I think the population they were referring to were active individuals who work out a little, eat well, and don’t drink alcohol. I didn’t see any mention of geographic area.
At some point you have to wonder about the costs. Denying yourself everything that's nice and pleasant, and exercising constant, total active control over yourself sure might prolong your life, but what's the point?
The thing is, drinking to excess, smoking, eating ‘badly’ just aren’t pleasures at all if you don’t do them all the time. It’s hard to take the perspective, but there is more to life!
Right, but that's the other extreme. Then there's everything in the middle, and most of that, unfortunately, do not form a kind of "healthy lifestyle" that has a chance to confer longevity benefits. So when people say, "just have a good diet and exercise regularly and sleep long enough and such" - it's a bit of a lie, because to do enough of these things to matter, you might be required to sacrifice the very things you value in life the most.
And I mean here both sacrifice the things you hold dear directly, or indirectly - which for us here is predominantly our careers and places of living.
Exaggerating a little bit to underscore the point: I could likely add years to my QALY lifespan if I moved to countryside, picked up more manual labor that required me to move my whole body, and went hiking in between going to the gym -- but, the things I value are found in cities, the work I like is white-collar, I hate hiking, and I also have people I love to support and lifespan-friendly labor generally doesn't pay enough.
Ultimately as much as we love individual responsibility, the truth is only the lucky few have the ability to freely choose their lifestyle. For the rest of us we have to conform to the unhealthy lifestyle that society demands of us.
To live a life that's even remotely healthy we have to dedicate a significant amount of the precious spare time we have just to undo some of that damage.
I do not believe we are predisposed to adopt sedentary lifestyles. As kids most of us are very active, but we are taught to be sedentary. Both academically and professionally we are most rewarded for sedentary activities: doing extra coursework, building your resume. Is it any surprise we develop a sedentary lifestyle when such a lifestyle is most rewarded?
I think rural life is too romanticized though. It will avoid the diseases endemic to sedentary life, but there will be different health issues instead. Preindustrial agriculture and generally jobs with lots of physical labor are not easy on the body. Coronary heart disease and maybe diabetes and dementia will be replaced by work-related injuries and arthritis. There is a reason many countries allow such people to retire earlier.
I don't get the contradiction? A healthy body will make it possible to enjoy all these things in moderation, be the company of your loved ones, and generally enjoy life for far longer. Making life just about the things that damage the body the most will have quite predictable consequences, no surprise there.
I still don't get it - do people think live is about smoking, drinking, taking drugs, burning in the sun, eating unhealthy, and sitting in a chair the whole day?
No, but it's also not the opposite - spending most time doing physical labor, hitting a gym, doing sports, running or hiking, while eating only the healthy, natural food - i.e. most bland and worst tasting food available, sleeping 8+ hours a day, and staying away from most technology.
(Oh, and walking covered in sunscreen all the time - except not, because that's technology and chemicals; though surely there's some perfectly natural, organic, non-GMO ointment known from ancient times that works even better...)
That's how the other extreme looks like - but unlike the "bad habits" extreme, this one is actually what's needed to make a noticeable improvement your QALY lifespan. It's also a kind of life I wouldn't personally find rewarding - hence the question, what's the point of living longer if you have to live like this[0]?
Between this and the fact that approximately no one can afford living like that today, I say the whole idea of living longer by "just" living healthier is a lie.
--
[0] - This lifestyle is basically the Edo people[1] from the infamous Star Trek: TNG episode "Justice"[2]. Chilling out in a paradise, keeping fit bodies, and basically running around all day in between of making art and having sex with others, sure sounds like an alluring lifestyle to us (and to the protagonists on the show). Still, this episode lets the viewer ask themselves - would they rather be with the Edo, or on the Enterprise? I'd take the latter, thank you - pretty sure I'd go bored shitless after a year in that place. And while United Federation of Planets isn't an available option, even the regular life in the real world seems much more interesting and rewarding to me, if you look past the immediate appeal[3].
[3] - See also: heaven in Christianity, which if you think more about it, is basically a place of infinite boredom - but it does look alluring to sustenance farmers of the middle ages, as it offered reprieve from the endless toil and oppressive lords.
Spending most of the day together with people whose company I value, sounds wonderful to me! There are plenty of sports out there and most people should be able to find something that they would both enjoy pursuing and strive to carve out time for it.
You can very well argue that a typical 40h work week leaves too little time to do enough of the good things. But most people would still most likely keep kicking back and using their time inefficiently even if we had to work much less than now.
Remaining too much time sitting in static positions is bad, sure. But people doing physical work are also exposed to massive health risks as usually the load is repetitive and uneven. Both populations need corrective action, but for the physical worker it is more tricky to add a workout routine because their bodies are already overtaxed.
Healthy food being bland and bad tasting is simply a sign of not being able to cook well. Learn stir frying and add some herbs, spices, and sauces. (Yes, sauces often contain sugar, but IMHO it's well worth giving up candy for better tasting real food!)
I hope you are aware that many societies displayed in Star Trek (and similar SF) are for storytelling purposes almost necessarily either oversimplified, have weird traits, or are caricatures reflecting something out-of-universe? For most of them we know very little about how daily life is actually like for a civilian. Of course it doesn't seem compelling to be part of any of these societies. And it is unconvincing to argue that a healthy lifestyle is necessarily one where we won't be able to have fun.
Anyway the point of that episode was to highlight the extreme cost of maintaining such a society, not the lifestyle itself. And of course it would be quite appealing to explore the universe in the comfort of a five star hotel, which living and working on the Enterprise-D surely must feel like.
Talked to police guy once for something unrelated. The moment I mentioned I don't have a telephone number all alarm bells went off in this man and you could tell the police guy was suddenly suspicions.
