First off, GOODBYE JEEP! I will never, ever own one or a Chrysler product again unless it’s free or damn near dirt cheap. To be fair, we did get it at the absolutely worst possible time, during the pandemic. Everyone and their mom was jacking up car pricing and things were stupid. I’ve been flipping cars and buying, driving, and trading in or selling shit since I was a teen; it’s the first time I got a bad deal.
In fact, I sold a 2019 Tesla Model 3 a month after picking it up for MORE than I paid for it! That $50,000 car is worth $28,000 today, hardly two years later, and it was already two years old by when it sold! Brand new Model 3s cost around $37k now and Model Y was… $70,000 during the pandemic and is $34,000-$37,000 now.
I really wanted to try Full Self Driving Beta, the thing that takes you from point A to B. The issue is that it was invite only and locked down and I wasn’t going to play the safety score game. Also, I was very unimpressed by Autopilot, it felt robotic, unreliable and phantom braking was awful. The Open Source alternative, Openpilot, had better quality of autonomy back in 2018.
Now days FSD Beta is basically free game now and from what I can tell (open invite), is pretty damn good from what ride along videos I can find by real life users. Not that you can take a nap, and there will be situations where it’ll be more stressful as it can screw up and you MUST be paying attention. But the promise of your car driving you across town, through stoplights, weaving around tight corners and handling stop signs, stoplights, unprotected turns, etc seems much more realistic than it ever has been.
They are working on what’s called “end to end” and I’ll explain. Right now, they have a self driving stack of around 300,000 lines of code. They hard program policy for the car to drive and as expected, it can often feel pretty robotic. The driving task isn’t a binary thing to solve, there are unlimited edge cases and trying to hard code real life can be just about impossible.
End to end is a method, basically, where you show a machine learning agent what a human does. Shove in camera images/videos of a human driving and where the steering wheel was pointed, gas, brakes. Shove in enough videos and data and by the end of it you get a model that can just kinda magically replicate what a human can do. Instead of being like “Hey, this is a stoplight, stop while red, etc”, the model just inherently learns that the human stops when the light is red, without even knowing what a stoplight is.
It’s kinda like… imagine two setups to fling poo. You can sit down and explicitly program a robotic arm with every single movement needed to pickup the poo, how hard to fling it, etc. Then, you can show a monkey how to. You squat over, shit in your hand, then throw it at the wall. You don’t have to say a word, and they get a banana if they do well. The monkey is likely going to learn how to do it and it’s motivated by a banana. Show the monkey over and over again. Show it at night, in rain, if someone is standing in the way, if the monkey is male or female and has those body parts, if they are tall or short. The monkey more organically learns and if you teach it a million different use cases and situations on how to throw poo, it’s generally going to learn how to do it.
End to end is the monkey. Right now, and why Tesla Autopilot requires lane lines and kinda sucks, especially compared to Openpilot, is that Openpilot has been using what is called a “laneless” model, which uses end to end. They have showed their monkey how to throw poo. Not how to move their arm or every single little millimeter of which joint to exactly move, but example after example of throwing poo and it just figured it out.
Same with speed bumps, stop signs, stop lights, cars pulling in front of you, etc. It just kinda figures it out.
And that’s why we’ve been told self driving is coming every year for a decade now. Well, first off because Elon is a twat, but also because it’s really, really hard. Let’s say that when it’s dark, it’s raining, and the monkey can’t see to the left that it flings poo at children and you don’t want it to do that. You can’t simply tell the monkey what a child is and not to fling poo at it. Instead, you just have to show the monkey that in those situations you don’t fling poo at children by showing it what to do in close enough of those specific situations again, and again, and again so it just learns. Maybe that sounds complex and ambiguous, and that’s my point, and why it’s hard. It’s a round about way of doing things, but closer to how humans actually learn.
And that’s what Tesla is doing come FSD v12, or such is the goal. Of course, you can throw manual policy on top of it like override the monkey when we know for sure it needs to stop, like when we are about to run into a car or something, or it’s clear that we need to turn left. We can manually grab the monkey’s hand when needed.
Anyway, I’m excited to try it out! I think it’s going to capture my wonder and awe that I first had with Openpilot and what led to driving around the neighborhood for 10,000 miles tinkering with things back when Openpilot needed tinkering to work well, I was pretty much completely over my driving anxiety then. This gets me driving, this helps me work on my agoraphobia, this gives me something to think about when doing the hard, scary work of exposure therapy and there’s something comforting about knowing I can let the car take over to some extent. Anxiety is one of those funny things. Anxious drivers are statistically very safe drivers as they are hypervigilant and when I say I can let the car take over, this doesn’t mean I’m not ready to take over at anytime or that I’m not paying attention, that would be very unsafe. More of, it’s just comforting to know that I can delegate some of the driving task when panicking in the car and chill out for a moment while still being in total control, if that makes sense.
Don’t think for a second that I like Elon Musk, however. It’s the most painful thing for me to own a Tesla and I think it’s why Teslas have become cheap enough for me to afford right now. It’s the major reason why I got rid of the Model 3, it was downright embarrassing to be associated with him and the fanboys are even worse.
I have an Anti Elon Tesla Club sticker coming which I will proudly display on the car:
Not that it’ll prevent me from getting keyed. I guess, just like playing the new Harry Potter game, I had to realize that thousands of other people worked to bring it together and just because the leader is a douchebag, doesn’t mean that it has to completely ruin the end result. Harry Potter has a trans character, you can have a trans character. I’m sure there are plenty of people who worked on the game that hate Rowling. It’s still a shame though on some level. I also think that Hybrid cars are more practical and if we actually cared about the environment, we’d have diesel hybrids with 200+ MPG. Alas, instead we have douchebags buying Rivians to virtue signal and greenwash and I suppose I’m a bit of a douche at the end of a day for considering a Tesla, even if I found one cheap.
Anyway.
We received approval for an apartment!!! I’M SO EXCITED! No more having to empty our poo every two weeks! No more 5 minute showers and water pipes freezing up! MORE SPACE! A GARAGE!
We are getting our shit from storage this weekend and honestly, I don’t remember the majority of what’s in there! It’s gonna be like Christmas from my past self.
I’m also feeling about 30% better, I’ve been sick these last two weeks. What started as an ear infection due to sleeping with Airpods in turned into bad vertigo. Now I have the sore throat and sinus headache going around. I’m thinking, honestly, it may just be COVID. My sleep the last few days has been pretty awful, just hard to get to sleep and stay asleep. I also had a breakdown yesterday between lack of sleep, not feeling well, and the stress of so much going on. Our lead is leaving at work and we’ll be down to two people from six in support, which is insane. I literally just hit a point where I caught up my queue.
And that’s about it for now!
Ross's Blog 