[p0wn]

One of my favorite tech articles of all time involved this guy. He was showing off the self driving capabilities of his framework and took a reporter out on a drive. Everything went well and while they were wrapping up the interview the reporter said "Well I bet you're just driving around all the time hands free, it must be amazing" and Hotz says "Oh well I just got it working this morning".

Classic. I love it. My kind of engineer.

[mayankkaizen]

It is funny to read top comment and then your comment. The thing you are admiring about him is the same thing top commentor is criticizing.

[PragmaticPulp]

Comma was always riding the tailwinds of the underdog effect.

When Tesla ships an autopilot on mass market cars that fails in edge cases, commenters are up in arms that it wasn’t tested to perfection in every scenario. Big companies are punished if they don’t deliver perfection.

When an underdog company hacks together an autopilot proof of concept and takes a reporter for a ride with it, they’re heroes for pulling off a technical feat like that. Underdog stories will always draw applause.

The challenge with a company like Comma is that they can’t maintain underdog status forever. The product is very impressive in the context of an underdog hacker success story, but outside of a few early magazine shootout wins it just can’t hang with the efforts of the big companies throwing huge budgets at their own solutions. This puts them in a difficult spot because the underdog-hacker story can’t scale forever.

[covertBehavior]

Is this why Argo AI (legacy funded startup from the ranks of CMU, system set them up for success) just shut down their entire company and Comma is still selling devices? No? Ok.

[qeternity]

I'm not sure what you think this proves, but Argo's shutdown is indicative of just how difficult driverless is. GP's comment is entirely about how Comma needs to mature beyond the hacker underdog shipping some devices to DIY tinkerers, and that's an incredibly challenging task.

If anything, your comment is proof.

[covertBehavior]

It proves that comma is making money today by being an “underdog” while Argo never made a dime and is now out of business by being the opposite of an underdog. Would you rather be an underdog or be unemployed?

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

That kind of attitude is great for editor or compiler or game development.

It is absolutely the wrong attitude for self-driving cars or anything that is safety critical.

[1980phipsi]

To be fair, he was recently in the news saying self-driving cars are a scam. https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/09/george-hotz-autonomous-...

[thepasswordis]

>autonomous cars are no closer to reality today than they were 5 years ago

Why do people keep printing things like this, which are objectively wrong? I have had a completely autonomous waymo come to my location, pick me up, and take me to another location.

That didn't exist five years ago, it does exist now. How is this not "closer" than it was 5 years ago when it literally exists now, and didn't exist then?

[phphphphp]

The situation you're describing is no different to 5 years ago: autonomous vehicles exist but can only operate in a limited environment. That's where Waymo was 5 years ago, it was just an even more limited environment. Read the "Road Testing" section on Wikipedia, specifically, 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo

[thepasswordis]

>it was just an even more limited environment

Huh, so are you saying maybe we're a little close to autonomous cars than we were 5 years ago?

[phphphphp]

sure, “no closer” is hyperbole and in the most literal sense of the phrase, we are closer because time has passed… but in the practical sense, we are closer today because testing is going well and so permission has been granted to expand testing — the technology is not meaningfully different, what’s happening today could have happened 5 years ago (if safety regulations were more lax and had permitted testing with less data).

[asdfqweqe12]

If you think geofencing scales to solve the FSD problem. Otherwise no.

[singlow]

If one believes that autonomous cars with no limitations on environment will never exist, then no progress will get us any closer to infinity.

[kajecounterhack]

It's different because San Franciso is not Phoenix. It's much harder.

Do you expect to wake up one day and have self driving cars work in every city? That's just not what today's technology can accomplish. You either end up with broadly applicable L2/L3 (Tesla, Comma) driving, or you get narrow scoped L4 driving.

The scope of L4 widening is a real change.

[phphphphp]

Waymo was driving in SF 5 years ago.

[Vt71fcAqt7]

True, until it can off-road in the amazon rain forest it has not improved.

[aantix]

The scope is larger.

[macNchz]

I think Waymo first launched early access to nobody-behind-the-wheel hailable rides in Arizona almost exactly 5 years ago: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-drivi...

[jerojero]

I don't really know the state of the art in self-driving. But it might very well be that it wasn't the technology that changed in these past 5 years but the regulation around it as incremental changes were made to regular cars which have led to regulators consider that the technology was, after all, safe enough for these use cases.

Not that the technology hasn't improved, but with these things there might be many factors involved that might answer the question "why we have this today and not 5 years ago".

[jeffrallen]

It exists now because you live in a place with good weather and regulators who are willing to put the live of other road users at risk for the sake of your toy.

