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| ▲ | jandrewrogers 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The long-term view of LIDAR was not so much that it was expensive, though it was at the time. The issue is that it is susceptible to interference if everyone is using LIDAR for everything all the time and it is vulnerable to spoofing/jamming by bad actors. For better or worse, passive optical is much more robust against these types of risks. This doesn't matter much when LIDAR is relatively rare but that can't be assumed to remain the case forever. | | |
| ▲ | tim333 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I hadn't heard that criticism. You can get multiple Waymos near each other without them crashing into things. | | |
| ▲ | vachina 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | When I see Waymos fail they usually fail together | | |
| ▲ | catgirlinspace 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Doesn’t mean they’re failing because of interfering lidar though. If it’s something like them failing due to the road being blocked or something, it makes sense they’d fail together. Assuming they’re on the same OS, why would one know how to handle that situation and another not? |
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| ▲ | consumer451 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I am just some schmoe, but optics alone can be easily spoofed as any fan of the Wile E. Coyote has known for decades. [0] What's crazy to me is that anyone would think that anything short of ASI could take image based world understanding to true FSD. Tesla tried to replicate human response, ~"because humans only have eyes" but largely without even stereoscopic vision, ffs. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ | | |
| ▲ | wongarsu 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | But optical illusions are much less of an issue because humans understand them and also suffer from them. That makes them easier to detect, easier to debug, and much less scary to the average driver. Sure, someone can put up a wall painted to look like a road, but we have about a century of experience that people will generally not do that. And if they do it's easy to understand why that was an issue, and both fixing the issue (removing the mural) and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift | | |
| ▲ | consumer451 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift Is this a joke? Graffiti is now punishable and enforced by whom exactly? Who decides what constitutes an illegal image? How do you catch them? What if vision-only FSD sees a city-sanctioned brick building's mural as an actual sunset? So you agree that all we need is AGI and human-equal sensors for Tesla-style FSD, but wait... plus some "swift" enforcement force for illegal murals? I love this, I have had heath issues recently, and I have not laughed this hard for a while. Thank you. Hell, at the last "Tesla AI Day," Musk himself said ~"FSD basically requires AGI" - so he is well aware. |
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| ▲ | solumunus 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why isn’t the solution a combination of both? | |
| ▲ | ycui1986 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | everyone uses cellphone that transmit on the same frequency. they don't seem to cause interference. once enough lidar enters real word use. there will be regulation to make them work with each other. | | |
| ▲ | jandrewrogers 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Completely different problem domains. A mobile phone is interacting with a fixed point (i.e. cell tower) that coordinates and manages traffic across cell phones to minimize interference. LIDAR is like wifi, a commons that can be polluted at will by arbitrary actors. LIDAR has much more in common with ordinary radar (it is in the name, after all) and is similarly susceptible to interference. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs. Look at how dozens of GPS satellites share the same frequency without stepping on each others' toes, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code Like GPS, LIDAR can be jammed or spoofed by intentional actors, of course. That part's not so easy to hand-wave away, but someone who wants to screw with road traffic will certainly have easier ways to do it. | | |
| ▲ | addaon an hour ago | parent [-] | | > No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs. For rotating pulsed lidar, this really isn't the case. It's possible, but certainly not trivial. The challenge is that eye safety is determined by the energy in a pulse, but detection range is determined by the power of a pulse, driving towards minimum pulse width for a given lens size. This width is under 10 ns, and leaning closer to 2-4 ns for more modern systems. With laser diode currents in the tens of amps range, producing a gaussian pulse this width is already a challenging inductance-minimization problem -- think GaN, thin PCBs, wire-bonded LDs etc to get loop area down. And an inductance-limited pulse is inherently gaussian. To play any anti-interference games means being able to modulate the pulse more finely than that, without increasing the effective pulse width enough to make you uncompetitive on range. This is hard. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I think we may have had this discussion before, but from an engineering perspective, I don't buy it. For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power. Large numbers of bits per unit of time are what it takes to make two sequences correlate (or not), and large numbers of bits per unit of time are not a problem in this business. Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley. | | |
