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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Lidar has strengths that complement where video has weaknesses. That seems like a good thing. However it is bulky and expensive, and not yet produced at scale. Those are bad things. Whether it really makes a difference in simplifying the machine learning, only those developers know. You have to balance the pluses and minuses, and just because one company came up with something different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

    Maybe it won’t work without lidar but maybe it will - in the meantime Tesla has saved like $1,000/car times however many million they produce. If they succeed, then they have a solid cost and scalability advantage

    The deciding point is if someone does develop general self-driving. Will those who are behind be able to swallow their pride and modify their approach?




  • They don’t though. Waymo runs a few pilots in a few specific geolocked locations with essentially hand built cars at a huge loss. They also have human remote supervisions. They do seem fairly successful and maybe their slow careful rollout will eventually be at scale in the areas that need it most. Hopefully it will work.

    While it’s easy to argue Tesla hasn’t had those successes yet, they do have the “at scale” part down and are already profitable on the vehicles. They are close enough to self-driving them at they’re willing to try their own pilots with human intervention. If they succeed, they already have the scaling up done and are profitable on hardware so will quickly surpass other competitors.

    I like that different companies are taking different approaches, so we have competition. May the best technology succeed!














  • At my local commuter rail station the entrance to the parking lot is immediately next to the track. It’s easily within margin of error for GPS and if you’re only focusing immediately in front of you the pavement at the entrance probably look similar.

    There are plenty of cues so don’t rolled shouldn’t be fooled but perhaps FSD wouldn’t pay attention to them since it’s a bit of an outlier.

    That being said, I almost got my Subaru stuck once because an ATV trail looked like the dirt road to a campsite from the GPS, and I missed any cues there may have been