On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers

jeffw@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 199 points –
On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers
arstechnica.com
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So the article repeats, several times, “waymo relies on remote operators”. I don’t think the author knows what “self-driving” means.

"self-driving"

Someone else, forreal - driving

A couple years ago, we used to joke around the shop "Of course they used AI - An intern."

I'm generally the one defending Tesla in these threads but on Waymo's defence; the remote operators aren't actually controlling the car. Instead when faced with a challenging situation the car "calls home" for assistance basically asking a human to take a look at the situation and help it to decide what to do. This might be a car partially blocking the lane of traffic cones placed in a weird manner so the car justs asks for assurance that it's okay to proceed. In the most difficult situations the remote operator can suggest a route for the vehicle to take but the decision on what to do is ultimately on the vehicle itself.

The author is very well aware of this dilemma, in fact that topic is the center of his article, and he is making some good points about why real autonomous driving might still take a long time until achieved.

Besides that the cars are constantly getting around without a designated driver. For the technology and for the industry that is a huge breakthrough.

And he forgets to mention the precise mapping required too. He also left out the terrible experiences Waymo has had with revoked permits, cars disabled by traffic cones, and multiple traffic stopping glitches where intersections were blocked for hours.

Yeah but the waymo ceo doesn't shitpost on Twitter so people here don't get front page hyped up stories every single time things aren't perfect

I'm making a prediction right now that real self driving will eventually rely on people from impoverished countries remotely operating the cars of wealthier countries. Sort of like how AI training data is combed through.

Elon ripped out the LiDAR, I don’t have any faith at all in Tesla’s FSD.

Elon ripped out the LiDAR

No he didn't...He never even installed it in the first place.

I had to look this up, but you’re mostly right. They never really did use LiDAR. They did use other types of radar, which were removed or disabled. In any case, they (Elon) asserted that neither radar nor LiDAR was really necessary.

However, that was mostly a couple years ago. In the past month or two they actually have begun buying up tons of LiDAR.

Also, they were sued over FSD in court and their lawyers are now arguing that customers should’ve known that cars without LiDAR are not capable of reliable FSD.

But the self driving taxi fleet is coming anytime now /s

Humans can drive just fine without lidar aswell. Road infrastructure is designed for vision. The car not being able to see is not the issue. It's teaching the car to understand what it sees and how to deal with it. Lidar doesn't help you solve this issue.

Unlike human eyes Tesla's inconveniently do not come with a supercomputer installed that is able to interpret the optical data reliably. With the compute power we have available Radar based navigation is the only one that produces reliably safe results.

It depends on your definition of "super computer", it used to be any computer with performance over 1 gigaflop, which today would probably include most smart phones and the built in car computer in the Tesla.

But regardless of semantics, I think your point holds, humans are a special case and computers can't do that yet.

Bro he was talking about your brain And there is no supercomputer on earth able to even approach it, and regardless supercomputer is a rather relative term tbh

Bro he was talking about your brain

Yeah, I caught that... Obviously.

and regardless supercomputer is a rather relative term tbh

That was essentially my point. Keep up.

Except we don't have reliable radar navigation, what are you smoking? Are you just making things up you think should be true?

Yeah Waymo has been silently ticking away over here for years. On the east side they are all over the place. It will take longer to get to freeway speeds but I think Waymo's approach is far safer. But fuck Google too

Google En Passat

Jesus Fucking Christ what are you fucking stupid? Read the god damn pinned mod comment on every post on r/chessbegginers, read the god damn wiki, read the god damn info button that pops up on chess.c0m, here's a thought just google it your god damn self. What do you think you're the first person in fucking history to experience this "weird pawn move?" You must be fucking stupid because it was only invented back in 1561. But I'm sure you thought "oh wow I know chess.c0m is a company valued in the hundreds of millions but I'm sure me, 100 ELO shit tier chess beginner, has found a bug in their program." It boggles my god damn mind that you just blindly post your stupid fucking questions on reddit without trying to research them first. Because you must be the first person in fucking history to ever experience a problem, and logically reddit, the source of all fucking factual information, is the only god damn place you can look for an answer. So here's a fucking thought the next time you're about to make a god damn post stop and google e-n p-a-s-s-a-n-t.

