That's what I do. If I need a tool temporarily, I just get it from eBay or Craigslist, and then unload it. I often make money when I resell. It's not much, but all in all I essentially rent things for free. This doesn't work for things that are very expensive, but for anything below a few thousand dollars, this will save you a ton of money.
100% fake news. There's no way they actually have any ride data from either company to back up this claim. In fact there's another bit of equally fake news posted to HN right now that says that recent events have failed to put a dent into Uber marketshare. "Journalists" should stop making shit up, and instead stick to reporting facts.
Second Measure relies on undisclosed data sources of unknown accuracy. So this is very much like those reports from "anonymous sources familiar with Comey's thinking" (an actual quote).
fake news is flat out making stuff up, whereas this is simply reporting from a named and referenced source. How is that fake news? That term is bandied about incorrectly as a smoke screen enough already without people wilfully abusing it here as well.
Fortunately that society is at least 100 years in the future and none of us here will see it. When I was a kid, we were promised flying cars and life of leisure. 30 years later: no flying cars and busting my ass at work like a hamster in the wheel.
Visual cameras can be blinded fairly easily - even high-end cameras - simply point such a camera at the sun and try to make out a cloud in the sky. If Tesla were using true high-dynamic-range cameras (e.g. Oversampled binary imagers) then I would be more confident - but Tesla isn't saying that they are - and if they really were they would definitely boast about it.
What I like about LIDAR is that it will never give you false-negative data regarding object proximity (i.e. it will never tell you an obstruction in the road is not there) but visual-only cameras can be fooled very easily and definitely can give you false-negatives regarding road obstructions.
It seems inherently less safe to rely on a more homogeneous sensor array: conversely it makes sense to use as many different types of sensor as possible to ensure your design isn't susceptible to being brought down thanks to a weakness in your predominant sensor type.
Lidar is absolutely useless for level 5 autonomy given that doesn't work in "bad" weather. It may be useful for level 4 autonomy but for sure it is not necessary even then.
Source: no car driven around the planet at the moment has any lidar apart for testing purposes.
The human visual cortex is still far more advanced than a computer's. Maybe that will change some day, but asking about non-camera sensing equipment is a reasonable question until it does.
Sure, and it's not only cortex. Humans also know a lot about the world, and can predict things much better. There are areas in which humans are limited, however, such as reaction time, spectral sensitivity, the fact that humans can only see well in the center of where they're looking at and fake the rest of their visual field, etc. It's not at all clear to me that a human pair of eyeballs is better than 8 high quality, wide spectrum cameras feeding into the system at once.
That said, I think it's disingenuous of Tesla to call their system "autopilot" or imply autonomy of any kind when talking about their system. I will call something autopilot when it can drive me from door to door without me touching the wheel, in less than friendly weather conditions. Not drive in a straight line where it never rains.
You can have a 1000 cameras and it still doesn't matter if you don't have a good computer to process the data. That is where machine learning, etc comes in. Machine learning is really starting to come into its own in last few years especially for image recognition but it still sucks compared to humans. That doesn't mean self-driving based on cameras isn't good enough but it needs to be proven and we aren't there yet.
Dude, I work on high performance machine learning and machine vision 12 hours a day. You don't need to tell me it sucks, I know. But it's superhuman on some tasks already, and in a few short years, it'll be superhuman on a few more, and little by little it'll get there. All you get from that lidar is a depth map. You can do that without a lidar, using two or more cameras. If you also interpolate across a series of predictions, and have sensor fusion (which Tesla does, they also use radars and ultrasonic sensors) you can even make it robust. Truly, people who say it can't be done should not interrupt people who are doing it.
Some humans are horrible drivers. Some humans are good drivers. The biggest difference is often how proactive the driver is.
It's true that a careful, experienced driver will typically recognise a rapidly emerging hazard as much as several tenths of a second faster than a novice, giving them significantly more time and space to react. However, a careful, experienced driver will also anticipate places where there are likely to be hazards and adjust their driving style to compensate.
Does a self-driving car know that there's a park just round the corner and it's half an hour after the local kids came out of school, thus increasing the risk of a child chasing a ball into the road?