| ▲ | addaon an hour ago | parent [-] | | > For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power. I haven't seen a system that does anti-interference across multiple pulses, as opposed to by shaping individual pulses. (I've seen systems that introduce random jitter across multiple pulses to de-correlate interference, but that's a bit different.) The issue is you really do get a hell of a lot of data out of a single pulse, and for interesting objects (thin poles, power lines) there's not a lot of correlation between adjacent pulses -- you can't always assume properties across multiple pulses without having to throw away data from single data-carrying pulses. Edit: Another way of saying this -- your revisit rate to a specific point of interference is around 20 Hz. That's just not a lot of bits per unit time. > Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley. I can believe this is true for FMCW lidar, but I know it to be untrue for pulsed lidar. Perhaps we're discussing different systems? | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I haven't seen a system that does anti-interference across multiple pulses... My naive assumption would be that they would do exactly that. In fact, offhand, I don't know how else I'd go about it. When emitting pulses every X ns, I might envision using a long LFSR whose low-order bit specifies whether to skip the next X-ns time slot or not. Every car gets its own lidar seed, just like it gets its own key fob seed now. Then, when listening for returned pulses, the receiver would correlate against the same sequence. Echoes from fixed objects would be represented by a constant lag, while those from moving ones would be "Doppler-shifted" in time and show up at varying lags. So yes, you'd lose some energy due to dead time that you'd otherwise fill with a constant pulse train, but the processing gain from the correlator would presumably make up for that and then some. Why wouldn't existing systems do something like this? I've never designed a lidar, but I can't believe there's anything to the multiple-access problem that wasn't already well-known in the 1970s. What else needs to be invented, other than implementation and integration details? Edit re: the 20 Hz constraint, that's one area where our assumptions probably diverge. The output might be 20 Hz but internally, why wouldn't you be working with millions of individual pulses per frame? Lasers are freaking fast and so are photodiodes, given synchronous detection. | | |
| ▲ | addaon 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I suggest looking at a rotating lidar with an infrared scope... it's super, super informative and a lot of fun. Worth just camping out in SF or Mountain View and looking at all the different patterns on the wall as different lidar-equipped cars drive by. A typical long range rotating pulsed lidar rotates at ~20 Hz, has 32 - 64 vertical channels (with spacing not necessarily uniform), and fires each channel's laser at around 20 kHz. This gives vertical channel spacing on the order of 1°, and horizontal channel spacing on the order of 0.3°. The perception folks assure me that having horizontal data orders of magnitude denser than vertical data doesn't really add value to them; and going to a higher pulse rate runs into the issue of self-interference between channels, which is much more annoying to deal with then interference from other lidars. If you want to take that 20 kHz to 200 kHz, you first run into the fact that there can now be 10 pulses in flight at the same time... and that you're trying to detect low-photon-count events with an APD or SPAD outputting nanoamps within a few inches of a laser driver putting generating nanosecond pulses at tens of amps. That's a lot of additional noise! And even then, you have an 0.03° spacing between pulses, which means that successive pulses don't even overlap at max range with a typical spot diameter of 1" - 2" -- so depending on the surfaces you're hitting, on their continuity as seen by you, you still can't really say anything about the expected time alignment of adjacent pulses. Taking this to 2 MHz would let you guarantee some overlap for a handful of pulses, but only some... and that's still not a lot of samples to correlate. And of course your laser power usage and thermal challenges just went up two orders of magnitude... |
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| ▲ | iknowstuff 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And then made the best adas on the market using cameras | | |
| ▲ | Rebelgecko 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | By what metric? In terms of deaths, injuries, and crashes per mile their Full Self Driving at least an order of magnitude behind Waymo | | |
| ▲ | DustinBrett 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Show the proof then with links to unbias articles and the numbers/math. | |
| ▲ | iknowstuff 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Waymo is not an adas. There’s nothing close to FSD 14 abilities out there for consumers. And your stats comparing to waymo are made up and debunked in the very reddit thread they came from | | |
| ▲ | Rebelgecko 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Llm hallucination? I want to give posters the benefit of the doubt but I didn't mention a reddit thread. If you're just getting me mixed up with another poster, I got my stats from an electrek article supplemented by Waymo's releases: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ Tesla's tech is also marketed as a full self driving autopilot, not just basic driver assistance like adaptive cruise control. That's how they're doing the autonomous robotaxis and the cross country drives without anyone touching the steering wheel. | |
| ▲ | cyberax 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure. And Tesla doesn't have robotaxis at all, they're still playing in the kindergarten league. So Tesla is in a weird state right now. Tesla's highway assist is shit, it's worse than Mercedes previous generation assist after Tesla switched to the end-to-end neural networks. The new MB.Drive Assist Pro is apparently even better. FSD attempts to work in cities. But it's ridiculously bad, it's worse than useless even in simple city conditions. If I try to turn it on, it attempts to kill me at least once on my route from my office to my home. So other car makers quite sensibly avoided it, until they perfected the technology. | | |
| ▲ | durandal1 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | For anyone who has or has experienced the latest gen FSD from Tesla this comes across as a complete lie. Why would you spend energy lying on HN of all places? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > anyone who has or has experienced the latest gen FSD from Tesla this comes across as a complete lie I used the latest FSD and Waymo in December. FSD still needs to be supervised. It’s impressive and better than what my Subaru’s lane-keeping software can do. But I can confidently nap in a Waymo. These are totally different products and technology stacks. | |
