My girlfriend has T1D, she diagnosed when she was very young. She’s great at managing it and has a pump and a CGM, but there’s still so much bullshit that she goes through when parts break. It’s really made me furious at the medical device industry, so I’m happy to see you’re working on new solutions. As a software engineer, I often wonder if there’s anything I can do to help with T1D management, so if anyone knows of projects/companies that need devs, I’m all ears.
There are 2 fixes Tesla could make to Autopilot that I think would make it much safer and pleasant to use.
1.) Set the self-steering torque limit much lower. By far the most anxiety-inducing thing of watching FSD videos on YouTube is how erratically the wheel jerks around when the system is unsure, and is literally unsafe because a driver’s reaction time won’t be quick enough.
2.) This one might be controversial, but don’t disengage Autopilot on driver steering. Keep disengage on gas and brake. If they implement (1), then it’s easy for the driver to overtake the system’s steering and course-correct. This also eliminates the driver’s hesitancy of taking over for fear of having Autopilot disabled for the remainder of the drive.
These two are features of Comma.ai’s system, and people report that as being a much more pleasant experience. I really think Tesla needs to think more about the human-computer interaction side of this.
Obligatory “Tesla != Elon”. You’re acting as if “researchers in this space” and Tesla are separate entities, and they’re not. Tesla employs people with very good research track records, notably Andrej Karpathy, who is Director of AI and has a decade of ML/CV research under his belt and was a founding employee at OpenAI. Andrej has enough clout independent of his work at Tesla that if he thought Tesla’s approach was stupid, he could just leave and get a similar job at a company he thought had a better approach. Not saying he won’t do this eventually, but he’s been working on FSD since 2017 and hasn’t jumped ship yet, so presumably he likes the direction they’re going in.
Always cool to see research from Numenta. They don’t get as much love as DeepMind, Google Brain, and OpenAI because their results aren’t as flashy, but I do feel like they’ve got a principled approach to engineering intelligent systems distinct from that of the big players.
I agree, just want to add my anecdotal evidence. I graduated undergrad in Dec 2020 with a good job lined up, as did many of my friends who picked majors that had been the obvious good choices when they enrolled in college 4 years earlier. It was easy to see what career tracks would be good ideas, and the people I know who put in minimal effort to research these before committing ended up just fine. It’s not like people who picked majors with poor employment prospects were blindsided at any point. Now these are the same people who I see vocally advocating for the government to cancel their debt and cancel their rent.
I’d say I’m pretty progressive on most issues, and obviously I have sympathy for my friends that ended up this way, but I have to agree with you that one way we could end up with fewer people limping along is to just keep them from shooting themselves in the foot.
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
Since other comments here and everywhere already covered that, left unchecked, this just devolves straight back into a bad system where a select few end up as the arbiters of truth, I want to ask: as technologists, what sort of systems are possible that incentivize people to find the truth instead of finding “facts” that just confirm what they already believe? The only thing I can think of is prediction/betting markets. These are good at discerning truth of events with easy to observe outcomes, and anyone is free to contribute provided they’re willing to have skin in the game. Outside of that, it becomes harder.
That the fact-checking and vicious labeling of “misinformation” would lead to distrust seems so obvious to me that the cynical conspiracy-minded part of me thinks it’s possible that the people doing it have been aware of it since the beginning, and that this is actually their intention. Increases division in society and makes the people loyal to your side easier to control. “Never let a good crisis go to waste” type of situation.
I agree that Tesla isn’t immune to the same mechanics of supply and demand that make dealerships do these markups, but I think it’s important to note that Tesla honors the price of the car from the time you placed the order. I ordered a Model 3 in October and the price of the car has increased since I placed that order, but I’ll still be paying the original price when I take delivery. I see that as a positive over what this article is saying, which is that the dealership hit reservation holders with a sudden markup, which probably wouldn’t have happened without the dealership as a middleman between Ford and the buyers.
> if you showed an image or two of an object to a person they could identify that object in other orientations and lighting conditions pretty well. To do the same with NNs requires thousands of examples and counter examples to train.
There’s work from 2019 on gauge equivariant NNs that looks to solve this, there’s a paper and explainer video from Qualcomm Research about it. Also, Tesla presumably does have thousands of examples for most driving scenarios. There’s also lots of work in the ML community on generalization—that’s arguably what all the research is about in some way or another. I don’t intend to be flippant, but I would bet that these are issues that the researchers at Tesla are well aware of.
Smearing an entire group of people by claiming they’re exclusively “literal cultists” or scammers and providing no additional argument for such a strong claim is the definition of a low-quality comment.
Another technique you can try to cut off the dizziness upon standing is flex your abdominal muscles as soon as you feel it coming on. Works 100% of the time for me. Probably works for the same reason (blood pressure), but easier than hyperventilating :)
This just sounds like you defined “value” to mean “something only living things do and that machines don’t do”, and then said the reason machines can’t learn is because they can’t value. Seems like circular reasoning. I think if you’re putting humans, chimps, ducks, and caterpillars in the category “can value”, machines still belong on that axis. They’re far below caterpillar for now, but they’re there.
> But since it’s Elon doing it, somehow it’s okay and makes his company worth a trillion dollars
Most comments on HN and Reddit (even the largely pro-Tesla subreddits like r/TeslaMotors) are people complaining about how bad FSD is and how ridiculous it is that it's allowed. Missy Cummings, who has a history of publicly calling out Tesla on their unsafe roll-out of FSD, was just made a senior safety advisor for NHTSA. So I disagree with your idea that somehow this is a case of everyone loving something because it's Elon.