[foogazi]

> regulators who are willing to put the live of other road users at risk for the sake of your toy

What about the regulators that allow drunk and distracted drivers everywhere

[paulryanrogers]

> What about the regulators that allow drunk and distracted drivers everywhere

In what places is drunk driving legal? The laws exist and are rigorously--if imperfectly--enforced everywhere I've ever lived.

Are folks building transportation businesses employing drunk drivers?

[cjbgkagh]

I think it’s the hard parts are still just as hard.

[Barrin92]

because that's like arguing that because you can now climb your way up a tree which you couldn't do five years ago you're closer to climbing to the moon.

Self-driving is still incredibly limited and progress is often overstated because people make headway on some tiny issue. A thing I always liked for people who think progress is rapid, this is Germany in the 1980s where Ernst Dickmann had autonmous cars drive thousands of miles: https://youtu.be/_HbVWm7wdmE

[thepasswordis]

What?

No, it would be like if somebody said "some day we will travel to the moon", and then after the Apollo missions there were articles being published that said "we are no closer to traveling to the moon than we were 5 years ago".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHdKm0kW4l0

This is a video of a person riding in a fully self driving car.

[Kbelicius]

That is not a fully self driving car in the sense of what people think when they say a fully self driving car or are you saying that I could order that car and it will drive me to New York under any conditions that a human would drive through?

[jocker12]

"I have had a completely autonomous waymo come to my location, pick me up, and take me to another location." - Waymo uses 3d mapping, limited geofencing, remote operators and mobile roadside assistance teams because those cars are not even close to any type of autonomy. Those cars are "mice" in a well designed and designated (inch mapped) maze. The car without a driver in the driver's seat is like David Copperfield flying on the stage in a cheap magic show, in front of a few hundred people that paid $50 for the tickets - see https://youtu.be/qZS9maIq_Zc

[Dylan16807]

Anyone can use 3d mapping and geofencing. That's not a disqualifier.

As long as the remote operators and assistance teams are an order of magnitude smaller than putting a driver in every car, then it's close enough to autonomy to count as "closer" and to be useful.

[jocker12]

"Anyone can use 3d mapping and geofencing" - that shows you their limitations and also doesn't qualify for "completely autonomous" standard. - Completely means anytime (regarding weather conditions or time of the day), anywhere (no geofencing) and completely adaptive behavior to the permanently and randomly driving conditions humans deal with while driving. Pattern recognition software alone (A.I.) would never be able to match human driving performances.

"As long as the remote operators and assistance teams are an order of magnitude smaller than putting a driver in every car" - the entire gig is way to expensive and requires "time travel" level of scientific achievements, which is 100% fiction and 0% reality.

[melony]

Does it matter? They are functional and safe enough for most sunbelt cities. We may not have FSD from day one but what we do have is leagues ahead of what's possible 5 years ago.

[jocker12]

What these failing companies are doing for almost 15 years now is 1 step forward, 3 steps back while promising they are 6 months away from the impossible. A.I. is only pattern recognition software statistical tool, that has zero capability of learning by itself from previous experience, and that shows you how any business designed around updating the constantly changing environmental data required to make the robots operate at a decent level, is prohibitively expensive.

[fuckstick]

Waymo in its current form in Arizona launched about 5 years ago.

[collegeburner]

"I couldn't get this working so nobody else can either". Classic gifted kid response to failure tbh.

[panick21_]

Self driving car companies, not cars are the scam. And he has been saying the same thing for years.

[jocker12]

This is not news. He is saying that for at least two years now - https://reason.com/video/2020/02/24/george-hotz-fully-self-d...

[jeffbee]

"I am a charlatan and therefore this whole industry is a scam" does not have great logic to it.

[breck]

Please read the details of Howard Hughes's test flights (also Winston Churchill) and realize that perhaps it's people like that who are required to make anything work.

If planes were designed by safety committees we would have never figured out how to make them light enough to fly.

[paulryanrogers]

No one is saying people cannot experiment. We'd just not rather be the unsuspecting rats in Tesla's try-not-to-kill-too-many-pedestrians beta.

[tim333]

Well personally I'd rather not be any of the 1.35 million annual road deaths. It wouldn't make a huge difference to me if I was one of the 0.000001% got by a Tesla or one of the other ones.

If you want to help US pedestrians you'd be much better going after SUVs and pickups https://www.webmd.com/first-aid/news/20220318/turning-pickup...

[paulryanrogers]

We can do both. And based on interventions per mile driven I'd say Tesla's are a whole new level of danger.

[terafo]

That's what he is talking about. There are different standards for safety for experimental planes and commercial jets. And he is much better in building former than latter.

[generalizations]

> It is absolutely the wrong attitude for self-driving cars or anything that is safety critical.

With your attitude, we would never have allowed cars in the first place.

[turminal]

Compiler development is (often indirectly) safety critical too.

[wiseowise]

You do understand that this is joke, right?