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Comment by dawhizkid | Hacker News Reader

I’m getting Theranos level vibes

so, the reporter in your opinion is lying when he says

"...It’s in the city, though, where Zoox really shines. The screens inside the vehicle show an overwhelming amount of information, as the computer vision software keeps tracks of cars, people, stoplights, and road markers all at the same time. Unlike many self-driving cars, it glides to stops. At an intersection with a left turn, it allows oncoming traffic to pass and then waits for some slow pedestrians. Overall, the vehicle performs so well that you forget no one is driving. ....."

If you’ve followed the Theranos saga you know they had set up a lab specifically for reporters and their blood samples were manually tested by a team of scientists instead of their actual device.

How would the reporter know if the car was or was not being remote control operated by an employee?

Is “overwhelming amount of technical info” any more impressive than those memes of computer hackers typing really fast with the green terminal text scrolling down like you see in the movies?

The left turn doesn’t sound like anything an autonomous car shouldn’t be doing? He’s wowed that the car stopped for a pedestrian? Really?

actually, no. They did not let people into the lab and never sent back the tests they did on those reporters. The story of Theranos, as I said in another comment, is not the story of lack of evidence - it's the story of lots of people ignoring evidence. Do you have any evidence this company cannot do what it claims to do ?

so, you're saying it would be impossible to fake the demo with, for example, a remote driver?

no, I am not saying it's impossible. So, are we actually claiming that this company lied to the reporter and manually drove the car through the streets of SF, while remote controlling it? it is POSSIBLE. But do we have any EVIDENCE this happened? Because the story of Theranos is not the story of lack of evidence that it was a fraud. It was virtually apparent from the early days that it was a fraud with plenty of evidence that was ignored. Is there a shred of evidence that this is a fraud?

It is impossible considering the network lag and unreliability when transmitting all the 3D data to a remote location. It doesn't make any sense at all. The remote operation can only help vehicles make decisions, while the vehicle still needs to drive by itself.

The remote driving driver could in theory ghost the journalist car for low latency. Just saying.

Coincidently Ericson and KTH (which Zoox has cooperated with) has done remote driving over cellphone links over multiple miles. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cvSM7pbqZEM

I'm not saying it's what happend. I mean Darpa challange was not fake so Stanford has delivered in the area. But it's possible to solve the lag issue.

It's technically possibly but unbelievably dangerous, given the necessity of relying for millisecond response times over unreliable wireless connections. That $800M would disappear in a puff of litigation if anything went wrong.

But of course we know Zoox is actually driving on SF roads according to public documents, and the fact you can watch them drive if you are in SF and know where to look. Demos are demos, but this one happened with Zoox software at 100% autonomy.

To be fair, demos can be faked (and were, in Theranos' case). But I think the commenter is actually referring to the palpable cult of personality being spun into this article. The article is more of a profile of the founders than it is of the company. In fact the details of the company and its mission appear to be a backdrop for talking about the founders' pedigrees and just-eccentric-enough antics.

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