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The Elon magic is getting people to bikeshed bullshit like this and ignore the bigger issues. You don’t gouge out your ears because you hear something walking

The Elon magic is getting people to bikeshed bullshit like this and ignore the bigger issues. You don’t gouge out your ears because you hear something walking around at night that doesn’t appear to be accurate. As a human, your executive function makes judgements based on context and what you know. Your eyesight is degraded in the dark, so your brain pays more attention to unexpected sound. The argument for lidar, sonar or radar isn’t that cameras are “bad”, it’s that they perform very well in circumstances where visual input may not. As an engineer, you have an ethical obligation to consider the use case of the product. It’s not at all like the 737max issue - many companies have been able to successfully implement these features I have a almost decade old Honda that uses camera and radar sensors to manage adaptive cruise and lane keeping features flawlessly. In the case of Tesla and their dear leader, they tend to make dogmatic engineering decisions based on personal priorities. They then spackle in legal and astroturf marketing bullshit to dodge accountability. The folly of relying on cameras or putting your headlights inside of a narrow cavity in the car body (cybertruck) is pretty obvious if you live in a place that has winter weather and road salt.

vitus 2y ago
What? I was responding to the specific claim that two independent sensors always make your failure rates go down. Not that any particular source of sensor data is strictly inferior. I agree that optimizing for vehicle cost and shipping shoddy software at the expense of human lives is the wrong tradeoff, and having different sensors that provide more coverage of situations is generally preferable if you can afford it. But suppose you have a radar sensor that's faulty, and so it periodically thinks that there's something right in front of it, and so it causes the car to slam on its brakes. That's likely going to cause an accident if you're traveling at highway speeds. Does that mean that we shouldn't use radar in any circumstances? Of course not. But sensors are not infallible, and we need to keep that in mind when designing these systems.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  If you’re Tesla, the answer is going to treat it as a driver assistance tech… turn off the automatic feature and throw an alarm. Hopefully the driver has time to reorient, if not, his problem. If you’re Waymo, you’ve built in a higher standard of sensor and diagnostics, at the expense of the aesthetic. That’s always been the issue with Tesla… they push 99% solutions for 99.99% problems.

vitus 2y ago

What? I was responding to the specific claim that two independent sensors always make your failure rates go down. Not that any particular source of sensor data is strictly inferior. I agree that optimizing for vehicle cost and shipping shoddy software at the expense of human lives is the wrong tradeoff, and having different sensors that provide more coverage of situations is generally preferable if you can afford it. But suppose you have a radar sensor that's faulty, and so it periodically thinks that there's something right in front of it, and so it causes the car to slam on its brakes. That's likely going to cause an accident if you're traveling at highway speeds. Does that mean that we shouldn't use radar in any circumstances? Of course not. But sensors are not infallible, and we need to keep that in mind when designing these systems.

Spooky23 2y ago
If you’re Tesla, the answer is going to treat it as a driver assistance tech… turn off the automatic feature and throw an alarm. Hopefully the driver has time to reorient, if not, his problem. If you’re Waymo, you’ve built in a higher standard of sensor and diagnostics, at the expense of the aesthetic. That’s always been the issue with Tesla… they push 99% solutions for 99.99% problems.