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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

??? I thought that was what it was for. Or maybe for making wacky collision vids on YouTube?

Tesla just closed their whole self-driving office in San Mateo, and fired ("for poor performance") most of the staff, directing some to come to work across the bay. For now.

People still employed on that activity would best update their résumés. People who paid for self-driving already? I would ask for a refund, in your shoes. (I wonder if they will comply.) People fired for cause without due process? Sue. Really. How scummy is it to do a mass layoff, and make toxic shit up just to avoid complying with laws for mass layoffs?

Supposedly the "important" people are still employed. For now.

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I can’t imagine there is a way to get a refund, but if I could I would. 10k on something they won’t even let me beta test because where I live triggers incorrect forward collision warnings too frequently for my driving to be considered good enough. I was skeptical but paid up front, and I’m pretty sure I got taken

I don’t think the “safety score” has much to do with safety. I suspect it’s a way to ensure that only the most obsessed/devoted fans will get access to the beta, since there seems to be no way to get a high enough score through normal driving in a populated area. You basically have to be willing to devote a ton of time to “gaming” your score, rather than just driving places.

Yup. The simplicity of the system, combined with the fact that the method of calculating the score is publicly available, means that it encourages drivers (in some circumstances) to drive less safely. It also doesn't include rapid acceleration or speeding despite those being pretty good predictors of purposeful unsafe driving, probably because those are part of the reason you buy a Tesla in the first place.

Beyond that, the way it is calculated makes it less of a safety score and more of a risk score; it can't distinguish between a person driving effectively in a risky environment (safe) and a person creating a risky environment (unsafe). Some portion of the testers are then people who actively avoid safe defensive driving techniques in risky environments to maintain their safety score. That type of person is the absolute last person you want testing an autonomous system.

This video is a great overview of FSD beta safety, I've linked to the section specifically about the safety score: https://youtu.be/sHyOL_vDQMQ?t=801

Which skews your dataset. People are getting trained to operate Autopilot rather than generally drive safe.

Procrustean bed, hooooo!

It’s plausible that the goal isn’t to select for safety at all — the goal could be to select for drivers for whom, for whatever reason, FSD has a chance of actually working.

> they won’t even let me beta test because where I live triggers incorrect forward collision warnings too frequently for my driving to be considered good enough

WTF. And I guess they will still compare "Autopilot" accidents with your average driver's, when they are literally combing (supervisor) drivers for their skill?

Combing drivers for their skill and their driving routes for how easy it would be for FSD to drive through.

It’s their crap tech that can’t tell an overhead bridge from a real obstacle.

Talk to a lemon law attorney. If your car doesn't do what it's supposed to do, it might be a lemon, or at least lemon adjacent enough to be handled by such an attorney. Don't fight with Tesla on Twitter.

You need to set your forward collision warnings to 'early'. The safety score ding happens at medium. If you have it set to 'late', you will get dinged and never even know it until later.

"You need" to buy a different car.

I’ve got a baby in the car, the noise of the alert wakes him up. It’s for a bridge at the top of a hill on my way home, triggers every time. It’s not valid

Sue, I guess. Seems like they would settle quickly because fighting tens of thousands of lawsuits would look bad. And, maybe anyway cost more than settling.

I think for the money I’d be in small claims court against the skill of Tesla’s legal team, I’ll get washed so I don’t think it’s worth my time. Honestly, I didn’t even want full FSD. Tesla dropped the price of my car by 10k after I’d purchased but before I took delivery, they gave me this as a way to smooth it over so I didn’t just cancel my delivery, eat the 2k fee and re-order saving myself 8k. I didn’t trust Musk to deliver on his promises, but that was 2018-19. In my wildest dreams I didn’t imagine it would be 2022 and they just fired the team doing it, and I still don’t even have access to a beta test.

Common practice among corporations in small-claims court is to default, because just showing up would cost more. It is worth a try.

That's why they hired the 'hard core street fighter litigation team'…

But he promised to use them only for good, not for evil! (I may have just strained my eye-rolling muscle)

Unless Tesla owners agreed to Forced Arbitration with Tesla, when buying their vehicle.

IANAL, but I expect that the killer lawsuit will come from the estate of someone killed by a Tesla who doesn’t own a Tesla. No contract = no arbitration or much leeway for Tesla to claim that the driver should have known better.

The fact the arbitration is even a short circuit for the courts is absolutely ludicrous.

That probably will not get this unhappy customer his "FSD" fee back.

No, but a $5bn personal injury case might actually get Tesla’s attention.

I’m not at all familiar with the relevant law, but I imagine the FTC could sue to force a refund of the FSD charges.

