stefan8r

14 ms·

31.
by stefan8r 6y ago
CEO of Starsky here. My assumption is that they won't - Waymo has a lot of inertia around trying to build full autonomy, and it working in a corner of Phoenix seems to not have convinced that that it's way too hard. The winner in
32.
by stefan8r 6y ago
Website is still up because it's too sentimental to bring it down. I also still have a ridiculous amount of Starsky swag in my closet.
33.
by stefan8r 6y ago
It's a regulated crowdfunding - so there is a fair amount of reporting startups need to do before they can raise and they're limited with how much they can raise from unaccredited.
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How AV Safety Engineering Is Like Covid Public Health(forbes.com)
2 points by stefan8r 6y ago|0 comments
35.
by stefan8r 7y ago
Realize the phrasing may have been confusing - I'm talking about regular Ubers, not self-driving. My quote was from a person internal to Uber. Below is a TC article citing a public report on US Data. Numbers in that are roughly 50&#x
36.
by stefan8r 7y ago
Lidars break. Radars fail. Cameras run into issues. Drive by wire systems malfunction. Computers vibrate to death. All parts of an autonomous system break. Safety engineering is measuring those breakages, and designing a system that is
37.
by stefan8r 7y ago
The difference between "in the sleeper cab" and "outside the truck" are huge. We first started doing in the sleeper cab in Jul'17, took us 2 years of dedication to get confidence to remove from vehicle. To take the
38.
by stefan8r 7y ago
I haven't heard that thought before, but it's an interesting one. Probably won't help with any of those folks opposed to UBI because "people get meaning from work." Proponents of that view must know a hidden trove
39.
by stefan8r 7y ago
TBH - In the early days the "cool AV people" seemed to act as if teleop was an admission of bad engineering (your team isn't good enough to perfect L5). If everyone else is right on the cusp, and you're not trying, you
40.
by stefan8r 7y ago
Answering these from easiest to hardest: 3) Sure! It isn't too hard to figure out how to email me, so send me a note or DM on twitter or LinkedIn or whatever. 2) AV has been a great testcase for federalism, and I think we've seen
41.
by stefan8r 7y ago
My current thesis is that robots (have to sense the world, make decisions, move freely, and respond to stimuli) only make sense in markets with labor shortages. AKA - if people are willing to do it for cheap, it probably won't make sen
42.
by stefan8r 7y ago
What's hard about this comparison is knowing exactly what you saw. If the safety driver disengaged 1-3x, it might have felt like a robotaxi drove you all over; but the effort to get that system safe for unmanned regular service might t
43.
by stefan8r 7y ago
Some large teams have tried to overcome this by making up every such scenario, coding it into simulation, and testing their system. What makes this challenging is that there are more such scenarios that might occur than there are grains of
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by stefan8r 7y ago
Crisis PR is an interesting thing. Each incremental death from AV causes less repetitional damage. Uber had a big shitstorm when they first killed someone, now they kill someone every day and the response is crickets. This is less of an
45.
by stefan8r 7y ago
Exactly. Tesla is an EV company that uses Autopilot to get better margins (and marketing)
46.
by stefan8r 7y ago
There was a person in the vehicle. Amusingly - many VCs who "should know better" fell for the same error. I'd regularly get in arguments with investors about whether others had done unmanned or not.
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by stefan8r 7y ago
Fair point. I'm shitty at drawing mathematical graphs. I'll update at some point with different notation.
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by stefan8r 7y ago
The problem is that most of those businesses don't make sense with the current cost of talent. The L2 systems OEMs are rolling out are primarily made by engineers in low-cost areas at $60-90k/yr, not $130-250k/yr in SV. Real
49.
by stefan8r 7y ago
There are a couple of people working on that, notably CloudTrucks. It's not for the faint of heart - truck drivers and engineers follow a very different set of social norms. It's hard to be the hardass boss drivers don't wan
50.
by stefan8r 7y ago
All transportation businesses are utilization businesses. Empty hours/miles are never recovered. Early robotaxis will have tight geofences. Makes them particularly bad competitors to poorly paid people who are willing to drive wherev
51.
by stefan8r 7y ago
Great point by the other responder. High level - Uber and Lyft have done a terrific job getting people to work for less than minimum wage. I've met quite a number of uberdrivers who work in Robotaxi-Ready cities (think Chandler, Tampa
52.
by stefan8r 7y ago
Hard to say. Truck drivers will be hit hard by this - they can't really stop interacting with people, almost never get paid time off, are older and in poor health, and are paycheck to paycheck. My bet is that nearly all of them get CO
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by stefan8r 7y ago
I live next to the weird intersection at Duboce Park. I see a Cruise car go by it every 30m. A better solution for robotaxis - just avoid the weird intersections.
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by stefan8r 7y ago
Another common fallacy. The US actually has a better rail network than Europe - most people just think it's worse because passenger rail here sucks. That's the case because we prioritize freight trains over passenger (in America
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by stefan8r 7y ago
Many many smart people share this thought. I don't. Freeway costs roughly $4m/lane/mile. Building a duplicate system for trucking would make UBI look cheap. Truck taxes also pay for much of current hway infrastructure, so
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by stefan8r 7y ago
Hard to say. We had really strict rules on what we wanted our data to look like, and were very specific about subject matter. We probably wouldn't have been able to be a customer. Our intention to deal with accidents/edge cases w
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by stefan8r 7y ago
Also happy to answer questions (my username might sound similar to the name of the author ;) )
58.
by stefan8r 7y ago
Just stopping is ok is ok in some use cases, but not others. It will be a long time before robotaxis "just stop" less frequently than uberdrivers, but AV trucks can already be more reliable than contemporary drivers.
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by stefan8r 7y ago
This is true, but essentially every transit system in the world (minus Hong Kong and Singapore's) operates at a loss. Maybe you can save money vis a vis unionized drivers, but I'm not wildly optimistic.
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by stefan8r 7y ago
System worked. Problem was investors have mostly bet on full autonomy, and when that failed to materialized they got scared out of the space. Full autonomy isn't necessary. And I don't know if it's even profitable for truck

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