I have vague but genuine concerns about that. I legitimately don't have any social media accounts. Does HN count? Well, none that can be casually associated to the name on my passport.
Social media is where one shares ones social life (it's in the name!). Technical discussion forums are something entirely different.
Naturally, there is sometimes crossover (I'm thinking of a motorbike forum I frequent), but to suggest the likes of HN is social media is demonstrably false.
Thats some semantic pedantic gymnastics. Even if you could persuade me to agree with you (and I very much do not) it does not matter. The only definition that matters here is the governments, and they LOVE overreach.
This is really not a convincing argument. Plenty of people put social information in their profile on this forum; there is clearly some social aspect to commenting and I’d argue the social aspect is the reason to comment and read comments. There are comments that are automatically more interesting to read because of the name in front of it.
> demonstrably false
Surely not “demonstrably” false. How would you demonstrate it? You may believe that it’s not social media but there’s no reason for you to think I should not believe it is social media.
Under your definition Reddit and Twitter/X aren't social media either, since you're mostly interacting with strangers. I believe your definition doesn't reflect how the term is used.
Now that we are there, deleting social media presence for privacy concerns, you will need to keep a "Stub" account to access the parts of life that require social media accounts: marketplace, local groups, immigration.
I killed my accounts with fire some time back and have yet to come across a single instance where I've felt that I've needed some kind of "stub" account. YMMV, however.
Not at all, many friends have at least tried to cancel FB account, even when those assholes are making it a very lengthy and painful process. We talk about doctors and surgeons here in their 30s and 40s, wife is a doctor who waits for second year to get her FB account deleted so these are our social circles.
Its sort of a mark of upper class (or just having a class) in more developed societies these days.
Sidenote - all folks here working for meta - shame on you. I get the greed part, but then you define what sort of human being you are and what your legacy is.
> This is only true if they introduce them. i.e. FB doesn't have a paid service, but obviously Youtube does.
FB does - “Meta Verified” for $16/month (presumably different depending on locale), but the benefits aren’t very good. (A verified badge, Increased account protection, Enhanced support, Upgraded profile features, Bonus stars and stickers)
“Can’t” is relative. I suspect there are a lot of people who pay for at least one streaming service that isn’t YouTube, but spend more hours watching YouTube in a month than they do watching that service.
And of course there’s also the age-old comparison that if someone goes to Starbucks more than twice in a month, they probably spend more there than you would on YouTube Premium, and does that provide the person with as much value as YouTube does?
In my opinion, it’s rarely about “can’t” when we’re talking about 12 bucks a month or whatever. It’s about the psychology: when a free tier exists, people reframe it in their heads that paying for that thing is an extravagance. Relatedly, removing the free tier altogether also has dangerous effects, as people immediately jump to “I can’t believe you’re taking away the free thing I used to have” outrage, while nobody complains about not having free access to say, HBO.
I think out of the "serious magicians" there's also the general "fraud" style. Who were in fact truly angry.
Make a space shuttle disappear[0], or hide an elephant. The TV show revealed all those to be fake and were in fact - paid audiences. My little brain trusted that they weren't paid and wanted to know so bad how the space shuttle disappeared.
Overall the TV and the internet helped push magic to exactly where it is today. Amazing, talented folks who even when you know how it's done, it's so good - it's magic.
I hadn't heard of that one, but reminds me of David Copperfield 1983 disappearing the Statue of Liberty, which I'm pretty sure was a "real" audience? But is also pretty boring.
The audience was real for the Statue of Liberty. The “magic” was developing ball bearings smooth enough to allow the audience’s seating to be turned without them noticing, in order to give them the same view as the television audience.
it was still pretty boring TV, honestly. Being in the audience in person was probably more thrilling. As a child, it seemed like a stupid trick to me even without knowing how he did it -- that's it? I guessed some kind of mirrors or something. Maybe I wasn't smart enough as a 9-year-old to realize how hard it would be to fool the in-person audience? It didn't seem hard to me.
I watched it when it originally aired and agree it was surprisingly unimpactful on TV. Interesting backstory: I know someone who worked on the creative team for that TV special and while developing new illusion concepts, they brainstormed the idea of making the moon disappear from the night sky (as verified by a live audience augmented with astronomers with telescopes and a laser). However, they realized the concept of that effect was "too big" to play well to television audiences.
It's an interesting thought that a magic trick concept can be 'too amazing'. I think the Statue of Liberty was still 'too big' of a concept, at least for a television performance. Copperfield's illusion titled "Flying" is also really interesting in this regard. As both a magician and magical inventor, I think it's a terrific effect and Copperfield presented it beautifully. It's also one of the more difficult effects I've ever seen him do, both technically and physically. It's visually stunning, yet it just doesn't seem to have as strong of an impact on audiences as it should.
Levitating a person has long been one of the most challenging and popular stage illusions. Over the last 150 years it's been done dozens of different ways - with my personal favorite being the Asrah levitation invented by Servais Le Roy and first performed in 1902. Arguably, the Flying illusion, which was invented by legendary illusion creator Johnny Gaughan for Copperfield, is the ultimate 'perfect' levitation. It achieves levitation in its most ideal, unconstrained form yet somehow fails to 'connect' strongly with audiences. Understanding why it doesn't is one of those fascinating puzzles magical inventors debate over beer. Sometimes figuring out if you should do an effect is even harder than figuring out how to do it.
Disclaimer: I'm not super into magic, and I don't know what David Copperfield's "flying" looks like.
I think probably it's just too similar looking to easier tricks. A magician/enthusiast can appreciate the craft of the trick and the difficulty in executing it, a naive audience member is probably just thinking "Well it's wires somehow, I just don't know how," which is less exciting than "Wait I genuinely have no idea what on earth is going on here I could have sworn that ball was somewhere else."
