
George Hotz Is Giving Away Self-Driving Software - devnonymous
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/qa-why-exhacker-george-hotz-is-giving-away-selfdriving-software
======
akerl_
This seems like the kind of end-run around the system that tech folks tend to
think is a clever life hack, only to find out that legal/regulatory bodies
aren't fooled. Like trying to convince the judge that you weren't speeding
because if you set your frame of reference inside the car, it was the _road_
that was speeding, backwards!

I only hope that the folks hand-rolling this onto their cars don't injure too
many people in their attempt to "disrupt" cars.

~~~
stale2002
This isn't some "clever trick". It is genuinely not illegal to release a bunch
of code open source on github.

The Government asked him to not sell his product, so he complied with the
government's request.

~~~
chillydawg
It is an ethically shitty move, though. The software is not properly tested.
People will run it thinking it's legit and probably some will get hurt or die.
The law doesn't matter.

~~~
diggan
It's ethically shitty to release open source software now? People who pull
down some source from Github that has 4 commits, thinking it's legit and rely
on it to drive your car are probably not too many. Those that do, are
generally hard to protect from themselves in any area of life.

~~~
nzjrs
7 years ago I completed a PhD developing the first control software for
quadrotor drones. I mention this only to give a sense of time. Now every idiot
with an arduino and a github account can crash one into my family at the park.
Do you think the adoption of shitty self driving technology by unequipped
amateurs will follow a different path?

~~~
tbrake
The cost of both entry and failure for hacking on quadcopter vs car is orders
of magnitude apart?

Unless you know something about the upcoming price of cars that you'd like to
share ;).

~~~
nzjrs
Really?

In 5 years how many cars will be equipped with the basal level of sensors that
make these sorts of hacks possible? My guess is more people will have
compatible cars in their house than qudrotors....

Cost and chance of failure is poorly (or not at all) evaluated by the kinds of
dangerous beginners likely to crash their car-pilot into a bridge.

~~~
tbrake
The point wasn't about the ubiquity of the feature set in cars but rather the
cost of bricking one/crashing one being well beyond what it is for a
quadcopter. And the point still stands.

The people who are out there with quadcopters are the same people who would be
doing these hacks at home on cars; some hobbyist/tinkerer subset of nerd.

I don't share your low opinion of their threat evaluation functions either.

~~~
nzjrs
Fair enough. Agree to disagree then.

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jakozaur
Wouldn't it better if he pivoted to self-parking?

At $700 a kit that allows car to drive by itself to garrage, open it, park
would be so attractive.

Driving through parking lot seems to be way easier than fully autonomous car.

~~~
agumonkey
You mean finding an empty spot and parking ? interesting small scope project.

~~~
jakozaur
Yes. Or even let me walk out of the car at front door and let it drive to
garage spot.

Pros:

\+ parking is one of the least favorite part of driving. It also eats a lot of
time.

\+ low-speed makes it much easier, you can stop at any time. Also stopping and
asking human for help would be acceptable.

\+ 360 sensors are superior to human vision in parking situation.

\+ parking accidents are usually minor. Self-driving car getting minor bump,
scratch is much easier to swallow them someone getting killed, injured.

\+ you can implement valet parking for free. E.g. Self-driving valet that gets
30% discount would be so much welcomed in San Francisco.

~~~
yamaneko
Also, if you're late to work and can't find a free parking spot, you can let
the car circulating until it finds one, while you can head to work.

But this would add other problems to cope.

------
arihant
I might be missing something, but most of the critical code seems to be
binary. It only supports two car models. So unless you own those two and are
willing to let no-warranty indie code which you cannot see drive you around,
this is a solid no-no.

~~~
mjpuser
I noticed that too.
[https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/v...](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/visiond/visiond)

------
xt00
It would be interesting to have somebody who was knowledgable in the area of
self driving cars to analyze his code. I mean it seems like he might benefit
from a combination of learning a few things and some level of humility. I
mean, Kalman filters, and even the algorithms used to lower the noise in
images and radars were not invented overnight but when it comes to a car that
may easily kill somebody it seems like it's worth it to be a bit cautious
about learning about potential pitfalls to different algorithms and
technologies. I mean build all the self driving car algorithms and cars that
drive on test tracks, but if one of his cars ran over my kid, or anybody
else's kid, then the price of progress is too high.

