aimkey

You fell for the boondoggle. Waymo has a very narrow set of routes you can take. They collect ultra HD maps for those routes in SF which has a completely unsustainable human labor cost. It doesn’t scale to “drive me on any road”. Waymo is localized-only driving funded at a major loss by a search ads monopoly.

Cruise does the same, just with VC money (and weird low-traffic hours of operation).

They have not solved driving in the generic sense and they are fooling you (and investors)

Three specific demographics prefer the (from the factory) higher ride height of SUVs:

1) Women

2) The elderly

3) The overweight

Women have a say in over 70% of vehicle purchases in the US. So even if the vehicle is for dad, mom (who is 5’4” on average) preferring the higher ride height of the SUV will influence the purchase if she has to drive it occasionally.

The elderly and the fat have a harder time getting in and out of lower-riding cars/hatches. The country is getting both older and fatter at the same time.

These are the driving forces in crossover dominance.

Their app is a thin wrapper to their mobile site. With Safari push notifications, they don’t need the App Store. I would guess the App Store isn’t a path of discoverability for them anyways. People find them very intentionally on the web.

Lock in

"Don't take the unproven, unjustified drug" is the default position in medicine. You are trying to shift the burden of proof here and it's embarrassing.

YOU are making at least 3 positive claims when advocating vaccination for those with prior COVID infections:

1) COVID natural immunity breaks historical patterns of natural immunity in similar infectious disease 2) People with "only" natural immunity are at significant risk of severe reinfection 3) There is a risk-adjusted, significant benefit for those with "only" natural immunity to get vaccinated

>which confirms my point

lol, no. You know that not a single vaccinated vs unvaccinated population study has ever been conducted, right?

VAERS is designed to detect acute, recent reactions and only acute, recent reactions. If it's not an accute, recent reaction, it probably never makes it into VAERS. That notion that long-term effects could even be reasonably detected today without a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated population study is highly questionable. The CDC refuses to do a vaccinated vs unvaccinated comparison study of overall mortality and disease prevalence. Don't believe me? Go on YouTube and you can find videos of Melinda Wharton making excuses to not do it. Sad, laughable excuses.

Also, you mentioned a German specialist: are you only considering vaccine rollouts in high HDI nations? Because DTP is absolutely associated with increase overall mortality in developing nations. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15082643/

There's also evidence that DTP yields higher mortality in girls: https://academic.oup.com/trstmh/article/110/10/570/2548939

Worth noting that DTP was the reason why the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act was lobbied for and passed in the first place. Vaccines were so "safe", that they couldn't be brought to market for a profit because injuries and lawsuits were so frequent. So, the government indemnified the manufacturers, capped the max injury settlement at $250k, made a special court for vaccine injury where all documents are under seal, and had HHS (taxpayers) make all the payouts. Sounds safe to me!

Because before 2020, natural immunity to virtually any infectious disease was considered sufficient and superior to immunization. The entire concept of natural immunity being "not good enough' is brand new. It was never uttered before COVID, and it has never been proven even during COVID. It's an absurdity, that nobody in the realm of infectious disease even entertained before government started acting forcefully on behalf of pharmaceutical companies in the past 18 months.

Go look for yourself. "Do I need varicella vaccine if I had chickenpox?" The answer is NO.

>Oh, this is a different disease

Okay, then produce a single study indicating that those with prior COVID infection are hospitalized with a reinfection at higher rates than the fully vaccinated. That study doesn't exist. It's all just arbitrary anti-body level response studies, which are useless. If you can't produce a study to show why this infectious disease should be treated differently than all the others, then we'll go with the default position: natural immunity is enough.

Useless paper. Measuring arbitrary antibody levels. The antibody levels produced by natural exposure could be sufficient to protect against hospitalization, and the additional vaccine dose could be unnecessary. Also, 21-day follow up (laughable).

Show me some real-world data of previously infected individuals getting severe reinfections at significantly higher rates than the fully vaccinated. That's the metric needed to make your claim and those data have not been produced. Also, the staying power of the vaccine is already in question BY ITS OWN MANUFACTURER just via the prospect of boosters. They admit implicitly that the immunity their drug produces does not last.

