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Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by CamperBob2 on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @12:45PM (#34507120)
Agree- so many are dismissing it because its not perfect

In fact, I'd submit that phenomenon as its own entry in the Weirdest or Most Surreal Tech Trend contest. People who, when confronted with a talking dog, say things like, "This talking dog is an idiot. It thinks 429 is prime, its painting looks like something from Bob Ross on acid, and the C++ code it wrote for me is full of bugs. I don't see what all the hype is about."

Some of this dismissiveness is just whistling past the graveyard, but much of it comes from people who genuinely think the human brain is something that operates by means of ethereal, ineffable, and unreproducible mystic forces.

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by kevstev on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @01:31PM (#34507832)
I feel this way about self driving cars as well. Its like even 10 years ago, the capabilities they have today would be considered mind blowing, yet they receive so much hate because they aren't yet adapted to all situations. Its baffling to me, every time I watch a video of one I get all giddy and I am like we are living in the future! Yet even from tech circles, they get so much criticism because they aren't 100% there yet.

Its just a mindset I don't understand. And on places like reddit there is definitely some astroturfing going on or at least some definite "camps" that don't like SDC technology, but on HN AFAICT its been genuine disdain. So weird.

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by daveguy on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @02:16PM (#34508634)
I think most of the criticism with self driving is around the over-hyped under-delivered "full self driving" from Musk -- it actually seems to be getting worse compared to 5 years ago.

Apparently Cruise and Waymo are doing much more impressive things, but they only get a fraction of the press.

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by benlivengood on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @02:59PM (#34509349)
I'm curious how many people who criticize full self drive have actually ridden in the car while it navigates city streets. It makes about as many mistakes as a 1-3 years of practice new driver. I don't own a Tesla so I've ridden with friends. It's a barely noticeable difference between human and FSD operation, with very few overrides necessary.
Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by chrisco255 on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @10:08PM (#34513907)
If they're doing more impressive things why is it not in production at scale, right now? Just earlier today there was a story of a Waymo car getting stuck in an intersection in SF. Those cars still need constant intervention and human assistance that's why.
Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by daveguy on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @11:59AM (#34520793)
The miles between intervention is known for Waymo and Cruise.

Tesla refuses to publish this data.

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by 93po on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @08:03PM (#34526477)
Waymo and Cruise have published their known operating areas. It's tiny and only during certain times of day (middle of the night).

Tesla operates nearly everywhere. The scale of what's happening isn't even comparable.

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by daveguy on Thursday January 26, 2023 @02:53PM (#34537781)
Estimates from users of FSD are ~5 miles between disengagements.

https://sites.google.com/view/fsdbetacommunitytracker/home?p...

Even the best self reported areas are less than 100 miles between disengagement.

Waymo and Cruise are at around 30,000 miles between disengagement.

Tesla has released nothing.

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by 93po on Thursday January 26, 2023 @05:57PM (#34540074)
Tesla has FSD released on literally every car in the US that has purchased it. Hundreds of thousands of cars.

No one serious in the self driving space is using disengagements to pick winners or leaders on the path to commercialization. There is no standard about what qualifies as a disengagement and companies will interpret and report their disengagements differently. Those interpretations also change over time, making it even more difficult to actually understand how a company has progressed in its technology.

And again you're missing the point. Waymo/Cruise are operating in an extremely different and much more narrow context than Tesla's FSD. Let's go put Waymo on a random road in a random city and see how it fares compared to Tesla FSD. I guarantee it will be tremendously worse and no one who knows anything about the space would argue otherwise.

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by daveguy on Thursday January 26, 2023 @08:24PM (#34541320)
Hundreds of thousands of 5 mile jaunts.

Also, why is Tesla so adamant about how many accidents occured simply with FSD disabled? Shouldn't we know how long prior to the accident FSD was engaged? I mean, hitting the brakes in panic only technically makes it "not FSD".

I'd be happy if you showed me any reported data, self or Tesla, of 30k miles before disengagement with FSD. Even within one order of magnitude instead of two.

