CatastrophicFailure
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Posts posted by CatastrophicFailure
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2 hours ago, tater said:
How to say, "We're a bunch of scumbags!" without actually saying "We're a bunch of scumbags!"
Well, they are designing a lander… maybe this is how they do research into digging themselves into a really deep hole… with rockets…
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2 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:
Re radar vs vision: As I understand radar, it sends out microwaves which reflect back to the sensor. If it hits an angled metal surface (like the top of an overturned semi) most of the radar signal will reflect away from the car sending the signal, so the radar won’t “see” it. Unlike light, which scatters in all directions (mirrored surfaces notwithstanding). Which is why I believe Teslas are having trouble “seeing”’some obstacles and why pure vision should be better.
IIRC, this is more or less what happened with the couple of cases of a Tesla going under a semi trailer. The radar is pretty neat, it can bounce waves off the road to see the car ahead of the car in front of you, but that makes it too low to see that trailer. The other scenario I've heard is a trucking coming at you on a cross-street. Radar says it's clear, vision says stop! Which to believe? Conventional wisdom seems to say the best system combines vision and something else, radar, LIDAR, etc. But Tesla has arguably the best AI people in the world working there, if they say pure vision is best, I can give them the benefit of the doubt. Humans, after all, manage to drive with nothing but vision. Now, get the basics down, then we can talk about something like IR cameras in addition to visible light to see through smoke and fog. I'm wondering if the Hardware 4 mentioned for Cybertruck will begin to incorporate just that.
2 hours ago, tater said:Watching their new approach on the AI day... it's kind of amazing. I'm one of those who tends to think that actual FSD is a lot closer to an "AI complete" problem than many imagine, and now I'm starting to wonder if narrow AI might literally come along for the ride sooner rather than later (in the Dojo space, not in each car, obviously, not nearly enough computer there).
I think the hardware and software will get to FSD alot sooner than the, er, wetware (ie: regulations). SAE Level 4 should be "relatively" easy, making that step to true Level 5 is gonna take rethinking a whole lot of legalese. Or, by that point, we just let the Tesla Robots figure it out.
2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:And that's the difference. You are driving for decades. Like a dolphin, with brain hemispheres sleeping in turns, lol. So, an autopilot is an assistance for you.
While most part of autopilot users are amateurs, which can't be simultaneously alert and sleeping at once.
And yet, with over a million Teslas on the road, these kinds of incidents remain extremely rare. As @tater often says, they're nothing but noise. The same kind of people getting distracted while using Autopilot would probably be distracted and/or otherwise doing dumb things with or without it. The vast majority of people, after all, are quite capable of safely operating an automobile. I would posit that Autopilot makes anyone a better, safer driver: if you're already a good, safe driver, AP just give you that extra layer to make you more so, if "you're" an incompetent, irresponsible moron, Autopilot may make you a better driver, but you're still way below the control.
1 hour ago, magnemoe said:low on flasher oil.
I hate it when that happens.
1 hour ago, magnemoe said:seeing an bus run off the road too
I hate it when that happens, too...
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3 hours ago, tater said:
Yeah, this is obviously required. What are the active safety features on the tesla? Will it stop itself without autopilot on (if car is closing too fast on a vehicle ahead, etc)?
It's got forward automatic emergency braking. You can set it to warn early, medium, or late, and then it should stop the car before an impact, up to a point. Would probably be good on a lower-speed city street, but I dunno about an interstate. More on that in a sec. I think I've only had actual braking kick on maybe once in the last couple years, I keep the warning set to Early and that's gone off a number of times, usually right about the time my foot is heading for the brake pedal. It'll also automatically reduce power and acceleration in a congested area, like a parking lot, to hopefully reduce those "hit the gas not the brake" incidents. Like @RCgothic's truck, it's also got lane-departure safety, it'll beep, vibrate the wheel, or physically move you back into the lane even if Autopilot is not enabled. And the usual round of blind spot warnings and such. One thing it definitely lacks, which others do have, is rear-cross-traffic alerts.
