
Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski - edshiro
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/28-revealing-text-messages-between-travis-kalanick-and-anthony-levandowski
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swang
> A source close to Uber’s operations says its engineers watched the
> intersection where Uber’s cars were said to have run the red light, and that
> this text refers to them recording a number of normal, human-operated
> vehicles also breaking the law. Uber has never officially admitted that its
> software was to blame.

is the implication here that that intersection has a lot of red light runners?
if so, are they so dense in not understanding how normal people running red
lights is less of an issue here than a machine running that red light?

normal humans run red lights because they're either not paying attention or
they're assholes. how is a machine safer or better if it can't pay attention
(or even worse, is an asshole).

someone could have died because uber decided the rules didn't apply to them.
it's ridiculous that they're still allowed to operate in california.

~~~
paul6987
Don't forget illegally running autonomous tractor trailers in Palo Alto and on
the roads of Nevada.

These guys are criminals... total disregard for human life (but their own) in
every shape and way there is. From potentially killing people, too treating
everyone is who not their BRO like trash; drivers, employees, customers,
business partners, etc, etc, etc... GROSS!

~~~
furioussloth
Your comments come off as if you are more bitter about some company you can
just choose to ignore than benchamark is about Travis.

~~~
kbenson
> bitter about some company you can just choose to ignore

This is not about some product you buy, or some service you pay for, it's
about sharing the road, and whether the other people/entities on the road with
you operating multiple thousand pound machines at 24-65 Mph have a legal right
to be there and are safe. That's not something you can necessarily "ignore"
without consequence.

~~~
furioussloth
I am only referring to this person's tone being unlike most of the people on
this forum. "GROSS" "burn Uber down to ground". It is concerning how angry
this person is. Also yes the car ran the signal, it was bad they should be
fined and what not. This is not L5 autonomy so the driver is also responsible
for not breaking at that signal . Stop making this sound like the car ran over
someone or did not stop for pedestrian.

~~~
paul6987
Yes Travis continues to meddle with Uber and be involved he may just well burn
it to the ground out of pure ignorance and hubris. Only hold the ashes he
built then burnt!

Their behavior is so GROSS it's almost illegal.

As for concerning that's funny ... Uber stole my money and laughed, then
caused other ppl I know financial harm and then all this stuff comes out in
the press about them. I loathe Uber that is all ... no more no less.

Why do you care so much ... what skin in the Uber game do you have?

~~~
paul6987
21 ppl upvoted my comment at the top.

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loceng
"Uber Saw Tesla as a Huge Competitor

While Uber followed Google’s cars closely, it was Tesla and Elon Musk that the
duo discussed most frequently.

9/14/2016 Levandowski: Tesla crash in January … implies Elon is lying about
millions of miles without incident. We should have LDP on Tesla just to catch
all the crashes that are going on.

9/22/2016: We’ve got to start calling Elon on his shit. I'm not on social
media but let's start "faketesla" and start give physics lessons about stupid
shit Elon says like [saying his cars don’t need lidar]"

Does anyone know what they're referencing here? I don't take Elon as a person
to lie, his character seems too strong for that - he understands public
perception and seems to deeply cares about it.

~~~
sanguy
Multiple images can be used to compute a 3D point cloud. This is computer
vision stuff around for many years. The challenge is this is a passive sensor
in that the cameras count on light illuminating the scene. So at night; in
bright light (that causes images to blow out); shadows; etc; you can have
voids. If a person is in that void bad things can happen.

But cameras now cost under a $1 each in volume (thanks smartphones!) so dirt
cheap. An imaging based point cloud extraction system main components are
therefore cheap. Add a GPU enabled system to process (it's quite compute
heavy) and you are set. OpenCV has the algorithms needed.

LiDAR is an active sensor in that the laser "illuminates" the target area.
This adds cost but that is coming down quickly. Also as the sensor delivered
3D points (not images) the computational cost with images can be saved; so
less CPU/GPU required.

Levandowski is a LiDAR guy. It's what he believes is the best solution for the
problem.

Some feel that LiDAR is not a fit either as it doesn't work well in
rain/fog/sleet/snow. There was a youtube video showing a self driving car
running a test course in clear weather and again in the rain. You would not
want to be a pedestrian during the rain test.

In reality this is all engineering dick waving. Prices will come down and the
sensor payload will converge.

For full autonomy it is likely that cameras, LiDAR, Radar, and sonar all will
be used. They all bring some advantage to the problem that addresses a
weakness of one of the other sensor techs.

Oh yeah, and Levandowski is a complete prick. Someone should teach him about
IP theft and give him a prison life lesson. He's going to need it.

~~~
tim333
Incidentally, Musk's take: "The whole road system is meant to be navigated
with passive optical or cameras and so once you solve camera vision then
autonomy is solved if you don't solve vision it's not solved so that that's
why our focus is so heavily on having a vision neural net that's very
effective for road conditions."
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv7qL1mcxcw&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv7qL1mcxcw&feature=youtu.be&t=14m02s)

~~~
ariwilson
Why would you want to limit yourself to passive cameras and make your life
harder? This is like limiting yourself to flapping bird wings to make
airplanes.

~~~
erikpukinskis
No, it's like limiting yourself to using skis to move down a ski slope. He's
right: the roads are design to be navigated using vision. Signage,
regulations, paint, curbs, etc. There's no proof that you could safely
navigate the roads with LIDAR, but we prove every time we drive that you can
do it with vision.

