you explain why are AS/400 relatively popular? I don't read much about these mainframes, and am a user of Personal Computers (macbook, thinkpad) and EC2 instances (something that runs Linux?) , so I am not sure what AS/400 servers are, but I'd love to learn more!

Well, by "relatively popular" I meant that AS/400 servers (aka AS400 or IBM iSeries or IBM System i: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i) have been quite popular mostly only within certain industries and/or niches (e.g., banking, insurance, manufacturing, supply chain). They are still widely used there for legacy reasons, however demand for AS/400 developers (which implies proficiency in RPG language, since, as I understand, most legacy applications are written in RPG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG) is tiny; so, it's a good language to know to potentially expect a relatively high salary or consulting rate (hello, Delphi!), but a dead end for IT career growth. I would also venture to guess that some (many? most?) companies currently using AS/400 plan to migrate their legacy applications to the cloud.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#318

Post by nojvek »

Tarq0n wrote: post #277
nhumrich wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google search, netflix, facebook, gmail, roomba, apple, microsoft, slack, youtube, AWS, wordpress, github, jira, the list goes on

I'm not convinced any of those would last even hours without an army of SRE's holding them together.

They all have support. True. However at my gig at my previous Job I have gone many opslead shifts without incidents. In fact most incidents were because someone added something new. During code freeze, we coasted multiple weeks without incidents.

SREs job is exactly this. Prevent future incidents. Prevention is much cheaper than cures (mostly)

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#319

Post by freeone3000 »

Ghostp4ntsRex wrote: post #301
freeone3000 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Popular" was a touch sarcastic. AS/400s were most recently called the IBM system I, and are now a discontinued product. IBM still sells mainframes, and they have discontinued the AS/400.

They are most certainly not a discontinued product. We just purchased a brand new Power9 server at work. The model we purchased was just released. Everyone at work still calls it an AS400. They are bulletproof and run many large businesses today. They are also not mainframes but are a class of machines called minicomputers.

IBM Power Series is closer to the RS6000, no? Running real AIX and having a full JCL makes them a far sight better than the RPGII stuff on the AS/400. Night and day.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#320

Post by ablekh »

freeone3000 wrote: post #291
kovek wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain why are AS/400 relatively popular? I don't read much about these mainframes, and am a user of Personal Computers (macbook, thinkpad) and EC2 instances (something that runs Linux?) , so I am not sure what AS/400 servers are, but I'd love to learn more!

"Popular" was a touch sarcastic. AS/400s were most recently called the IBM system I, and are now a discontinued product. IBM still sells mainframes, and they have discontinued the AS/400.

IBM AS/400 is not discontinued, but rather has been rebranded as IBM Power System: https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/power.
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