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by 93po on Friday January 27, 2023 @11:16AM (#34547673)
Show me data of Waymo or Cruise doing 30k miles before disengagement in the 99% of the country where they don't operate. I guarantee their stats are worse anywhere outside their carefully chosen, extremely narrow operating areas.
Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by daveguy on Friday January 27, 2023 @01:14PM (#34549590)
If there was a single operating area that Tesla could do as well, they would be shouting it from the rooftops. They are not only silent. They are trying to argue to the state of California that they are not testing self driving capabilities past level 2. Have a great day.
Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by 93po on Friday January 27, 2023 @01:30PM (#34549797)
Telsa has no reason to hyper focus on a few square miles in some random city and only in the middle of the night. You too.
Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by 93po on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @08:02PM (#34526466)
> it actually seems to be getting worse compared to 5 years ago.

You pretty clearly don't know what you're talking about.

> Apparently Cruise and Waymo are doing much more impressive things, but they only get a fraction of the press.

They are doing objectively much less impressive things by relying on sensors that require much less intelligent analysis and will lead them to dead ends at the higher end of abilities that Tesla's approach won't.

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by daveguy on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @10:31AM (#34596322)
They can't even keep up with self-parking technology. All the other electric car manufacturers don't seem to have any problem with it. But Tesla's implementation is laughable.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by phkahler on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @02:48PM (#34509167)
>> I feel this way about self driving cars as well. Its like even 10 years ago, the capabilities they have today would be considered mind blowing, yet they receive so much hate because they aren't yet adapted to all situations. Its baffling to me, every time I watch a video of one I get all giddy and I am like we are living in the future! Yet even from tech circles, they get so much criticism because they aren't 100% there yet.

This is one I take the side of the skeptic, and I can explain why. In college ~1994 a friend entered an autonomous ground vehicle contest. It was a big deal and our university hosted it each year - this was the 2nd year. He had cobbled together an unusual electric wheelchair base, a 486 PC and a tripod with an old camcorder looking down and forward with a frame-grabber card. The course was about one lane wide, bounded by 2 white lines painted in a grass field. There were some other obstacles and stuff (later years they had sections of dashed white lines and other complexity). We had talked about line following algorithms and such, and he had tried some things with limited success.

One day I said I had an idea, and he said OK but I need the hardware back in an hour. I don't recall if it was C or Pascal, but it was familiar enough that I coded something in an hour - with a visual display showing the 15 horizontal lines of pixels my code analyzed (at about 10 fps). We added some stuff later to incorporate sonar data, but that hour of code got us second place. I'm not here to brag about my fabulous code, I'm here to tell you that "faking it" with lane following and simple driving skills is really easy. There was zero "understanding" in what it was doing, zero ability to recover when it went wrong, zero of just anything but the simplest of code to enable moving forward without crossing the lines. I could write pseudo-code for it here in a comment in 10 minutes. When you think about it, driving safely on real roads requires semantic understanding of a lot of things and it's impossible to observe a vehicle driving and have any idea what level of comprehension it has. This combined with personal experience knowing how easy it is to do rudimentary lane following causes me to set the bar very high indeed. Parlor tricks are not safe, and whatever they have on the road today surely falls somewhere between that and fully sentient AI. But where is it exactly? What is good enough for your spouse and kids? And what is good enough for someone else to be letting drive on the road with them? Or while they cross the street on foot?

When a car can't "see" a semi crossing the road, or one doesn't identify something as human because it's not in a crosswalk, or another runs into and pushes an airplane, no I'm not impressed in the slightest at what these things CAN do reasonably well. The instances of what they get wrong tell me so much more about how far they have to go.

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by CamperBob2 on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @09:04PM (#34513464)
Agreed. However, in the detractors' defense, self-driving cars were hyped beyond all reason by people like Musk, so it's easy to justify some very vocal pushback.

GPT wasn't hyped much at all, in comparison. It just appeared. The next couple of iterations will be interesting to watch, since right now we don't really know what the rate of improvement is going to be. We might be fighting Skynet next year, or we might be in for another 50-year-long AI winter.

Re:Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) tec... by muzani on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @07:01PM (#34512423)
I consider it more like the golden calf that people worshipped while Moses was away. The Quranic version is it was made of gold, it made a sound, and so people idolized it.

I think it's a good parable. It's something expensive and man made. Even though it's on average dumber than a typical human, people try to ascribe godliness to it. And so many judge whether it has achieved omniscience. For many of us, it's just a better tool, an IDE, but for some, it's an oracle or divination tool that they use to decide whether they should marry someone.

I think the term "artificial intelligence" makes it even more confusing.