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I agree with what you say, but part of the reason Tesla is even around to have these problems is Musk's dubious talents as a relentless hype man. Musk himself s

I agree with what you say, but part of the reason Tesla is even around to have these problems is Musk's dubious talents as a relentless hype man. Musk himself says they were at the brink of bankruptcy at least twice: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-bankruptcy-model-3-electric-vehicle-ev-production-2020-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-bankruptcy-m... Personally, I think if we had better laws Musk would be looking at charges of criminal negligence for encouraging people to think they have things like actual "autopilot" and "full self driving". But as it is, he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list. So Tesla's problems here are just the consequences of his actions.

javajosh 4y ago
He strikes me more as a physicist arguing from first principles. Once you have drive-by-wire and a sensor array, self-driving is a pure software problem. You should be able to get 99% of the way there in simulation with a team of 4 really smart coders and an endless supply of Redbull and a year, tops. Also, the world's energy problems are trivial when you consider how cheap and efficient solar power is, and how little surface area is required. Clean water is just a matter of filtration at best or desalination at worst, which just devolves into an energy problem. And so on. I do it myself sometimes, but at least I recognize how annoying and inaccurate it is. It is kind of nice to have someone arguing these positions and even better to act on them, and I for one wish that these analyses held (the world would be a better place if they did). But the real world just doesn't care about your first principles, and even simple ideas present obstacles you never imagined. Musk knows this, but willfully leaves it out during his pep talks, which is dishonest. But sometimes I get the uncomfortable feeling he's deceiving himself, which is quite chilling considering the amount of real power he's amassed (being able to launch large things into space is about as real as real power gets.)
- jsjohnst 4y ago
  > You should be able to get 99% of the way there in simulation with a team of 4 really smart coders and an endless supply of Redbull and a year, tops. I can say this about a lot of things, but man, it scares me that there’s people in the world who are crazy enough to think that’s true. Even Elon Musk isn’t that delusional.
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- onion2k 4y ago
  Once you have drive-by-wire and a sensor array, self-driving is a pure software problem. This is correct, but only if you have the right drive-by-wire and sensor array tech. Essentially what you're saying is "Once you solve the hardware problem the rest is just software" which isn't particularly insightful. What happens if Tesla can't solve the software problem because the sensors aren't providing the necessary data?
  - rossmohax 4y ago
    add more inaccurate sensors and do corrections in software? We have photos of black holes out of almost a pure noise, surely it is possible to build self driving car with current gen of hardware.
    - onion2k 4y ago
      add more inaccurate sensors The point here is that Tesla have already sold the $10k FSD sensor pack to people and told them that one day in the future a software update will provide FSD, with no additional sensors necessary. Adding more sensors is not an option (well, maybe Tesla will do that for people who bought the upgrade, but it seems unlikely they'd do that for free.)
    - polygamous_bat 4y ago
      One part of the argument you are missing is that FSD requires real-time decision making as well, so when complexity goes up with a larger number of inaccurate sensors that can become an issue. No one cares if getting a picture of a black hole from noisy data takes one year to process, the same is not true for self driving.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    >what you're saying .. which isn't particularly insightful. Which was my point. I'm intentionally making silly arguments that are valid from first principles, but clearly wrong in the real world. I'm sorry that wasn't obvious because I endeavored to make it so.
- Ar-Curunir 4y ago
  Yeah, because entire armies of top-class engineers and researchers are clearly less competent than “4 really smart coders with Redbull”. Jfc.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    In case anyone else was wondering: a) jfc => jesus fucking christ, and b) you missed the point.
    - Ar-Curunir 4y ago
      ah sorry, missed the sarcasm in your original post. I should have read more closely.
- dlkf 4y ago
  > Once you have drive-by-wire and a sensor array, self-driving is a pure software problem. This argument proves a little too much. Even if we assume that the sensors are equivalent to whatever input stream humans are working with, reduction of the problem to ”software eng” doesn’t mean it is tractable in our lifetime. Compare: ”Once you remove the requirement that employees work from the office, building a software engineer is a pure software problem.”
  - javajosh 4y ago
    >Once you remove the requirement that employees work from the office, building a software engineer is a pure software problem Hey, that's a good point!
- l33tman 4y ago
  To others commenting on the comment above: read the entire comment, the first paragraph is a satire on the trivialization Musk and others often do of complex subjects.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    Thanks for saying that. But the lesson for me, or anyone making points like this, is that you can never be too explicit. Intricate constructions are dangerous on the internet. I like them but I have to admit they function something like a trap that readers can fall into. It's tempting to blame them for not understanding, but it's really on me. At the very least I should have put a warning label at the bottom.
- chillingeffect 4y ago