Tesla has had to recently "recertify" it's auto-emergency braking software, as they're transitioning from radar+vision to a pure vision approach. I've read lots of back-and-forth on this, and there's a compelling argument for pure vision, but it is harder, that's why there haven't' been a lot of updates until recently. I'm wondering how many of these "hit a thing on the side of the road" type incidents happened because of confusion between radar and vision; if the radar says one thing and the cameras say another, which one should the car beleive? From what I've heard from others, the pure-vision approach does indeed seem to be working better overall, and has drastically reduced if not eliminated the obnoxious phantom braking. I can't speak to that myself, I'm 99% sure my Model X is still using radar. I think the wife's 3 has the newer vision-only software, but I haven't really driven it in months to compare.
8 hours ago, magnemoe said:4, 2 and 1 million km is Tesla's at comparable roads, say the automated systems don't work because of say snow its also an much higher chance of an accident?
The .48 millions makes sense overall, few has Tesla as their first car for one and inexperienced drivers has an much higher accident rate.And that's where it gets tricky, since Autopilot can actually work in snow if the ruts are apparent enough, but it will shut down in really heavy rain. This is the only data available, AFAIK, but the point that "Autopilot is already safer than the average human driver" remains true even if Tesla's data is off by a factor of almost 9.
7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:So, Tesla takes the easy part, leaving the human driver without training and letting him take the control in complicated cases immediately.
Kinda it says: "... But you are an expert, human, hehe. Show us your master-class, and rememeber that in any case you are guilty, not me."
This is how evolution works. It's literally the only way make a functional system, there is no other way to gain the billions of data-miles to make autonomy work. If "you" are uncomfortable with that, then don't use it. If you do choose to use it, then you accept the responsibility that comes along with that.
40 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:I drive a manual transmission 2005 Honda Element. It has a radio. That's about it, as far as driver electronics.
I'm old.
I drive for a living. I've spent decades now wrenching on everything from motorcycles to big, loud diesels, sports cars, lawn mowers. I'm more than happy to finally have a ride that requires almost no maintenance from me, and will be quite happy when it can also drive me 95% of the way to work, so I can do drive someone else to work, knowing full well that sooner or later it's gonna put me out of a job, too.
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1 hour ago, benzman said:
I wonder how many Tesla crashes have been caused because the driver has been daydreaming, distracted or playing games on his phone?
Likely less than a control group of non-Tesla drivers being distracted:
Quote“…We registered one accident for every 4.19 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 978 thousand miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.”
28 minutes ago, DDE said:Overpriced, inflexible, potentially rarely updated vis-a-vis smartphone apps. Strapping a phone or tablet to the dashboard seems like the easier option.
That said, I've never seen anyone listening to GPS correctly navigate anything more complex than a cloverleaf interchange. Gotta read those maps... at which point, audio becomes a secondary channel.
The solution, then, is to integrate the GPS right into the car itself, which every single manufacturer has done to some extent, by now, and the bigger the display screen, the better. Then eventually you take the driver out of the loop entirely.
Ive had one experience, to this point, driving with Navigate on Autopilot in a strange city. NoA will take you from on-ramp to off-ramp, even handling lane changes, (presumably) with no interaction beyond paying attention and keeping a hand on the wheel.
In every single case where I second-guessed the car and disengaged it… the car was right, and I took the wrong exit.
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9 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:
That's part of why companies settle lawsuits. Because that way, there is no public decision against them.
Also because fighting a lawsuit is almost always far more expensive, even if you win.
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57 minutes ago, tomf said:
Has the autopilot liability been tested in a US court yet? It's hard to imagine that no enterprising lawyer yet hasn't tried an argument that a product that is so easy to use irresponsibly, even with good intentions must give some liability to the manufacturer.
If I were Tesla's lawyers I would be up at night worrying.
But you see, it's not. Consumer Reports recently demonstrated how "easy" it was, in that doing such required deliberately ignoring or flat out disabling multiple safety features. There were follow up videos from other sources demonstrating the same behavior from other manufacturers' systems, too. Eye-tracking could be circumvented just with sunglasses on the headrest or even googly eyes.
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2 hours ago, mikegarrison said:
Things KSP gets right:
- Docking is slow and tedious, and you really want to just time warp through as much of it as possible.
Eh, speak for yourself. *suicide burns into docking port*
ya wanna know how I got
thesescarsthis username? -
6 hours ago, tater said:
Really interesting to hear from someone who uses it. I tried it a little the few times I was trying friends' teslas, but only briefly.