We see singers and acrobats and circus clowns "flying", and while I'm sure it's vastly less impressive to anyone that knows what's going on, from four-hundred feet away it just doesn't actually look all that different.
My other (very speculative) suspicion is that I think object permanence is a pretty old, primitive part of our brains. They've done studies showing toddlers, and even a lot of animals, get confused when you clearly demonstrate violations of object permanence (e.g. put a ball in a tube and have it come out the other end, then put in another identical ball and it doesn't come out). I suspect tricks that make an object disappear or transport or duplicate or some other seeming nonsense have an easier time having a big impact because they're legible enough to impress a dog, and an audience full of cocktails isn't that different from a dog, when you get down to it.
Edit: and you said levitating has long been a very popular illusion, so maybe this wasn't the case in the past; I would suggest maybe modern audiences are just more familiar with wires/stage "flight" from other performers, or even, like, The Matrix. But again, I'm speaking from no knowledge, just thinking.
> probably just thinking "Well it's wires somehow, I just don't know how,"
Yes, I agree this is likely a big component. It's interesting to ponder why "less pure" versions of levitation get bigger reactions. You can see Flying here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=112EIHu5gFc. What I like about the Flying illusion is that it is basically just a guy dangling on a wire. The artistry is in how Copperfield packages the presentation from the story-telling upfront to elevate the significance to the 'proof points' to eliminate audience suspicion like passing hoops over him and flying into a human sized glass fish tank with a lid (which each involve a lot of cleverness). It must've taken an enormous amount of practice to develop the body control that transforms it from "a guy dangling on a wire" to someone flying gracefully.
> object permanence is a pretty old, primitive part of our brains
Indeed. This is why close-up coin magic has always been my focus.
I hadn't heard that. It also strikes me as a little odd since both of those effects can be done for real so there's no good reason to cheat in that way. Houdini popularized the elephant vanish as part of his stage show over a hundred years ago and Copperfield vanished a Lear jet from an airport tarmac in one of his early TV specials. The jet was completely surrounded by blindfolded audience members who were holding hands. I know how both were done and neither relied on a stooge audience.
Streaming video and social media have been mostly terrific for the art of magic as there's a tremendous amount of excellent performance material now widely available. Even more importantly, anyone interested in learning magic can access very high-quality instruction videos. There's also interactive instruction with top notch magicians available one-on-one and in groups via Zoom. Growing up I got to see magic once or twice a year on TV and when I wanted to learn how to do it the local library had exactly three magic books. Fortunately, I happened to live in the Los Angeles area, auditioned for the Magic Castle and got accepted as as a junior member (a kind of apprentice program), where I was mentored by some of the greatest magicians of the 20th century and had access to the world's largest magic library. I was very, very lucky because 99.99% of teens interested in magic had nothing like that. Today, there's so much great magic readily available the only problem is curating what to see and learn.
The downside of streaming video magic is there's an entire generation of magicians who've only performed alone in their own house via recorded video clips. This has led to some oddly perverse outcomes. Not having a live, interactive and unpredictable audience eliminates a huge part of the challenge of magic. Some of the sleight of hand effects I've seen from Youtube-only performers only really look great from the exact angle of that one camera shot. Also, nailing some high-difficulty sleights every time can take years of practice but when you can make dozens of attempts and only post 'the good one', it's a different thing than repeatedly doing it five shows a night. Magic is really about solving for constraints, so having infinite 'backstage' time to prepare one effect as well as being able to 'cleanup' afterward hidden from the audience is profoundly different than creating a non-stop sequence of different effects while surrounded by a live audience looking wherever they want, whenever they want.
As a magical inventor, the thought of creating a new magic effect solely for the context of one-stationary-camera, single-effect-per-clip with infinite attempts is like shooting fish in a barrel. It removes so many constraints it's almost not even interesting from my perspective. It's like those amazing demo scene graphical demos on a 1987 Amiga 500. They're amazing because they create those effects within the constraints of the Amiga 500. Creating the same visual effects on a Geforce 5090 is hardly the same challenge. My Mom wouldn't understand why and, in much the same way, a non-magician may not understand how some Youtube magic isn't the same challenge as creating the same effect in an unpredictable, uncontrolled live context. And I'm not even talking about video editing tricks or special effects. Performing a single trick exactly one time (out of dozens of attempts) for a 'one-eyed' single-person audience whose head is locked down on a stationary tripod at one angle and who is blindfolded immediately before and afterward is, for many types of magic effects, as big a difference as that Geforce 5090 is to an Amiga. Both the Geforce and Amiga demos can look equally impressive but the skill, artistry and challenge are vastly different. I also suspect creating the demo on an Amiga vs 5090 was a lot more fun because it's a much more interesting challenge.
Yeah, I think there is the category of illusionists where it's just disappointing and sad if you learn the truth (oh camera angle and stage moved and thus the statue isn't to be seen anymore) and the category of masters of sleight of hand etc. where you really appreciate the masterfulness and even when you know how the effect was done are more stunned by the precision in the work.
> even when you know how the effect was done are more stunned by the precision in the work.
This is indeed true. Those who look at magic as merely a puzzle to be solved are really missing out on the beauty and wonder of it. After a lifetime of studying magic, I know how almost every effect I see is done. Sadly, knowing how they are all done is the worst part of studying magic deeply. The best part is being able to appreciate really great magic on deeper levels.