  > pure software problem Rather a missing algorithm. Software can no doubt be capable of being written to implement the alg... but no one has a good enough alg or even knows if one can exist or can exist with tesla's limited sensors.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > self-driving is a pure software problem. You should be able to get 99% of the way there in simulation with a team of 4 really smart coders and an endless supply of Redbull and a year, tops. Hyperloop was a great example of a project that made no sence from first principles, yet he pushed it anyway. It makes no sence because it's capacity, passengers it can move per hour, is like 2% of a high-speed train line. Additionally he came up with some pure fantasy cost estimates where the whole things cost less to build than a cycle path would, budgeted $0 for land aquisition, compacting or earth-works. Re software problem: Human genome is now digital too now, so figuring out immortality is a pure software problem. Making money on the stock market is a pure software problem. Simulating a concious mind is a software problem. > I get the uncomfortable feeling he's deceiving himself Maybe tha's what happens when you fire agressively anyone who disagrees and end up surrounded by yes-men
- wpietri 4y ago
  > But sometimes I get the uncomfortable feeling he's deceiving himself That is one of the best ways to lie. If you stop caring whether things are true, it can be much easier to sound like you believe whatever thing is most useful in the moment. And think of all the brain cycles you can save by not checking in with thinks like external reality or consistency with one's past statements.
mrjin 4y ago
Agree. Regarding so called auto-pilot/full-self-driving, Tesla was at best misleading, if not deceiving. So far seems not much we can do about it.
- chihuahua 4y ago
  It's pretty bad that Musk was asking people to pre-pay for the FSD feature years before it's even close to finished - with promises like "it's $5000 if you buy it now, or $10000 if you buy it when it's done." Even worse, some people are falling for this scam.
CryptoPunk 4y ago
>>Personally, I think if we had better laws Musk would be looking at charges of criminal negligence for encouraging people to think they have things like actual "autopilot" and "full self driving". But as it is, he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list. So Tesla's problems here are just the consequences of his actions. Your idea of better laws would mean no Tesla and no SpaceX. Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars, and given its current growth rate, and Musk's long standing plan to release progressively more affordable cars, this number will likely be massively larger in a few years. Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. All told, Tesla has had a massive impact in pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones. SpaceX, for its part, is responsible for reducing the cost of launching material to orbit ten fold, with another 100 fold reduction possible with StarShip. The spike at the end of this graph is almost solely due to SpaceX: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-launched-into-outer-space?time=earliest..2017&country=USA~RUS~CHN~GBR~JPN~FRA~IND~DEU~European+Space+Agency https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-... I see laws that prevent the emergence and flourishing of Tesla and SpaceX as far worse than current laws.
- ggm 4y ago
  Your line of reasoning depends on a strawman: that Tesla could not have achieved this much if Musk had called it Cruise control and lane assist.
  - CryptoPunk 4y ago
  - CHY872 4y ago
    Not quite - GP cites the spectre of Tesla nearly going bust to imply that Musk helped achieve the opposite (extremely healthy company) via dubious, ideally criminal means. It's not entirely based on that, but the implication is there. Put simply, if Musk only made one controversial call, this comment thread wouldn't exist. The many controversial calls cannot be easily disentangled.
elisharobinson 4y ago
"he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list" ... why do midwits always chose AP thread to gather .... i guess you dont need to start a rocket company an electric car company or try to create a fintech company in 1999 ... why work 100 hr weeks when you can just "lie" .... if biden goes ahead with this he will only shoot the foot of his supporter's like GM ( half of its current value is tied to cruise ) and blow up VC mna pipline for all the lidar based startup's
- wpietri 4y ago
  I am having trouble extracting much sense from this. I'm not saying lying is all he did. But his major skill is hype. E.g., you cite his fintech history as something apparently good. But he got rich on that because after a merger he ended up as PayPal's CEO for like 6 months, after which he was fired. His major focus, apparently, was shifting away from Unix to Windows. Which even if it were a good idea at the time (it wasn't), it was a terrible priority for a fast-growing company. People treating that as some sort of sign of business acumen, as opposed to a golden parachute for an arrogant chump correctly getting fired, is a great example of how good a hype man Musk is.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > why work 100 hr weeks when you can just "lie" Because lying is hard work! Ask any politician, clergyman, lawyer, or nearest big corp C-suite leader. Noone said it was easy. > tell a main paint is wet, and he has to touch it to be sure. But tell him there's an invisible man in the sky that created the universe, and the will believe you
- antifa 4y ago
  > i guess you dont need to start a rocket company an electric car company or try to create a fintech company in 1999 Did you mean "start" as in founding a company or "start" as in purchase established existing companies? > why work 100 hr weeks when you can just "lie" Well 60 of those hours are playing wario on SNL then playing wario on twitter then strategizing with your PR firm on how to convince people that buying Twitter means you invented social media. >blow up VC mna pipline for all the lidar based startup's Better to blow up lidar pipeline VCs than autopiloting battery fires straight into pedestrians > why do midwits always Peak Dunning–Kruger effect I suppose.

