There are laser measurers sold for a few buck on Temu. Robot vacuums sold for few hundred dollars have Lidars that map out the room in a seconds.
Is there any actual technical reason why automobile Lidar be expensive? Just combine visual processing with single point sampler that will feed points of interest and accurate model of the surroundings will be built.
Most spinning robovac LIDARs are 2D. Most solid state robovac LIDARs are like 8x8 array of laser pointers.
Automotive LIDARs are like, 128x64[px] for production models or 1920x1080[px] for experimental models with GbE and/or HDMI-equivalents-of-industry outputs. Totally different technologies.
I know that automotive parts of the standard requirement to withstand 80°C (or 120°C for military use). A robot vacuum working in a living room can probably be made cheaper because it does not have to face as harsh environments?
Also, range is probably a factor. In a living room, you probably need something like 20m max. You car should "see" farther.
Sure, these are the assumptions but silicon is silicon, copper is copper and solder is solder. They don't use easy melting electronics in vacuums and hardened stuff in cars, the tech is about the same unless it is supposed to work in highly radioactive environment. The plastics are different but car interiors are full of plastics, so its unlikely that the costs of temperature resistant plastics needed for this is more than a cupholder.
As for the range, again pretty powerful lasers are sold for sub 10SUD prices on retail. I am sure that there must be higher calibration and precision requirements as the distance increase but is it really order of magnitudes higher? 120 meters laser measurer with 1cm accuracy is 15 Euros on Temu and that thing has an LCD screen and a battery as a handheld device. How much distance do you actually need?
Vibrations are surely an issue with electromechanical systems but hardly with electronics. There are plenty of cheap electronic accessories for cars and you can observe that those keep functioning for years.
Oh my god so many reasons. I don't feel like getting fully into it but that's kind of like asking why you can't use your kitchen scale to measure highway traffic as it drives over it.
to add to the rest of the comments, a reliability standard also adds on cost. The scale is different, but compare a car bolt vs manned space mission craft's bolt.
I recall Shaun Maguire trying to interfere with European politics, specifically supporting AfD in Germany. Instantly lost my admiration towards Sequoia, the image I previously had about them was something like calm, deeply analytical grown ups. Turns out they are into petty daily politics that will not go anywhere other than stir drama, at least this Shaun guy. Still feels bad when I think about it, disillusionment is painful.
Since when social unrest is good for business? Africa, the Balkans and the middle east must be printing money then with their decades long identity politics and divisions.
Good for business for companies like the German Fox News: Nius, led by the former chief editor of Germany‘s worst „newspaper“ Bild: Julian Reichelt financed by the founder of CompuGroup Medical: Frank Gotthardt
Okay, what's stopping you from feeding the code into an LLM and re-write it and make it yours? You can even add extra steps like make it analyze the code block by block then supervise it as it is rewriting it. Bam. AI age IP freedom.
Morals may stop you but other than that? IMHO all open source code is public domain code if anyone is willing to spend some AI tokens.
One person reads the code and produces a detailed technical specification. Someone reviews it to ensure that there is nothing in there that could be classified as copyrighted material, then a third person (who has never seen the original code) implements the spec.
You could use an LLM at both stages, but you'd have to be able to prove that the LLM that does the implementation had no prior knowledge of the code in question... Which given how LLMs have been trained seems to me to be very dubious territory for now until that legal situation gets resolved.
AI is useful in Chinese walling code, but it’s not as easy as you make it sound. To stay out of legal trouble, you probably should refactor the code into a different language, then back into the target language. In the end, it turns into a process of being forced to understand the codebase and supervising its rewriting. I’ve translated libraries into another language using LLMs, I’d say that process was 1/2 the labor of writing it myself. So in the end, going 2 ways, you may as well rewrite the code yourself… but working with the LLM will make you familiar with the subject matter so you -could- rewrite the code, so I guess you could think of it as a sort of buggy tutorial process?
I am not sure even that is enough. You would really need to do a clean room reimplementation to be safe - for exactly the same reasons that people writing code write clean room reimplementations.
Yeah, the algorithms and program flow would have to be materially distinct to be really safe. Maybe switching language paradigms would get that for you in most cases? Js->haskell->js? Sounds like a nightmare lol.
Tell me you don't know how to use LLMs properly without telling me.
You don't give the whole codebase to an LLM and expect it to have one shot output. Instead, you break it down and and write the code block by block. Then the size if the codebase doesn't matter. You use the LLM as a tool, it is not supposed to replace you. You don't try to become George from Jetsons who is just pressing a button and doesn't touch anything, instead you are on top of it as the LLM does the coding. You test the code on every step to see if the implementation behaves as expected. Do enough of this and you have proper, full "bespoke" software.
I haven't read it and I'm curios what is the gist of the electrification approach. Is it that it's more efficient?
Wouldn't heating and cooling be more efficient if done through architectural approaches?
For example, for cooling Persians use "cooling towers" called Windcatcher[0]. I know that there's a lot that can be done through design both for cooling and heating.
Also, organising the public spaces and infrastructure must be much more productive than aiming for changing the energy conversion systems(i.e. switching away from combustion propellers to electric ones). I' m very sceptical of the idea that electric cars will solve our problems. Just recently Elon Musk demonstrated that electrification of cars and taking the traffic underground simply creates underground traffic congestion[1].