>There has never been a vaccine with a side effect found after more than 2-3 months. Long term side-effects are not a thing for vaccines.

Bullshit and demonstrably false. The first gen rotavirus vaccine was pulled post-marketing because it destroyed the intestines of infants. Was on the market for a year.

>in human clinical trials for around 10 years

And no approval. In other words, this is a dangerous class of drug that has failed to obtain a single human-use approval in 30 years. Thanks for the info!

This message has been brought to you by Pfizer.

Source or GTFO

EDIT: Your downvotes are delicious as you provide no source. The notion of vaccine immunity being stronger than natural immunity, especially with mRNA vaccines, is absurd. You are generating response to a single surface protein of the virus. The virus has many surface proteins and a natural infection will tune the immune system to respond to all of them. There is no evidence of vaccine immunity being stronger than natural.

>Algorithms are just laundering bad opinions like blood splatter analysis

You have way too much faith in the legal system. So many pseudo-scientific classes of evidence exist:

- Field sobriety tests

- Ballistic forensics

- Blood spatter analysis, as you mentioned

- Bite pattern analysis

- Burn / arson forensics

- Polygraph

- Biometrics under less-than-perfect conditions (your fingerprint reader on your phone works well because it's near perfect conditions. Crime scene partial finger prints are usually insufficient. Same for facial recognition -- works with your iPhone FaceID sensor, doesn't work with the gas station 480x320 camera)

- Most DNA and hair analysis

Pretty much all hocus pocus. Courts don't care. Anything for the conviction. Anyone hoping for fair scientific analysis in a court of law today is in for a rude awakening.

I don’t find it misguided at all. I’m far more productive with JVM languages than JS. It has always bothered me that JS won in the browser environment.

Java applets were clunky and dangerous, but I still wish I didn’t have to delve into JS hell just to make a website.

I think you should watch the scenario again. The car is only beat to the junction by the truck towing the trailer because the Mobileye car takes the wide-radius ramp at sub 22 km/h (13 mph). Normal human driver takes that ramp at 40-50 km/h, follows the hatchback out of the junction at flow of traffic speed, with 2-3 seconds of distance behind them for the truck to have a safe braking distance. The truck would have no need to modify speed, and the Mobileye car would satisfy the yield sign (not forcing another car to hit the brakes).

https://i.imgur.com/irkHBxc.png

I think people lower their expectations for autonomous systems. Driving the ramp at a speed a human would and taking that obvious gap to zipper-merge is the correct maneuver for a human. Perhaps you want the autonomous system to err on the side of caution, but I'm actually trying to hold it to a human standard.

But yeah, at the very least, don't get confused and sit there with your nose out in traffic. What's really scary is that this is the take Mobileye chose to go with. They probably had dozens more, with even worse blunders.

> Yes, all evidence I've seen indicates that cars partially driven by computers

Emphasis on PARTIALLY. Anyone who has read recent takeover scenario studies is rightfully horrified at the notion of a completely “hands off” driving experience, where the driver is expected to remain alert and vigilant but they’re not inputting any steering, throttle, or braking. Unsurprisingly, it takes people about 2 seconds to re-engage as active drivers. 2 seconds is way too long, which is why it may be safer to NOT use a system that does steering input in addition to throttle and brake. You need to keep the drivers actively engaged. And no, “touch the steering wheel every 30 seconds” is not active engagement. And if a car has “self driving” but also active driver monitoring, what’s the point? The driver doesn’t get to relax at all. The stress of driving doesn’t come from the input unless you’re racing. The stress of driving comes from having to stay alert. If I have to stay alert, I’d rather just drive myself instead of trusting an experimental system that drives like an indecisive, half-blind grandmother.

The BMW was safe PRIMARILY because it’s a well-designed, modern car, driven by an older and wealthy (safe) demographic. The assistance systems are probably secondary. They weren’t even standard on all vehicles and they were very primitive in that first generation.

If you actually read the Forbes article above, the back of the napkin math actually DOESN’T indicate that Teslas in autopilot are safer than normal driving. That’s the entire contention. I do not think these full-takeover systems are safer at the present time than active human drivers in comparable vehicles with safety assist systems. Tesla is very clearly fudging the numbers to make it appear as if autopilot is safer, but the claim doesn’t stand up to some really basic analysis.