And sure, there might be a better way to get down a ski slope, but skis would
be a pretty good starting point. And they guarantee you don't end up in an
impossible situation because you're doing things a fundamentally different way
than the system expects.

~~~
makomk
They're designed to be navigated using human vision, which has very different
characteristics in terms of dynamic range, resolution, processing pipeline,
inferring details about the scene based on past experiences, etc than machine
vision.

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zitterbewegung
Reading their exchanges its more interesting than just finding stuff about the
court case. Specifically how these insiders think about their competitors.
Such as how they think that Elon is the biggest competitor and how they wanted
to partner with Google.

~~~
sah2ed
I guess that's because of Tesla's advantage in vertical integration -- they
control the entire stack unlike Waymo or Uber who have to retrofit their gear
into specific car models.

Tesla's tech is generally considered weaker but Musk could still catch up and
overtake by playing the "worse is better" card.

~~~
curun1r
They might also realize just how important the combination of electric and
self-driving is in terms of $/mi. Both lower the cost substantially, but
together things start to get really cheap. When you add in the cost of a
driver, internal combustion is still roughly competitive. Once you remove that
cost, electric will be significantly cheaper. Tesla's investment into battery
production could be difficult for Uber's suppliers to overcome.

The end game in Uber's VC-money-burning present state is an eventual future
where self-driving vehicles drive the cost down to where Uber makes a profit
from the same fares we pay now. But if Tesla prices their service near their
own cost, Uber could get to its own self-driving service and be forced to
choose between pricing their service higher than Tesla or continuing to take a
loss on each ride.

Tesla also has a huge PR advantage. Competitors need to be able to capture the
attention of riders as well as offering self-driving vehicles. Given how easy
it is for Musk to get press, he might have the best chance of doing that
without having to pay for it in the same way that Uber has had to pay.

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koolba
> 7/23/2016 Kalanick: You hungry? .. Can get some Uber Eats steak and eggs.

Travis shows dog fooding at its best.

~~~
DaggerDagger
Even specifies "Uber" Eats. That's a CEO right there.

~~~
koolba
Exactly. The man doesn't have an off switch. It's like Alec Baldwin talking to
the sales guys: " _Always be closing!_ "

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yohann305
i don't understand how us the public are allowed to read a private
conversation. Don't take me wrong i enjoyed reading it, it felt like snooping,
but isn't it a blatant privacy violation?

~~~
empath75
Anything you do that's business related could end up on the front page of the
NY Times. I would be extremely careful about what you do on corporate provided
phones and email.

~~~
loceng
Zuckerberg's early days of conversation released didn't seem to hurt him
making $40B+ - I always wondered if FB censored/prevented the spread of that
information relating to him on FB.

~~~
jacquesm
Who knows where he would have ended otherwise.

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dgregd
So much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious
idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a
traffic light, a sign, a car, etc.) transmits info about itself. A car could
broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object
it sees. A traffic light could broadcast current state and when it is going to
change. That information would greatly enhance overall security, especially
during rain and snow conditions, when even LIDAR fails.

Self-driving is such important (just after eliminating combustion engines)
that we could upgrade existing cars with cheap ROMB boxes. Vehicle GPS
tracking system costs about $30. ROMB box would cost about $60. Let's say that
from 2027 all cars have to have a ROMB box to enter a downtown ...

~~~
Ohtrahddis
Because this would likely require a large change in city infrastructure.

Who will be building this? Who will pay for it? If it is the city how will you
convince the city's taxpayers to pay for it? If it is a profit-seeking
corporation, how will you convince a city to let you cause the disruption,
construction, etc. to let you do this?

For other cars, what advantage does this bring to other car manufacturers and
why would they agree to cooperate with competitors? Of course there is the
obvious benefit that this would help all the players, but why does that
marginal benefit outweigh the risk of commoditizing a brand new market /
product and eliminating the chance to establish a market share lead. I am
partly raising these hypothetical questions because I think companies are
trying to "tough it out" and do it without such changes to city infrastructure
first and see how that turns out.

I appreciate your simple approach, but you might be disregarding the societal
and business factors in favor of making the engineering challenge simpler.

Edit: grammar

~~~
tim333
Also GPS tracking systems are only accurate to about 20m, not enough to avoid
hitting stuff. And transmit over the cell network so don't work if you can't
get signal.

~~~
zimpenfish
Although if you're going to be adding to infrastructure, you could just as
well add differential GPS transmitters around the place and get the accuracy
down to sub-1m[1] although that's still not really safe enough for cars...

[1] (and I believe you can get it down to ~3cm if you have enough data.)

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Overtonwindow
I can't help but shake a feeling that all of this posting of text messages is
just trying to shame Levandowski, Kalanick, or both.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
Any "leak" is intended to weaken/shame some party. The unknown is whether it's
an attack on Levandowski/Otto, Uber, Kalanick, or all of the above.

~~~
hyperbovine
The source of these texts are unsealed court documents. Like it or not, these
things can become part of the public record if you get sued.

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loceng
I didn't read much of the transcript, however these guys must be intelligent
enough to keep what they know to likely be illegal as a private in-person
conversation without record?

~~~
ghaff
Most (though not all) people are probably smart enough not to send a text or
an email like "Where should we dump the body." However, the totality of a
bunch of emails or texts, considered together with other evidence, can
certainly be suggestive even if there's no smoking gun.

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msh
Interesting that they are using telegram. Ref the message in the end of the
PDF where they complain about telegram on planes.

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mikeevans
Simply unbelievable how much garbage is on that web page without an ad blocker
(I put a box around the actual content that appears without having to scroll):
[http://i.imgur.com/0S2FIAW.png](http://i.imgur.com/0S2FIAW.png)

~~~
umeshunni
Here's a direct link to the texts:

[http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3932688-TEXTS-From-
AL...](http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3932688-TEXTS-From-AL-1169.html)