Growing up near the Magic Castle and traveling to magic conferences over several decades I've had the privilege of seeing some of the greatest magicians in the world perform live. At the highest levels, great close-up sleight of hand transcends finger flinging dexterity and becomes all about timing, tone, pace, body language and other subtle cues which combined control the focus of the audience in stunning ways. One of the best I ever saw live was the legendary Albert Goshman, who died in 1991. By the time I met him, Al was in his late 60s and his hands were so arthritic he could barely grip his cane. Yet, somehow, it didn't matter. I watched Goshman perform at the Magic Castle dozens of times. I knew his entire act by heart, beat by beat - and it fooled me silly every time.
Al's signature routine was the Salt Shaker trick. A coin would magically appear underneath a salt shaker sitting on the table. That was the entire trick. But it kept happening. Over and over. Nothing else was on the table, no cover, nothing. And you never saw him put the coin there. The entire audience would just be burning that damn salt shaker with unblinking stares. There was no trick to it. It was just a normal salt shaker. The table was a normal green felt-covered poker table sitting under a bright spotlight with the audience at the table right alongside Al. The shaker, coin and table could all be borrowed. It didn't matter where you were or how close. You could even stand behind him.
Al's gnarled, shaking hands clearly weren't doing any sophisticated slight of hand. The only magic on display was Goshman's Jedi-like ability to control the attention of the entire audience, which he honed over decades of performing this one routine. I heard from older magicians that there was a time decades earlier when Goshman relied more on sleight of hand but he got so good at mind control, the trick still worked even when Al's hands no longer did. Toward the end of the trick he'd point out that maybe all that salt was keeping you from seeing when the coin arrived under the shaker, so he would replace the salt shaker with a clear water glass placed upside down in the middle of the empty table. Then he'd warn you he was going to put the coin under the glass. And, somehow, he managed to still do it when you weren't looking. Which was freaky because everyone in the audience would realize the coin had appeared under the glass at different moments. Then he'd proceed to do it again. And again. For the finale, a giant 3-inch coin bigger than the glass appeared under the glass. The coin was so big, the glass was actually sitting on the coin! The stunned silence usually lasted a good 15 seconds before the standing ovation.
Unfortunately, the effect of the unique misdirection ability Goshman developed over decades is largely muted in videos of him performing, So, sadly, the sheer mind-fucking visceral impact of that trick died with Goshman. A lot of good sleight of hand specialists could do every move in Goshman's act, probably better than Goshman could, but the clear glass - others could do the trick - but it only fooled people when Al himself did it. I've seen a lot of world-class close-up magic over the years, but that... that was special.
To me anything less than true level 4 should remain with the driver.
I also believe that marketing it as FSD should be liable and scrutinized as a level 4 system. Because when you hear FSD, the public naturally thinks the abilities marked in level 4 arguably even 5.
Until the car requests intervention and the timer runs out, levels 3 and 4 are supposed to have the same behavior. If that process has not happened, why should the driver's level of responsibility be any different?
(Though a consequence is that levels 3 and 4 are very close together in difficulty. We might not see many level 3 cars.)
Volvo was visionary and dismissed Level 3 in about 2014 for being too dangerous. Basically the car drives until it doesn't and you may suddenly die because the time to get the situation and react is too short. Level 3 way purely for managers to claim it would be a linear progression whereas it is petty much THE gorge of automated driving. If you look at the SAE table it's just a little blue wart in a green column, but it's a lethal one.
> because the time to get the situation and react is too short
The time is up to the manufacturer, isn't it?
Mercedes uses 10 seconds right now and that seems pretty good to me. At that point I know it can't be too dire or the car would have already emergency stopped.
The time depends on how quickly an event unfolds in traffic. You can't guarantee 10s notice for an event that is imminent in 2s and the system might not be able to handle or can't detect.
The car could become temporarily "blind" for some reason with just 4-5s to brake before a collision. It's enough for a human driver even considering reaction time. But it's impossible to guarantee a minimum time without the ability to predict every issue that will happen on the road.
If there isn't a guaranteed minimum time, then it's not level 3, it's advanced level 2. Level 3 needs to be able to handle very rapid events by itself.
If it becomes "blind" because of an unexpected total system failure, that's an exception to the guarantee just like your transmission suddenly exploding is an exception. It had better be extremely rare. If it happens regularly then it needs a recall.
When dealing with unpredictable real life events there are no guarantees, unless we're considering the many carveouts to that definition from a legal perspective. A blind car (fluke weather, blown fuse, SW glitch, trolley problem) can no longer guarantee anything. Giving the driver 10s, or assuming the worst and braking hard could equally cause a crash.
> your transmission suddenly exploding is an exception
As long as the brakes or steering work a driver could still avoid a crash. The driver having a stroke is closer to a blind car.
> When dealing with unpredictable real life events there are no guarantees
The guarantee here is that the human isn't obligated to intervene for a moment.
If you call that guarantee impossible, then what about level 4 cars? They guarantee that the human isn't obligated to intervene ever. Are level 4 cars impossible?
Is this a wording issue? What would you say level 4 cars promise/provide? Level 3 cars need to promise/provide the same thing for a limited time. And that time has to be long enough to do a proper transfer of attention.
> The guarantee here is that the human isn't obligated to intervene for a moment.
Ah, understood. So the guarantee is that the driver is not legally responsible for anything that happens in those 10s. I always took that as a guarantee of safety rather than from legal consequences.
It's more about safety than legality. But with the understanding that nothing is perfect.
The guarantee is that you will be very safe and you can go ahead and look away from the road and pay attention to other things. But at most this is as good as a level 4 or 5 car, not an impossibly perfect car.
Yes but there is a minimum time (if a bit under-specified)
> "At Level 3, an ADS is capable of continuing to perform the DDT (Dynamic Driving Task) for at least several seconds after providing the fallback-ready user with a request to intervene."
I feel like that lack of standardization is part of the problem. Some manufacturers may pick different times to avoid nuisance braking, but that translates to higher risk to the driver. I’d like to see some core parameters like this standardized (whether by an industry body or regulator).