There WAS a proper gap in traffic if the car used its accelerator on the ramp. The car would not have impeded the truck at all if it drove the ramp faster. This is an incredibly common issue with autonomous systems: anticipation of other vehicles with an awkward angle of attack, which is common while merging or while other cars are merging. Also, autonomous systems also tend to be way too cautious, which is incredibly dangerous in merging scenarios.

A good driver accelerates on that ramp on beats the truck by 2-3 car lengths and merges at speed. Yield does not mean stop. A cautious driver slows before the merge point, maintains a roll, then mashes the accelerator to merge safely at next opportunity. A terrible driver (Mobileye) stop abruptly at the end of the merge junction, almost hits a truck, leaves its front end sticking out into the oncoming traffic, then dangerously merges sheepishly without accelerating fast enough. You can even see how much this freaks out the human passenger. He thought he was going to get hit!

The 11 minute mark is terrifying:

1) The car fails to accelerate to beat the truck as it merges (the safest option given the scenario, even with the yield sign)

2) The car almost collides with the trailer of the truck and it stops with its nose sticking out into the merge lane

3) The car sits there with its nose in the merge lane as other cars go by

4) When the car finally has an opportunity to merge after having done everything wrong up to this point, it sheepishly merges and takes forever to get up to speed. This is basically the least safe thing it can do when yield-merging into a high speed lane.

LOL. This is the best the autonomous driving world has to offer? 80% of this driving is an immediate failure for a teenage driver taking their road course. I think I can take pretty much any random 2 minute sample from that video and find more than a few inputs/maneuvers that would lead to failure in a driver's license test. Why would ANYONE with a brain put their life into the hands of this system?

OH, and do you want to know a little industry secret about these "unedited" long videos? Yes, the video is uncut. But guess what? They drove that route hundreds of times and only showed the best run. And they got laser-HD maps of the route that they won't have globally. This is what Zoox did for their infamous demo that got them bought out by Amazon. And it's what Tesla did for their "Full Self-Driving" video on YouTube that shows driving ability that their cars cannot match even today. Shhh, you didn't hear it from me.

Modern vehicles have much safer crash characteristics than older cars. The average vehicle on the road in the US is 11 years old. Do you know how much crash characteristics of cars have improved in the last decade? The comparison needs to stay in the modern, $65k+ vehicle realm for it to be apples-to-apples. Otherwise, you're comparing a bunch of decade old rust buckets with heat-cycled rubber, no blind spot monitoring, and Takata airbags to modern vehicles and claiming victory. Come on.

The BMW F10 535i had ZERO FATALITIES over its entire life in the US. Zero. It had no "self-driving" capabilities. Just lane-departure warning, BLIS, and ACC.

>It seems really what you are saying is not that Tesla are charlatan but the whole industry is.

The entire industry has an air of charlatanism. Tesla is the biggest charlatan of the bunch. The LIDAR-using ventures at least have a snowball's chance in hell. Tesla has no chance with vision alone.

Mentioning the senses wasn't meant to be an itemization of "senses" that a car or car operator needs. Of course you can still drive decently while deaf and without feeling the g-forces. The point is that vision is NOT the only input. In semi modern (non-self-driving) cars, the driver is still assisted by a flurry of additional vehicle sensors in addition to vision and the other human senses. So dismissing LIDAR as "not needed" is foolish.

I understand the complexities of modern commercial flight. I still consider it far less complex (computationally) than driving on today's public road. The fact that you have V2V communication out of the box (via transponders) is probably the biggest factor. I would not rule out autonomous driving WITH a standardized V2V / V2E system. Without one? I'm bearish.

>Tesla's self-driving is far safer than human driving: the number of accidents and deaths per mile driven are something like an order of magnitude lower (i.e., around 10x safer).

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Tesla here, is, again, being funny with the numbers. They LOVE to cite autopilot ON death statistics as being "10x safer than normal driving". What they fail to note is that Autopilot can ONLY be on while driving on a limited access highway. Highways are much safer to drive on than a mix of ALL ROADS, which is where the baseline figure comes from.