Are you kidding ??? What the **** are you talking about man ? You are a biggest looser i ever seen in my life ! You was doing PIPI in your pampers when i was beating players much more stronger then you! You are not proffesional, because proffesionals knew how to lose and congratulate opponents, you are like a girl crying after i beat you! Be brave, be honest to yourself and stop this trush talkings!!! Everybody know that i am very good blitz player, i can win anyone in the world in single game! And "w"esley "s"o is nobody for me, just a player who are crying every single time when loosing, ( remember what you say about Firouzja ) !!! Stop playing with my name, i deserve to have a good name during whole my chess carrier, I am Officially inviting you to OTB blitz match with the Prize fund! Both of us will invest 5000$ and winner takes it all!

I suggest all other people who's intrested in this situation, just take a look at my results in 2016 and 2017 Blitz World championships, and that should be enough... No need to listen for every crying babe, Tigran Petrosyan is always play Fair ! And if someone will continue Officially talk about me like that, we will meet in Court! God bless with true! True will never die ! Liers will kicked off...

I used to be so excited for self driving cars, but my naive younger self assumed they'd actually make sure they're safe before putting them on public roads.

I was wrong.

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They both suck and Waymo's has a whole ass sensor thingie on the roof. So it's insane that Tesla's is even legal given that they rely entirely on cameras and fate.

Waymo is literally being investigated for self-driving incidents lol... They've also only been able to operate in a small area. I wouldn't really call that chess.

I’m starting to get the feeling that “X is playing chess while Y is playing checkers” is an indicator species for a terrible take.

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Am I remembering correctly that Tesla removed sensors for self driving?

Yuuup. Muskrat decided LiDAR was too expensive to include in every vehicle and scrapped it. Even disabled the sensors on the cars that have it.

My vacuum has LiDAR. That man is a cheap idiot.

The LiDAR you have on your vacuum isn't going to cut it as a safety relevant component onboard your car. Automotive-grade LiDAR are on another price range. Development for such sensors is quoted separately from the part price, and it costs millions of $.

The LiDAR you have on your vacuum isn't going to cut it as a safety relevant component onboard your car. Automotive-grade LiDAR are on another price range. Development for such sensors is quoted separately from the part price, and it costs millions of $.

Obviously, but my Ford Escape PHEV also has LiDAR and, despite being the highest trim level, cost FAR less than a Tesla. It doesn’t do FSD, obviously, but it still has LiDAR. And radar. And will do level 2 self driving enough that if I’m driving in traffic I’m more managing the car than driving it.

There is zero good excuse for not including LiDAR in Teslas.

There is a reason. It's just not a good one. It's profit.

I don't believe Tesla ever intended on having full self driving. That's just an idea Musk sold people to boost confidence in the company. The promise sold vehicles and boosted stock value, making Musk a shit load of money.

What difference would it make if they were fully devoted to FSD with the best technology they could get? It still wouldn't work perfectly and wouldn't be allowed alone everywhere probably, and they would have made less profit during that period. In what time frame would it actually pay back?

I can't seem to find information about the Ford Escape having a LiDAR, it's not on the spec. Sheet on Ford's website and in the news it's only about prototypes.

I am not saying Teslas should or shouldn't have LiDARs. I am just curious. I only know about Audi, Mercedes, Honda and Hyundai currently selling cars with LiDAR used for ADAS. They might be more Chinese OEMs selling cars with LiDARs, buy Ford, it surprises me.

I may be wrong then. There are a bunch of sensors above the windshield behind the rearview mirror, it could be that LiDAR isn’t one of them.

