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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, it's just a little sad that reading this article it seems that Hotz hasn't grown up much, and that attitude isn't great to see from a person working on a safety critical application. If you want to put your hands in the life of George Hotz fine, but keep the hell away from the public roads.

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Comma has really good safety code. ISO26262 compliant, and they use MISRA C guidelines. Hotz talks about safety in the comma.ai discord server all the time, and frequently berates people for requesting unsafe features or making unsafe forks of openpilot. Afaik, comma auto-bans devices from using their servers if they detect that you’re running a fork that’s removed safety restrictions. It’s safe.

I've worked with ISO26262 before, it's not some utopia, it's a very basic set of requirements, and these requirements are bourne of hard-learned lessons, lessons Hotz seems to publicly dismiss constantly. It doesn't matter if he points out the safety cocerns he has, it's about having a system in place to address safety concerns you don't have. It's the things that aren't obvious that are going to go wrong, and even if they go wrong in 1/10000 cases that's still once per person per year. To be clear, these standard are literally about not assuming the designer is a genius, which absolutely seems to be a premise that Hotz doesn't want to accept.

I think you are extrapolating something that doesn't exist in the article...

Comma implemented driver attention monitoring into their device before Tesla did, and George had been advocating Tesla do it for a long time before they finally did. He talks about this in the most recent podcast with Lex Friedman.

That doesn't sound like someone who is too immature to work on a safety critical application to me.

Okay, if you're advocating Tesla as some paragon of safety we're in a different universe. Telsa is known as the company as notoriously the least safety concious. Other car companies have comparable technology to Tesla marketed under ADAS. Why? Because they don't want to burn their reputations to the ground for having similar attitudes towards safety as Tesla. The entire approach of Comma is "Maybe we can train a computer to be slightly worse than a human driver"

> it seems that Hotz hasn't grown up much

What do you mean by "growing up"? Hopefully not embracing the pervasive mediocrity of institutions and defending the current status quo.

His architecture for designing a machine that can drive is for it to learn from mediocre humans.

The "mediocre humans" you cite are the everyday folks who drive cars, most of whom do not get into accidents. That makes them quite a useful model to learn from.

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