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The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

bloomberg.com

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Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#381

Post by jsprogrammer »

outworlder wrote: post #312
jpfr wrote: post #37

Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars. What he did is impressive. But the results are not that outlandish for a talented person. 1) Hook up a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car [1] and attach a bunch of sensor peripherals. 2) Drive around for some time and record everything to disk. 3) Implement so…

A project like this is extremely impressive. The guy deserves a lot of credit (and maybe some investment?). That's hacking in the truest sense. The parent's checklist misses a bunch of things. For instance "1) Hookup a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car". That alone is not trivial. It is trivial if you want to read the car's odometer, but good luck doing more than that. For instance, people are still trying t…

Google's first Udacity class taught how to build a self-driving car. The basic algorithm is simple and produces a fairly safe vehicle. In no way should it (or other) have been tested on the freeway as described in the article, however.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#382

Post by engi_nerd »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #376
outworlder wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A project like this is extremely impressive. The guy deserves a lot of credit (and maybe some investment?). That's hacking in the truest sense. The parent's checklist misses a bunch of things. For instance "1) Hookup a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car". That alone is not trivial. It is trivial if you want to read the car's odometer, but good luck doing more than that. For instance, people are still trying t…

It's only impressive to outsiders who aren't aware that this hasn't been new for a very long time and is reusing the work of others. There are tons of videos and documentation from amateurs and hobbyists hooking computers up to the canbus. In parallel to the tech community, the tuner/mod community have also been doing this on their own. It's been old news for years, led to many funny pranks and stunt hacks, culminati…

How is it not impressive to take bits of knowledge from multiple domains (programming, instrumentation, electrical engineering, control laws, etc) and fuse them together into a single thing?

We all take from the good work of those around us. But how many people seriously do things with that work? Not many, and disdaining people who do so is not productive or, in my view, a good thing.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#383

Post by kybernetikos »

jpfr wrote: post #37

Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars. What he did is impressive. But the results are not that outlandish for a talented person. 1) Hook up a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car [1] and attach a bunch of sensor peripherals. 2) Drive around for some time and record everything to disk. 3) Implement so…

You're probably right (since pessimism and cynicism are pretty successful predictors whenever anyone is trying something bold), but we have nothing like enough information to know if he's done something revolutionary or not. As the article makes clear, he doesn't want to give too much away, so of course you're stuck with a vague summary which sounds like he's just done what any smart person skilled in the art would do.

General cynicism isn't really adding much to the conversation in my opinion, since almost everyone here probably knows this already, and too much cynicism can put people off starting projects and people starting projects is something we should cherish.

I do think your point about emergency situations is substantive though. Perhaps he is only planning for self-driving while supervised by humans, but his idea for training as described (become an uber driver) would not at all produce the kind of dataset that would assure me that I would be safe. I think a lot of training with advanced drivers in simulators where you can have crazy life threatening situations would be the absolute minimum. I'd be worried that bad habits picked up on the thousands of uber rides would kick in during an emergency rather than the couple of situations that would be feasible to train on in real life.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#384

Post by [deleted] »

Tepix wrote: post #372
cafebeen wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a fair comment given his quote "I know everything there is to know" and the headline of the article claiming he's "building a self-driving car by himself". I've always thought the "hacker" community attributed value to sharing and building off other's work, but maybe times have changed.

Seems obvious to me that the journalist was manipulating what he said which was that he is deeply familiar with the state of the art of AI tech.

[deleted]

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#385

Post by rolux »

oldmanjay wrote: post #370
webmasterraj wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One person can build something that starts a revolution. See Woz/Apple. The real issue here is that self-driving cars are probably the wrong place for that to happen in AI. At best, a solo project creates a crappy prototype where there was no product before (again, see Woz/Apple). The expectation for driverless cars is too high – they need to be 100% good, because your life is on the line, not 80% good. What's the AI…

I don't follow why AI vehicles need to be 100% good. Plain old human-driven vehicles sure aren't and we accept their utility as being worth the trade.

In one word: liability.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#386

Post by cafebeen »

Tepix wrote: post #372
cafebeen wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a fair comment given his quote "I know everything there is to know" and the headline of the article claiming he's "building a self-driving car by himself". I've always thought the "hacker" community attributed value to sharing and building off other's work, but maybe times have changed.

Seems obvious to me that the journalist was manipulating what he said which was that he is deeply familiar with the state of the art of AI tech.

To expand on that: '“I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple"', which seems like an attitude of someone without a solid understanding of ML. But who knows, maybe he's figured out something the rest of the field hasn't...

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#387

Post by stcredzero »

MOil wrote: post #344
stcredzero wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you thought this out? What happens when someone hacks their own beacons for lulz? So then the beacons have to have public key cryptography. Now all of the firmware will need to be audited and kept updated. Will there be over the air updates? What if someone cracks or steals the key? It seems to me that a target as juicy as "getting control of the North American road network" would be worth a major national power…

What if someone would install their own traffic light right now?

That's immediately visible to people with eyeballs. The first sign that something is going wrong isn't going to be a car colliding with another car. It's going to be, "Hey, why are those kids installing a light with a step ladder?"

Have you seen a traffic light? They're pretty substantial. How long would it take for you to make one in a hackerspace?

Contrast this with hacking OTA updates for traffic beacons. You might not even have to change any atoms around to do your dirty deed. You might not even have to be there physically.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#388

Post by myztic »

(This is completely Off-Topic but it's been bothering me for such a long time now and I never got sufficient answers)

Why am I seeing Ubuntu on Screens of developers, experts, et cetera in Cover Stories such as these, most of the time with the 100% plain Ubuntu Desktop with all the craziness that comes with it? It feels like this is the case 90% of the time. Two more (recent) examples I can remember:

1) Fyodor (Guy behind nmap) running plain Ubuntu on a Notebook while giving a speech at a conference

2) Developers at Honda (Video was an Asimo promotional video) running plain Ubuntu

Since in my personal opinion Ubuntu is not the technically superior choice in these cases (though that can be debated), it can not simply be explained with it being backed by a company, there being support you can buy for the system if you need it.

What motivates technically extremely skilled people to use "Plain Ubuntu" instead of one of the many alternatives?

I really don't understand, please enlighten me!

(I actually think it's worth "spending" some Karma on this if I for once get a satisfying answer)

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#389

Post by nradov »

foota wrote: post #294
nradov wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with using neural nets for safety-critical real-time systems is that it's really hard to do the necessary level of validation. You can't accurately predict how the system might react in totally novel or unexpected situations. Which isn't to say that human drivers handle those situations well, but most of the time they don't do something totally bizarre or dangerous.

Doesn't it seem possible that we could start testing the cars in a simulated environment?

Simulated environments aren't accurate enough (inputs are too clean, other drivers don't act real, etc) and would end up training the software to do the wrong things. A more reasonable approach would be to record the activities of multiple safe human drivers across a wide range of situations and then train the software to act like them.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#390

Post by ocdtrekkie »

testuser111 wrote: post #273
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be far more interested in a piece of software for my car put out by Hotz than either Google or Tesla. Because the latter two are almost certainly going to keep it proprietary as heck. (Tesla has notoriously actually called people to ask them to stop tinkering with their car when they detect the interface has been connected to.)

> "He says he’s come up with discoveries—most of which he refuses to disclose in detail"

We'll see where things get in the future. If I wasn't sure where I was going yet, I might hold a few things close to the vest initially too. There's a short-term value too, where he has to ensure Google or Tesla or Uber doesn't become too dominant first. I really hope self-driving systems are an ecosystem, not a monoculture.
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