This felt like it didn’t do your aim justice, “$X and an incomplete understanding of what you’re doing is all it takes to be compromised” applies to many $X, including Tailscale.
Puerile and uninformative, unfortunately. I respect that each of us has their world view, but if the last decade has shown anything at all, it is that when you are in the public square, you are asking for interlocution, not for escapism to be indulged. And the best thing is to do as you implicitly ask, and interlocute.
Camera's are not the issue, they are dirt cheap. Its the amount of progressing power to combine that output. You can put 360 degree camera's on your car like BYD does, and have Lidar. But you simply use the lidar for the heavy lifting, and use a more lighter model for basic image recognition like: lines on the road/speed plates/etc ...
The problem with Tesla is, that they need to combine the outputs of those camera's into a 3d view, what takes a LOT more processing power to judge distances. As in needing more heavy models > more GPU power, more memory needed etc. And still has issues like a low handing sun + white truck = lets ram into that because we do not see it.
And the more edge cases you try to filter out with cameras only setups, the more your GPU power needs increase! As a programmer, you can make something darn efficient but its those edge cases that can really hurt your programs efficiency. And its not uncommon to get 5 to 10x performance drops, ... Now imagine that with LLM image recognition models.
Tesla's camera only approach works great ... under ideal situations. The issue is those edge cases and not ideal situations. Lidar deals with a ton of edge cases and removes a lot of the progressing needed for ideal situations.
The issue isn't just the cost of the lidar units off the shelf. You have to install the sensors on the car. Modifications like that at the scale that Waymo does them (they still have less than 10K cars) are not automated and probably cost almost as much as the price of the car itself. BYD is getting around this by including them in a mass produced car, so their cost per unit is closer to the $130 off the shelf price. This is the winning combination IMO.
Waymo already has an automated integration line, and the new vehicles from Zeekr will come partially assembled from the factory as a semi-custom design so there's no modifications in the sense that you're talking about.
Tesla uses their own chips. Chips which you can’t skip by using lidar because you still need to make decisions based on vision. A sparse distance cloud is not enough
They have no fabs. They're using nvidia chips on server side last I checked, and what tsmc thei own design for in car? Those aren't cheap anyway. The markup on nvidia chips is high, but it's not _that_ high.
Is it really comparable, though? What is better a Ferrari or a Ford Ranger? That depends on if you are trying to go fast or haul 500 lbs of stuff across town. Waymo is a much better completely autonomous robo taxi in limited areas mapped to the mm, but if I want an autonomous driving system for my personal car to go wherever I want, Tesla FSD is the better option.
We being who? What is your evidence it's better? The fact all the cars stopped moving when the power went out? The fact they cost WayMore? Show the evidence for your claims. And they have remote operators as proven by the power outage.
Apologies, I was unclear with the "i.e." bit I assume, to spell it out: I think after struggling with it over years its time to call it because Waymo has a scaled paid service, no drivers, multiple cities, for 1 year+.
It’s because you spam this thread so much with such aggressive language that it honestly is scary to deal with you.
You’re smart Darren, and so are other people, you should assume I knew the cars have remote backup operators. Again, you’re smart, you also know why that doesn’t mitigate having a scaled robotaxi service vs. nothing
I doubt you’ll chill out but here’s a little behind the scenes peek for you that also directly address what you’re saying: a big turning point for me was getting a job at Google and realizing Elon was talking big game but there’s 100,000 things you gotta do to run a robot taxi service and Tesla was doing none of them. The epiphany came when I saw the windshield wipers for cameras and lidar.
You might note even a platonically ideal robotaxi service would always have capacity for remote operation.
This is such a weird take when Elon Musk is still letting his Optimus robots be teleoperated for basically every live demo. If you're lenient with him, it's completely unreasonable to be strict with Waymo, which works autonomously the vast majority of time.
This whole thing reminds me why I never wanna work for someone again. From what I saw at Google it all just ends up being classist top-down BS of who isn't allowed at the big kids table, or bottom-up BS by insisting they aren't the SME just the IC and we can't do anything until the XYZ PM SME TL and/or manager approve.
It is unparsable Dilbert nonsense to anyone outside of specific scenarios. And it causes interminable discontent. Because what if the SME is the PM because they know business and tech but the SME is actually the IC because they know the tech and its tech but what if the manager is actually the SME because they're running the tech and may need to redelegate if the IC needs vacation, blah blah blah.
(job history: college dropout waiter => my own startup, sold => Google for 8 years => my own startup)
I'm sorry you've had bad experience working with other people, but in my experience as a developer, having multiple SME's available is indispensable to real alignment and fast development. I've primarily worked in startups, not big companies, and have often worked in healthcare. In healthcare, you get beyond your "I'm a big smart engineer" ego BS and you are willing to listen to the PhD's and MD's that help inform clinical workflows. From my perspective, I would never ask a clinical researcher or a doctor to understand our react app, and they aren't going to ask me to have deep understanding on medical details and clinical workflows. We work together to deliver high quality useful software quickly.