Another confounding factor is the price of the vehicle. The average CONFIGURED Tesla with the FSD package today costs what? $65k? More? Those X's and S's are $100k+. Nobody is buying that base Model 3. The point is that Tesla drivers are 1) Older and 2) Wealthy. Wealthy, older people get in far fewer car crashes than the average driver. In fact, car crash fatalities are really driven by two groups: drunks (or pill addicts), and young (teenage) men. Not saying it's IMPOSSIBLE to have a substance abuse problem and own a Tesla, but the average Tesla owner is less likely to have these issues. It's also less likely to own a Tesla while young.

So, Tesla autopilot stats should be compared to other comparably priced vehicles while driving on the highway ONLY. That would actually be a fair, honest comparison. I believe a recent outgoing BMW 5 series chassis finished its entire life without a single fatality in the US. That's right -- 4-5 years of service in the US without a single death. Turns out, wealthy people who drive expensive family sedans don't get in a lot of fatal highway crashes.

Here's a Forbes article (sorry) doing some of the back-of-the-napkin math. They estimated that in Q3 2019, autopilot really wasn't any safer than manual driving.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...

What an annoying charlatan. Karpathy is a brilliant computer vision engineer, but he has let his expertise in that subfield cloud his judgement on achieving the overall goal of autonomous driving.

Musk and Karpathy have been dead wrong about LIDAR for years. Remember Musk making the absurd claim of a million Tesla robotaxis by 2020? I think most hilarious is that both Karpathy and Musk claim the LIDAR systems are too expensive. Yet, in the same 2019 Autonomy Day they simultaneously claimed that Teslas would be able to drive themselves and operate as robotaxis, earning their owners passive income and therefore justifying significantly increased MSRPs. So, the $7k LIDAR system (that accelerates safe autonomous driving) is not worth the cost, yet stumbling towards autonomy on vision only is? If the car becomes an money-earner, you should use all of the systems available. The 2019 Autonomy Day was an utter embarrassment. I'm sure 2021 will be more of the same.

So now it seems that they've realized their folly in logic. So what's the solution? Well, you can't just complain about COST of non-vision perception systems. Because, as noted above, that doesn't make sense if you're going to simultaneously claim that your car will be able to earn you money (augmenting any extra hardware cost that gets you to that point faster). No, now you have to smear all non-vision perception systems. You have to say that their data is worthless and detrimental to the overall effort.

The entire claim from the 2019 Autonomy Day that "vision is what humans use to drive" is also completely bogus. Humans use many senses to drive. They feel the pedals and steering wheel. They use their equilibrio sense to sense motion. And they use their hearing to hear other vehicles, sirens, and issues with their own car (driving with headphones in is illegal for a reason). Any modern car, even a Tesla, is also using far more than just vision when attempting autonomy. Forget about radar and LIDAR for a moment. There are endless sensors in the drivetrain. Steering angle sensors and multiple IMUs for the electronic stability control. Brake and wheel sensors for the ABS. Temperature sensors everywhere. And countless other ECUs. The notion that vision is getting you there exclusively is nonsense. There's no good argument against LIDAR today other than perpetuating a lie to sell cars that are cheaper to produce. And, Karpathy has a massive professional conflict of interest in making CV the main player -- he's a CV expert. He was never a fusion expert before his hire. If CV is the pathway forward, he's gets to remain "the guy". It certainly behooves HIM to make that claim.

Autonomous driving will not be achieved in this decade. Perhaps ever. Ask yourself honestly: if you were tasked with building an autonomous commercial aircraft OR an autonomous car, which would you choose? Most would say aircraft -- nothing to really hit in the air, fully mapped airport and runway systems, and far fewer variables. Yet autonomous aircraft still do not exist. Perhaps the edge cases always rule the roost. Ask yourself why driving would be any different...

It seems as if the people gobbling up the "Tesla has the data! Autopilot will keep getting better!" line have never trained a neural network in their life. Models converge. Loss stops decreasing, regardless of more incoming data. Extreme manual data cleaning effort becomes required to prevent overfitting. Model architecture has to change and hyper parameters have to be tweaked. Then you're back at square one as far as testing goes if you change any of those things.

The notion that Tesla's model HAS to keep improving simply because they will be able to pile on more (unlabeled!) data is laughably false. And, in fact, quite insulting to the intelligence of even the most casual ML engineers.