It's telling that so much criticism levied against Autopilot comes from people who've never used it at all, based on hearsay on what it's "supposed" to do. Like anything, it takes a bit of learning, for the moment. My wife loves the traffic-aware cruise control but pretty much never uses auto-steer, if she does she sends up unintentionally disengaging it by tugging the wheel a bit too hard. I've found you have to trust the system about half a second father than you want to. Where it's meant to work, it works really really good. Even where it's not meant to work, it still works pretty good. But you've got to know and accept its limitations as an incomplete system.
6 hours ago, tater said:The difference vs actively driving if impaired is interesting. I end up staying awake most of the time when my wife gets called in to the OR in the middle of the night, particularly if she's already been on call a couple days in a row—concerned she might be so tired driving is less than ideal.
I do a lot of long driving on nearly-deserted roads in the middle of the night, even as it is now, it's dang near perfect for that.
45 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:The listed sandwich, dryer, etc, differ from the "autopilot" requiring the driver's constant attention without driver's actions.
Not really, no. They are all things which have a specific set of circumstances where they can be used safely. If you deliberately-deliberately-ignore warnings and use them outside of those circumstances, that is on you, not on the item. You have made that choice and need to own that mistake.
46 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:an autopilot which can replace a human on the driver seat
Except, it's NOT that. And it's not marketed or sold as that, either. Those warnings I posted above demonstrate that. Autopilot is a driver assist system, not full autonomy, and no one familiar with it actually thinks otherwise. Full Self Driving is coming, but it's not here yet, safe for a handful of carefully chosen beta test volunteers.
49 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:The only purpose of an autopilot is a long boring trip
And this remains its primary use and selling point.
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37 minutes ago, tater said:
I use cruise control all the time, but I'm not sure I'd ever use autopilot the way it is currently available. If I'm paying attention anyway, I'd just steer. I'd see autopilot (if I had it) as a way to stretch, or change positions briefly on a long drive, maybe.
…
I would imagine I would consider autopilot to be about as mentally taxing as it is sitting in the right seat with one of my kids driving (they are both learning now). In some ways I think I am paying far more attention when supervising kids than when actually driving.
I use Autopilot near constantly, and almost entirely on winding country roads. I’ve had a while now to get used to its quirks and features, and figure out where it works well and where it doesn’t. It’s an absolute Godsend when I get off work after a long day of, ironically, driving, and now have to drive home when I’m a virtual zombie. Autopilot handles the basic tasks of keeping speed and staying in the lane, so I can focus my admittedly compromised attention entirely on watching the road, not the minutia of driving itself. And even on long road trips where I’m not compromised, just like airplane AP it greatly reduces my mental workload, so at the end of the day I don’t have that drained feeling nearly as much, and you’ll hear this same sentiment echoed by other frequent Autopilot users.
Yes, it’s extremely surreal the first time you engage it, and that wheel starts moving on its own. It does take a while to learn how to trust it, but for the vast majority of users, that trust that leads to responsible, proper use comes fairly quickly.
28 minutes ago, tater said:Country roads I'm less sure about, animals, passing into oncoming lanes (common on undivided highways here), etc. On twisting roads I'd probably end up hyper aware prepping to take over, lol.
It does extremely well on winding highway-speed (50-60mph) two-lanes, on some tighter 30-40mph suburban windies it’s struggled a bit in the past, but I’ve seen it improve remarkably over the last year or two. It even slows down for cyclists or walkers on the side of the road. I trust Autopilot far more than the rando coming the other way and inching closer to the centerline.
1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:So, all those measures to attract the attention are just an attempt to drop the blame from the manufacturer onto the customer.
The blame for blatant misuse of a product remains, as it always has, sorely on the shoulders of the user, not the manufacturer. Ever hear that gag about the guy with the wrecked RV who set the cruise control then went in back to make a sandwich?
If you take a hair dryer into the shower, despite being warned not to, and get electrocuted, that’s on you, not the hair dryer.
If you spill hot coffee on yourself, after being warned it’s hot, and get burned, that’s on you, not the coffeemaker.
If you stick your hand in the garbage disposal… well, you get the idea.