When your compensation is based on profit per car, you make strange decisions like removing winker stalks and quality control.

That was just an excuse, they just couldn't get the parts. Radar is back now.

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Chess is a very complex rules game, while Checkers is quite simple. Waymo has a complex approach to self driving:

  • Expensive suite of sensors
  • High resolution maps of operating areas
  • Remote operators standing by

While Teslas approach is simple:

  • Capture a bazillion miles of camera footage, feed into AI, profit?
  • Unpaid volunteers teach the AI safe driving
  • Car has only a basic map for routing, the rest is inferred in real time from cameras

Waymo’s successful approach scales linearly. They have to high-res map every city they want to operate in, and they can gradually bring down the cost of the sensors. They will require fewer remote operator interactions over time.

Teslas success is more difficult, but it scales exponentially. They already produce vehicles at scale and full control over all the equipment on board. The existing fleet would be able to participate as well. If they succeed, they may want to offer buy-backs for customers who didnt buy FSD - the cars would be worth more to Tesla than the owner.

In both checkers and chess, the player gains super powers for reaching the other side of the board. Time will tell who reaches the other side of the board first. They are playing different games on the same board. Okay that’s fair.

Tesla will hit walls with rain and snow. Cameras will fail before other sensors in those conditions.

Radar and Lidar also get a lot of noise from heavy rain or snow. Fog can be just as bad. Some conditions just aren’t safe to drive in, regardless of who’s driving. I don’t think either of them are trying to design a system for those conditions.

On a personal note, I have no interest in getting a ride in a self driving car. I do have an interest in an empty car that can drive itself. Drop myself off at the airport, valet parking downtown, easier to share one car per household, river shuttling, through hike shuttling - I would use it a lot. I understand the more profitable goal is taxi services, but I don’t want that. So in my narrow use case, I hope Tesla succeeds since that approach can be used on personal vehicles anywhere while Waymo is strictly city taxis, which I don’t use.

The USS they took out of Teslas were at least a second measurement system.

Wavelengths with decent water transmitability exist.

Sound and light don’t propagate well through changes in media. The reason rainbows exist is because light does not travel in a straight line through drops of water, across the full spectrum. Radar is used to sense how hard it’s raining so it obviously gets returns from rain (and through it). But it will depend on the processing they do from the sensors. But just so we’re clear, cameras also work in the rain and snow. I don’t think one is clearly better than others.

And still Mercedes is the car company with the highest autonomy level of any car manufacturer. And no one talks about that.

Mercedes Drive Pilot only works on a handful of hand-picked highways is California and Nevada. It must have a car in front of it to follow. It can't go over 40mph. It can't navigate thru interchanges. It can't be used in inclement weather. It doesn't work around flashing lights. It doesn't work on construction sites. It doesn't work in night time. It cannot change lanes and it doesn't work on roads without lane markings.

It's effectively a train except train can take you to more places. Also, it must have a driver who can take over when needed. That's level 3 self driving. Waymo is level 4.

Here's what happens when you put Mercedes Driver Assist (Not Drive Pilot) against Tesla's FSD. Tl;dw: It's completely useless.

Tesla ACC (Autopilot my ass) manages to ‘drive’ 130km/h, while requiring you jerk the wheel every few seconds. The 2015 VW Passat I used to drive supported 160km/h and I didn’t have to jerk the dam steering wheel. Granted it did not have lane assist (Autopilot in Teslaspeak). Still, claiming a Mercedes not doing at least 220km/h using assisted driving is just silly.

One more anecdote: couple of weeks ago I rented a current Audi A4, the ‘Autopilot’ took the car to 244km/h - I decided to not push it further even though it was legal. That was just an A4!

Teslas add dangerous because the car - very much like the company CEO - is claiming it can do things which it ultimately can’t. When it fails and the and you, the driver, can’t compensate you’re on the newspaper.