I've had several different cars from a few different manufacturers with different levels of ADAS systems and have used them on many long road trips and short trips. I haven't used any Tesla ADAS system for very long though.
The highest level of ADAS system I use regularly has facial attentiveness tracking. If you spend too much time drinking coffee or even looking out the sides of the car it will alert you and eventually turn off. So you're not spending a ton of time drinking coffee or reading emails.
It's really nice having the car just want to stay in the center of the lane and keep the following distance all on its own. It's less fatiguing on your hands and arms having the car feel like it's in a groove following all the curves for you instead of resisting your input all the time for hours and hours. It's incredibly nice not having to switch between the brake and the gas over and over in stop and go traffic. Instead, the only thing I need to focus on are the drivers around me and be ready to brake.
I've driven between Houston, Dallas, and Austin dozens of times with ADAS systems and another dozen or so times with only basic cruise control. It's way nicer when the only time I have to touch the gas and brake are getting on and off the highways. I'm considerably more relaxed and less exhausted getting to my destination.
Let's assume all these options are either the same price or an immaterial difference to the price of your next car. If you had an option for a car with basic cruise control or no cruise control, which one would you take? If the option was basic cruise or adaptive cruise which kept pace with traffic and operated in stop and go conditions, which would you choose?
You're right cruise control or whatever you want to call it is definitely great on long journeys on the highway. Maybe car makers should concentrate on those systems?
They are, other than Tesla. GM's SuperCruise, Ford's BlueCruise, and Mercedes DrivePilot are the few actually hands-free driving systems made by the legacy automotive companies and they're all largely locked to only fully operate on mapped and approved highways.
I actually think its worse than driving yourself. Humans are OK at doing a repetitive task non-stop. They're terrible at sitting still doing nothing waiting to quickly spring into action. They fall asleep or their mind wanders. This is something a computer is good at yet we've got it reversed. The car drives along doing mundane things but then hands it over to groggy human right when things really get hairy.
And then there's the skill atrophy. How do you learn to perform in stressful situations? By building up confidence and experience with constant repetition in more mundane ones, which this robs you of.
And the part of my sentence that you cut off was all about the circumstances of intervention.
Level 2 requires the driver to choose whether to intervene at all times. This is an unreasonable task for humans.
Level 3 puts the car in charge of when intervention is needed, and even once it wants intervention it still has to maintain safe control for several seconds as part of the system spec.
Level 4 puts the car in charge of when intervention is wanted, but you can refuse to intervene and it has to be able to park itself.
So I will double down on my claim. Until the car requests intervention AND the timer runs out, level 3 and 4 are the same. They require the same abilities out of the car. And that section of time, between wanting intervention and getting intervention, is the hardest part of level 3 driving by far. If you can solve that, you're 90% of the way to level 4.
A level 3 car has to be able to handle emergencies several seconds long, and turning it into level 4 is mostly adding the ability to park on the shoulder after you get out of the initial emergency.
The gap between 4 and 5 is a bunch bigger. A level 4 car can refuse to drive based on weather, or location, or type of road, or presence of construction, or basically anything it finds mildly confusing. 5 can't.
I edited a bit for clarity, but also I'll append a thought experiment as an extra edit:
A level 3 car with an hours-long driver intervention timer is basically identical to a level 4 car.
If you have a 0 second intervention timer, you're barely better than a level 2 car.
How long does the timer have to be before developing your level 3 system is almost as difficult as a level 4 system?
I agree with your thought experiments and also agree that overall it's a valid, technically accurate interpretation. So, this may be where we agree to disagree.
I still stand by level 3 != level 4 in terms of real world liability.
Level 3 allows too much wiggle room and sloppiness to be able to legally shift liability away from the driver. At that point you're playing that "intervention period" length. Manufacturers claiming Level 3 will want to lower it as much as possible, regulators raise it. To me, Level 3 simply shouldn't exist.
Only at Level 4 is the expectation, without a doubt, the machine is in control. A person in the driver seat is optional because the steering wheel and pedals are as well. When people bought "Full Self Driving" they seriously believe "when can I go to sleep?" ability is where it belongs, which always put the expectation at Level 4.
Saying level 3 shouldn't exist makes sense. But I don't think the liability gets very blurry as long as the intervention period is properly documented.
It looked like the Mercedes system is 10 seconds which seems like plenty to me.
And while it would be nice to sleep I'll be pretty happy just looking away from the road.
"A lie", FSD as it stands right now is a lie. A few cars might be able to drive a few geofenced places, but no car anywhere can drive anywhere, even with perfect weather and visibility and I'd even wager no traffic or even no other cars at all. Our Subaru gives up steering if there's no olcar in front, on "suburban" and rural roads about 35% of the time. More on some roads, less on others. I cannot determine, while driving, the cause for half of the self driving disable occurrences. No fog line and a broken center for an intersection on a 1 lane road it'll shut off nearly every time. It's surprising when it doesn't.
I've clocked nearly a half million miles on the road (I'll be there sometime in the next 9 months), and the range of technical ability you need to drive in just the US, no, scratch that, any given state or even county varies so much and potentially so often that FSD is just a lie to sell cars. I'm willing to upload a full hour drive touring a few parishes around here in my quite heavy Lexus, front and rear cameras, just to prove my point. I'd do it in the subaru but the dashcam isn't very good and also it's lineage is rally so it exaggerates how poor the roads are. My YouTube has dashcam footage of drives that I'm willing to bet no automated system could handle, even if it claimed to be "level 5". Driving after a storm or hurricane is another issue. I know the hazards in general and specifically for the areas I'd need to travel during or after an emergency. I cannot fathom the amount of storage and processing that would take, to have that for every location with roads. On board, in the car? Maybe in 20 years.