I'd also disagree that this isn't an impressive feat. If Tesla has been able to build a pipeline that allows them to incrementally improve FSD up to the point where it's almost as good as a human, then it indicates that they could probably continue to incrementally improve the performance past being as good as an (average) human, at least up to a point.
On the trillion dollar valuation, obligatory reference to Efficient Market Hypothesis. FSD is not the sole thing driving the stock to that price.
> tends to fall into the "slipper slope" fallacy territory a lot of the time it's rolled out
Yeah, and the "that's a 'slippery slope' fallacy" rebuttal is often addressing something that is an actual slippery slope a lot of the time it's rolled out. Pointing out a slippery slope by itself isn't proof that the thing in question isn't real or isn't bad. Slippery slopes are real, and are quite often bad.
> "Question Authority" became "Trust the Science or Else"
You forgot “according to fact-checkers”. Seriously one of, if not the worst creation of the news media complex from the past few years. I don’t know how they think that fools anyone.
> It is baffling that these people pretend to not know why people don't trust them.
This has been the real sticking point for me throughout this whole thing. As much as I don’t like Joe Rogan, I went and watched some of his conversation with Sanjay Gupta, and I applaud Sanjay for even agreeing to go on Joe’s show at a time when he was (imo) only getting worse. But he really, really, did not do a great job. Specifically, he literally hesitated to answer the question “Do you think it’s a problem that your news network lies?”. Surely Sanjay Gupta knows that CNN had exclusively been running headlines saying Joe Rogan was taking “horse dewormer” even though he was taking the actual human version of ivermectin.
I don’t think it’s the responsibility of public health officials to bend over backwards trying to repeatedly convince people who will not be convinced by any evidence. But I also think they’re between a rock and a hard place, since if they just stop trying, then there’s the question of “well we could have done more and saved more people”. I don’t have any solution, but I don’t think the move is for them to keep doubling down on repeating “the vaccines are safe and effective”. Because although it may be true, it clearly isn’t working.
As someone who is also vaccinated as has had the same thought re: other health choices, I think the convincing argument here is that indulging in junk food and being obese aren't contagious conditions. Although with early data on Omicron seeming to indicate that this variant evades antibodies from prior infection and vaccination, I'm not sure how much this specific mandate is going to help--especially considering that it's probably coming too late for NYC to avoid a massive spike this season.
I don’t understand how a post-scarcity society would even be desirable. For things like art and music, their creators need to be able to command a price on their creations. The digitization of these things removes their scarcity and essentially makes them function as a public good, making it impossible to set a price on them that will support the artist. If there’s no way for digital artists to support themselves, then they’ll cease to exist. Extend this to any other proposed “post-scarcity X” and you get a society I wouldn’t really want to live in. This isn’t meant to be flippant, I’m genuinely curious if there’s something here I’m missing.
As a sidenote, "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," is just completely devoid of substance. Do the people crafting these corporate statements actually believe that people don’t see straight through them? Nobody is going to read this and think, “Oh, thank god, they’ve assured us that the change isn’t going to communication worse and decision-making less informed, this is good stuff!”
The hole in your reasoning is that “it’s a Ponzi scheme!!!” is not a reasonable argument against crypto and shows a misunderstanding of both Ponzi schemes and cryptocurrency. And it is always at the top of HN threads about cryptocurrency. “why don’t they just believe” ends up being the response because if you look around, there are well-reasoned arguments against nearly all of the criticisms of the main cryptocurrencies, and people continue to willfully ignore them, giving us never-ending comments about Ponzi schemes. Reasonable criticism is what is happening within the development communities of these projects.
Increasingly doesn’t mean as much to people as it used to when it comes to debasing their own currency. See the recent lie about inflation being transitory, which Powell literally just admitted isn’t true.
> the number in the bitcoin wallet has no value itself
This is a weird take and I don’t see what your point is. The number in your fiat bank account means just as much as the number in a BTC wallet. The number there is how much you’re entitled to withdraw or spend.
Seconded. This “private companies can do what they want” isn’t the “gotcha” many people think it is. Societal values exist independent of the specific implementations of laws meant to protect them, and in places where the law doesn’t reach—like the USA’s 1st Amendment not applying to private businesses—I think it’s still worth talking over “Hey, the law doesn’t really enforce this value here, but maybe it’s a good idea to abide by it anyway”. Saying private companies can do whatever they want is just stating the obvious and avoiding the question of what they should do.
Another thing that baffles me is the need to mention energy usage along with anything related to crypto. The complaint about energy usage is a normative claim that these technologies don’t deserve to use the energy they do, which is fine, but then it’s never backed up by an actual argument for why they don’t.
Additionally, this is a standard I don’t see applied to anything else that could be reasonably argued to be on the same level of “dumb” as anti-crypto people claim crypto is. Let’s see the same scrutiny of energy usage applied to every TikTok ever made. Let’s see it applied to the training of massive ML recommender systems that serve no purpose but to better target ads (this is one I have seen from some folks, but nowhere near as much as I’ve seen outrage over crypto energy usage). If someone says “well yeah, but at least those recommender systems have value, which crypto doesn’t!”, sorry, but value for whom? Certainly not users.
I’m disappointed that even on HN, there’s pushback against individual creators of digital content trying to capture some of the value they create. Individuals simply don’t have the resources to use the legal system to go after anonymous people online who steal their work, and they shouldn’t be expected to just give it away for free. So other solutions need to be tried, and NFTs are maybe one potential solution.