Statistically, it is more dangerous to have a human in control.
The stats that Tesla have shown are for Autopilot with a human ready to take over at a moment's notice. Do you have stats for Autopilot with a zoned out human behind the wheel?
If Autopilot got it right yesterday, it will get it right today.
That is an incorrect assumption. Weather conditions change, the behaviour of other drivers changes, one day there might be roadworks or some debris in the road.
There was a fatal accident in China where the car drive into the back of a road sweeper that was partially occupying the lane. There have been instances in the US where the car suddenly disengages or crashes into roadworks. Low sun can blind the cameras at certain times of year.
There is extensive discussion of this on the Tesla forums, including information from guys who dissect the firmware and extract images from the cameras.
Currently they are not using all the cameras. They don't use the side ones, there is no blind spot detection. They don't do any sign recognition yet. They seem to have some level of detection of motorbikes, but it's not consistent enough to show on the instrument cluster.
They only process a single frame of video at a time. They do road marking detection and base steering decisions off that. They also use GPS and maps for assistance, like slowing for corners.
You simply can't sell cars with big $10k domes bulging out of the top upping your drag coefficient by 10-20% and consuming a couple kilowatts of power.
That's why people who know about this stuff are predicting 2020 or later for self driving, because that's when lidar will become cheap and compact enough to make it practical. The tech is already working in the lab, but it takes time to commercialize and the characterise to understand the differences between the larger units.
The breakthrough has been to find electrical ways of directing the emitted light, rather than needing to have a spinning mirror.
It feels great to just click on Autopilot and zone out.
It's also incredibly dangerous. You could kill someone.
Autopilot requires you to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention at all times. It can and does do stupid things sometimes. Wondering over centre lines, "truck lust" where it moves dangerously close to large vehicles, taking the wrong path when the road splits or there is an exit ramp...
Their cars are not self driving. They are Level 2 automation, which means that the driver has to keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. It's basically unreliably auto-steering and reliable traffic-aware cruise control.
The early version didn't force the user to pay attention, and then that guy was killed and they made it more strict. If you go back and watch the original videos made about the feature on YouTube there are a lot of people not touching the wheel at all for minutes at a time.
And it's exactly that sort of control over your town's choices and economic life that makes many people absolutely recoil at the notion of EU-style nanny statism.
On the other hand, we don't have a race to bottom where things like environmental regulations and infrastructure costs get offloaded just to enrich some politicians.
Yeah, we have corruption here too, we just make an effort to actually deal with it by removing powers that are frequently abused. I thought small government with less power was good???
It depends how badly they fleecy you. There are costs to hosting a large company. Infrastructure updates to cope with traffic, or time lost to traffic if not addressed, for example.
It's okay if the benefits outweigh the costs, but the whole point of bidding processes like this is to create a race to the bottom where politicians lose sight of that and end up with a really bad deal that pretty much pays Amazon to build an HQ there.
Other languages exist, but Unicode sucks for encoding them. Most Japanese, Chinese and Korean software doesn't use Unicode, for example. And most software that claims to support Unicode is broken.
We need to replace Unicode with something better. My suggestion would be:
- 32 bit unsigned is the primary character encoding, with an 8 bit format for legacy systems like email. Compatibility modules for loading UTF8 and UTF16 will be provided. Most text is compressed when transmitted anyway (e.g. HTTP) so 32 bit characters won't have much effort on real load times.
- No combination/composite characters. Unicode is a horrible mix of composite and non-composite, and it makes simple operations like determining the number of characters in a string horrendously complex. With a 32 bit character space there is no need.
- Split out CJK languages. Dedicate entire pages to each, making language detection and font selection trivial.
They probably would have solar backup, at least enough to survive. Wouldn't want to rely on one technology or one unit when you are a year away from resupply...
The solar panels on the rovers had issues with dust, but for a permanent static installation that is solvable.
These days politics has been reduced to sound bites and tweets. Intelligent statements often can't be reduced to a 3 second clip. Effective solutions often require explanation, where as simple but ineffective ones like "build a wall" or "ban Muslims" don't.
We need to find ways to communicate good ideas in this new age, or somehow force a change away from politics by tweet.
At the rate they are going a lot of people's leases will expire before they deliver the feature. Even Musk is saying 2020 now.
