
George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars - LinuxBender
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/13/17561484/george-hotz-comma-ai-self-driving-car-scam-diy-kit
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asteli
Here's the low-level controller for Comma AI's self-driving software. Lateral
and longitudinal control, as well as actuator command are contained within.

Their low level control is done in Python, on top of Android, on a smartphone.
No further comment, your honor.

[https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/devel/selfdrive/co...](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/devel/selfdrive/controls)

~~~
sametmax
As much as I love Python, you need realtime processing for this kind of
things. You can't have a slow language with gc pauses and no way to guaranty
execution time for a given operation.

~~~
tinus_hn
If you want to replace the always attentive driver who never blinks their
eyes?

~~~
blub
It's not necessarily about speed of reaction, although that certainly plays a
part.

Such software needs to react in real time though, if the task that's turning
the steering wheel gets preempted in the middle of taking a curve on a cliff
your self-driving car will become a self-flying car.

Such a system would be the equivalent of a driver that suddenly starts texting
at all sorts of poorly chosen times.

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jimnotgym
When George demonstrated his first model I showed a friend who designs safety
critical systems. To paraphrase he said, that of course you can hack something
together in a weekend that does this.

However a analysing a million edge cases, making sure all failures fail in a
safe way takes a lot of time and knowledge.

It made me think that this is a great demonstration of the difference between
hobbyist hacking and professional engineering.

~~~
jsiepkes
> that of course you can hack something together in a weekend that does this.
> However a analysing a million edge cases, making sure all failures fail in a
> safe way takes a lot of time and knowledge.

Thats true for a lot of things. Most developers can whip up a Slack clone in a
weekend, create an uber clone in a weekend or create a Netflix clone in a
weekend. But dealing with all the edge cases, the details, making it scalable,
etc. that's were the pain is.

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zck
> California’s DMV requires all companies testing self-driving cars to report
> how many times safety operators were forced to take control of its vehicles.

You make what you measure. This encourages companies to have their safety
operators take over less often: if you tell the operators to err on the side
of safety and take over more often, your car will look less safe.

I don't have a solution here, just pointing out how this actually can benefit
companies that care less about safety.

~~~
mcny
Sorry if this is a stupid question but what does California do with these
numbers? If Wayne has 10 engagements per mile driven with 10M miles driven and
Tesla has 2 per mile with 500k miles driven and Uber has 1 per mile with 1M
miles driven (all made up numbers), will there be some sort of penalty for
below average scorers? Is it possible to categorically say who is the best?
How does this work?

~~~
lern_too_spel
It just makes the data public.

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flippmoke
If you are interested in learning more about George, you should listen to him
talking at Mapbox's Locate conference with the Mapbox CEO, Eric Gundersen [1].
Its another example of George being George. I just happened to be called out
during the talk, but overall rather enjoyed it.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9WxlR1ZTZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9WxlR1ZTZc)

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I found his description of his company, “ghost riding for the masses”, to be
particularly amusing

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Shank
> If the driver looks down or away from the road for two seconds, a visual
> warning will appear on the Eon’s screen. After four seconds, the driver will
> hear an audible alert. And after six seconds, the system will disengage and
> begin to slow down.

The biggest use of some kind of driver assist system is something that can
keep me going straight and at a constant speed on a relatively open road while
I twist open a bottle cap and take a sip of a drink. Making me have a death
stare out of the windshield to avoid disengagement is about as useful as
standard cruise control. Except standard cruise control isn't going to be
prone to making a mistake about whether or not I'm paying attention, and then
stopping my car because it isn't satisfied.

~~~
alkonaut
Right. Keeping in lane for 2 secs when you spill your coffee or the kid
screams or you do something else that makes you lose your concentration for a
short while is great.

I don’t need to sleep or work for an hour during a commute. Not now not
tomorrow. I can drive the damn thing or at least _watch it drive itself_. And
like mr Hotz I believe that’s what it will be like for decades to come. My
prediction is flying cars before completely self driving ones. And not some
novelty one person quadcopter. I mean the proper Blade Runner ones.

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juliangoldsmith
What would the point of current self-driving car systems be? If you can't take
your attention off the road anyway, it's basically a glorified, expensive
cruise control.