Does a self-driving car understand that the group of people standing quite near the road up ahead are outside a bar at 11:30pm and thus quite likely to be drunk and suddenly stagger into the road?
Does a self-driving car know about the pothole in the cycle lane that you had to avoid while riding into town yesterday, and anticipate that anyone riding in that cycle lane today may move out into the main traffic lane without warning to go around it?
Does a self-driving car know that the news last night reported on a local black spot for "accidents" caused by people wanting to make fake insurance claims, and decide to take another route that is a little slower but avoids that black spot?
Better sensors, fast data processing, and the ability to monitor all sensors all the time are big advantages, for sure, but these things mostly support reactive behaviour. I've seen nothing so far to suggest that the better reactions currently outweigh proactively avoiding or mitigating these kinds of hazards in the first place. Obviously that might change in any number of ways in the future, but we seem to be a long, long way from that point yet.
a) Most humans aren't aware of these things, either, so they're really non sequiturs at best.
b) Even if you accept them as valid premises, it's much easier to disperse this kind of info to every car on the road than it is to disperse it to humans (every tourist in a city needs to know where every bar / park is? Or watch the local news?)
Those were all real examples. These kinds of things happen in my area every day, and drivers are actively taught to look for signs like these before they are allowed to qualify and drive independently. Obviously not everyone gets the message, and the best anticipation skills only develop with more experience, but nothing I described was unusual or exceptional (other than the last one, which was quite a specific example of a more general idea).
On your second point, the important thing here is that you don't need to disperse much of this information to humans. Humans automatically recognise situations based on all of their experience, not just their driving experience. Of course sometimes external information sources like the news might be helpful, but much of it is just down to understanding context. See fresh horse crap on a country road? Someone's probably riding horses nearby. Horses scare easily. So, slow down and try to avoid anything noisy that could startle the animals. How many of today's self-driving algorithms take into account this kind of implied knowledge?
Humans have the computation equivalent of 38 petaflops of processing power. Does a Tesla vehicle?
If you seriously want to play the inane game of "well if a human doesn't have it then a Tesla doesn't need it" then let's play that game and talk about the things humans have that the Tesla lacks.
What's interesting about human's vision system is that the human eyeball is, relatively speaking, poor. We have digital cameras far better than that already. It is what the human brain that does with that raw data which makes us, as a species, thrive. Most of what we believe we "see" we never actually see, our brain fills in the gaps dynamically and infers information over time.
So this human processing ability, much of it automated rather than conscious, is totally relevant if you want to have this "Tesla Vs. human" debate. It is also why Lidar might be needed to make up the massive shortfall in a Tesla's processing ability relative to the human brain.
But hey, you want to keep to the "but HUMANS don't need it" then I ask where is my 38 petaflops and 1 TB of memory...
You don't need 38 petaflops to drive a car. We are wasting our minds driving. Driving doesn't need creativity, it needs the 360 degrees of awareness without any lapse in concentration and the ability to react in milliseconds.
Humans also lose focus, fall asleep and get tired.
Teslas have multiple radars for judging distance and multiple cameras that are used for stereo disparity. Also human 38 teraflops is not the same as nvidia teraflops.
I am not saying teslas are better than humans, I'm just saying teslas can drive on I5 highway from Vancouver to Mexico better than I can.
Also Lidars are really really expensive, I applaud Tesla and commaai for breaking major ground just with cameras. Convolutional neural nets have being doing phenomenal things in the past few years.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/415041/new-measure-of-hum...
I don't think we know enough about how the human brain works yet to give a precise value, but just on caloric arguments I would say that the mean processing power of the brain is not significantly above what we have now in general purpose computing devices.
It's memory + control driven with visual feedback, not much more. You don't have to solve anything if you already sorta know the solution, and can adjust it for the goal.
Just pool the money with Buffett and Gates, and do something jointly. Eradicate some deadly disease, cure cancer, something like that. Really bring those billions and project management skills to bear on it.
You seem to think money grows on trees. Your suggestions can't be implemented without taxing people like Bezos to death. In fact, I'm pretty sure they can't be implemented at all, no matter who you "bribe".