My PM SME validated my workflows and I found Jesus in them then my MBA TL PhD…bla bla bla.
A human being who avoided corporate brainrot just writes “I worked with John and he was indispensable because (insert reasons you wrote here)”
I’m 37 and never heard of this acronym. That’s the entry-level version of my point. Not that other people hurt me or people knowing things is actually bad.
This is 100% true, and what I'm about to describe isn't an attempt to falsify it: took me 11 years and 3 cities to figure it out.
You don't have to exercise so much as get moving.
I'm the best I've been in 37 years, and it's because in August I started forcing myself to just keep walking whenever I went out to have a cigarette. I was in Boston, and would end up ~nowhere and exhausted.
Then started doing random stuff: "might as well walk to Harvard Square instead of the bike path again" "might as well go to a bookstore instead of somewhere random" "I should use the skate park, I don't fit in*, but I miss rollerblading from middle school"
Then my dog died, 2 days later I severely sprained my ankle at the skate park and couldn't walk anywhere substantive for a couple weeks. By the time I'm able to do a sustained 10m+ walk it's winter.
Went to visit California as a not-tech-employee for the first time, so I saw San Luis Obispo and Los Angeles for the first time. And the same habit kicked in, in SLO I ended up hiking for the first time on what I find out later was not a real trail, end up hiking every day that week.
Get to LA and it's nothing like I would have thought. Egalitarian, tons of stuff to do, and Waymo is a godsend. Whenever I get antsy there's somewhere to go and a way to get there.
2 weeks later, I got an apartment in LA, moving away from Northeast for the first time in my life. I could see me just spending another 4 months decaying in Boston until its barely warm enough out to take a 30m walk, and I'm tired of that cycle..
All that to say, I'm fit, I had a great career in high school sports, I played basketball occasionally, but couldn't really get active consistently. Treadmill was never stimulating enough to keep my attention on anything other than being bored. In retrospect, I really wish I heard this old saw ~all of us know and heard it as "moving around" instead of exercise.
(n.b. this was all under active mental health care x medications spanning a decade+. It's not that the mental health care was useless, I don't think I could have done what I did without it. But it couldn't "fix" me on it's lonesome, only enable me to get moving.)
* in retrospect this was wrong, plenty of newbies, and one of the most welcoming social environments I've been in. just people out there all trying to do the same thing and supporting each other.
That's a great way to think about it. "Get moving" is a lot less intimidating and feels more achievable than "exercise" which conjures images of marathons and four-plate squats.
Some of my best friends are personal trainers and they say the same thing. When you tell people just moving essentially gives you what they refer to as "free exercise". The kind that doesn't make people feel like they have to get up off the couch, change their clothes, go to the gym, get on the treadmill, lift their weights, etc.
Just walking around the block. Just walking up a few flights of stairs. Just doing something that doesn't feel like you have to have a huge investment is sometimes the best way to start - then transition into more structured stuff like wight lifting or running or anything else. And you still get the benefits for almost nothing. Walk a few flights of stairs and your legs start to burn, your lungs open up, you increase your blood flow, and you release endorphins. And it didn't cost anything if you can just include it in your day-to-day activities.
Not sure how many times I make extra trips to my basement just to get in a few more stairs. lol
No way could I do a gym and these days most things in a gym would be just begging for joint pain. But the wilderness is a great gym (assuming you know what you're doing safety-wise, I see too many idiots out there.)
There's a difference between what something is and what something is perceived as. For whatever reasons they may have, many people have a strong negative emotional reaction to the idea of exercising, ask them to go for a two mile walk around the neighborhood with you and they'll balk. But then you take them to a city like Rome and they'll walk 20 miles in a day without even realizing it.
(context: gp poster) It's extremely funny to contemplate what my resumé would say about my intelligence vs. it taking 11 years of really worrying about my mental state consistently, occasionally trying to precisely define "exercise" via my mental health professionals and get in the weight room, when I knew the whole time about that phenomenon. i.e. I'd play pickup basketball for 3 hours post-high school but wouldn't run for 10 minutes. (not saying you're wrong, the opposite, it is the fundamental core lesson. intellectual error was forgetting to expand "exercise" to include walking to places I wanted to be)
Cheers, I thought I was the only person like this :) (also didn’t tie it to my anxiety, but it’s extremely obvious in retrospect. This is too short and elides the own kind of comfort part, but I guess it means I can’t spin out, ruminating on or creating other problems, when I have stuff right here to complain about!)
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