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As an engineer, it boggles my mind how much people trust software in general. Toyota was put under a microscope after the Prius crashes....do you think anythin

As an engineer, it boggles my mind how much people trust software in general. Toyota was put under a microscope after the Prius crashes....do you think anything has changed since? Do you think the software running the cars has gotten any better? VW cheated on emissions, they payed civil and criminal fines and a couple engineers got charged. No one from managment....Since then, it has come out that almost everyone was cheating. Cummins was most recently caught and it is now a civil fine(also being called record breaking in the news, at 1.6B where VW was 1.5B civil but 4.3B total...) We normalize the behavior and decrease the penalties.

bluGill 3y ago
I trust humans even less than software. At least software can be debugged over time and is consistent so if we get it working...
- avgDev 3y ago
  I would imagine debugging something like FSD might be difficult. Not sure what kind of data they store, but no situation might be the same.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Every try to debug a human? Worse, humans are not copies so making one better doesn't make it easy to upgrade the rest of us.
    - themaninthedark 3y ago
      If the software was broken up in a sane manner and followed the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy, it would be easier to debug. You don't debug humans, you train them. Yes, the training is imperfect and doesn't always stick. Which is why we have yet another imperfect system of checking and certifying the training has been done before release. And then we have yet another system of bug catchers that patrol around making sure that the training is being adhered to. And then a system to revoke certification if we detect to many issues with the driver. I would like to trust a self driving car, however it has also been programed by the very same humans that we don't want to trust. And I doubt that the review is nearly as robust as it should be. Also the code is not open so I can't review it even if I wanted to because "trade secrets" which might just translate to "we are way to embarrassed to let others see this code because of how shitty it is". Not being easy to upgrade might be a feature in this case; Right now I don't have to deal with a pushed update that makes all 2024 model Chevy SUV platform encounter a race condition that adversely affects lane keeping after being passed on the left side while in a turn on my morning commute.

bluGill 3y ago

I trust humans even less than software. At least software can be debugged over time and is consistent so if we get it working...

avgDev 3y ago
I would imagine debugging something like FSD might be difficult. Not sure what kind of data they store, but no situation might be the same.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Every try to debug a human? Worse, humans are not copies so making one better doesn't make it easy to upgrade the rest of us.
  - themaninthedark 3y ago
    If the software was broken up in a sane manner and followed the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy, it would be easier to debug. You don't debug humans, you train them. Yes, the training is imperfect and doesn't always stick. Which is why we have yet another imperfect system of checking and certifying the training has been done before release. And then we have yet another system of bug catchers that patrol around making sure that the training is being adhered to. And then a system to revoke certification if we detect to many issues with the driver. I would like to trust a self driving car, however it has also been programed by the very same humans that we don't want to trust. And I doubt that the review is nearly as robust as it should be. Also the code is not open so I can't review it even if I wanted to because "trade secrets" which might just translate to "we are way to embarrassed to let others see this code because of how shitty it is". Not being easy to upgrade might be a feature in this case; Right now I don't have to deal with a pushed update that makes all 2024 model Chevy SUV platform encounter a race condition that adversely affects lane keeping after being passed on the left side while in a turn on my morning commute.