Small stickers on the ground trick Tesla autopilot into steering into opposing traffic lane

In some places where contractors don’t bother to paint over old markings, it’s a damn necessity.

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Doubling down on a spelling mistake, huh?

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Seriously? Drunks, drug impaired (cocaine, pot, meth, ecstasy, lsd, whatever) drivers are not capable of driving while under the influence. Add road rage and humans are just as capable of poor driving as unproven autonomous driving programs have already shown.

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There’s probably a large tutorial accompanying every Tesla whether onscreen or owner’s manual to alert drivers about when not to use AP. Construction zones are probably one area to avoid using autonomous driving as signage and road markings are altered. This can confuse some drivers and mess with AP. There is no such thing as 100% autonomous driving. Everyday examples are showing how foolish some Tesla drivers are, attempting to test boundaries most sane drivers would presume as hazardous. YouTube videos prove new members lining up for the Darwin award.

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Well if you live any where in the NYC tri-state area pretty much there is permanent construction everywhere. So basically Tesla’s autopilot is mostly useless in these states? ha

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image

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To be fair, Toyota had some major firmware defects that could cause unintended acceleration.

http://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRUBBED.pdf

Granted, this wasn’t studied in connection with Prius models. The link is a slide deck from an expert witness who studied the source code in a case where the jury decided that a Camry did have an unintended acceleration that caused a fatality.

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Imagine that!

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If you are comparing apples-to-apples, I don’t think the numbers could possibly pencil out. I don’t know of anyone who operates a rental property as a nonprofit. Maintenance, insurance, etc. are costs for renters as well as home owners. It just gets passed through the landlord, instead. Unless you are talking about ephemeral savings due to economies of scale, expenses are the same for the owners of rental properties as they are for individual owners. Even the economy of scale factor goes away with a condominium property, where the maintenance and insurance expenses are amortized over a large number of owners, similar to the same property as a collection of rentals.

To sum up, for any for-profit rental property, the same property wholly owned by the resident is going to be cheaper over time for an owner vs. renter. The landlord is making money somewhere, somehow.

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I don’t want autonomous cars on the road unless they are “level 4” - in other words, I can take a nap, read a book or play gin rummy with another passenger while traveling.

Because a level 2 or 3 car - one which requires the driver to monitor the road at all times without actually driving - is more dangerous than a car which is entirely human operated. It’s a recipe for inattention and distraction. We should have learned that by now given the recent experience of the aviation industry.

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Aircraft autopilots have been under continuous development since the late 1920’s. And the airways and air navigation infrastructure is standardized pretty much worldwide, with navaids that can talk to all but the simplest aircraft.

Yet with all that history and experience, no airline today allows its planes to fly without pilots. This does not bode well for the arrival of autopiloted cars in the near future.

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Am I the only person who is disturbed by the repeated misspelling of “perturbation” in the article tags?

OK, I guess I wasn’t the only one bothered by that.

Not to mention that when planes are flying under full autopilot they’re generally not very close to any other objects, and it would take more than just a second or two of wonky behavior to plow the plane into something hard.

We’ll definitely get to the point where self-driving cars are far safer than human drivers, but it’s pretty dang hard to control and plan for for all the weird edge cases.

Not when they’re sleeping, though! Some people unfortunately take the “autopilot” moniker too seriously.

Metrorail work caused a lane shift on a road I use for commuting and even after 6 years people are getting surprised by the repainted lines. Every day there is a traffic jam and near misses (plus many actual accidents) where the old lines were ground off but still remain visible in certain lighting conditions like evening rush hour.

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Except they don’t. They typically have no measure of their model uncertainty and they have big null spaces that map to goodness knows what with high confidence. Hence lots of scope for adversarial attacks.

Edit: This is from someone that actually understands it all properly (unlike me).

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In a normal economy, that’s true, but in places where housing has been upended by excessive, well, investment, then landlords, especially those who bought in before the market explosion, can easily charge rent below a comparable mortgage. This was true for most of the Bay Area for the 15 or so years I lived there.

See also the previous articles about real estate as a money laundering tool…

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i think that’s probably not totally true. there are some places ( apartment buildings ) where you’re getting economies of scale.

and something similar probably happens for landlords who can act as maintenance or building contractors themselves, or for businesses with enough properties that they can negotiate contracts for maintenance and upkeep.

[edit: oh! and better mortgage rates. kind of also an economy of scale.]

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Condos are basically owned apartments with exactly the same economies of scale.

As well as home owners who do their own maintenance.

I was referring to situations where all else is equal. If you tilt the scales one way, then you can certainly get a different result. But you can tilt it the other way, too. I bought my home early in the property value rise, and my mortgage payment is less than half it would take to rent my own home from myself.

There are definitely people who simply can’t afford to buy, whether it’s a small condo or a McMansion. Renting is often the only option. However, when there is an option for one or the other, equal residences, buying is going to save money over renting in the long run.

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