You don't need to "jerk" the wheel. You only need to touch it gently. This is because level 2 is "hands on" system. Allegedly though even this will be going away with version 12.4 and from there on it's only the cabin camera that's monitoring you. It's debateable wether this is a good thing or not. Makes it easier to abuse the system.

No one is making any claims about how fast Mercedes Drive Pilot should go. Your accusation is disingenuous. I'm simply stating that it can't go over 40mph. That's pretty slow for a vehicle that can drive autonomously only on highways.

You don’t need to “jerk” the wheel.

Yes, you do. One of the reasons I didn't end up buying a Tesla.

You only need to touch it gently.

That's true for any other manufacture but Tesla. Stop lying.

For people not familiar with the wheel-jerk required by Teslas:

This is because level 2 is “hands on” system.

No, it's because it's a Tesla. Other manufacturers, including Mercedes, have sensors in the steering wheel so "You only need to touch it gently.". Again on (all) others, not Teslas.

" only the cabin camera that’s monitoring you."

Some current cars do have (Lidar based?) driver monitoring as this is set to become law. The car checks whether you pay (enough) attention. Test drive a GWM Ora - it's fucking annoying. No worries though, this will never work properly in a Tesla.

No one is making any claims about how fast Mercedes Drive Pilot should go. (...) I’m simply stating that it can’t go over 40mph.

Please re-read this, does it still make sense to you?

I could return the accusation of being disingenuous but that falls short as claiming a Mercedes does 64 on ACC/assited driving is just fucking stupid. 64 is to slow to be on the Autobahn.

Okay well I was wrong about having to turn the wheel. I'm not lying - I just didn't know. I've watched hours and hours of content of people driving with FSD and I haven't ever seen them having to do that so I didn't know it was a thing.

Anyway, that's allegedly going away with V12.4

Then you should test drive some EVs yourself - it is very eye-opening. I also recommend watching YT channels that test different brands and aren’t caught in the fanboy trap.

Why do you need to be such a dick about it? Just because I'm interested in self-driving technology doesn't mean I'm a Tesla fanboy. That's ad-hominem. No other brand (that I know of) makes a car you can buy that's capable of doing what Tesla's FSD can do. That's why it's the brand I most pay attention to. If you think there's some other manufacturer I should look into more closely then by all means link me a video about it.

I already daily drive my dream car and the "smartest" feature it has is anti-lock brakes. While it would be nice to test drive a modern EV I however have no interest in buying one nor could I even afford it.

I’m aware that I was not my politest in this conversation but my last comment wasn’t meant to be dickish in any way. Sorry if it came across as such.

Also I did not say you are a Tesla fanboy but you are clearly misinformed by Tesla fanboys. The Tesla community is also well known for its sometimes toxic fanboys. That does not mean that all of them are like this though but it’s a thing.

Please take the following advice, not me being a dick or trying to be condescending:

When you watch better YT channels you’ll notice that no manufacturer offers FSD. Tesla sells “potential FSD” since more than a decade. See for yourself by going on tesla.com and opening the order form or check out one of the YouTube videos showing Elon promising FSD to be happening ‘soon’ year after year after year. At this point I don’t think we’ll ever see a FSD Tesla.

Also you’ll see Tesla isn’t the best by a long shot.

As for test drives: Just because you don’t intent to buy one doesn’t mean you can’t test drive one. I buy used cars on general principle but do the test drives on current models - a dealership that sells both used and new cars prefers you drive a designated test car. Just give it a try.

We're good. I tend to fall victim to the snide remarks from time to time myself as well.

To me "Full Self Driving" is just the name of the software. I've been perfectly aware from the day one that it's not actually capable of full self driving. That's a quite tired argument that I'm not interested in debating. I can however still aknowledge that Tesla has been intentionally misleading in their marketing of it.

People have different definitions for what "full self driving" means to them and by my definition Teslas are more or less capable of this. If not "full", then atleast self-driving. It's not a system I'd trust my life with but the car is capable of driving itself from point A to point B often without driver intervention so to me that fits the definition.