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yalogin
Serious question. He seems to lack tact, saying Ford never did anything
remotely useful in computer science. Why would his investors let him piss off
their potential acquirers that way?

~~~
drcross
He basks in controversy. It greatly detracts from what he is hoping to
achieve- automate humans traveling in large metal contraptions at 70mph. This
is not an area for inflated egos.

~~~
jbigelow76
"Move fast, break things"; eventual body count not withstanding, this is
literally silicon valley's ethos for the last 15ish years expressed via temper
tantrum.

------
eternalban
A somewhat critical point of view from a month ago on George Hotz, comma.ai,
and engineering ethics for this category of software:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3Cor8E9...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3Cor8E9U1Z4J:http://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2016/11/01/thoughts-
on-george-hotz-and-the-death-of-the-comma-one/)

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AmVess
He says it's better than anything other than the Tesla, yet he ran away the
moment NHTSA looked into his project. I've been around long enough to know
when something smells like bs, looks like bs, and sounds like bs...it's bs.

~~~
captainmuon
I could imagine NHTSA was pressing him too early for his taste. I don't know
Hotz personally, so I can just guess his motives, but if it was me I might
react in the same way. After all, this is basically still a hobby project
(although announced like a product and made by a very clever guy). Who knows
if he even has the money and time to implement NHTSA's demands?

~~~
Jarwain
The NHTSA seemed to only request for comma.ai to push back a release date
until further testing happened.

As for the money

>Well, we have Andreesen Horowitz [the VC firm], which provided $3.1 million,
and we spent under $1 million to do all of this.

~~~
trymas
I am interested where's the profit behind this funding, if it's given away?

Or the funding is just to buy the person/people/team to make some innovative
products or work in some other self driving car research teams?

~~~
usrusr
The experience won while writing that code could be a lot more valuable than
the code itself. If ever a car company was interested in building on top of
what comma.ai has done so far, they would hire (or acqui-hire, that's the VC
bet) the heads and have them rewrite the code together with more formal
engineers.

But when nobody is buying comma.ai, nothing of that will happen. The (little,
given the domain) money invested will only have been sponsorship of a
romanticized take on hacker culture. Which may actually have been a
contributing factor in the investment decision here, this a frugal garage
operation, not a fast-burning startup with fancy offices.

Open sourcing some code can create visibility, without it we would not be
talking about this today. From the investment perspective, opening this code
is clearly a hail-mary-pass. There are situations when those are the best
course of action and I think this is one of them.

------
dovdovdov
I remember when we did lane image recognition in Matlab on uni, I felt like a
master hacker. This was like 10 years ago.

Sure this is more advanced tech, but seriously, we should be far far further
in the development of these.

I still have my tinfoil-hat hope that all these technologies are ready made
and resting in a drawer, and companies are just milking the fossil fuel era as
long as they can, and teasing us with this crappy progression meanwhile.

~~~
ohwello
How would self-driving detract from fossil fuels? It should increase total
demand for fuel.

~~~
cxseven
Self-driving tech would make vehicle sharing much easier, which would in turn
allow people to use vehicles properly sized for their _current_ need.

In other words, people wouldn't need a big honkin' SUV or truck most of the
time, and could ride around in something smaller with just the fuel range they
need for that trip.

Also, traffic might get better. If everything became automated it might even
be possible to eliminate traffic lights.

~~~
trome
There would likely be vehicle sharing benefits, but self driving cars are apt
to make traffic worse. Your average 8 lane freeway will still only be able to
carry 11k cars an hour assuming everyone has minimal stopping distance & is
driving at 40mph for ideal throughput.

Traffic lights are also unlikely to disappear, as self driving cars do not
magically get perfect traction or stopping abilities, and they will have to
share the road with the other humans that exist on our streets, whether they
be pedestrians, bikers, joggers, skateboarders, etc.

In contrast, a light rail alignment can move 20k people an hour. It also won't
reduce traffic, but it'll slow traffic growth by reducing latent transport
demand and allow cities to remain economically viable as traffic increases.

