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Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski
- yohann305 9y agoi don't understand how us the public are allowed to read a private conversation. Don't take me wrong i enjoyed reading it, it felt like snooping, but isn't it a blatant privacy violation?
- mikestew 9y agoCourt documents are generally part of the public record and that's where the texts came from. Like it or not, that's the way it currently works.
- empath75 9y agoAnything you do that's business related could end up on the front page of the NY Times. I would be extremely careful about what you do on corporate provided phones and email.
- loceng 9y agoZuckerberg's early days of conversation released didn't seem to hurt him making $40B+ - I always wondered if FB censored/prevented the spread of that information relating to him on FB.
- jacquesm 9y agoWho knows where he would have ended otherwise.
- heedlessly 9y agothey must've done a pretty good job since i still have no clue what you're talking about
- cm2187 9y agoPublished AND edited. They will delete the part of the sentence that makes it explicit you are joking about something.
- OzzyB 9y agoPublished AND edited AND photoshopped -- into a nice fake iPhone stock photo for maximum effect.
- jdavis703 9y agoThis is why you don't write down anything illegal you plan to do. If you get caught courts can demand you hand over evidence, or it'll be seized by a search warrant, and likely made part of the public record.
- Sleeep 9y agoThey were entered into evidence for a court case. Court documents are generally public record. That's how these messages went from private to public.
- koolba 9y ago> 7/23/2016 Kalanick: You hungry? .. Can get some Uber Eats steak and eggs. Travis shows dog fooding at its best.
- DaggerDagger 9y agoEven specifies "Uber" Eats. That's a CEO right there.
- koolba 9y agoExactly. The man doesn't have an off switch. It's like Alec Baldwin talking to the sales guys: "Always be closing!"
- loceng 9y agoI didn't read much of the transcript, however these guys must be intelligent enough to keep what they know to likely be illegal as a private in-person conversation without record?
- ghaff 9y agoMost (though not all) people are probably smart enough not to send a text or an email like "Where should we dump the body." However, the totality of a bunch of emails or texts, considered together with other evidence, can certainly be suggestive even if there's no smoking gun.
- hmhrex 9y agoPossibly communicated through other channels as well like Signal or Whatsapp.
- loceng 9y ago"Uber Saw Tesla as a Huge Competitor While Uber followed Google’s cars closely, it was Tesla and Elon Musk that the duo discussed most frequently. 9/14/2016 Levandowski: Tesla crash in January … implies Elon is lying about millions of miles without incident. We should have LDP on Tesla just to catch all the crashes that are going on. 9/22/2016: We’ve got to start calling Elon on his shit. I'm not on social media but let's start "faketesla" and start give physics lessons about stupid shit Elon says like [saying his cars don’t need lidar]" Does anyone know what they're referencing here? I don't take Elon as a person to lie, his character seems too strong for that - he understands public perception and seems to deeply cares about it.
- tmh79 9y agoElon has publicly claimed that he will be able to provide an L5 autonomous car without using lidar in the next few years. AL, another expert in the field, believes that claim is so ridiculous that he must be willingly lying, not just overconfident.
- Fricken 9y agoMusk said they'd demo L5 late this year, which is delusional.
- mhmiles 9y agoMusk has said on a few occassions that he can achieve full automony on a Tesla with no LIDAR setup. I think instead they use a front-facing radar and a bunch of cameras. Maybe IR?. Levandowski strongly disagrees and sees LIDAR as critical to reliably mapping the environment. This all came up when that guy drove into the side of a trailer in a Tesla.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gruturo 9y agoTesla will do self driving without a LIDAR, just cameras (ok, 8 of those), a RADAR and some ultrasonic distance sensors: https://electrek.co/2016/10/20/tesla-new-autopilot-hardware-suite-camera-nvidia-tesla-vision/ https://electrek.co/2016/10/20/tesla-new-autopilot-hardware-... Some people believe this to be impossible for the time being - LIDAR gives you a 3d point cloud (every obstacle, with its distance from you measured), which is amazing (but currently expensive, bulky, fragile, etc) while with cameras it's way harder, and RADAR can't see some materials at all. Tesla argues that their suite is enough (humans manage with just 2 "cameras", some even 1), but the algorithms to let you safely entrust your life to such a sensor suite are harder (i.e. more far off in the future). Kalanick + Levandowsky disagree with Musk, and were planning on calling him out on it.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoReading their exchanges its more interesting than just finding stuff about the court case. Specifically how these insiders think about their competitors. Such as how they think that Elon is the biggest competitor and how they wanted to partner with Google.
- sah2ed 9y agoI guess that's because of Tesla's advantage in vertical integration -- they control the entire stack unlike Waymo or Uber who have to retrofit their gear into specific car models. Tesla's tech is generally considered weaker but Musk could still catch up and overtake by playing the "worse is better" card.