Also you’ll see Tesla isn’t the best by a long shot.

Then who is? Waymo self-driving taxies might be more capable at this moment but that's not something you can buy. Mercedes Drive Pilot is extremely limited and I'd argue less capable than FSD not to even mention their level 2 driver assistance software which is complete garbage. If there's a car that you can buy which does self-driving better than Teslas then I'd really like to know about it so that I can look into it more. As demonstrated above; I have no issue admiting I'm wrong when proven otherwise. I'm not in any way emotionally invested into Tesla or Elon. This just is the kind of subject where no one so far has managed to convince me I'm wrong. I truly believe that the current version of FSD is the best self-driving software currently available to consumers.

Going by official testing authorities Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Ford, Hyundai, Genesis, Nio, and a couple of others are better.

From personal experience I can say Audi, Ford (Mustang Mach E), Hyundai, Nio and Jaguar beat Tesla hands down. The GWM Ora beat Tesla in the majority of features, not sure about driving assistance though. The Nio was particularly fantastic, there’s a good chance it’ll be my next car in 3 years or so.

Edit to add: I did not test drive a Mercedes myself as the EV models within budget were either too big or too expensive.

Are you sure you're actually aware of what the current version of FSD is capable of? Because when I try to find videos demonstrating the self-driving on those other brands they're only using the highway assistant (which Tesla calls autopilot) and thus only driving on highways and not in the cities at all. I really struggle to find videos of anyone comparing FSD to the brands you named and I'm assuming it's because there literally is no compareable system on any of the competition and Tesla is just so far ahead. The only other company with car that has similar capabilities is the Waymo's highly modified Jaguar I-Pace but that's Level 4 self-driving taxi that you cannot buy. Tesla FSD is level 2 but in reality they're not very far off despite Tesla only using cameras (and radar on hardware 4 Model S and X)

Here's a video comparing Tesla Autopilot (not FSD) to Mercedes Driver Assistance (not Drive Pilot). The video starts by showing the "official ratings" for those systems and according to them the Mercedes should be significantly better. However the real world test tells quite a different story. Mercedes 44 driver interventions versus 0 on the Tesla. And they're still only driving on a highway.

You said you drove at 244kph legally so I'm assuming you're from Germany. FSD is not available there, only the less capable Autopilot of which's basic version comes with every Tesla. FSD is paid software and much more capable.

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Because it's insanely restrictive and can't be used by most people or in most situations. It's little more than a marketing ploy.

I drove a hyundai recently which had multiple levels of lane assist and it drove for miles unassistated. Jarring experience, it didnt meet intersections or anything but kept to the road and speed I wanted.

Did not handle off ramps well, drove past them as needed then tried to course correct onto them very late.

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I just watched a video of one of these going down the wrong side of the road yesterday

Maybe they accidentally outsourced one of the remote drivers from the UK

We should abandon self driving cars and instead make the roads more safe and provide multi modal transportation options like trains.

I wonder if they’ve thought about having an extra long car, like I’m talking fits nearly 100 people. That way instead of having 25 cars self driving, you could have 1 driver.

You could even put it on tracks so you don’t need to worry about steering. Just go /stop.

Brb gonna patent something…

I still want to see someone slap an airplane grade INS suite into a car and load it up with some maps to see how far it can go without relying on GPS lol.

Not that it would functionally change much, but I find it annoying only self driving cars are still using dedicated navigation setups.

Google Maps has an aneurysm if you're not going above 5mph even though the accelerometer really should have made this a non problem. Its even more dumb to be using your tiny phone receiver for vehicle navigation. GMaps still has to wait until you're past a spot before finally deciding where you actually are.

A couple things#

I like the INS approach, but couple that with cameras to correct for random walk error (this is much like our eyes correcting for our inner ear.)

I think the issue with Google maps requiring GPS differentials for getting your trajectory has mostly to do with it being agnostic of your phone's orientation while moving.