javajosh 4y ago

He strikes me more as a physicist arguing from first principles. Once you have drive-by-wire and a sensor array, self-driving is a pure software problem. You should be able to get 99% of the way there in simulation with a team of 4 really smart coders and an endless supply of Redbull and a year, tops. Also, the world's energy problems are trivial when you consider how cheap and efficient solar power is, and how little surface area is required. Clean water is just a matter of filtration at best or desalination at worst, which just devolves into an energy problem. And so on. I do it myself sometimes, but at least I recognize how annoying and inaccurate it is. It is kind of nice to have someone arguing these positions and even better to act on them, and I for one wish that these analyses held (the world would be a better place if they did). But the real world just doesn't care about your first principles, and even simple ideas present obstacles you never imagined. Musk knows this, but willfully leaves it out during his pep talks, which is dishonest. But sometimes I get the uncomfortable feeling he's deceiving himself, which is quite chilling considering the amount of real power he's amassed (being able to launch large things into space is about as real as real power gets.)

jsjohnst 4y ago
> You should be able to get 99% of the way there in simulation with a team of 4 really smart coders and an endless supply of Redbull and a year, tops. I can say this about a lot of things, but man, it scares me that there’s people in the world who are crazy enough to think that’s true. Even Elon Musk isn’t that delusional.
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onion2k 4y ago
Once you have drive-by-wire and a sensor array, self-driving is a pure software problem. This is correct, but only if you have the right drive-by-wire and sensor array tech. Essentially what you're saying is "Once you solve the hardware problem the rest is just software" which isn't particularly insightful. What happens if Tesla can't solve the software problem because the sensors aren't providing the necessary data?
- rossmohax 4y ago
  add more inaccurate sensors and do corrections in software? We have photos of black holes out of almost a pure noise, surely it is possible to build self driving car with current gen of hardware.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    add more inaccurate sensors The point here is that Tesla have already sold the $10k FSD sensor pack to people and told them that one day in the future a software update will provide FSD, with no additional sensors necessary. Adding more sensors is not an option (well, maybe Tesla will do that for people who bought the upgrade, but it seems unlikely they'd do that for free.)
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    One part of the argument you are missing is that FSD requires real-time decision making as well, so when complexity goes up with a larger number of inaccurate sensors that can become an issue. No one cares if getting a picture of a black hole from noisy data takes one year to process, the same is not true for self driving.
- javajosh 4y ago
  >what you're saying .. which isn't particularly insightful. Which was my point. I'm intentionally making silly arguments that are valid from first principles, but clearly wrong in the real world. I'm sorry that wasn't obvious because I endeavored to make it so.
Ar-Curunir 4y ago
Yeah, because entire armies of top-class engineers and researchers are clearly less competent than “4 really smart coders with Redbull”. Jfc.
- javajosh 4y ago
  In case anyone else was wondering: a) jfc => jesus fucking christ, and b) you missed the point.
  - Ar-Curunir 4y ago
    ah sorry, missed the sarcasm in your original post. I should have read more closely.
dlkf 4y ago
> Once you have drive-by-wire and a sensor array, self-driving is a pure software problem. This argument proves a little too much. Even if we assume that the sensors are equivalent to whatever input stream humans are working with, reduction of the problem to ”software eng” doesn’t mean it is tractable in our lifetime. Compare: ”Once you remove the requirement that employees work from the office, building a software engineer is a pure software problem.”
- javajosh 4y ago
  >Once you remove the requirement that employees work from the office, building a software engineer is a pure software problem Hey, that's a good point!
l33tman 4y ago
To others commenting on the comment above: read the entire comment, the first paragraph is a satire on the trivialization Musk and others often do of complex subjects.
- javajosh 4y ago
  Thanks for saying that. But the lesson for me, or anyone making points like this, is that you can never be too explicit. Intricate constructions are dangerous on the internet. I like them but I have to admit they function something like a trap that readers can fall into. It's tempting to blame them for not understanding, but it's really on me. At the very least I should have put a warning label at the bottom.
chillingeffect 4y ago
> pure software problem Rather a missing algorithm. Software can no doubt be capable of being written to implement the alg... but no one has a good enough alg or even knows if one can exist or can exist with tesla's limited sensors.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> self-driving is a pure software problem. You should be able to get 99% of the way there in simulation with a team of 4 really smart coders and an endless supply of Redbull and a year, tops. Hyperloop was a great example of a project that made no sence from first principles, yet he pushed it anyway. It makes no sence because it's capacity, passengers it can move per hour, is like 2% of a high-speed train line. Additionally he came up with some pure fantasy cost estimates where the whole things cost less to build than a cycle path would, budgeted $0 for land aquisition, compacting or earth-works. Re software problem: Human genome is now digital too now, so figuring out immortality is a pure software problem. Making money on the stock market is a pure software problem. Simulating a concious mind is a software problem. > I get the uncomfortable feeling he's deceiving himself Maybe tha's what happens when you fire agressively anyone who disagrees and end up surrounded by yes-men
wpietri 4y ago
> But sometimes I get the uncomfortable feeling he's deceiving himself That is one of the best ways to lie. If you stop caring whether things are true, it can be much easier to sound like you believe whatever thing is most useful in the moment. And think of all the brain cycles you can save by not checking in with thinks like external reality or consistency with one's past statements.