This is the warning you have to acknowledge before you can ever engage Autopilot:
Spoiler
This is the warning you get every single time you do engage it:
Spoiler
If you choose to ignore all these warnings, and fail to pay attention to the point that you don’t even see the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle ahead, that is YOUR fault, not the machine’s.
Every single Autopilot-involved accident up to this point has been a result of user error, pure and simple, full stop.
And they remain extremely rare, because the vast majority of people are not, in fact, blithering idiots, and can responsibly operate a piece of equipment after sufficient “education.” But, “another Autopilot crash!” is sensational, and sensational gets those sweet sweet ad clicks. Double bonus points for Tesla, too, since anything negative involving Tesla is also sensational (it’s almost like someone(s) somewhere has a vested financial interest in all this sensationalism, hmm…)
Pretty much every automaker has their own driver-assist system available now that kinda-sorta approaches what Autopilot can do, yet you never hear about those crashes, because those crashes are so unsensational that no one is even keeping data on them.
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Oh, we’re singing now? Um, ok, how bout…
I clicked a thing and I liked it,
That satisfying click-noise
I clicked a thing just to try jt
I hope @Vanamonde don’t mind it…
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1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:
You can't just dismiss valid criticism by labeling it as invalid criticism.
Well, OK, you actually can do this. But that doesn't make it correct.
I remain highly skeptical as to such validity.
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8 hours ago, mikegarrison said:
Just as a reminder, the way this discussion got (re-)started is that a poster here made a dismissive comment about "NIMBY environmentalists".
I clarified my position already, but let me do it again: I used that term very specifically, to refer to a very specific subset of people: those for whom SpaceX can do no right, for whom it's mere existence is an affront not to be tolerated, largely because of its ties to Elon Musk. There is literally nothing SpaceX could do to please such people short of-maybe-completely disbanding, liquifying its assets and distributing them to some group or another, after, of course, completely un-making every construct it's made. For such people, rockets are bad, and civilization is bad, because humans are bad. The same kind of people who love to harp on Tesla for this or that, completely dismissing that actual good they're doing for the environment, because humans are bad. Based on all the information I've seen, everywhere, Spacex (and Tesla) is doing it's realistic best to be a good neighbor. Is it perfect? Of course not. There is no perfect. The perfect is the enemy of the good enough. I've come to look on a great number of "environmentalists" with great cynicism, as if one pokes their motivations just a little, once finds them laced with, shall we say, conflicts of interest. Yes, my opinion on the matters at hand is absolutely biased, but remember, so is yours.
6 minutes ago, Beccab said:I... I don't even know what to say"If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with..." well, you know...
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14 hours ago, tater said:
they have a history of pretty catastrophic failures
I had nothing to do with anything, I swear! I was never even in same state!
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Yes, I am still here.
After too many run-ins with the Kraken, I have spent these many months inventing a new method of Kerbal propulsion!
The Fahrten Drive.
Spoiler
It's German.
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13 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:
It's a bit much to be talking about "environmentalist NIMBYs" when SpaceX picked a spot right next to a wildlife refuge knowing full well that it was right next a wildlife refuge.
If they didn't want to have to worry about stuff like that, they should have picked a different location.
There’s literally nowhere they can go on the east coast that isn’t going to rustle someone’s jimmies. It’s either protected land of one sort or another, too close to populations, or too far from road access, which would require its own sessions of jimmy rustling to build the needed roads. See @tater’s post up-thread for a proper dissertation on perceived (by a certain set of people) impacts to sensitive areas vs actual impacts. The wildlife at KSC ain’t exactly teetering on the brink…
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1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:
My first thought as well. Boondoggle.
Just build a 'jetwash berm' however many miles long and call it a day. MUCH cheaper
Heck - using 'tilt-up' concrete wall construction techniques - they could build a building/ tunnel with a light covering of topsoil cheaper than trying to tunnel and keep dry for any reasonable length of time.
Problem here is environmental impact. Most of the closures are simply for outsize load transport, the "easiest" solution would just be to drastically widen the existing road or build an entirely new, private road for SpaceX use only. But to do either one, especially the latter, they'd be doing some serious encroachment into the surrounding wetlands, which would no doubt drive the "local" environmentalist NIMBYs apoplectic, if such projects could even get approved.
