n0tth3dro1ds

I always thought the confounding factor was that coffee keeps you productive. Meaning, drinking coffee gives you (superior) employment, which means you get decent health care. You also might gain some meaning in life from your job. You will also probably get some extra human interaction with coworkers as well.

Going to work and being a part of a large organization that works on cool products definitely “energizes” me. I have friends at work that I enjoy seeing daily. I would have a hard time keeping my job without caffeine. I could easily see all the ancillary life benefits of being caffeine addicted being the primary reason why coffee seems to be good for health in all these studies.

“Tech”, as in social media company, isn’t cool. It’s mostly CRUD at scale, and the core product is a social ill.

Fighter jets and super cars are cool, but they aren’t considered “tech” for some reason.

The former pays way more than the latter. But yeah, it’s not “cool” or even really respected outside of software engineering circles (who know the salary range). Doctors and lawyers command more cool factor and respect, even if they’re earning less than FAANG employees.

“Meaningful defense work” is not orthogonal to violating the 4th amendment. I don’t think I’ve heard Snowden argue that the NSA’s work is not meaningful. He mainly objected because it was unconstitutional.

Based and Ted-pilled

Grandparents? How about Obama (or most mainstream Dems) from ~2006

>against gay marriage

>against illegal immigration, supported erecting physical barriers

>pro wars in Middle East

You surely do not need to go back two generations to get shrieked out of a room. Just dip back ~10 - 15 years into mainstream Democrat positioning.

Not at all. Silicon Valley tech companies crushed all dissenting opinions online to a comical level. The only place you’re allowed to have a dissenting opinion is in real life

>BLM

>LGBT

>counter culture

Endlessly supported by literally every news outlet, major tech company, big 5 sports league, F1000, university, and at least half of the political class. You’re not counter to any major institution, lmao. You’re not the resistance

That’s cool. The engagement metrics show more usage and ad clicks when the feed is ML-driven, so that’s what they’re gonna give you. Thanks for playing.

Cowardice: the post. Cops won’t care or do anything near me. Dangerous confrontation > dead/raped sister any day of the week.

>“If you drive a Tesla you’ll have experienced phantom braking at some point, a false positive condition when the Autopilot cameras thinks there’s a wall up ahead, for example if going under an overpass. It will literally brake. You step on the accelerator and cuss once or twice at Elon and you’re good to move on. This Bay Bridge driver could not make a decision and let the car brake to a stop. It’s not uncommon. Anecdotally I would say Teslas get rear-ended quite often.”

This level of apologism is shocking. “Everyone knows Teslas emergency brake to a stop in the middle of highway traffic randomly, bro. Just gotta be ready for it! No biggie!”

Yikes. Ever considered rental cars? Borrowing a friend’s car that you’re not familiar? Or just 100+ years of automotive history in which random no-input braking was considered completely unacceptable and not even a thing?

>It’s relatively easy to take over the controls which instantly disengages FSD or Autopilot.

What a naive assertion. Have you read takeover studies? Driver assistance systems put drivers in a state of inattention (universally, not just ones named “Autopilot” or “Full Self-Driving”, which undoubtedly makes it worse). Regaining attention and building a model of actors and hazards around you takes time — too much time to make the necessary split second maneuver to avoid an accident at highway speeds.

So, if you constantly have to maintain full attention even with FSD engaged, what are you really buying for $15k? You don’t get to sleep. You don’t get to watch a movie. You don’t even get to relax your awareness at all. If you do, the company that you paid $15k to for “Full Self-Driving” will say YOU were the one being irresponsible.

Basically, I see Tesla’s FSD as the following proposition: “Would you like to pay $15k to allow an overly-cautious and sometimes-erratic beginner driver to drive you around everywhere? Most of the time, this driver will drive so cautiously that it will frustrate you and confuse other drivers on the road. This driver may also get confused by shadows and abnormal visual phenomena, and this may lead to inexplicable emergency braking or incorrect path selection at any time. To help this driver, we’ll install a second steering wheel and pedals at your passenger seat so that you can take over driving at any time (which you WILL be required to do regularly and immediately). If you guys get in an accident, YOU will be at fault, no matter what.” Sooner or later, people will stop buying this garbage and just opt to drive themselves.

Less friction for the option that scores Apple some sweet, sweet recurring revenue.

Foot and mouth disease (and others)

> You're already behind on which cities are being mapped by the way.

Funded by investors or search ads, not ride fares. And in a $200k vehicle that will never be economically viable. Your resume will be embarrassing in a few years if you stick around. Do yourself a favor and get out before you go to zero.

>build really good electric cars, that people choose to buy over cheaper alternatives.

From the perspective of an employee at another OEM, I’d say they already do that. They have several moats outside of autonomous gimmicks:

1) Charging network. Nobody comes close. 2) Infotainment software (combined with underlying architecture and in-house silicon). They have the best experience in the industry. Their architecture is streamlined unlike disjoint legacy OEM 15 ECU hell. The broad market doesn’t really understand how far ahead they are in terms of architecture. Any new OEM has a huge advantage of starting fresh. 3)Packaging and battery density. They have the best range. They have the best packaging (tons of trunk and frunk space), where as many other manufacturers end up with weird raised trunk floors and no frunks in their competitor products that also somehow get worse range.

So yeah, I think Musk definitely undersells their lead in these areas. With no redesigns of the main models yet, they really could have focused a lot of effort on improving quality, interior materials, etc, but they instead poured money into the quagmire of autonomy.

> this ranting would be a lot more relevant if you couldn't hail rides in our vehicles

Where? A narrow area in which you can create ultra-HD maps that are in no way indicative of the general case?