~~~
agumonkey
The notion of traffic will probably shift if energy becomes cheap and
navigation doesn't require human attention. You don't need shortest path, and
can redirect flow freely in smaller places. Unless you're in a hurry.

~~~
trome
Unlikely, at peak times most alternate routes are already at or above
capacity, energy & navigation dropping in cost will not make more road
capacity suddenly appear, and the point of diminishing returns with road
capacity is very low. When you try to ignore that you end up like Atlanta,
which is no joy.

------
paulsutter
There are countless auto manufacturers around the world. I was surprised to
see the length of the list:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacture...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacturers)

I'm sure some percentage of these are willing to move faster than the major
brands we know in the US. This strategy by Cruise could help then reach these
smaller companies, some of whom surely have more flexible regulatory
environments. Especially for local companies.

~~~
wichert
FYI that list also contains manufacturers that went out of business a long
time ago. The first one I looked at immediately said "The company [Minerva]
became defunct in 1956". For some countries this is explicitly mentioned with
a "defunct" headers, but not everywhere.

------
occamrazor
In which countries is it legal to install a DIY actuator system like this one?

------
tempw
He is not releasing visiond binary, the main part of the project though. Can't
say with certainty buy I don't doubt it was a little of a publicity stunt

~~~
jamescostian
> not releasing visiond binary

Nit: he did release the binary[0] he just didn't release its source, and
there's a README that mentions this:

> Contact us if you'd like features added or support for your platform.

But I totally agree that it is pretty fishy to provide the source, especially
in an "open-source" project...

[0]
[https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/v...](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/visiond/visiond)

[1]
[https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/master/selfdrive/v...](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/master/selfdrive/visiond/)

~~~
tempw
yeah, the source, my bad. The blob is available

------
sschueller
Am I missing something? I only see the dataset available but no source code.

~~~
jsjohnst
As typical for this type of article, it's poorly linked.

Here's the code:
[https://github.com/commaai/openpilot](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot)

~~~
andrewzk
Wow, this codebase is alarmingly bad. No tests. Comments like "TODO: actually
make this work" all over the place. I can see why geohot is terrified of
regulators.

~~~
justinjlynn
Apropos,
[https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/5](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/5)

bneiluj > There is no test suite. Unit tests or E2E tests.

Geohotz > Pull request please!

mgraczyk > We have unit tests which have not yet been open sourced, because we
haven't yet set up automatic testing on Github. [...]

Wat.

In what world is it acceptable to elide the test suite for your product
because you don't have automatic testing setup on your repository host? Are
your tests in a completely separate repo... (checks the repo history) no,
you've just dumped a snapshot of your development in a git repo and pushed it
to github.

I really don't want to sound snide... this project has the capability to be so
_cool_. It's just... well, if someone hands you what they say is a magic box
that you can trust your life to and that box is manky and leaks strange fluids
all over the shop (and it really isn't supposed to do that)... what would you
think? Is that box magic? Will that box save your life?

It certainly doesn't give the engineer in me great confidence in the quality
of their system if this is quality of the piece they're proud enough to show
everyone.

------
winteriscoming
Looking at that github repo, its a handful of python scripts with around 30
odd commits? Am I missing something or is this really what is the core
implementation of a complex thing such as a self driving car software?

Edit: Someone else in this thread commented that the repo linked in the
article isn't the right one and apparently this is where the code resides
[https://github.com/commaai/openpilot](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot)

~~~
nitrogen
Previous discussions came to the same conclusion, with the added realization
that Python has no hope of maintaining the consistent latency required by a
hard-real-time task such as driving a car.

~~~
agumonkey
I don't know how much bandwidth and complexity is involved in processing the
single cam setup, maybe with a recent core i7, the variability of python is
swallowed by the cpu performance.

That said, Hotz claimed to have read state of the art papers, but it doesn't
seem he meant hard real time physics/mechanics computations; probably neural
net, computer vision and deep learning. Hacker way ?

~~~
tremon
_I don 't know how much bandwidth and complexity is involved_

It's not about bandwidth or complexity, it's about latency. And no, even a
recent core i7 can be stalled for long enough to cause underruns in a simple
audio stream.

------
andrewclunn
Torn. Concerned about safety, but wanting this to be open source and not
vendor locked in...

~~~
sickbeard
it only works on 2 cars.. that have a tech package. Might as well buy it from
the vendor

~~~
Nomentatus
Vendors who will use his tech, now, 'cause it's free and better than what they
could craft. His point is to offer his services to vendors. What's available
now amounts to a demo.