> I cannot fathom the amount of storage and processing that would take, to have that for every location with roads. On board, in the car? Maybe in 20 years.
Doing some napkin math, with 4 million miles of road in the US, if you wanted to store 1KB of data per meter of road, hundreds of data points, you'd only need 7TB for the entire database.
And the processing to make it shouldn't be anything special, should it? Collection would be hard.
Currently that would probably cost ~$500 per car to implement based on retail pricing of 8TB SSDs. It would need to be updated constantly, too, with road closures, potholes, missing signage, construction. With an external GPS unit like a tomtom, they had radio receivers in the power cord that tuned to traffic frequencies, if available, and could route you around closures, construction, and the like, so you need a nationwide network to handle this. Cellphone won't cut it. Starlink might, but regardless, you need to add that radio and accoutrements to the BOM for each car.
and i'm not talking about the processing of the dataset that gets put onto the 8TB SSD in the car; i am talking about the processing of the data on the 8TB SSD on the car while at speed.
furthermore, i am fairly certain that it would take, on average, more than 1.6MB per mile to describe the road, road condition, hazards, etc. a shapefile of all roads in the US - that which gets one closer to knowing where the lanes are, how wide the shoulders are, etc is 616MB. and it's incomplete - i put in two roads near me with fairly unique names and neither are in the dataset. So your self driving car using these GIS datasets won't know those roads.
I had an idea to put an atomicpi in my car, with two cameras. it has a bosch 9-dof sensor on the board, coupled with the cameras you can map road surface perturbations, hazards, and the like, which i believe will be much more than 1KB per meter, especially as you need "base" conditions and updates and current conditions (reported by the cars in front of you, ideally).
the csv GIS dataset looks like this:
and i ran, for example `awk -F, '/PACIFIC COAST/ {sum += $4} END {print sum}' NTAD*.csv` and it spat out 79.04, which i think is a bit shorter than reality. Looks like the dataset i pulled is only "major roads" as well - but that doesn't explain 79.04 as the sum of lengths of all rows with "PACIFIC COAST" in them. It does show the total length of interstate 10 is 3986.55, which is roughly double what the actual length is (2460mi), so perhaps i'm just not understanding this dataset.
Anyhow 600+ MB for just that sort of information (plus shapes) for only a really quite small subset of roads in the US.
anyhow my thoughts are scattered, this input box is too small, and i'm not really arguing. Maybe it is possible, but it will raise the price thousands of dollars per auto, you need infrastructure (starlink will work) to update the cars, and so on. I'm prepared to admit i am wrong, but your comment didn't move the needle for me.
If you want such constant updates that's tricky to distribute and hard to collect, but let's put that aside for a bit. I want to focus on the amount of data and how the car would use it. With $500 of SSD being nice and cheap.
> i am talking about the processing of the data on the 8TB SSD on the car while at speed.
I'm not worried about that. The actual driving takes such powerful computers that even if there was a petabyte of total data, the amount the car would have to process as it moves would be a trickle in comparison to what it's already doing. Max 50KB per 10 milliseconds. And obviously the data would by sorted by location so there's very little extra processing required.
But you tell me, how many data points do you think you need per meter of road?
I really don't think you need millimeter-level surface perturbations all the way across. Mapping the precise edges of the road and lanes should only need dozens of data points, 4 bytes each. And then you can throw a few more dozen at points inside the lanes to flesh it out. You can throw a hundred data points at each pothole without breaking a sweat. Measuring the surface texture in various ways and how it responds to weather is only going to take a handful of bytes per square meter, in a way that repeats a lot and is easy to compress.
That's an extremely inefficient format. Unnecessary object ids, repeating metadata over and over, way too many decimal places, and all stored as text.
But even then, your database is so tiny compared to the size I suggested that I don't think we can extrapolate anything useful. Even if we 4x it or whatever to compensate for a lack of rural roads.
Suffice to say that the 600MB just lets you draw the roads on a plane, it's like comparing an ascii art drawing of the road (from .csv/shp) to a digital still of the road (the amount of information you'd actually need). you absolutely cannot rely on "a couple of sensor [types]". I mentioned i have nearly a half million miles on the road. All of that prior experience influences my driving when i am driving someplace new. in that 8TB disk, you have to find a way to produce that "experience", except instead of my 0.5mm miles, you are talking about the aggregate "experience" of 0.5mm miles per road per unit of time (day for some places like I-10 through Los Angeles, month for others, maybe a year for some "rural" roads.)
none of this has to do with visual or proprioception. It's knowing "every inch" of road. It's knowing how far i can leave the center of the lane if someone else crowds me or goes over the center divider, because the shoulder is soft through here because logging trucks have been exiting the forest onto the highway. It's knowing what part of I-605 floods - not the whole thing, some lanes, some places, and "flood" means 2+ inches of water on the road surface, hitting it at speed makes a tidal wave flying into other lanes. If someone hits that in front of you, you're blind for a couple of seconds minimum. If we want to have semi trucks be "FSD" it needs to know, for the traffic and other conditions, how fast to go and what gear to be in to climb each hill, and then the hazards that are over the hill - that a trucker would know. Where's the gravel bed on more mountainous passes? Or more simply, what time of day neighborhoods are more likely to have people approaching or going through / out of intersections, blind or otherwise. How many "bytes" is that information, times every neighborhood? If many cars brake at the same place, there's probably a reason, and that needs to be either in the dataset or updated somehow if conditions change. You ever used Waze and had a report of something on the road or a cop parked somewhere, and it's nowhere to be seen? And that's updated much more frequently than the radio-info on the GPS systems i referred to earlier. Some roads become impassable in the rain, some roads ice more readily.