mrjin 4y ago

Agree. Regarding so called auto-pilot/full-self-driving, Tesla was at best misleading, if not deceiving. So far seems not much we can do about it.

chihuahua 4y ago
It's pretty bad that Musk was asking people to pre-pay for the FSD feature years before it's even close to finished - with promises like "it's $5000 if you buy it now, or $10000 if you buy it when it's done." Even worse, some people are falling for this scam.

CryptoPunk 4y ago

>>Personally, I think if we had better laws Musk would be looking at charges of criminal negligence for encouraging people to think they have things like actual "autopilot" and "full self driving". But as it is, he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list. So Tesla's problems here are just the consequences of his actions. Your idea of better laws would mean no Tesla and no SpaceX. Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars, and given its current growth rate, and Musk's long standing plan to release progressively more affordable cars, this number will likely be massively larger in a few years. Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. All told, Tesla has had a massive impact in pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones. SpaceX, for its part, is responsible for reducing the cost of launching material to orbit ten fold, with another 100 fold reduction possible with StarShip. The spike at the end of this graph is almost solely due to SpaceX: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-launched-into-outer-space?time=earliest..2017&country=USA~RUS~CHN~GBR~JPN~FRA~IND~DEU~European+Space+Agency https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-... I see laws that prevent the emergence and flourishing of Tesla and SpaceX as far worse than current laws.

ggm 4y ago
Your line of reasoning depends on a strawman: that Tesla could not have achieved this much if Musk had called it Cruise control and lane assist.
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
- CHY872 4y ago
  Not quite - GP cites the spectre of Tesla nearly going bust to imply that Musk helped achieve the opposite (extremely healthy company) via dubious, ideally criminal means. It's not entirely based on that, but the implication is there. Put simply, if Musk only made one controversial call, this comment thread wouldn't exist. The many controversial calls cannot be easily disentangled.

elisharobinson 4y ago

"he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list" ... why do midwits always chose AP thread to gather .... i guess you dont need to start a rocket company an electric car company or try to create a fintech company in 1999 ... why work 100 hr weeks when you can just "lie" .... if biden goes ahead with this he will only shoot the foot of his supporter's like GM ( half of its current value is tied to cruise ) and blow up VC mna pipline for all the lidar based startup's

wpietri 4y ago
I am having trouble extracting much sense from this. I'm not saying lying is all he did. But his major skill is hype. E.g., you cite his fintech history as something apparently good. But he got rich on that because after a merger he ended up as PayPal's CEO for like 6 months, after which he was fired. His major focus, apparently, was shifting away from Unix to Windows. Which even if it were a good idea at the time (it wasn't), it was a terrible priority for a fast-growing company. People treating that as some sort of sign of business acumen, as opposed to a golden parachute for an arrogant chump correctly getting fired, is a great example of how good a hype man Musk is.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> why work 100 hr weeks when you can just "lie" Because lying is hard work! Ask any politician, clergyman, lawyer, or nearest big corp C-suite leader. Noone said it was easy. > tell a main paint is wet, and he has to touch it to be sure. But tell him there's an invisible man in the sky that created the universe, and the will believe you
antifa 4y ago
> i guess you dont need to start a rocket company an electric car company or try to create a fintech company in 1999 Did you mean "start" as in founding a company or "start" as in purchase established existing companies? > why work 100 hr weeks when you can just "lie" Well 60 of those hours are playing wario on SNL then playing wario on twitter then strategizing with your PR firm on how to convince people that buying Twitter means you invented social media. >blow up VC mna pipline for all the lidar based startup's Better to blow up lidar pipeline VCs than autopiloting battery fires straight into pedestrians > why do midwits always Peak Dunning–Kruger effect I suppose.