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Comment by aza05001 | Hacker News Reader

Seriously. The website does a pretty crappy job at explaining what the product actually is.

I think that's sort of by design. The NHTSA shut down their ability to sell in the US a few years ago. This seems to be some sort of stealth method to sell it again using the same sort of trick pharmaceutical companies use where they don't have to tell you any warnings if they don't actually tell you what the thing does.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/comma-ai-cancels-the-comma...

> Hotz tweeted from the official Comma.ai account that rather than providing the requisite response, the company would instead be cancelling Comma One entirely, and turning its attention to “other products and markets,” since Hotz says that the prospect of a life “dealing with regulators and lawyers… isn’t worth it.”

...Wow. Maybe don't develop autonomous driving tech then?

Their tech is within the top two right now, and Hotz has demonstrated a deep responsibility with it. Plus, it's all libre software.

Skipping regulators seems fine, given (unlike their competitors) they're acting responsibly. Their eye-tracking tech is really cool, too, and prevents the Tesla problem of drivers losing focus.

Do you have any evidence to support your claim that Hotz has done anything resembling "deep responsibility"?

Because from the scraps that I've managed to put together, he seems childish and irresponsible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcYp-XT7UI

This Lex Friedman interview is pretty explanatory on the topic of responsibility.

A couple of highlights, which point to Comma being at minimum more responsible than Tesla: Comma doesn't advertise itself as anything beyond L2, unlike Tesla; Comma doesn't fuck up eye-detection, it refuses to cooperate with a driver who has their eyes off the road.

>Their tech is within the top two right now,

how can anyone make that statement in the same breath as declaring that dodging regulators is fine? Who the hell evaluates the quality of the product if not regulators?

Are we supposed to take George Hotz's or the companies word for it?

You can use it; you don't have to take Hotz's word, or the company's word for it. How everything works is completely open, and it works pretty well. Also, see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21987585

I thought the computer vision model wasn't open?

It's open sourced. Everyone is able to evaluate quality.

The people who are consumers of these products are not necessarily software engineers, so no everyone cannot evaluate the quality of these products. Secondly, the models are not open source, and even if they were looking at them tells them nothing about the quality of the product.

The only way to actually access the quality of these products is through independent testing by a body that is qualified and reputable enough to do so. Which in my opinion should happen before even a single one of these devices is actually allowed to participate in regular traffic.

It was made fully opened sourced last year.

https://medium.com/@chengyao.shen/decoding-comma-ai-openpilo...

> it was made fully opened source

Unless something changed I missed, the part I emphasized is not true. There’s binary blobs in the source code that last I heard would not be released.

The quality of a product is pretty much always determined by the marketplace, not regulators.

I feel like the Boeing 737 MAX situation is a clear demonstration that this isn’t really the case, especially in the realm of safety regulations.

It seems to me like the market has developed a better idea of the product quality there than the regulators initially did.

I am a comma user, engineer and autonomous vehicle enthusiast. Comma truly is second only Tesla if we leave out Waymo, but Waymo is only operating in Geofenced areas.

I have used every single pilot assist out and they're all quiet frankly terrible in comparison. I will give GM Supercruise a nod in how well it's done but again, it's Geofenced.

Their tech is nowhere close to the top two.

Or maybe don't have such a stringent regulation ?

As I understand it, "the NHTSA shut down" is a serious approximation of the story. They marketed aftermarket self-driving kits while not getting any regulatory approval, and when the NHTSA sent them a letter saying "So, uh, what's this thing you're selling? Can we meet?" they immediately chose to shut themselves down instead of meeting.

It isn't an actual consumer product, it is a development kit.

it's a dashcam with a passive driver assist system, the openpilot stuff is a separate product meant to be installed onto the "comma two" by the user

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