Selling technology that doesn't even exist and which you have no realistic prospect of delivering in the next few years is not a great marketing strategy. It's a recipe for lawsuits when people realize the paid $3000 for nothing.
Audi has level 3, which is hands and eyes off. It only works up to 60 kph, designed for traffic jams, but if a truck did cross in front of you it is supposed to be able to handle that by itself and not require immediate driver intervention.
The current A8 has the system installed but not active as they are waiting for regulatory approval.
Tesla is the one that has the most ingredients for success at hand.
No, Tesla has too few sensors and that is really hampering its efforts to even get back to where it was 2 years ago.
Originally Tesla was using MobileEye tech. They ended that partnership and developed their own hardware platform, which uses cameras, front radar and ultrasonic sensors. Crucially there is no lidar or stereo vision.
When AP2 was introduced it was a huge step backwards. A year and a half later they are starting to reach parity with the old AP1 system from MobileEye. But it really isn't clear if they will ever deliver the full self driving that they have already sold to customers with their hardware. The cameras might simply be inadequate for the job. They also seem to have a lack of engineering staff to work on this problem - they only just delivered rain sensing wipers and there are still other basic features missing. Progress is extremely slow, and even Musk has pushed back his estimate for self driving to 2020.
To understand why the AP2 might be inadequate it helps to understand how it works. They have multiple cameras around the card, with neural networks (NN) to process the images. The NNs are currently quite primitive, they only consider one video frame at a time and don't have any memory of previous ones. That is the cause of the infamous "ping pong" effect where the car bounces around in the lane. It also means that they have no real 3D vision, because when you only have mono vision (not stereo like a human) you need to compare successive frames to determine depth. This results in the system struggling with hills, especially corners with even slight gradients.
No consider what Tesla has already sold to customers. Full self driving capability, to be delivered by software update. You will be able to summon the car out of your garage to your front door. Summon it from the other side of the country. It will take your kids to school by itself. It will find a parking space by itself. For this to work the car needs a detailed 3D map of the surroundings so that it can navigate in areas without map data or GPS signals like your house or car parks. It needs to be able to manoeuvre with precision and skill, spotting small obstacles like low walls and children. None of the sensors are adequate for that task, let alone the NNs required to process that data.
I use the Google Authenticator app and did not need to add my phone or accept any SMS messages to make it work. I simply scanned a QR code off the screen.
The problem with the refund route is that a lot of your other hardware probably depends on the CPU, e.g. the motherboard won't take a newer Intel CPU let alone an AMD one.
In this case I think normal consumer laws are not going to be enough to sort it out, and I'll end up in Small Claims Court with them. Currently their engineers are looking at my situation to see if they can suggest anything, but I doubt it. I mean, if they could then they would have already told the people running thousands of servers and seeing massive performance hits about it.
Depends on where you live I guess. In the UK they have a "reasonable length of time" to fix warranty issues before you can get a refund or replacement. That's usually considered to be 28 days.
I guess the question is when does the 28 days start? It's from when you contact them about the issue. I contacted them as soon as I read about the flaw a few weeks ago, and they haven't delivered a working fix for it yet.
How come data plans in the US are so shitty? I pay about $18/month for unlimited data, unlimited SMS and 300 minutes of talk time. 4G and all that.
I wonder if there is a real problem with available bandwidth that necessitates high prices to discourage use, or if they are just using that as an excuse to fleece you.
Unless people got a pop-up message saying "sorry, due to a design flaw we had to slow your phone down, give us $75 to speed it up again" then they were not informed.
Do we really want Facebook, or any other corporation, to "steer the thoughts and actions of the masses"?
No, we just want them to recognize that they are now some kind of news outlet for a lot of people. In most countries the news media is expected to have standards and at least try not to print outright bullshit, so it would be nice if Facebook could say do something about fake viral stories. Not ban them, but maybe just throw up some debunking stories or opposing views along side them. Burst the bubble.
Slashdot Mirror
Statistically, it is more dangerous to have a human in control.
The stats that Tesla have shown are for Autopilot with a human ready to take over at a moment's notice. Do you have stats for Autopilot with a zoned out human behind the wheel?
If Autopilot got it right yesterday, it will get it right today.
That is an incorrect assumption. Weather conditions change, the behaviour of other drivers changes, one day there might be roadworks or some debris in the road.