Rome?

Once in rome I saw a car parked, a car crashed into it for some reason, and the driver just left the car in the middle of the road, crashed into another car.

I do have a photo of that somewhere.

That’s just normal parking.

Marin, CA

> Supposedly the "important" people are still employed.

Karpathy is still on a "sabbatical". The odds of him returning from that is pretty much zero.

Wait. Karpathy is on sabbatical? Says who?

Says Karparthy IRL. And yes I doubt he’ll return.

It's official now; https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1547332300186066944

Oh my, what a surprise, absolutely no-one saw that coming......

"Btw, @karpathy is on a ~4 month sabbatical."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1508110810614181890

Wow, didn't know. 200 ppl it seems: https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/tesla-laying-off-200-wor...

That’s a misleading headline. Tesla let go of their labeling team because they weren’t needed anymore.

Why weren’t they needed anymore? Do they now have an AI labelling for another AI? Or are they dropping this joke of fsd?

Whenever somebody calls musk the smartest man in the world, they don't understand the connection between data labeling and Tesla's propensity to stop for nothing and crash into stopped emergency vehicles.

OpenPilot doesn’t have a data labeling team. I think you should do some more research before doing a drive by comment on something you know nothing about.

Tesla's extremely well-documented results speak louder than whatever theory you've made a drive-by assertion that I know nothing about.

Has OpenPilot achieved level 5 autonomy? No? Keep it off the road.

Are you saying that it is OpenPilot that is responsible for Teslas crashing into stopped vehicles and barriers and turning illegally in front of trams; and that more or better data labeling would not improve that behavior?

Because I didn't see any mention of "OpenPilot", as such.

...

Never mind that. Look over here, a humanoid robot!

> Or maybe for making wacky collision vids on YouTube?

Don't forget the "shocked" expression poses for the thumbnails. :O

> How scummy is it to do a mass layoff, and make toxic shit up just to avoid complying with laws for mass layoffs?

??? This is California, an at-will state. Firing everyone for no reason is completely fine.

> Tesla just closed their whole self-driving office in San Mateo,

They closed office full of hourly workers labeling data, because their automated process can do it with less people.

Those guys are not AI engineers, they are doing menial work.

And tagged all 200 as fired for bad performance. Just to avoid complying with labor law. Classy move, Tesla.

You know this for an absolute fact and swear to it on first hand knowledge?

Really?

Yes, really. The world is obese with fantastical conclusions propagated by terrible practice of first hand experience and thus spreads rumors and worse.

You know this for an absolute fact and swear to it on first hand knowledge?

Yes, it is a certainty. Abundantly clear from direct experience myself, and consistent evidence between other experiences that it is at least a descriptor of a symptom of the increasing concern of conflict in our zeitgeist.

Speak of what you know, for what you don't, be quiet. Something like that.

I will know to ignore you in the future.

What a delightful strategy to propagate conflict toward resolution.

"Menial work" that's life-critical and impacts the safety of millions of vehicles on the road.

> Supposedly the "important" people are still employed. For now

I don't know if you're unaware of this or omitting it to mislead others, but everyone laid off were data labelers. This is completely consistent with a strategy shift to preserve capital: in-house annotation isn't that common for AV companies anyway. And data labelers are 100% the most "unimportant" in-house workers: their job is literally to be as consistent and mechanical as possible. In contrast to those defining and building the labeling procrsses, their job is to be as mechanical as possible.

I'm not a fan of Tesla. I think their approach to self-driving is irresponsible. But the level of dishonesty in conversation about them is astonishing, even on fora like this that are ostensibly higher-quality.

The news report said "mostly". So, who is being dishonest?

Other coverage, like CNN, made it sound like the layoffs were concentrated along annotators. But your comment made me double-check the original reporting[1], which AFAICT says that the layoffs were both data evaluators and annotators.

Granting you the pedantry point here, I hereby happily amend my comment to refer to "data [evaluators] and annotators", with zero impact on my point.

> So, who is being dishonest?

Not sure if you're actually familiar with the definition of the word? Being potentially technically wrong on a pt that doesn't change the overall claim is enormously different from the core of a claim being wrong (eg the implication that "supposedly important people haven't been laid off" when they demonstrably focused the layoffs on the most commoditizable and replaceable labor in the industry).

[1] https://archive.ph/i6BCD

If you complain about the quality of discussion, the onus is on you to be better. But, you are not better, or even as good. My original "important" was more accurate than your criticism taking it as an example of unfair dialog and, supposedly, correcting it.

But you do prove your point: discussion of the topic was here, with your comments, overall only a little better than your own contribution. Without, though, substantially better.

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