Navigation is not the biggest challenge with self driving.

Obstacle avoidance in an intelligent manner is the bigger problem to solve.

If you want people to trust your self driving solution, it has to be able to account for other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, wildlife, trains, fog, blowing snow, potholes, and a myriad of other things that can't be predicted in advance nor be plotted on a map.

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Both are risking the lives and safety of the non-consenting public as they beta test 2-ton vehicles on public streets. Damn them both.

I wonder what you then think about people who drive after heavily drinking or taking drugs. To be honest, I have more faith in technology than in humans.

Not to mention that self driving can probably solve some other problems too, like traffic jams caused by erratic driving behavior of humans, etc.

If you have vehicle to vehicle communication, it is possible to adapt the speed of all the vehicles on the street to avoid them being stuck in a traffic jam.

Driving while inebriated is illegal, self driving is not.

Traffics jams and erreactic behaviour could be fixed if everyone is in a self driving car, but at that point it woild be far more energy effecient, environmentally friendly and cheaper for society to build electrified transit instead.

If you prioritize the street so that only self driving cars are on it and they need wireless communications to function, how do other road users like cyclists and pedeatrians safely use the street?

Self driving cars are not here to make your life better, they are here to make a handful of people rich.

I tend to disagree here. For example if you have vehicle to vehicle standardized communications, vehicles can communicate between themselves the location of cyclists, some road obstacles, etc. generally making the roads safer and reducing the number of fatalities.

Yes, they will make some people more rich, but is this a legitimate reason to obstruct technological advancements? I am sure people were thinking the same way at the cusp of electrification, or automation of some factories, where machines were augmenting the human labor and in the process making those people redundant.

If we think the same way we should never abandon coal power plants and mines because miners might lose their job, right?

There are greener, more energy effecient and more socially fair ways to get the same results than selling everybody a high tech steel box.

What do those options matter if nobody is developing them and they only work in dense cities? You might as well be arguing for Star Trek-like transporter technology here.

This is literally the only way we'll ever get self-driving cars. You have to test them in real life. Simulations and tests tracks can only take you so far. Yeah it'll probably cost the lifes of some number of people but this will be greatly outnumbered by the amount of lives saved when the technology actually starts working as intented. It's not like human driven vehicles are exactly safe for pedestrians either.

Also, when a self-driving vehicle fails it almost always means it ends up getting stuck somewhere or blocking the road. It's extremely rare for it to cause an accident, though that does happen aswell.

I don't think public deaths is a valid cost for creating self driving cars. We could be builidng safer and more effecient transportation systems. Some billionaire is going to make even more money because they were allowed to use the general public and city streets as a testing ground for their product. This is not fair to the family or the people who are injured or killed by self driving cars.

There are currently 80+ people dying every single day just in the US alone because we don't have self-driving cars. Not developing that technology is just as much of a choise to let people die than going forward with it. I'd argue it's the moral thing to do. People are awful at driving. As a fan of cars I like to go sit by the freeway watching them passing by several times a week and the number of people driving 120kph while staring at their phones is mind boggling.

Not only that but virtually all of those vehicles are going to be electric as well so that also means less people dying because of air pollution. Then there's also the fact that it'll bring down the cost of taxies immensely as well as allowing private individuals to let their vehicle go do ride sharing for the day instead of sitting on the parking lot of their work place unused. There's just too many upsides to it. Also it's not like passengers getting killed by rogue self-driving vehicles is a particularly common occurance despite the technology still being at it's infancy. This is the worst they're ever going to be.

The same problem could be fixed with electrified transit and walkability. Transit would also be even more environmentally friendly.

Plus we could still develop self driving cars but do a lot more testing before we set the public as the guinea pigs to see if they are safe.

Id also argue that we cannot claim this is the worst self driving will get since self driving cars are only used in a few areas right now.

