I really like your analogy but I am concerned that analogies take you only so far. Human presence in digital world is simply unprecedented and deploying existing ideas without adapting them might prove to be difficult and ineffective.
This is the kind of stuff that never makes into a journal article, but frequently gets cooked up by the university public relations/outreach staff. There is a huge incentive to make every piece of work as flashy as possible.
I'll also point out the 10M times faster thing. How was that estimated? If I have some really bad code that I'm using and I optimize it and it runs 10M times faster (not uncommon for scientific code) do I get to make this a big public headline? (the answer is: apparently yes).
Isn't it possible that by the time LIDAR is technically and economically ready for general deployment current Tesla models will have enough mileage and Tesla avoids retrofitting completely?
How could Tesla avoid retrofitting if they are unable to solve full self driving with cameras alone? Their new vehicles would have lidar, and old customers who were promised FSD in their models would seem to be legally entitled to it, given that Tesla is currently selling that feature as a product, even though it isn't functional.
I am quite used to C++ exceptions and strongly favor them against error codes mainly because of error handling decoupling and the fact that exception (unlike return code) cannot be passively ignored - if you want to swallow it you need to do it rather explicitly. If you forget to handle exception it crashes loud and that I prefer.
All things accounted I still find HN the best discussion venue. I force myself to avoid reading discussions I suspect might not be interesting and apart from well known controversial topics signal to noise ration is usually high.
Genuinely curious question - do you know about place where these controversial technologies would be discussed in a "better" way?
It's also used in other embedded systems. Based on public talks, Thales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_Group) seems to be using it a lot internally, and not everything they do is military.
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Although sometimes "I do not tend to make many of the mistakes that would be caught by the C++ type system" might be related to "how to use C++ type system so it would catch mistakes people tend to make".
