I think anyone who listens to Musk talking about something they themselves know a lot about quickly realises that Musk's skills are elsewhere. He can motivate and market the hell out of a business whilst snorting more ketamine than a herd of horses but he is not a technical genius by any means. He pays people well to agree with him and fires them when they don't, so I suspect that his companies that produce better and more stable products do so because he micromanages them less.

It doesn't. It has a party trick that works in very specific conditions.

Yeah, it only works in extremely controlled environments driving really slowly.

The design is also flawed as it has to work with cameras anyway. The last thing you want is two systems arguing over what they see.

What do they actually use that much money for?

How well do they work? Camera only systems can be easily blinded by sun, fog, dirt, and snow

I ignore the Chinese because it is difficult to get reliable English information. Apart from those, these are the only level 3 systems available, and level 3 is the most advanced system that private individuals can currently get their hands on. Have I missed any?

Don't forget Blue Cruise from Ford.

To be honest, it's possible that having too much data can only cause problems in quick decision-making. Any redundant data will only slow down processing pipelines.

Is that because their vision fails to provide the information necessary to drive safely? Or is it due to distraction and/or poor judgment? I don't actually know the answer to this, but I assume distraction/judgment is a bigger factor.

I'm not a fan of the camera-only approach and think Tesla is making a mistake backing it due to path-dependence, but when we're _only_ talking about this is _broadly theoretical_ terms, I don't think they're wrong. The ideal autonomous driving agent is like a perfect monday morning quarterback who gets to look at every failure and say "see, what you should have done here was..." and it seems like it might well both have enough information and be able too see enough cases to meet some desirable standard of safety. In theory. In practice, maybe they just can't get enough accuracy or something.

Oh and the sun. I get blinded when the sun is in my eyes at sunrise and sunset.

Explains the Tesla robot actually

Based on presentations we've seen what sets Tesla apart are its datasets not the core technology.

And those don't translate across to the Optimus bot.

Optimus should probably have LiDAR more than a car…

My back of the napkin estimate is that a human using time of flight ranging would be unable to distinguish between an object directly in front of their face and 8.6 meters away[1]. I think human echolocation uses a different mechanism (presumably relating to amplitude)?

Skimming the Wikipedia article[2], it seems like animals do use time of flight, but also Doppler shifting.

(As a side note, some animals have apparently evolved active countermeasures to echolocation!? It seems obvious in retrospect but incredibly cool.)

There's interesting research into the mechanisms of human echolocation [3], but it was over my head. My impression was that the jury is out as far as the precise mechanisms involved but that there's a lot of evidence to be considered, I'm sure someone with a better background would get more out of it than I did.

(I'm just curious about the mechanism, I agree that LIDAR has natural analogs.)

[1] Speed of sound * 25ms, 25ms being the rule of thumb I've memorized for the minimum interval for two sounds to register as distinct from each other. This is just folk wisdom I've picked up hacking on audio, so perhaps I'm mistaken.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation

[3] https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1375913/1963...

2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160071

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18208334