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

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

#391

Post by Daneel_ »

myztic wrote: post #388

(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 b…

Most of these people have passed the stage of caring about the desktop itself. I would say they are simply interested in a bash shell that sits on a reliable, well maintained, stable distro with good community knowledge.

When you spend all your time at a prompt you don't really care about unity vs cinnamon vs anything else.

Debian is stable and has fantastic package management, and Ubuntu builds on that with a vibrant community and wide support. For these users, Ubuntu 'just works' and lets them get on with what they want to do. It's about as simple as that.

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

#392

Post by [deleted] »

dkns wrote: post #371

Absolutely exciting stuff. Imagine if you have 100, 1000 or 10000 cars each with deep learning software on board. Have them all upload data after each drive to central repository and download updates from other cars. You might start without stuff like 'react to that deer that just jumped on the road' but when you have 10 000 or 100 000 cars that learn and share their knowledge between them you'll quickly learn a lot…

[deleted]

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

#393

Post by staticint »

thedz wrote: post #4

> “I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple. For the first time in my life, I’m like, ‘I know everything there is to know.’ ” Yep, he's still in his twenties.

I take that to mean that for the first time in his life he read the papers and fully understood them without needing additional background, not that there isn't more to learn outside of those papers.

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

#394

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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…

Isn't that the same for most self-driving technology? Computer vision toolsets aren't new. Obviously hooking up to a car's drive systems isn't new, full-size RC cars have been built for years for various reasons. None of the rangefinding hardware equipped on self-driving cars is novel.

Where's the sudden breakthrough? All of this is built on technology and work that came before it. The whole field. It probably only really started being worked on in earnest from a business context because big tech companies like Google had more money than they knew what to do with, and were willing to spend it on ventures with no likelihood of profit any time soon.

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

#395

Post by ocdtrekkie »

fsociety wrote: post #175
Aleman360 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this article reinforces our bizarre cultural notion that one person deserves all the credit for some innovation. Nevermind the ridiculous amount of engineering that was required to build all the tools he's using and the order of magnitude more engineering required to make this a safe, mass producible product. But nah, let's just praise the founder, allow him to get rich while we all do the dirty work.

He didn't write the article, it's not his fault it comes off as cocky. He is tackling an impressive project on his own, and spitting in the face of corporations. He should be giving talks at DEFCON about this, teaching people how he did it. Your comment screams a superiority complex, but I bet that you are actually a nice person in real-life. Hotz is doing good work, and everyone in the technical field is relying on…

A good point. I did some HTML for my elementary school when I was a kid, and the local newspaper put me up as a 'whiz kid' on their front page. Not that anything I did was shockingly complicated in the slightest, even for the web of that era. Journalists hype stuff, that's nothing new.

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

#396

Post by datashovel »

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…

I think most people would agree it's one thing to understand how the pieces work together "in theory", and an entirely different level actually building a functional prototype.

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

#397

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

engi_nerd wrote: post #382
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think because the goal posts keep moving with technology. The number of people who have ever combined knowledge from multiple domains into a useful thing may be small relative to the general population, but it's been done. The first time it's impressive. Then others add different ideas and concepts. Then everyone can do it and it feels old.

We've also seen all the news from Google about their efforts and the pain points that they are experiencing. And this guy cobbles some stuff together and just puts it on the road. Most of us are not as smart as this guy, but that's just irresponsible. That just puts a bad taste in people's mouths.

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

#398

Post by orky56 »

michael_h wrote: post #342
orky56 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more technology can seamlessly take care of the foundation of humanity's needs, the better. Leisure is a very new concept and only came about when humans were able to destress from not having to worry about their next meal or getting attacked by predators. Despite all the progress, much of humanity still faces some basic problems due to inequality and access to resources. Technology combined with some other cultu…

Of course, but once our needs are seamlessly taken care of we're going to just "plug into our computers and get lost in virtual reality"? That is the depressing bit.

I think he's made the assumption that virtual reality would be the ultimate form of leisure since as the article states, it would allow us to experience things our world can't create on its own. We'll leave it up to each individual to decide whether that's depressing or the ultimate goal.

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

#399

Post by jacquesm »

> ‘I know everything there is to know.’ 

Except the law when it comes to exceptions for being in control of your vehicle at all times. Somebody take this guys license before he kills someone due to a divide-by-zero. Testing this in an abandoned parking lot would be ok with me (probably still against the law but fine). In traffic is a definite no.

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

#400

Post by mtanski »

1stop wrote: post #329
czechdeveloper wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSD can also stand for Solid State Disk. Disk does not imply moving parts.

But it does imply a disc, as in a circular thing. SSDs are very square looking discs...

It's kind of like apps still using the floppy drive icon to indicting Save action.
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