~~~
throwawayjava
Ever drive 8-12 hour days for 2 days straight? Used to do it 4-5, but
sometimes up to 10, times per year. I'd pay many thousands for lane-keeping on
rural interstates in a heartbeat.

~~~
closeparen
Yep. I _love_ the headspace of focusing on something so simple for so long. If
I weren’t going to have the experience of driving, I would just fly.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> If I weren’t going to have the experience of driving, I would just fly._

I mean, today, ditto. But for like at least 100M of the 300M+ Americans,
that's not an option for various reasons...

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21
So now we'll have weekend "hackers" downloading this open source software,
tweaking it, and hurling their cars down the road at high speed. Great.

The system also seems to have a single front facing camera. How will this
detect for example a cyclist riding along the car and prevent the car from
turning into him?

~~~
xedeon
You seem to have pretty strong opinions without even actually taking the time
to look into comma.ai and how it works.

All it takes is 5 minutes to know that it actually uses the built-in safety
systems in cars like ADAS, LKAS, ACC. Hence, they only support only specific
make/models. It's not just the "single front facing camera".

~~~
qznc
None of these built-in safety systems is design to work without a human driver
having the actual responsibility. This is why e.g. ACC is a "comfort" system
but not a "safety" system. Even systems like AEB don't come with a guarantee.
They just might help.

~~~
xedeon
>None of these built-in safety systems is design to work without a human
driver having the actual responsibility

You are exactly right! which is why NEITHER comma.ai, Tesla's Autopilot,
Nissan's Propilot, and GM Supercruise are being marketed as such i.e. only as
L2/Partial Automation at the moment.

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SOLAR_FIELDS
I think that this being marketed as anything other than the next generation of
cruise control is a lie. Don’t get me wrong, for that it’s absolutely great. I
would pay for this kit (if my car was new enough to actually have software for
it) just for the ability to be able to eat a sandwich on the way to work or
cruise down the boring parts of E6 or I-10 in a more relaxed, reclined
position.

I think Hotz is wrong about the predictions of self driving cars, but he
doesn’t have to be right to make this business succeed in the medium term
because he is filling an entirely different market niche here.

~~~
nojvek
Truly self driving car is incredibly hard. He’s right: waymo, cruise, Uber,
Tesla are over-selling it. People have died in Teslas because drivers were
over confident in their technology. Uber has run over people because their
software couldn’t see humans in dark.

A reliable and smarter cruise control can save so many lives. I think we’re
trying to jump the gun sometimes.

The number of highway deaths is insane. If software just augmented humans
better and saved those people/animals we’re coming out ahead as a
civilization.

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brokenmachine
I'm personally very happy that homemade self-driving tech would be illegal to
use on the road in my country.

~~~
amelius
How about a small startup selling that tech? Would it be legal to use?

Curious, what kind of regulations does your country have in place?

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brokenmachine
I'm in Australia.

Cars need to be registered to legally be on the road, and you couldn't
register a car with some homemade self-driving tech attached to it.

If you had a small startup selling the tech, I'm sure there's some painful and
lengthy process to prove it's safe. But certainly if the code is user-
modifiable, it wouldn't be approved.

How do other countries operate without such regulations? Certainly I've seen
some crazy car mods on the road in US TV shows that would never be allowed
without masses of red tape here in Australia. Even to import a normal car from
Japan to Australia you need to get child restraint attachments
installed/engineer approval/etc.

I don't know how a car could possibly be considered safe otherwise. Some of
those "Pimp my Ride"-type show mods just don't seem safe.