| ▲ | cyberax 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've been using Tesla since 2015. And no, it's not a lie. Tesla FSD gives up with the red-hands-of-death panic at this spot: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Cfe9LBzaCLpGSAr99 (edit: fixed the location) It also misinterprets this signal: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fhZsQtN5LKy59Mpv6 It doesn't have enough resolution to resolve the red left arrow, especially when it's even mildly rainy. At this intersection, it just gets confused and I have to take over to finish the turn: https://maps.app.goo.gl/DHeBmwpe3pfD6AXc6 You're welcome to try these locations. | |
| ▲ | qwerpy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I recently went on vacation and rented a 7 year old Model X and the FSD on it (v12) was better than nothing but not great, especially after having v14 on my truck drive 99% of my miles. It truly is a life-changer for people fortunate enough to have it, so it's always jarring to see the misinformed/dishonest comments online. It's still not perfect but at this point I would trust it more than the average human and certainly more than a new/old/exhausted/inebriated/distracted driver. |
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| ▲ | ronnier 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This goes against my daily fsd usage and my friends fsd usage. We all use fsd daily, zero issues, through hard city and highway environments. It’s near perfect outside of the occasional weird routing issues (but that’s not a safety issue). We all have the latest fsd on hw4. No other consumer car on the market in the US can do this (go from point a to b with zero interventions through city and highway). If there was something better then I’d buy it, but there’s not. | | |
| ▲ | terminalshort 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The issue here is that "zero issues" is something that must be based on a very large sample size. In the US the death rate for cars is a bit over 1 per 100 million miles. So you really need billions of miles of data. FSD could be 10x as dangerous as the average driver and still it would most likely be "zero issues" for you and all your friends. | | |
| ▲ | ronnier 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It doesn’t matter what stats are shown. You’ll dismiss it because of political reasons. You can lie to yourself and others but I use this car daily and you won’t fool me. | |
| ▲ | qwerpy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'll post the 7 billion miles of stats here (https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety) but then the objections will be "it's Tesla of course they lie" and the debunked "they turn FSD off right before an accident". |
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| ▲ | cyberax 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sigh. FSD is OK on freeways, but it constantly changes lanes for no discernible reasons. Sometimes unsafely or unnaturally, forcing me to take over. The previous stack had a setting to disable that, but not the new end-to-end NN-based system. In cities, it's just shit. If you're using it without paying attention, your driving license has to be revoked and you should never be allowed to drive. |
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| ▲ | iknowstuff 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Girl get real. Mercedes fooled quite a few people with their PR stunt but they have NOTHING like fsd. Drive assist pro is vaporware, as their “L3” has been for the past 2 years. You can’t order that shit but half of hackernews is glazing mercedes for it |
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| ▲ | cr125rider 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That’s not true at all. Tesla taxis aren’t even close to Waymo’s capabilities. | | |
| ▲ | iknowstuff 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I said adas, nothing about waymo. That being said, yes they are, I ride them every day. | |
| ▲ | DustinBrett 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Where is the proof/evidence for this statement? | | |
| ▲ | jeltz 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Curious how you only ask this to people who claim Teslas are bad and not to people who claim Teslas are good. |
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| ▲ | refulgentis 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've struggled with this over the years, but think we can call it at this point: Waymo is definitely better. Just too much real world data. (i.e. scaled paid service, no drivers, multiple cities, for 1 year+) | | |
| ▲ | terminalshort 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Is it really comparable, though? What is better a Ferrari or a Ford Ranger? That depends on if you are trying to go fast or haul 500 lbs of stuff across town. Waymo is a much better completely autonomous robo taxi in limited areas mapped to the mm, but if I want an autonomous driving system for my personal car to go wherever I want, Tesla FSD is the better option. | |
| ▲ | iknowstuff 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Waymo is fully autonomous, FSD is an adas for consumers. Robotaxi is a separate product. They are fantastic at driving but until they remove supervisors it’s a moot comparison | | | |
| ▲ | DustinBrett 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We being who? What is your evidence it's better? The fact all the cars stopped moving when the power went out? The fact they cost WayMore? Show the evidence for your claims. And they have remote operators as proven by the power outage. | | |
| ▲ | refulgentis 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Apologies, I was unclear with the "i.e." bit I assume, to spell it out: I think after struggling with it over years its time to call it because Waymo has a scaled paid service, no drivers, multiple cities, for 1 year+. |
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| ▲ | kcb 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I was just thinking about this on my 60 mile FSD driver I just finished. Basically inevitable that I would shortly go HN or reddit and read how FSD doesn't work. FSD is here, it wasn't 3 or 4 years ago when I first bought a Tesla, but today it's incredible. |
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