So in the end, the real-world "path of least resistance" model might indeed be a finicky tunnel. Convenient that Musk also just so happens to be connected to a fledgling tunnel-boring company, which might even welcome to chance to expand its knowledge on how to build such a difficult tunnel, since dealing with such situations will no doubt become a factor in their expansion plans down the road... or through the tunnel...
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27 minutes ago, Beccab said:
Seriously, with ULA they have a delay of 4 years over an engine that should have been completed after 1 year and here they speed up
This keeps up and Tory is gonna show up at Jeff Who's door with a lasso and a branding iron, mark my words.
Where are my engines, Jeff?
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Split the rest of the wood today. Everything huuuuuurrts.
But found some
disgustingcool bugs:
*pokes @cubinator with a stick* -
Got my Dishy up & working today!
Some “real world” observations:
SpoilerSetup is, indeed, stupidly easy. If you’re just using the included Starlink wifi router, which kind of stinks. Took a few minutes for the connection to “settle” into something usable, first speed test I got 60mbs download, second 130:
It’s very temporarily “installed” on a table on my back porch, in a pretty horrible location for obstructions. The dish comes with 100’ of Ethernet cable permanently installed, seems pretty stout and durable for outdoor use, as it should. I also ordered a simple pole mount I’ll switch to once I find a permanent spot, that’s kind of an impressive bit. Very heavy steel with a very thick powdercoat, and also dead simple: it slides over the end of a wood/metal pole, is secured with set screws, then the dish just latches in on top. Even comes with a couple dozen screw-in cable clips
So, crummy location aside, we were able to watch en episode of Loki just fine with no buffering or freezing (which is more than I can say for Comcast
) through the included router. The WiFi signal seems pretty weak, it was showing red in the Starlink app just like 20 feet and a wall & a half away, but worked fine. Then I tried to integrate Dishy into the existing network… First tried plugging my Linksys router into the aux port on the Starlink router, and all hell broke loose. Got everything patched back together but I’m now reminded of which devices on my net do not have static IPs which are supposed to, so now nothing else can find them. Problem for later.
Solution was just to plug the Dishy directly into my existing router like a modem. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be as seamless as I’d hoped, as it looks like I’ll have to reboot the router each time I need to switch between Starlink and Comcast. Was hoping it would be just a simple cable swap so I could use an A/B switch. Anyways, downside is that without the Starlink router I can’t connect with the app to get this handy stats page:
As you can see, it’s listing a fair amount of outages, on the order of every couple of minutes for a few seconds. Now, in practice, I haven’t noticed at all so far. This was during that streaming episode, you can see the throughput there too. Running random speedtests the last couple hours I’ve seen burst speeds approaching 200mbs, or down as low as 40-ish. So far, pretty on-par with what I get from Comcast. When it works. IIRC, there are ways to integrate the Starlink router to still get this page, will have to research that next.
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Finally found the load limit on the tractor.
Could lift this basket of alder but juuuust barely. Check how squooshed the front tires are, I could barely turn the steering wheel, either. Yup, split the whole load by hand, too.
And of course by “by hand” I mean my hands worked the levers on the wood splitter. Yet I still somehow feel like I got hit by a truck.
And that’s not even half of what needs splitting.
Also, this finally happened:
Temporarily “installed” our Dishy in a horrible location on the perennially dirty
squirrelporch table. And right off the get go, Comcast decided to plotz and not stream anything so we broke it in with the first episode of Loki, which worked perfectly well despite the app reporting disconnects every few minutes.
yes I drink the Kool-Aid, and it is sweet -
On 8/16/2021 at 10:48 PM, CatastrophicFailure said:
Oof.
...and then it gets worse.
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12 hours ago, sh1pman said:
Circa 2023, after Fedor goes missing…
Some “real world” observations:
) through the included router. The WiFi signal seems pretty weak, it was showing red in the Starlink app just like 20 feet and a wall & a half away, but worked fine. Then I tried to integrate Dishy into the existing network… 
And that’s not even half of what needs splitting.
SpaceX Discussion Thread
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
Also, whatever Final Form the MechzillaTreads end up taking, they’ll need some simple mechanism for actually gripping the booster’s load points, like cups or something, not a flat, slippery surface.