[InTheArena]

I was taught that unless you are really really sure that there is no impediments and/or cliffs to either side of you, to hit it straight on, and only to dodge if you were sure you could make it.

Of course, they also said to break as much as possible but hit it straight on. You would total the car, but cars are designed for that, versus your body not being able to take a deer going through the windshield if you clip it on the side. The engine block is padding, use it.

Looking at the video, it looks exactly like the videos of horrible car crashes I saw in school (less blood). As usual with Tesla, the headlines are sensational, the hacker news comments breathless, but it's a fairly straight forward physics and recognition problem. 300+ people die a year, and billions of dollars in cars are destroyed each year. A neural network mimics the way human brains work. If a animal goes in a unexpected direction (or if it wasn't recognized at all), its going to be a problem.

[heavyset_go]

> As usual with Tesla, the headlines are sensational

The headline is "Tesla Autopilot Hits a Deer" which is as bland and unsensational as you can get while being true.

> A neural network mimics the way human brains work.

This is like saying a drawing of a circle mimics the way the sun works. NNs are vaguely inspired by a high-level neuron topology, but the similarities pretty much end there. Gradient descent and backpropogation don't take place in the brain at all, and we don't know enough about the brain to mimic the way it works.