- curun1r 9y agoThey might also realize just how important the combination of electric and self-driving is in terms of $/mi. Both lower the cost substantially, but together things start to get really cheap. When you add in the cost of a driver, internal combustion is still roughly competitive. Once you remove that cost, electric will be significantly cheaper. Tesla's investment into battery production could be difficult for Uber's suppliers to overcome. The end game in Uber's VC-money-burning present state is an eventual future where self-driving vehicles drive the cost down to where Uber makes a profit from the same fares we pay now. But if Tesla prices their service near their own cost, Uber could get to its own self-driving service and be forced to choose between pricing their service higher than Tesla or continuing to take a loss on each ride. Tesla also has a huge PR advantage. Competitors need to be able to capture the attention of riders as well as offering self-driving vehicles. Given how easy it is for Musk to get press, he might have the best chance of doing that without having to pay for it in the same way that Uber has had to pay.
- mikeevans 9y agoSimply unbelievable how much garbage is on that web page without an ad blocker (I put a box around the actual content that appears without having to scroll): http://i.imgur.com/0S2FIAW.png http://i.imgur.com/0S2FIAW.png
- captn3m0 9y agoZero text content for me (without having to scroll, and ad-blocked enabled). JS Disabled: https://imgur.com/a/IAcXb https://imgur.com/a/IAcXb JS Enabled: https://imgur.com/a/TtSeg https://imgur.com/a/TtSeg Likely a result of my zoom/font settings, but this is ridiculous.
- eridius 9y agoThe headline and image are also content, they're just not body text.
- striking 9y agoArchive.is doesn't have this issue: (http://archive.is/k7vgK http://archive.is/k7vgK)
- downrightmike 9y agoWe've so far since 1999, and we have so much further to go.
- umeshunni 9y agoHere's a direct link to the texts: http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3932688-TEXTS-From-AL-1169.html http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3932688-TEXTS-From-AL...
- spiznnx 9y agoMore annoying is that even with as a IEEE member with Spectrum subscription, there's no way to log in and remove the ads, only to download the magazine.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoI can't help but shake a feeling that all of this posting of text messages is just trying to shame Levandowski, Kalanick, or both.
- TAForObvReasons 9y agoAny "leak" is intended to weaken/shame some party. The unknown is whether it's an attack on Levandowski/Otto, Uber, Kalanick, or all of the above.
- hyperbovine 9y agoThe source of these texts are unsealed court documents. Like it or not, these things can become part of the public record if you get sued.
- whipoodle 9y agoMaybe so. You play in dirt, you get dirty.
- swang 9y ago> A source close to Uber’s operations says its engineers watched the intersection where Uber’s cars were said to have run the red light, and that this text refers to them recording a number of normal, human-operated vehicles also breaking the law. Uber has never officially admitted that its software was to blame. is the implication here that that intersection has a lot of red light runners? if so, are they so dense in not understanding how normal people running red lights is less of an issue here than a machine running that red light? normal humans run red lights because they're either not paying attention or they're assholes. how is a machine safer or better if it can't pay attention (or even worse, is an asshole). someone could have died because uber decided the rules didn't apply to them. it's ridiculous that they're still allowed to operate in california.
- paul6987 9y agoDon't forget illegally running autonomous tractor trailers in Palo Alto and on the roads of Nevada. These guys are criminals... total disregard for human life (but their own) in every shape and way there is. From potentially killing people, too treating everyone is who not their BRO like trash; drivers, employees, customers, business partners, etc, etc, etc... GROSS!
- furioussloth 9y agoYour comments come off as if you are more bitter about some company you can just choose to ignore than benchamark is about Travis.
- eropple 9y agoAre you saying that we should ignore companies that act badly?
- kbenson 9y ago> bitter about some company you can just choose to ignore This is not about some product you buy, or some service you pay for, it's about sharing the road, and whether the other people/entities on the road with you operating multiple thousand pound machines at 24-65 Mph have a legal right to be there and are safe. That's not something you can necessarily "ignore" without consequence.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- msh 9y agoInteresting that they are using telegram. Ref the message in the end of the PDF where they complain about telegram on planes.
- dgregd 9y agoSo much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a traffic light, a sign, a car, etc.) transmits info about itself. A car could broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object it sees. A traffic light could broadcast current state and when it is going to change. That information would greatly enhance overall security, especially during rain and snow conditions, when even LIDAR fails. Self-driving is such important (just after eliminating combustion engines) that we could upgrade existing cars with cheap ROMB boxes. Vehicle GPS tracking system costs about $30. ROMB box would cost about $60. Let's say that from 2027 all cars have to have a ROMB box to enter a downtown ...
- Ohtrahddis 9y agoBecause this would likely require a large change in city infrastructure. Who will be building this? Who will pay for it? If it is the city how will you convince the city's taxpayers to pay for it? If it is a profit-seeking corporation, how will you convince a city to let you cause the disruption, construction, etc. to let you do this? For other cars, what advantage does this bring to other car manufacturers and why would they agree to cooperate with competitors? Of course there is the obvious benefit that this would help all the players, but why does that marginal benefit outweigh the risk of commoditizing a brand new market / product and eliminating the chance to establish a market share lead. I am partly raising these hypothetical questions because I think companies are trying to "tough it out" and do it without such changes to city infrastructure first and see how that turns out. I appreciate your simple approach, but you might be disregarding the societal and business factors in favor of making the engineering challenge simpler. Edit: grammar
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tim333 9y agoAlso GPS tracking systems are only accurate to about 20m, not enough to avoid hitting stuff. And transmit over the cell network so don't work if you can't get signal.