If this was easy/simple/solved, waymo et al would be bragging about it, the tech in their cars. Waymo (or the other one) specifically, because they cover less than 0.1% of road surfaces in the US, in some of the most maintained and heavily traveled corridors in the world. So, if anyone from a robotaxi company happens by and knows roughly how much storage is needed for <0.1% of the road surfaces in the US, then we could actually start to have this dialog in a meaningful way. Also i am unsure how much coverage robotaxis actually have in their service area. A "grid system" of roads makes mapping and aggregate data "simple", for sure.
This reminded me a bit of the idea that somewhere in the US there's a database of every sms sent to or from US cellular phones. "it's just text; it'll compress well" - belies how much text there is, there.
for reference, the map in my lexus is ~8GB, for the US. And that's just "shapes" and POI and knowing how the addressing works on each road. It doesn't know what lane i'm in, it doesn't track curves in the road effectively (the icon leaves the road while i'm driving quite often), and overpasses and the like confuse all GPS systems i've ever used - like in Dallas, TX where it's 4 layers high and parallel roads stacked. furthermore, just the road data on google maps for the nearest metro area to my house is 20MB. i have a recollection it goes real quick into hundreds of MB if you need to download maps for the swaths of areas where there is no cellphone reception, like areas in western Nevada. given 20MB for my metro, that's 40GB of just road shapes and addresses for the US, which is much more than the 600MB incomplete GIS files i downloaded.
so we've moved from fencing 600MB "text" data; to the actual data needed by a GPS to give directions, 8000MB. Your claim is that a mere 1000x more data is enough to autonomously self-drive anywhere in the US, at any time of day or year, etc...
you know who actually has this data and would know how big it is? Tesla.
The part of the computer that knows how to drive is completely separate from the 7TB database of the exact shape and location of every lane and edge and defect.
> knowing how far i can leave the center of the lane if someone else crowds me or goes over the center divider
Experience, not in the database.
> knowing what part of I-605 floods
> Where's the gravel bed on more mountainous passes?
That goes in the database but it's less than one byte per meter.
> How many "bytes" is that information, times every neighborhood?
I don't know why you would want that data, you should be wary of blind traffic at all times, but that's easy math. There's less than a million neighborhoods and time based activity levels for each neighborhood would be about a hundred bytes. So: Less than 1 byte per meter and less than 100MB total.
> If this was easy/simple/solved, waymo et al would be bragging about it
This doesn't happen for two reasons. One they are collecting orders of magnitude more data than road info, two like I keep saying the collection is extremely difficult and I'm only defending the storage and use as being feasible.
> This reminded me a bit of the idea that somewhere in the US there's a database of every sms sent to or from US cellular phones. "it's just text; it'll compress well" - belies how much text there is, there.
Well we know how many meters of road there are. So it's basic multiplication.
I can tell you how many hard drives you need to store a trillion texts. It's five hard drives.
Google thinks the human race sends almost ten trillion text messages per year. So I guess you could store them all very easily? Why do you think it's not doable?
> Your claim is that a mere 1000x more data is enough to autonomously self-drive anywhere in the US, at any time of day or year, etc...
My claim is that 1000x is enough for utterly exhaustive road maps. Figuring out how to drive is another thing entirely.
ohhhh, we're arguing past eachother. I am unsure how to reconcile.
an SMS isn't just "140 characters/bytes" or whatever (i honestly don't care what your definition of "SMS" is). Of course you could fit 140 characters * 1e12 onto 5 hard drives. Where are you going to put the 1PB (for 1e12, but your own cite says it's 1e13, so 10PB) of metadata, minimum? the most barebones amount of metadata you need to actually have actionable "intelligence" is 1KB per message (technically i was able to finagle it to ~1016 bytes.) And that's for every message, even an SMS that is the single character "K".
you need the metadata to derive any information from the SMS. "Lunch?" "yeah" "where?" "the place with the wheel" "okay see you in 25, bring Joel" This is what you propose to save. (quick math shows you went off something like ~32TB of sms data per 1e12 messages)
in the same way that you propose that the shapes of a road and it's direction and distance "plus 1KB of metadata per meter" is enough to derive the ability to drive upon those roads.
It's pretty obvious that just using sensors is not going to get FSD. Maybe in the next 20 years we will develop sensor technology (and swarm networking and whatever else) that will allow us to dispense with the "7TB" of metadata. My argument is that: we need much more "metadata" than 1KB per meter to "know the road baseline, current conditions, hazards", much in the same way a text message is more than 140 bytes. Driving with "only sensors" and rough GPS has killed people. It does not matter if human drivers have more death per million miles or whatever, because i am strictly talking about FSD, what other people are calling level 5 (i'd even concede level 4; although i wouldn't be able to use a level 4 car where i live for roughly 1/4th the year - and other areas would have more than 1/4th the year.)
Obviously you can reduce this, but there's a minimum viable amount of metadata, that's my claim, and it's more than 1KB per meter. that snippet is ~1800bytes as is. the "current conditions" would not be part of the dataset on the "7TB" disk. that would need to be relayed or otherwise ingested by the car as it drives - the way my 2012 lexus tells me that i'm about to drive into a wild storm, but that's all the extra information i get out of its infotainment system. waze is a better example of the sort of realtime updates i expect a FSD to need; although i expect many times more points of information than waze has, maybe dozens, maybe hundreds more. and each "trick" you do to reduce the size of the metadata necessarily implies more CPU needed to parse and process it.
> the most barebones amount of metadata you need to actually have actionable "intelligence" is 1KB per message (technically i was able to finagle it to ~1016 bytes.) And that's for every message, even an SMS that is the single character "K".
How did you reach that number?