There was a fatal accident in China where the car drive into the back of a road sweeper that was partially occupying the lane. There have been instances in the US where the car suddenly disengages or crashes into roadworks. Low sun can blind the cameras at certain times of year.
$99 is just the base cost, you then have at add up all the extra you pay for over priced items that qualify for Prime.
Maybe it's better in the US, but I couldn't live off the selection available at Amazon UK.
There is extensive discussion of this on the Tesla forums, including information from guys who dissect the firmware and extract images from the cameras.
Currently they are not using all the cameras. They don't use the side ones, there is no blind spot detection. They don't do any sign recognition yet. They seem to have some level of detection of motorbikes, but it's not consistent enough to show on the instrument cluster.
They only process a single frame of video at a time. They do road marking detection and base steering decisions off that. They also use GPS and maps for assistance, like slowing for corners.
It wasn't worth it at the old price. Their streaming service is substandard and the "free" shipping is just added on to the price of the item.
The weird thing is some people think he's doing really well. When asked to rate his first year they give him an A.
You simply can't sell cars with big $10k domes bulging out of the top upping your drag coefficient by 10-20% and consuming a couple kilowatts of power.
That's why people who know about this stuff are predicting 2020 or later for self driving, because that's when lidar will become cheap and compact enough to make it practical. The tech is already working in the lab, but it takes time to commercialize and the characterise to understand the differences between the larger units.
The breakthrough has been to find electrical ways of directing the emitted light, rather than needing to have a spinning mirror.
It feels great to just click on Autopilot and zone out.
It's also incredibly dangerous. You could kill someone.
Autopilot requires you to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention at all times. It can and does do stupid things sometimes. Wondering over centre lines, "truck lust" where it moves dangerously close to large vehicles, taking the wrong path when the road splits or there is an exit ramp...
It's not safe to zone out.
Their cars are not self driving. They are Level 2 automation, which means that the driver has to keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. It's basically unreliably auto-steering and reliable traffic-aware cruise control.
The early version didn't force the user to pay attention, and then that guy was killed and they made it more strict. If you go back and watch the original videos made about the feature on YouTube there are a lot of people not touching the wheel at all for minutes at a time.
And it's exactly that sort of control over your town's choices and economic life that makes many people absolutely recoil at the notion of EU-style nanny statism.
On the other hand, we don't have a race to bottom where things like environmental regulations and infrastructure costs get offloaded just to enrich some politicians.
Yeah, we have corruption here too, we just make an effort to actually deal with it by removing powers that are frequently abused. I thought small government with less power was good???
It depends how badly they fleecy you. There are costs to hosting a large company. Infrastructure updates to cope with traffic, or time lost to traffic if not addressed, for example.
It's okay if the benefits outweigh the costs, but the whole point of bidding processes like this is to create a race to the bottom where politicians lose sight of that and end up with a really bad deal that pretty much pays Amazon to build an HQ there.
Other languages exist, but Unicode sucks for encoding them. Most Japanese, Chinese and Korean software doesn't use Unicode, for example. And most software that claims to support Unicode is broken.
We need to replace Unicode with something better. My suggestion would be:
- 32 bit unsigned is the primary character encoding, with an 8 bit format for legacy systems like email. Compatibility modules for loading UTF8 and UTF16 will be provided. Most text is compressed when transmitted anyway (e.g. HTTP) so 32 bit characters won't have much effort on real load times.
- No combination/composite characters. Unicode is a horrible mix of composite and non-composite, and it makes simple operations like determining the number of characters in a string horrendously complex. With a 32 bit character space there is no need.
- Split out CJK languages. Dedicate entire pages to each, making language detection and font selection trivial.
This is what happens when you have people kissing your arse your entire life, just hoping to get some trickle down wealth.
They probably would have solar backup, at least enough to survive. Wouldn't want to rely on one technology or one unit when you are a year away from resupply...
The solar panels on the rovers had issues with dust, but for a permanent static installation that is solvable.
Twitter's insistence on SMS is a real pain. In some countries I don't even have SMS reception capability, it's data only.
These days all SMS and voicemail I get is spam anyway. I'd disable them if I could but my provider doesn't even allow it.
These days politics has been reduced to sound bites and tweets. Intelligent statements often can't be reduced to a 3 second clip. Effective solutions often require explanation, where as simple but ineffective ones like "build a wall" or "ban Muslims" don't.
We need to find ways to communicate good ideas in this new age, or somehow force a change away from politics by tweet.