If you’re at Cruise, I can only grab a ride between 10 pm and 5:30 am (lol, lmao). If you’re at Waymo, your beta is still closed (though I have several invites from former colleagues) and you only serve a tiny fraction of realistic destinations in the city. Do you think this proves your point? Let me restate my position: you can’t scale to the general case. You never will. You will be stuck in Phoenix and specific part of SF forever. Your business will never be viable. Your vehicles will never be able to navigate roads without a prohibitively costly mapping effort in that region that doesn’t scale. Your valuation will continue to decline. What part of offering unsafe rides to friends and family right now changes that?

>How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial autonomy, to full autonomy?

I don’t. Should you be able to sell an unsafe car just because you speculate about some non-existent alien technology that would make it safe if it existed? Why?

> If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved that way I see no foul play.

So if NHTSA doesn’t force their hand then they have no obligation to make a safe driving system, even if they know it to be unsafe? I’m very glad that countless engineers at Volvo (3-point seatbelts) and GM (airbags) and others didn’t have that mindset.

>You don't know how much a map costs to make, nor how much it would cost to maintain long term. Nor the cost of amortizing over 30 years. You're just making claims with nothing to back it up.

I literally work at an automotive OEM that maintains its own AV team and map infra. I have seen the balance sheets. It’s not going to scale.

Also, you make the inverse claim without evidence or any purported industry expertise. Where’s your evidence that Waymo can just walk into a new city without ballooning costs? If they can do it, why don’t they? That which has been asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

> You used "fraud". Fraud requires damages to a party

Tesla owners bought a product called “Full Self-Driving”. You are illiterate if you don’t consider that product name tantamount to fraud if the car can’t drive itself.

Investors were clearly lied to. Once again, I don’t care about VC money. Part of the game to lose it.

You work at a company committing fraud with a dead end product that will never scale. You’re mad that I’m exposing your fraudulent demo tactics. Go tweak those hyper parameters one more time —- cross your fingers your model converges this decade before your funding gets pulled and your resume has a half-decade block filled with “I bought the hype, committed fraud, got caught, and failed.”

But then you may form an opinion of your own (that differs from theirs) by reading the source material. Or you may notice that those trusty journalists weren’t accurately representing the content of source material in their articles.

That would be bad (for the media company).

> Ok, and when they want to expand to Knoxville, TN, they'll have a couple people take X months to map it

No they won’t. That’s the entire point. It doesn’t scale from a cost perspective. The entire thing is funded by their search ads monopoly right now. They can’t pull in the revenue they need to maintain the map from ride fares alone.

> Mapping is probably the closest thing to a solved problem in autonomous driving.

LOL! Not even close to true. “We can do it” != “we can do it without burning billions of dollars per year”

> so it's not like investors are deceived

Investors (and consumers) are absolutely deceived. I don’t really care: being a VC is risky. But these types of videos are intentionally deceiving. Only the best of many runs is shown. Editing is often used. The routes have HD mapping that won’t be collected universally (due to cost problems). How is that not deception in your mind?

I literally work for an automotive OEM and have worked in computer vision for over a decade. Nice links to engineering blogs written by my colleagues.

You are a moron and I seem to have struck a nerve. Hello, salty Tesla owner or engineer.

> for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone anything about.

I work in computer vision and work at an automotive OEM. Left autonomous field specifically because it was fraudulent. Have many friends that helped stage fraudulent videos like the ones that Tesla/Zoox/Waymo put out regularly.

When you post a video of a “successful” drive, have the CEO tweet about it and say the car is driving itself, yet the same software version of your autonomous stack literally crashed on an earlier run, you’re committing fraud. If you imply via video that your AV can handle a certain type of driving scenario without issues, yet in the actual video your AV is relying on an ultra-HD map of that specific route that your company cannot conceivably collect for the majority of roads, you’re also committing fraud. If you think otherwise you’re drinking somebody’s Koolaid.

It’s about scale. When you show a video of the car driving itself, you’re implying it can do it in similar arbitrary scenarios. When the car can only drive itself on a route with an ultra-HD map, yet your business model doesn’t allow you to collect ultra-HD maps across the country, and you don’t mention this in your video, you’re committing fraud.

Waymo and Cruise can drive SF because they limit the number of scenarios and they collect ultra-HD maps for that tiny area. Throw a Waymo van in Knoxville, TN and it fails left and right, even in similar scenarios due to the lack of the quality map.

> Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time?

If Apple never delivered the features that he demo’d and went on to sell the phone for $650 with the promise of those features existing, then yes.

A software system sold as “self-driving” with the lawyer-derived safety valve of an attention warning is not safe. All automotive companies have done takeover studies for ADAS systems. Spoiler: there’s no such thing as a timely takeover at highway speeds. The more a system drives itself, the more the drivers are lulled to a state of inattention (or in the case of many Tesla drivers, literal sleep). This doesn’t work at 70 mph. It’s false advertising on top of a highly unsafe apparatus.

Walter Huang’s Tesla drove into a barrier on the 101 not far from Tesla’s Palo Alto facility. It drove into a barrier because of its naive vision-only system paired with the constantly changing and faded lane lines on the 101 due to construction. If Teslas can’t drive the 101 without mistakes, they can’t drive anywhere. It’s literally right down the road from their autonomous driving team’s office.

> Why do so many news articles do this?

Because they’re serving ads. They don’t want you clicking on a link that takes you to an external site. They don’t care about you reading primary material and forming your own opinion, either. They want to shape your thought and they want you to click their ads.

I told you so.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850#33214018

> This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.

Never hire a lawyer, then.

The mental model of GPL cancer has infected the concept of public domain