Tesla's driverless car software chief steps down

Apparently, microdosing with LSD is a big thing in Silly Valley and similar places. They say it boosts their creativity and insight. It also makes cats very adventurous.

identifying not simply that there is a truck in the picture, but that there is a big white truck with no side impact guards, could be useful. However, spotting that there is a truck there in the first place should hopefully be their priority.

but that it is an orange, spotted cat, riding on a skateboard with red wheels on brown hardwood flooring

If that's their idea of the sort of real world situation that the software needs to cope with, then maybe it's time to introduce mandatory drug testing in the workplace

You mean you *don't* have a ginger, skateboard riding cat at home? Admittedly, none of my ginger-gene cats (one ginger, one ginger and white, one tortie[1], one calico and one black cat with self-tabby marking that I suspect is a closet tortie, based on her behaviour) have shown a propensity to ride said devices, but I don't get to see what they do when I'm not there.

For all I know, my garden could be the local skate park. I cartainly haz enough cat-drugs[2] in it to qualify..

[1] The ginger gene is linked to gender - males are ginger, females are almost always[3] torties or calico cats. It's also epigenetic so, if you were to clone a tortie, the clone almost certainly would have the same coat pattern as the source cat.

[2] We have several large patches of cat mint. We planted a number of them because the original one got eaten down to the stump and then died.

[3] There are some entirely ginger females. They are usually XXY (and so almost always infertile) or torties that only have the ginger epigenetically expressed. And usually, worth a small fortune to breeders[4].

[4] I'm not a fan of breeders generally - especially those that perform matings with very close sanguinuity in order to fix a particular feature. That's how you end up with cats and dogs that can't actually breathe properly or have offspring without requiring a caeserarian.

I suppose it's down to the difference between "seeing computers" and "computers seeing"...

"What Tesla offer is a selection of driver aids which among other things incorporate cruise control, lane-keeping and auto braking, but to call it "driverless" technology is very misleading."

No, if the car can do a trip of 37 minutes before crashing and only 25 seconds of that is with the "driver's" hands on the wheel, that's more than a driver aid - that's something that was designed, intended and expected by the end user to operate as an autonomous driverless system.

Re: I think Uber might have a vacancy.

+1 Beat me to it

Re: I think Uber might have a vacancy.

Uber doesn't need a computer science expert.

What it needs is someone who knows what 'ethics' means and has them. It would also help if this person understands how to fix a toxic company without destroying it.

Re: Not a good fit...

AC related "...I get to check two pages of boxes beside adjectives..."

This appears to be a more scientific and logical process than shaking a mug of chicken bones over your head. Keyword "appears"...

Back in the day, 30-odd years ago, my hiring including 'Handwriting Analysis'. Not joking.

Re: Not a good fit...

In my experience, it generally means "he disagreed with the boss one time too often"

Re: Not a good fit...

Well consider that he left Apple for a new job, and six months in he's letting everyone know he's left Tesla and is looking for a job. That means he was fired.

No way to know under what circumstances he left Apple, but if he told them he was quitting and they wanted to keep him they could have beat Tesla's offer if they considered him valuable enough. If he left Apple on good terms and he was someone they would want back, he probably could have got himself re-hired right after Tesla fired him and wouldn't be putting the word out that he needs a job. So it doesn't look like Apple wants him back, either.

Re: Not a good fit...

I've usually seen that the "good fit" argument is used in cases where you are seen as a threat to the management.

Here's my guess as to what happened here at Tesla. Even though the deaths induced by negligent drivers were not really the fault of Tesla, the gruesomeness of the deaths created a permanent negative association from a PR standpoint. This put an immense amount of pressure on the folks in charge of self driving tech, and charged them with trying to idiot-proof a potentially deadly product that many consumers were already using in the wild.

Because our technology is still unable to deal with particular changes to the environment, we are still a long way away from achieving human-level perception and judgment out on the road. So in a very real sense, autonomous cars are currently impossible, and no single engineer will be able to live up to the promise of delivering a human driver replacement. It will get better with time, but this isn't something that you can ever assign a due date.

Thing is, management and marketers don't like being told that what they want is "impossible". Shareholders demand their payouts on a regular schedule and can't be bothered with the concerns of reality and physics. They deal exclusively in imaginary numbers and slinging bullshit, and all they really want is for the nerds to inflate their egos.

Re: Not a good fit...

Or he was "asleep behind the wheel" ?