Every wealthy nation but the U.S. provides universal healthcare. They all provide much more subsidized higher education. They do theses things without taxing people to death. Do you have any evidence to support your belief?
They have different cost structures and much higher taxes, and their healthcare couldn't exist without multi billion research efforts US healthcare consumer pays for. How much pharmaceutical innovation is there outside the US?
There are many multi billion dollar companies that do pharmaceutical research outside the US, their revenue is not exclusively from the US, suggesting there would be no healthcare without the US, is like suggesting there would be no cars without the US
Merck isn't a US company, it is a German company. There is a US company with the same name that originates from a seizure of US assets of the German company with the same name.
Also known as the Merck that actually invents new drugs and rakes in almost three times the revenue of the German counterpart. I wonder if the fact that it's a US company has something to do with that. Hmm.
You are making factual claims without providing evidence. It might be true that advancements in healthcare wouldn't be st the level it is today without the U.S. but to ascertain that their healthcare wouldn't exist without the U.S. is clearly incorrect.
Even supposing all pharmaceutical innovation comes from the U.S. still does not show that without the U.S. there would be none. Clearly there is a market for drugs and the U.S. is not the only country with research capabilities.
Taxes are not that much higher elsewhere. People are not being taxed to death elsewhere.
You're saying the rest of the world is so poor, their health care systems are bouyed as a /side effect/ of the research that companies do, financed by the their average American customer?
Why does it have to change? It's a free market, internationally. Perhaps if they don't want to pay for drugs, drug companies should stop selling to them.
Our education system and business environment produces a hell of a lot more innovation (including pharma) than the rest of the world produces combined. The rest of the world then piggy backs on all that and invests diddly squat into R&D, all while being smug about their social safety net. Don't be so quick to dismiss the US way of doing things. While imperfect, it's not beyond repair either.
No. I'd love to see lower drug pricing in the US. One must understand, hovewer that this will cause the prices to rise everywhere else. Which is quite all right with me. About time those folks started paying their fair share. They might even get their own pharma research going if they have to pay through their nose like we do.
I disagree. It is _vital_ for cloud providers to keep Intel's feet to the fire. Things got so bad a few years back, Google started porting its entire software stack to ppc64le, which is far less convenient as a platform than amd64. I think we will totally see EPYC deployment in data centers if AMDs benchmarks hold up. You may not even know they're there, but I can guarantee they'll see a significant traction.
The person, not the campaign. Besides, he's under investigation now for firing Comey… although not much to investigate when you admit committing crimes on TV.
No laws have been broken by Trump. Hillary Clinton & co. on the other hand have broken _many_ at an egregious level. Lynch and Mueller should similarly be under investigation for covering up crimes as well.
Let me remind you that you know of this from the same sources which, until Comey's testimony, swore on a stack of bibles that Trump is under investigation.
As a TMobile customer in the US, tongue in cheek question: what's a "roaming fee"? It's kinda cool when your phone just works worldwide. That's the way it ought to be, imo.
The job of NSA is getting easier by the day. Blame it on the boogeyman du jour and have the media present it to the masses as ironclad evidence. What happened to the actual, you know, national security? You can't have it without working on preventive measures. How about we start with something tangible, like government infrastructure, power grid, etc, and make them darn near impenetrable. Think you could do that, NSA?
> Blame it on the boogeyman du jour and have the media present it to the masses as ironclad evidence
It says right in the article that the assessment was "issued internally last week and has not been made public". Until it's made public, it's unreasonable to expect them to provide evidence.
> government infrastructure
That's not really their responsibility
> power grid
That's the private sector's job. Congress has to yell at the industry to get them to do it[1]. Yet they still fail [2].
I don't trust the NSA either, but come on, be reasonable. If everyone just rambled incoherently, they would overshadow the legitimate complaints.
It has been "made public", since we, the public, are talking about it here. If it was some BS government agency, I'd assume the leak wasn't intentional, but with NSA I choose to assume otherwise, for obvious reasons.
>> that's not their responsibility
Then what the fuck are my taxes paying for? Weaponized zero days that leak out from there on a regular basis? Mass wiretapping? Undermining democratically elected government?