Like I said; there's only so much you can test on a closed track. At some point you must start doing that in the real world. Pedestrians getting killed by experimental self-driving vehicles is not an actual issue we're dealing with right now but more like a theoretical possibility of what could happen in the future. There are only a couple of such incidents recorded ever. That's not a good enough reason to not continue with it.

What I mean by them now being the worst they'll ever be is the self-driving technology itself. It's constantly improving and the trend is towards better. The technology we have right now is the worst it's ever going to be.

Yeah it’ll probably cost the lifes of some number of people

Easy to say when those lives doesn't include yours or anyone you love/care about.

How could anyone know that? It just as well might.

It's a fallacy to think we can build a perfect world where all bad things can be avoided. With all new technology comes downsides. We're already losing 80+ a day in the US alone because we don't have self driving cars. It's far more likely for someone close to me to get killed by a human driver.

So you'd rather more people die in avoidable traffic accidents because we weren't allowed to develop this technology?

I'd rather have people avoiding using cars at all, adopting mass transit solutions instead.

Great that's admirable, but that isn't going to happen because it doesn't work for most people and there is no political capital to make it happen, so what then?

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OK but put it into cars for sale. Ain't worth shit if I can't buy it

Eh, if there was an automated taxi service that was really cheap (since there isn't a driver) I have a feeling that the need for individuals to own cars would go down.

There are people out there that can't drive or that have limitations on driving that this could help, and in the long term it may be cheaper to pay for a service rather than own a car which needs maintenance, costs generally 20k+ new, and is a liability from a financial view.

Yeah their tech is clearly gonna be b2b last mile delivery type stuff which is the application I would use it for

It really is an insult for checkers as a game. It is a common misconception that it's simple. The game has surprising amount of depth, and the saying "x is playing chess while y is playing checkers" should really die.

X is playing chess while Y is playing tictactoe would be a better analogy.

Chess has roughly 10^44 positions. Checkers has roughly 10^20.

That means under that metric, chess is roughly 24 orders of magnitude more complex as checkers.

Tic tac toe has roughly 10^3 positions, or 17 orders of magnitude simpler than checkers.

In other words, the complexity gap between chess and checkers is larger than the gap between checkers and tic tac toe.

Maybe they should compare playing chess with playing Go.

The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1×10^170, which is far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is estimated to be on the order of 10^80.

My point is that checkers actually still is very mich complex. Tictactoe is not and every board position can reasonably be managed by a human.

With checkers, that is unfeasable. That's why I am of the opinion that checkers is unfairly treated as "the simple game" when for humans it is far from simple.

I usually take the chess/checkers idiom to be more like "the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing" Not that one is smart and one is dumb, but that they're going in completely different directions and playing by different rules.

And in the news this just in.... Tesla runs over checkered flag and flagman at Daytona. Shortly after, it burst into flames. As it burned it was discovered that the car's emblems melted into the shape of Toyota emblems....

Comparing Tesla with Waymo is stupid. They are doing fundamentally different things, and people like this author don't realize that. Waymo's technology, like a few self-driving products from Ford or GM, rely on having a centimeter level 3D scan of the road ahead of time. This allows a crap ton of pre-processing so fewer decisions need to be made in the car. It's a developmental shortcut, but it also means their cars will only work on roads that have been scanned and processed and approved ahead of time. Tesla's system doesn't pre scan roads. It makes all the decisions on the fly based solely on what the car is seeing as it drives. That means that it can theoretically work on any road, in any situation, without advance preparation.

Tesla's approach tackles a MUCH harder problem. And that must be considered when comparing the two technologies.

Otherwise it's like looking at two people at the gym, William lifts 25lb weights and can now lift them 10 times, Tom lifts 250 lb weights and can now lift them 9 times, and saying that William is in better shape than Tom because he can do more reps. No, Tom is in better shape because he is lifting a lot more weight. Even though he can't lift it as many times, he's doing a lot more work in his workout.