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aurizon
Sour grapes? I recall when push button elevators were installed. The union
insisted an operator was still needed - who asked you 'what floor?' and then
pushed that button. Without operators, western, and indeed all global
civilization would come to an end...

~~~
Semirhage
When push-button elevators were installed, they worked. Can you imagine if the
pitch had been, “sometimes this elevator will kill the odd person, thanks for
helping us work out the bugs.” As a bonus, the actual working elevator might
not emerge until decades after installation began, and the early models only
worked on alternate Wednesday’s.

~~~
regulation_d
This might be a valid point if the current system of driving wasn’t already
killing millions of people per year.

~~~
sverige
"Millions" is an overstatement. Annual deaths worldwide are around 1.25
million. And deaths in the U.S. have declined significantly from their peak in
the '70s.

All of that begs the question of whether autonomous cars will save lives. It
is always asserted that it will "because humans are such bad drivers compared
to computers," but there's no actual, real-world data to back up that claim.
Oh yes, some of these vehicles have been tested with millions of road miles,
but that is far from the scale of billions or trillions of road miles on every
kind of road under all conditions where people travel currently.

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iamleppert
I personally do not want a smartphone with a 3D printed case and heatsink
controlling my car. Do you hear that? It's the sound of a critical flaw in
your product, no matter what you do technically you are never going to have a
mass appeal product that becomes more than the nerds who hang out in your
Slack channel.

But it's fine for a lifestyle business I suppose. You can market to them and
sell them over-priced odb2 fit-bit-for-your-car dongles. Until Honda or
whoever comes out with a "good enough" consumer grade "auto-pilot" (whatever
that means these days because you still have to watch the car like a teenage
driver), you'll loose a huge swatch of users right there who are only spending
time on it to be on the cutting edge of tech and to look cool for their
friends. Once it becomes a blender, those users will leave and go on to the
next thing that grabs their attention in a banner ad. Or else people will get
bored, loose interest after the first few joy rides with their friends. I'd
imagine retention would be difficult in a business like that which takes a lot
of sustained effort and engagement from the users.

The only possible path forward in this market is to partner with an OEM (car
manufacture vroom vroom), have access to users, or make some kind of must-have
tech that you can then con one of the real big money backed self-driving
companies into buying. I've seen a bunch of web apps popping up lately that
offer to annotate your training data, those seem like a lot better pump and
dump tech companies than this dashcam that plays Pandora and runs some cool
python PID controller.

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lowtolerance
geohot has always been equal parts brains and bombast.

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raslah
Driver assist is a good way to get people comfortable with automated driving.
The only way autonomous vehicles will ever really show any benefit is if
communities, municipalities and eventually, governments start rolling them out
en masse and incentivising their purchase; SDVs driving together is the only
way to finally eliminate traffic related deaths and make travel smooth and
fast. As long as you have computers trying to predict and/or respond to
erratic human behavior, you're fighting a losing battle; it doesn't matter how
many times you rehearse it you'll hit a certain plateau where the correct
decisions simply can't be determined.

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stillsut
It seems likely that autonomy will not be first adopted by the US but instead
in the 'wild west' of BRICs - Brazil, Russia, India or China.

Also maybe in a country small, rich, authoritarian, and organized enough to
build infrastructure around it and limit liability like Singapore or
Luxembourg.

And oh look, a cheap and open source solution that gets you started in
CommaAI. I think they (or a fork of them) are quite good candidates for the
first system to reach one trillion miles driven. There will no doubt be
carnage. But the benefits of self driving are going to be first on display
outside of US markets.

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anfractuosity
Isn't a key part of openpilot, the vision related code, still closed source?

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maym86
This guy is all talk and represents one problem with Silicon Valley. There are
a lot of people now who can talk the talk and get the attention needed to get
money but with no ability to deliver. Stop giving him attention until he
actually shows something that matches even a little bit of what he is
promising.

People who know what they're doing technically are deeply aware of the issues
with their technology. Anyone in this area knows how hard it is to make these
vehicles work. He is finding out the reality of what he promised two years
late and is spinning it to get more attention.