To be fair Tesla's "marketing" strategy of selling cars with full self-driving capability since September 2016:
https://electrek.files.wordpre...
At the rate they are going a lot of people's leases will expire before they deliver the feature. Even Musk is saying 2020 now.
Selling technology that doesn't even exist and which you have no realistic prospect of delivering in the next few years is not a great marketing strategy. It's a recipe for lawsuits when people realize the paid $3000 for nothing.
Audi has level 3, which is hands and eyes off. It only works up to 60 kph, designed for traffic jams, but if a truck did cross in front of you it is supposed to be able to handle that by itself and not require immediate driver intervention.
The current A8 has the system installed but not active as they are waiting for regulatory approval.
Tesla is the one that has the most ingredients for success at hand.
No, Tesla has too few sensors and that is really hampering its efforts to even get back to where it was 2 years ago.
Originally Tesla was using MobileEye tech. They ended that partnership and developed their own hardware platform, which uses cameras, front radar and ultrasonic sensors. Crucially there is no lidar or stereo vision.
When AP2 was introduced it was a huge step backwards. A year and a half later they are starting to reach parity with the old AP1 system from MobileEye. But it really isn't clear if they will ever deliver the full self driving that they have already sold to customers with their hardware. The cameras might simply be inadequate for the job. They also seem to have a lack of engineering staff to work on this problem - they only just delivered rain sensing wipers and there are still other basic features missing. Progress is extremely slow, and even Musk has pushed back his estimate for self driving to 2020.
To understand why the AP2 might be inadequate it helps to understand how it works. They have multiple cameras around the card, with neural networks (NN) to process the images. The NNs are currently quite primitive, they only consider one video frame at a time and don't have any memory of previous ones. That is the cause of the infamous "ping pong" effect where the car bounces around in the lane. It also means that they have no real 3D vision, because when you only have mono vision (not stereo like a human) you need to compare successive frames to determine depth. This results in the system struggling with hills, especially corners with even slight gradients.
No consider what Tesla has already sold to customers. Full self driving capability, to be delivered by software update. You will be able to summon the car out of your garage to your front door. Summon it from the other side of the country. It will take your kids to school by itself. It will find a parking space by itself. For this to work the car needs a detailed 3D map of the surroundings so that it can navigate in areas without map data or GPS signals like your house or car parks. It needs to be able to manoeuvre with precision and skill, spotting small obstacles like low walls and children. None of the sensors are adequate for that task, let alone the NNs required to process that data.
I use the Google Authenticator app and did not need to add my phone or accept any SMS messages to make it work. I simply scanned a QR code off the screen.
I think that text might be out of date.
Over many thousands of years, causing huge changes that were difficult to cope with.
It will be bad when that happens very quickly and to civilisations rather than nomadic tribes.
The problem with the refund route is that a lot of your other hardware probably depends on the CPU, e.g. the motherboard won't take a newer Intel CPU let alone an AMD one.
In this case I think normal consumer laws are not going to be enough to sort it out, and I'll end up in Small Claims Court with them. Currently their engineers are looking at my situation to see if they can suggest anything, but I doubt it. I mean, if they could then they would have already told the people running thousands of servers and seeing massive performance hits about it.
Depends on where you live I guess. In the UK they have a "reasonable length of time" to fix warranty issues before you can get a refund or replacement. That's usually considered to be 28 days.
I guess the question is when does the 28 days start? It's from when you contact them about the issue. I contacted them as soon as I read about the flaw a few weeks ago, and they haven't delivered a working fix for it yet.
How come data plans in the US are so shitty? I pay about $18/month for unlimited data, unlimited SMS and 300 minutes of talk time. 4G and all that.
I wonder if there is a real problem with available bandwidth that necessitates high prices to discourage use, or if they are just using that as an excuse to fleece you.
Unless people got a pop-up message saying "sorry, due to a design flaw we had to slow your phone down, give us $75 to speed it up again" then they were not informed.
Do we really want Facebook, or any other corporation, to "steer the thoughts and actions of the masses"?
No, we just want them to recognize that they are now some kind of news outlet for a lot of people. In most countries the news media is expected to have standards and at least try not to print outright bullshit, so it would be nice if Facebook could say do something about fake viral stories. Not ban them, but maybe just throw up some debunking stories or opposing views along side them. Burst the bubble.