Obviously passive is better, but the point is that you need active heating or cooling or cooking or moving, electric is better. For example, a heat pump space heater or hot water heater is 3 - 5 times more efficient than gas heating.
Electric cars, of course, do share the same issues cars have (extremely space inefficient meaning the throughput of people through over a distance is lower than most other transit options). But the roundtrip efficiency is about three to four times better than a regular ICE (most of the energy goes into producing heat, not locomotion). So they're generally better than ICE cars. You are right that the Boring company seems to have basically solved no problems, and the Vegas system could have hundreds of times more throughput just using light rail (either underground or overground). But the rolling stock of the light rail would be electric - so that better solution would be electrification too!
What about the energy already spent producing and getting your current car to you, the energy spent doing away with said car, the energy spent to produce said eletric car and get it to you? A car represents a lot of potential energy at rest. A lot of power was used to take those atoms of metal or carbon from all over the living earth and reconfigure them into the shape of a car at your present location.
I haven’t seen very many analyses pencil all this out. I’d assume the greenest thing would be to drive your current car for the rest of your life.
Plenty of this research is being done. I know of one a Dutch academic Auke Hoekstra who does a lot of this kind of thing as his main area research.
The average age of vehicles around where I am is 10.6 years, so it is unfair to pretend as if people don’t scrap most vehicles already after 15 or so years. I think a lot of the transition will not be forcing people to replace their cars but just phasing out new ICEs from being sold. The ones that were being driven by those who buy electrics will get sold into the used market and replace older, even less fuel efficient cars that are naturally scrapped.
My understanding around EV production is that it currently takes something like 3 years to cross the total lifecycle energy curve of a conventional car, and then every subsequent year is better for the electric car. Things are improving too as energy grids get greener and battery production gets more efficient.
As I said, cars still have many problems and are a quite large amount of embedded energy and anything we can do to reduce the number of cars around and shift journeys to other modes (walking, cycling, busses, trams, trains) is better again.
It's not really that electricity is more efficient (is IS more efficient in most cases, but a key point of the book is that we can't "efficiency" our way out of the climate crisis). It's that as long as the generation of electricity is clean, the use of it is also clean. We already have clean ways of generating electricity that are cost-competitive with fossil fuels, and by scaling up production it will actually end up massively cheaper than fossil fuels. But there is a high upfront cost to switching, so financing the switch is one of the biggest challenges.
The book is quite thorough in laying out all the challenges (eg, handling variable production from renewables, how to get buy-in from existing fossil fuel stakeholders, etc) and presents realistic solutions for each. I recommend you pick up a copy and read it!
I don't understand why so many make a big deal of the Las Vegas loop congestion. I don't have the impression that it's supposed to demonstrate anything other than that Boring Co could actually dig a tunnel. Presumably they could fix the problem by building a vehicle actually designed for the purpose of a "loop" transportation system, but that's obviously still some ways out. So it's basically a demo, a playground and a marketing gimmick for Boring Co/Tesla.
But surely you would agree that for a company claiming to be revolutionising transport, building a demonstration system that is much worse in most ways than conventional systems is not a very good marketing strategy...?
> I don't understand why so many make a big deal of the Las Vegas loop congestion
Because it demonstrates the exact thing that sceptics said it would happen?
Think a perpetuum mobile company having a demonstration of their machine and it stops. Would you be able to use the excuse that the demo was about showing that they can build machines and not the machine that they promised?
Demonstration that they can dig tunnels? Why would that need a demonstration and even if they wanted to demonstrate it why would they demonstrate it with cars inside and then say that the cars part doesn't count.
Digging tunnels is a very old thing. We know it can be done and we know it works well when you run electric vehicles inside it(All underground systems already run on electric cars), it's just that it doesn't solve congest any differently than the one on the ground. Two cars can't occupy the same volume and it holds both over ground and underground.
Sometimes the difference between Elizabeth Holmes and Mus*k are negligible. She should just failed to kick can down the road for long enough I guess. She should have imitated Mus*k instead of Jobs, then people would have been saying thing like "The tests not producing correct results doesn't mean anything, it's just a demonstration that they can build machines".
So, If I understand it correctly the security issues are at architectural level and not simply bugs?
Is there an alternative tool you can suggest, to allow us securely run arbitrary JS? I was looking at Apple's JavaScriptCore to run JS and and if it happens that I need any level of access to the system(i.e. files) simply handle that in Swift and pass the file to the JS. Would that be a secure approach?
Yep, trying to restrict the access to a system on the API level instead of the OS level will inevitably lead to problems like these (Deno is doing worse than it could though).
If you want to isolate your program, you should use an OS-level sandbox like bubblewrap or a lightweight VM like Firecracker. I’m not familiar with Apple’s JavaScriptCore, but if it doesn’t provide any access to the system (and instead relies on passing arguments from Swift code), it might also be a viable approach.
Yes, my understanding is that it's the pure language interpreter without anything about filesystems or web browser. You need to create an interface in Swift/Objective-C or C to put in and get data out of the execution context.
Is there any actual technical reason why automobile Lidar be expensive? Just combine visual processing with single point sampler that will feed points of interest and accurate model of the surroundings will be built.