~~~
commaai
You are aware we are giving away open source software that will control your
car, right? It's online today! And it's on par with the best systems money can
buy, Tesla Autopilot and GM Super Cruise.

[https://github.com/commaai/openpilot](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot)

No ability to deliver?

~~~
jaredklewis
Not disputing your claim, but how did you determine the comma Ai system was on
par with that of autopilot and super cruise?

In general, are there any standardized tests for self driving cars, like car
safety ratings but for the driving part? Basically, is there even a way to
measure how good a driving system is?

~~~
commaai
Not really. It's mostly subjective, but a good metric is time between user
action needed. We did 2 hours of press demos on highways without a single one.
(usually it's about an hour)

In addition to us, we have a community of users on slack with thousands of
miles of experience with each system. I think most would generally agree with
the quality assessment. You'll also find a bunch of YouTube videos comparing
them.

~~~
magic-chicken
So you test the system with human drivers for a few miles, and if none of them
dies then it's secure ? You actually rely on the subjectivity of uninformed
users to assess the reliabilty of a safety-critical system ?

>> Not really. It's mostly subjective.

No. The quality of a safety-critical system is not subjective.

>> I think most would generally agree with the quality assessment.

You are not qualified to make that claim, and neither are your users.

~~~
nojvek
Self driving systems is in its very early days and commaai is one of the open
ones i.e you can take the software and verify under the hood. commaai isn’t
also lying that it’s a glorified cruise control.

Unlike crash safety, crash and burn, topple etc, there are no open tests or
third party certifications that can verify that car model X is subjectively
this safe and passes this scenarios.

The big cos are notoriously secretive and throwing a lot of marketing money to
create hype.

I’m just glad that certain states have allowed such cars to be tested on the
streets.

We have to start somewhere.

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stephengillie
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17522766](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17522766)

~~~
sctb
Thanks. Since that submission didn't get too much attention, we've moved those
comments here.

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mirceal
Interesting tidbit: Hotz actually means thief in a few languages.

I actually don’t believe this guy. He may be brilliant, but there are quite a
few brilliant people working on this problem - so no.

~~~
mieseratte
> Interesting tidbit: Hotz actually means thief in a few languages.

You've piqued my inner language geek, but cursory Googling / Google Translate
hasn't given me any luck. What language(s) would that be?

~~~
mirceal
If you google it, it comes up as the first result :) :)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=hotz+thief](https://www.google.com/search?q=hotz+thief)

~~~
mkl
Your comment here comes up as the first result for me. The second and third
results are other comments in this thread. None of the other results on page 1
or 2 have any relevance, so I'd say it's pretty obscure.

What languages are you referring to?

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amai
Hotz always reminds me of those kids using Adderall in the TV series Silicon
Valley.

------
yters
Brilliant! Pure AI is a dead end street. Turing machines cannot increase their
minimal Kolmogorov sufficient statistic, so will always be unable to learn
more information than is put into them originally. Humans are the only known
information creators, and so only hybrid human/AI systems can work in the real
world.

~~~
jrace
>Humans are the only known information creators

What do you think whale-sounds and bird-songs are?

~~~
yters
If whale-sounds and bird-songs are information, and human intelligence is the
only thing that can create information, then the conclusion is whales and
birds were created by some kind of intelligence.

~~~
jrace
So it is your belief that whales and birds and all other animals were created
by humans?

And if so, then why would a human not be able to create an AI that is capable
of creating information?

~~~
yters
I think they were created by God. God is a meta-intelligence, an intelligent
being that can create other intelligent beings. Our intelligence is only
capable of creating mechanical beings, which are necessarily not intelligent.

The second question does not follow. If intelligence is defined by the ability
to do something non-algorithmic (i.e. create information), then AI can never
be intelligent.

