If its run anything like twitter then there are loads of teams running around trying random shit, along lots of duplication.
Its the same for meta, literally you could remove 2/3 of the head count and not have a problem with productivity (assuming you could not impact morale)
if youre using a pico, you can use PIO to have a bit more power. (I use it to control stepper motors with a smooth accel/decel ramp. Its doable with RMT, but not as easy.
Sure, and if it didn't is not complicated to add a new module. Thing is, the module does not support DMA. So, for the specific use case I gave, its not a good fit.
To me the maker movement is alive as ever. Sure the arduino has died a death, but pico, esp32 and various other microcontrollers evolved the entire system, and with wifi too.
I mean thats a big number, but if you think about the amount of lakes needed to run hydro, its not actually that much of a number.
I'm not saying musk is a clever man for pointing this out. Even greenpeace said stuff like this in the early 2000s.
the point is, it sounds bigger than it is. For oil storage, the US has something like 36 square miles of storage (converting from cubic to square isnt accurate)
tesla isn't great value any more. For a while powerwalls were the shit And the powerwall three is nice, with direct DC charging as well as islanding.
But, only 13kwh still, and internet dependency, and very expensive.
I currently have enphase micro inverters and a power wall 2. It was the right mix at the time.
But, if you have the space, which I think you do, An insulated shed for a 19" rack, and choose any one of the many battery unit makers. Its about $200 per kwh now (in UK prices, I'm not sure what tarrifs are doing for you)
then get a frame for your solar (or build a barn and roof it with solar, its cheaper than 12mm plywood at the moment.)
Have micro inverters, they are more expensive, but solid state, less likely to catch fire, do MPPT better, and are not a single point of failure.
You'll need backup for when solar doesn't cover your daily needs, so either grid or some other power source.
As a fifth-generation former Texan, I understand "separatist mentality." ERCOT's buy/sell market is perhaps also the most purely capitalistic marketplace in existance (and among least-regulated, in first-world); for these reasons, winter-proofing funding is terrible and outages likely when the system is stressed (e.g. approximately every decade Texas loses power during winter storms) — which is also when generating profits are maximized (orders of magnitude increases).
Certain deregulated-market Texans are still paying off powerbills from years-old storms, a few cold days of billing often exceeding the rest of the year's usage.
One benefit of the previous Texas winter disaster is that the highest MWH fee was reduced from $9000/per to $3k/p [normal would be ~$30/p].
In my personal opinion the winterization of LNG lines is still not enough for the next major storm (the cause of previous two decade storms was lack of adequate heat-tracing along pipelines — not windmills [Hotwheels' deception]). This has been discussed in every post-disaster report, since the 1980s. Private grid operators see little incentive to prepare for these storms, particularly since they make so much money when the grid is stressed (just how it's set up).
Instead of the stupidity of isolation, Texas could easily amalgamate its resources with the entire rest of Lower 48 USA, and not have to spend nearly as much prepping for emergency gas lines (instead: buy power from somewhere else).
Look america's 1939+ expansion was subsided by the british empire trying to expand arms manufacture.
What america has been doing is subsiding engineering capacity in china. This was done because it created more profit for larger companies as they merged and eliminated costs. This higher profit drove a "roaring" economic expansion. But now china is capturing more of the value.
A solution is to use tax as a way to re-patriciate engineering capacity. This is kinda what trump is supposed to be doing, but carving out exceptions for friends, and using blunt instruments doesn't work all that well.
> Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world.
Wait what? when did they actually enter mass production?
> I mean humans have Lidar sensors
Real time slam is actually pretty good, the hard part is reliable object detection using just vision. Tesla's forward facing cameras are effectively monocular, which means that its much much harder to get depth (its not impossible but moving objects are much more difficult to observe if you only have cameras aligned on the same plane with no real parallax)
Ultimately Musk is right, you probably don't need lidar to drive safely. but its far more simple and easier to do if you have Lidar. Its also safer. Musk said "lidars are a crutch", not because he is some sort of genius, Its obvious that SLAM only driving is the way forward since the mid 00's (of not earlier). The reason he said it is because he thought he could save money not having lidar. The problem for him is that he didn't do the research to see how far away proper machine perception is to account for the last 1% in accuracy needed to make vision only safe and reliable.
> Tesla's forward facing cameras are effectively monocular
Notably, human perception is effectively monocular in driving situations at distances of 60 feet or farther. It's best in the area where your limbs can reach.
"precise" stereo vision is 30m, but the limit of depth perception is around 200m (some people are 500m)
crucially we have excellent implied depth, and object detection, something that even non-realtime state of the art tracking doesn't have.
human depth is much more complex than just parallax, which some poeple use as an argument that "pure vision" monocular depth is possible to do robustly. It will be, but not for a while. Especially as depth is only part of the problem. object categorisation is the other.
Not mass production yet, but the first one rolled off the completed assembly line at giga texas last week
Sensor fusion is not far simpler, when the sensors disagree, and they will often, you have to pick which to trust.
It is amazing to see how many people here are confident they know the one true way to build autonomous systems based on nothing but wanting to confirm their biases
Sensor fusion is a piece of piss. How do you think any of the VR headsets work? SLAM is compute expensive, and runs at ~30hz, sensor fusion is the only way to give a smooth experience.
Online calibration is actually the hard part, even then its largely solved.
I mean it doesn't. If you actually look at it comma.ai proves that level two doesn't require lidar. Thats not the same as full speed safe autonomy.
whilst it is possible to drive vision only (assuming the right array of cameras (ie not the way tesla have done it) lidar gives you a low latency source of depth that can correct vision mistakes. Its also much less energy intensive to work out if an object is dangerous, and on a collision course.
To do that in vision, you need to work out what the object is (ie is it a shadow) then you have to triangulate it. That requires continuous camera calibration, and is all that easy. If you have a depth "prior" ie, yes its real, yes its large and yes its going to collide, its much much more simple to use vision to work out what to do.
It's fair to point out that comma.ai is SAE level two system, however it's not geofenced at all, which is an SAE level 5 requirement. But really that brings up the fact that SAE's levels aren't the right ones, merely the ones they chose to define since they're the standards body. A better set of levels are the seven I go into more detail about on my blog.
As far as distinguishing shadows on the road, that's what radar is for. Shadows on the road as seen by the vision system don't show up on radar as something the vehicle will run into.
Your autonomy scale is pretty arbitrary and encodes assumptions about the underlying technology and environments the vehicle is supposed to implement and operate in.
The SAE autonomy scale is about dividing responsibility between the driver and the assistance system. The lowest revel represents full responsibility on the driver and the highest level represents full responsibility on the system.
If there is a geofenced transportation system like the Vegas loop and the cars can drive without a human driver, then that is a level 5 system. By the way, geofencing is not an "SAE level 5" requirement. Geofencing is a tool to make it easier to reach requirements by reducing the scope of what full autonomy represents.
Thanks for reading! They are arbitrary, but they're just as arbitrary as SAE's levels, it's just that I'm not a standards body or anything. I am more interested in the underlying technology than the politics of it all because that's what's more interesting to me. Maybe if I update to call them milestones or some other analogy rather than levels I can get it to stick.
The geofence isn't a feature, its a safety mechanism.
The geofence is there to keep a system inside its safe operating area. The point of level 5 is that it doesn't need a pre-computed map to be safe, it can safely and autonomously navigate an unknown area.
Its the same for meta, literally you could remove 2/3 of the head count and not have a problem with productivity (assuming you could not impact morale)
reply