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Maybe we need an open source protocol that has all the standards and edge cases handled. I think competitiveness is a good thing and will drive innovation. But

Maybe we need an open source protocol that has all the standards and edge cases handled. I think competitiveness is a good thing and will drive innovation. But in this specific field, with regards to safety and security, it needs to be out in the open.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago
That's what Comma.ai was supposed to do, but there is no money in it apparently.
- manarth 9y ago
  Comma.ai wasn't originally going to be open-source, Comma.ai intended was going to be a $999 proprietary retro-fit product. NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) asked Hotz to delay the launch on safety grounds. He then open-sourced the software specifically to avoid regulation and safety standards. "NHTSA only regulates physical products that are sold,” Hotz said. “They do not regulate open source software, which is a whole lot more like speech.” [1] https://qz.com/849669/to-dodge-government-regulation-self-driving-car-startup-comma-ai-released-all-their-code-for-free/ https://qz.com/849669/to-dodge-government-regulation-self-dr... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/30/13779336/comma-ai-autopilot-canceled-autonomous-car-software-free https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/30/13779336/comma-ai-autopi...
at-fates-hands 9y ago
>> But in this specific field, with regards to safety and security, it needs to be out in the open. This is one of the horrors of capitalism. If there's money to be made, you can bet that if someone creates a proprietary protocol, it won't be released and will force other companies to develop their own technology to compete. Yes, it will drive competition, but I fear that it will spawn a host of different, competing technologies and make the whole industry awash in proprietary technology. In most of those cases, the people who lose are the consumers.
- manarth 9y ago
  Volvo's three-point seat belt and Jonas Salk's polio vaccine make good (although old) counter-examples. I'd be interested to hear if there are more recent examples.
  - bluGill 9y ago
    John Deere (I work for John Deere but do not speak for them) freely licenses all safety patents except for ones that we think any competent engineer can work around. We figure we make more money from someone who buys our competitors product and because of a safety feature survives to make the decision on what to replace it with when it wears out; than we make from the person who buys something without a safety feature and as a result dies. I used to work for the company that published rfc 1223, giving away private information. The motivation is a competitor reversed engineered the protocol, and some customers had both. There was now a need to change the protocol but we knew our customers would not accept having to throw out the competitors equipment to take the upgrade. By publishing the protocol we ensured the competitor understood it and thus when the bit that was "always 0 apparently unused" changed to 1, with a change to the meaning of all following bytes they understood why it was always 0 and why the change happened and how to read all the following bytes.
yellow_postit 9y ago
The protocol is likely uninteresting rather it's the models, training data, and training configurations which are most interesting and the least likely to be open sourced. I don't work in the autonomous vehicle space but I would be surprised there's a set of deterministic rules that are easily reviewed instead collections of deep nn models.
- ghaff 9y ago
  The data is the real rub. There's some open source code in the space and we'll see what else gets opened up over time. But AFAIK, no one is talking about making their data sets public (and, to the degree that data is coming from regular drivers, there would probably be privacy concerns with doing so). And, as you say, with NN techniques, a lot of actions aren't deterministic or understandable.
- ajanuary 9y ago
  Wouldn't you test the output rather than the input? Before an autonomous vehicle / update is allowed to go on public roads, it must pass a "driving test" that includes a bunch of known edge cases.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Sure. And maybe that's what will happen. But now you have pre-defined tricky situations. Everyone builds those very specific situations into their systems but may not really generalize them.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

That's what Comma.ai was supposed to do, but there is no money in it apparently.

manarth 9y ago
Comma.ai wasn't originally going to be open-source, Comma.ai intended was going to be a $999 proprietary retro-fit product. NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) asked Hotz to delay the launch on safety grounds. He then open-sourced the software specifically to avoid regulation and safety standards. "NHTSA only regulates physical products that are sold,” Hotz said. “They do not regulate open source software, which is a whole lot more like speech.” [1] https://qz.com/849669/to-dodge-government-regulation-self-driving-car-startup-comma-ai-released-all-their-code-for-free/ https://qz.com/849669/to-dodge-government-regulation-self-dr... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/30/13779336/comma-ai-autopilot-canceled-autonomous-car-software-free https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/30/13779336/comma-ai-autopi...

at-fates-hands 9y ago

>> But in this specific field, with regards to safety and security, it needs to be out in the open. This is one of the horrors of capitalism. If there's money to be made, you can bet that if someone creates a proprietary protocol, it won't be released and will force other companies to develop their own technology to compete. Yes, it will drive competition, but I fear that it will spawn a host of different, competing technologies and make the whole industry awash in proprietary technology. In most of those cases, the people who lose are the consumers.

manarth 9y ago
Volvo's three-point seat belt and Jonas Salk's polio vaccine make good (although old) counter-examples. I'd be interested to hear if there are more recent examples.
- bluGill 9y ago
  John Deere (I work for John Deere but do not speak for them) freely licenses all safety patents except for ones that we think any competent engineer can work around. We figure we make more money from someone who buys our competitors product and because of a safety feature survives to make the decision on what to replace it with when it wears out; than we make from the person who buys something without a safety feature and as a result dies. I used to work for the company that published rfc 1223, giving away private information. The motivation is a competitor reversed engineered the protocol, and some customers had both. There was now a need to change the protocol but we knew our customers would not accept having to throw out the competitors equipment to take the upgrade. By publishing the protocol we ensured the competitor understood it and thus when the bit that was "always 0 apparently unused" changed to 1, with a change to the meaning of all following bytes they understood why it was always 0 and why the change happened and how to read all the following bytes.

yellow_postit 9y ago

The protocol is likely uninteresting rather it's the models, training data, and training configurations which are most interesting and the least likely to be open sourced. I don't work in the autonomous vehicle space but I would be surprised there's a set of deterministic rules that are easily reviewed instead collections of deep nn models.

ghaff 9y ago
The data is the real rub. There's some open source code in the space and we'll see what else gets opened up over time. But AFAIK, no one is talking about making their data sets public (and, to the degree that data is coming from regular drivers, there would probably be privacy concerns with doing so). And, as you say, with NN techniques, a lot of actions aren't deterministic or understandable.
ajanuary 9y ago
Wouldn't you test the output rather than the input? Before an autonomous vehicle / update is allowed to go on public roads, it must pass a "driving test" that includes a bunch of known edge cases.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Sure. And maybe that's what will happen. But now you have pre-defined tricky situations. Everyone builds those very specific situations into their systems but may not really generalize them.