820 karma · joined December 27, 2020
There are definitely people in the industry who are thinking about this and working on it, but AFAIK none of them work at Tesla.
Of course, because as the customer nothing bad happens to you if it’s not. Worst case scenario, the merchant doesn’t accept your payment and you either have to pay with cash or not buy anything.
The worst case scenario for the merchant is substantially worse. If the payment doesn’t go through, they lose money. This could happen days or weeks later if the customer decides to chargeback the merchant. There are countless stories of payment processors siding with customers, placing holds on a business’s funds for extended periods of time while conducting investigations, etc.
I would actually take the opposite stance. Unless a ledger is public and independently verifiable, there is no reason to trust it at all. Nearly every instance of financial fraud has relied on people trusting a private ledger.
Of course blockchains can be used for crime, almost anything can. In fact, if you want the preferred currency of criminals the world over, look no further than the US Dollar.
Most organizations, governments, businesses, etc. start with plenty of trust to go around. There's no reason to inherently distrust them, so their governance, currencies, securities, etc. work just fine. Distrust breeds over time, which is why establishing governance, currencies, securities, etc. in a way that can be cryptographically verified by anyone is a useful property to have to ensure the system remains generally trustworthy long into the future.
For example, there are many reasons to distrust stock brokers, the Depository Trust Company, the spineless SEC, and other entities who run our securities exchange. If securities were traded on a blockchain instead of an opaque database that can't be audited except by a corrupt few, everyone could strongly trust in the freedom and fairness of the securities exchange markets.
If I could own all my stocks on the blockchain, I would do it in heartbeat.
To be explicit, the reason blockchains exist is to have a globally consistent database that doesn’t require trusting the operator.
For example, I am way more likely to take Cal Train into SF if I can use a point-to-point service like Uber/Lyft/Waymo to get me the rest of the way there. Without that missing link, I'm much more likely to just give up and drive instead.
So the vast majority of the US has either significantly worse weather than SF, or a significantly harder ODD than SF?
Could you elaborate on that?
Surely Alphabet has noticed that their competitors are nipping at Waymo's heels. If they don't pick up the pace, all sorts of business books will be written about how Waymo squandered a decade-long lead in the industry.
Most products, including this one, don't need to do everything to be both useful and profitable.
What you just described is the same thing, it's simply a matter of perspective. If you wear a mask, it helps me by reducing the chances that you spread it to me if you have it but aren't experiencing symptoms yet. It works the same way in reverse. I don't wear a mask to protect myself, I wear it to protect others in the case that I'm shedding virus and don't know it yet.
A great solution without good communication is just as worthless as an aspirational pitch deck with no solution. Both result in a problem not getting solved.
Why? Things like Wine and Proton exist and Windows is proprietary.
If you're competent enough to get Comma running, you're probably technical enough (and invested enough!) to read the instructions and understand the operational limits of the system.
Most people I've talked to cannot accurately articulate the boundary of its operational capability, and there is a growing number of injured and dead "FSD" drivers that seem to have very muddied expecations of what "full self-driving" means.
You hinted at this by mentioning political capital, but in my experience as engineers gain experience at the company their impact largely grows in ways that aren't obviously visible. It's not like they are churning out work or managing teams that have ever increasing product impact, it's that their job responsibilities expand to include things like:
- Convincing potential hires they should join the company.
- Speaking frankly to leaders when newer employees don't feel comfortable doing it.
- Seeing large cross-cutting issues that require time and experience at the company to identify.
- Mentoring newer employees so they get up to speed and become productive quickly.
- Arbiters of information and documentation that tends to never get written down. "Person X can help you learn about Y, Team Z is responsible for that, etc."
They cutely dodged NHTSA's regulatory ire by shipping a "dash cam" that happens to run software you can install which makes it semi-autonomous... even though said software is made by the same company that ships the "dash cam". NHTSA isn't stupid, so I'm curious what it will take for this loophole to eventually be properly closed.
Sadly, safety is a lot like security. When it's done well, it's invisible, but when it's done poorly...
There's another axis here, which is how our desire for a product overlaps with DFM. It could be the case that offshoring to cheap labor actually increased the manufacturing costs 2x, but enabled a product that would sell 10x better than its DFM counterpart.
(I have no data to say that is the case, only the intution that these things are complicated systems which rarely come down to single-issue decisions.)
The problem with Tesla's approach has always been that Elon wanted to sell it before he actually knew anything about how to solve it. It's lead to series of compounding errors in Tesla's approach to AVs.
The vehicle's sensor suite is woefully inadequate and its compute (yes, even with the fancy Tesla chip) is woefully underpowered... all because Elon never really pushed to figure out where the boundary of the problem was. They started with lane-keeping on highways where everything is easy and pre-sold a "full self-driving" software update with absolutely no roadmap to get there.
To overcome the poor sensor suite and anemic compute, they've boxed themselves into having to invent AGI to solve the problem. Everyone else in the space has happily chosen to spend more on sensors and compute to make the problem computationally tractable, because those things will easily get cheaper over time.
I'm fairly convinced that if Tesla wants to ship true FSD within the next decade, the necessary sensor and compute retrofit would nearly bankrupt the company. The only way out is likely to slowly move the goal posts within the legalese to make FSD just a fancy Level 2 driver assist and claim that's always what it was meant to be.
Average folks beta testing Tesla's software for them are woefully under-prepared to safely mitigate the risks these vehicles pose. In several cases they've meaninglessly died so that Tesla could learn a lesson everyone else saw coming months in advance.
What we really need aren't tools that help us write code faster, but tools that help us understand the design of our systems and the interaction complexity of that design.
It's certainly a pain, but cross-platform development has always been a thing so it's not a unique pain to Apple platforms.
This makes some important assumptions, namely that Tesla built a lidar and radar perception pipelines and sensor fusion of equivalent quality to their competitors, and then decided they were unnecessary.
Given that their competitors have shown substantially better perception than Tesla, and that Tesla has a significant economic incentive to deliver autonomous driving on a sensor suite that already shipped years ago, I find that difficult to believe. Did Tesla build good enough perception to dismiss lidar and radar purely on their merits. Unlikely I think. Did an intern build a student-quality lidar pipeline that "proved" Elon's camera-first approach is the right one? More likely.
In effect, they solved the disagreement problem by sticking their head in the sand and pretending their sensors are never wrong.
And despite humans having legs and birds having articulated wings, ground vehicles use wheels and airplanes use fixed wings with propellers or jets. Why?
Just because biology solves a problem a certain way doesn't make that same approach optimal for machines. Typically with machines you need to work around other systemic deficiencies.
Humans may have only two cameras, but those cameras are connected to a vision, spatial understanding, and reasoning system that is light years beyond what current day AI is capable of. But the good news is that we can make up for AI deficiencies by giving vehicles super-human sensing ability which makes those problems easier.
Tesla's approach seems to be one in which they think the sensors are the expensive/hard part and solving general AI is the cheap/easy part. I think plenty of people would not agree.
If Tesla was developing their system with trained safety drivers or on closed courses, I think they would have higher moral ground to gamble here. But placing the untrained public behind the wheel of alpha quality software is unethical IMHO. There ways to develop autonomous software that are significantly less risky, and the only reason Tesla is doing it this way is for marketing/PR purposes as far as I can tell.