I figure the most important metadata is source and destination phone numbers and a timestamp, and I guess what cell tower each phone was on. A phone number needs 8 bytes, and timestamp and cell tower can be 4 bytes, so that's 28 bytes of important metadata.
> (quick math shows you went off something like ~32TB of sms data per 1e12 messages)
I was going for a full 140TB of data. 20-30TB hard drives are available.
I did consider metadata, but I figured you could probably put that in the savings from non-full-length messages.
> Where are you going to put the 1PB (for 1e12, but your own cite says it's 1e13, so 10PB) of metadata, minimum?
Well for just the US it would be closer to 1PB. But, uh, I'd store it in a single server rack? (ideally with backups somewhere) As of backblaze's last storage pod post, almost three years ago, it cost them $20k per petabyte. That's absolutely trivial on the scale of telecomms or governments or whatever.
> My argument is that: we need much more "metadata" than 1KB per meter to "know the road baseline, current conditions, hazards", much in the same way a text message is more than 140 bytes.
I mean, I agree with you about needing extra information.
But that's why the number I gave is 10000x larger than your CSV. My number is supposed to be big enough to include those things!
> note: the metadata for a meter of road could be:
I really appreciate the effort you put into this. I have two main things to say.
A) That's less than a kilobyte of information. Most of the bytes in the JSON are key names, and even without a schema for good compression, you can replace key names with 2-byte identifier numbers. And things like "critical" and "Active roadwork zone with lane closure" should also be 1-byte or 2-byte indexes into a table. And all the numbers in there could be stored as 4 byte values. Apply all that and it goes down below 300 bytes. If you had a special schema for this, it would be even lower by a significant amount.
B) Most of those values would not need to be repeated per meter. Add one byte to each hazard to say how long it lasts, 0-255 meters, instant 99% savings on storing hazard data.
> each "trick" you do to reduce the size of the metadata necessarily implies more CPU needed to parse and process it.
CPUs are measured in billions of cycles per second. They can handle some lookup tables and basic level compression easily. Hell, these keys are just going to feed into a lookup table anyway, using integers makes it faster. And not repeating unchanged sections makes it a lot faster.
and again - if you use clever tricks to reduce this, you increase the overhead to actually use the data.
get a celltower snooper on your phone and watch the data it shows - that's the metadata for your phone. SMS dragnet would need that for both phones, plus the message itself.
It's not an integer. But you can store it inside 64 bits. You can split it into country code and then number, or you can use 60 bits to store 18 digits and then use the top 4 bits to say how many leading 0s to keep/remove. Or other things. A 64 bit integer is enough bits to store variable length numbers up to 19 digits while remembering how many leading zeros they have.
If you want really simple and extremely fast to decode you can use BCD to store up to 16 digits and pad it with F nibbles.
> JSON
Most of this is unimportant. Routing path, really? And we don't need to store the location of a cell tower ten million times, we can have a central listing of cell towers.
I don't think we really need both phone number and IMEI but fine let's add it. Two IMEI means another 16 bytes. And two timestamps sure.
Phone number, IMEI, timestamp, cell tower ID, all times two. That's still well under 100 bytes if we put even the slightest effort into using a binary format.
> and again - if you use clever tricks to reduce this, you increase the overhead to actually use the data.
No no no. Most of the things I would do are faster than JSON.
Soap box - Analogies simply don't help. They invariably have some flaw and rarely aid in actual understanding as is the case with the anode/cathode reference. I know 100% of readers understand that countries want to attract talent, but <100% of people understand anode+cathode functions.
It gets worse when others attempt to build off the analogy and so it becomes flawed on top of flawed. At some point, semantic arguments begin, i.e. source of electrons, and now we're quite far from countries+talent.
I wholeheartedly agree. I have both a hard time to grasp when others are using analogies, especially when they use phrases that are wrong in the public consciousness, like "fish rots from the head" - no, fish rots from the softer places first, or from wherever, the head is not particular.
Pet peeve - soapbox is also used in an abstract way here, not better than the overuse of analogies. A whole century has since passed since people routinely stood on literal soapboxes.
Furthermore, and I was (am?) guilty of this myself, people often use analogies and other kinds of abstract speech to hide the fact that they have no idea what is going on, or they don't know how to express something. And then the responsibility to decode meaning is passed on to the listener.
Okay you have two complaints about analogies: They're leaky abstractions (people get tripped up on the mismatch), and people don't understand the analogy domain (and miss the analogy entirely).
The former is mostly a problem for a certain kind of concrete-thinking persons, and the former can be solved by picking a more universally understood analogy domain (like puppies). So analogies can be good, given the right audience and analogy domain.
Analogies are a great tool to illustrate problems, to make the issue more accessible. So I don't think the issue is with analogies, but analogies that are far more complex that the issue he wants to illustrate.
In the specific context you're replying, however, I agree that any analogy would not add any useful information.
You're making a huge assumption yourself - that the goal of communication is to appeal to the greatest number of readers. This is not always true and often deliberately not always true.
"Appeal to" and "being understood by" are two different things.
You can write a text that appeals to a small audience, but is understood by a big audience.
You can also write a text that would appeal to a big audience - but doesn't because no one understands it.
It's not hard to write a text that can be understood by a large audience. Using an analogy that only some people understand is counter productive as analogies are used exactly to allow the audience to illustrate the problem.
The core of my response was not about appealing vs understanding, but about the objective function being to max(number) with whatever operator (appeal or understand)
But you demonstrated that in a beautiful way with your misunderstanding! How wonderfully meta! QED
Some of the best pieces of art are when a smart person wants to communicate a subversive idea to another smart person without anyone pedestrian arcing up. It can lead to wonderful comedy.
There are populations that consistently outlive and the only other thing I would add is stress removal in the form of relatively simple life styles.
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