<story><title>Comma.ai, self-driving cars and indefinite optimism</title><url>https://mleverything.substack.com/p/commaai-flying-cars-and-indefinite</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>atty</author><text>I think the author is guilty of exactly what he’s accusing everyone else of. The major car companies are delivering relatively high quality products at scale (we have decent certainty it’s high quality because the presence of many of these driver assist features correlate with reduced accidents). And they’re rolling out slowly without a ton of stories of cars going haywire and flying off the road. And of course certain cars will only have certain features (addressing his Ford complaint) because those features require the correct mix of sensors and compute that is not yet present on every vehicle. That’s how technology that can affect personal safety should be rolled out. Slowly, carefully, and very boringly.&lt;p&gt;Releasing “alpha” level software and saying essentially “lol have fun idk” when it can significantly impact customer safety is childish, bad business, morally wrong, and something we as an industry need to move away from. It doesn’t matter if your customer base are early adopters, hackers, or open source supporters. You still owe them their safety and a reasonable and coherent privacy policy.</text></comment>
<story><title>Comma.ai, self-driving cars and indefinite optimism</title><url>https://mleverything.substack.com/p/commaai-flying-cars-and-indefinite</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bri3d</author><text>Python straw man aside, Comma could improve their safety dramatically, today, by documenting their safety systems, requiring a specific, audited checklist for new vehicles to be introduced, producing a real change management and detailed test result report for each release, utilizing a real safety processor in their &amp;quot;Panda&amp;quot; CAN intercept product, and working to reduce their use of bus effects like message-stuffing or first-in-wins racing with CAN control messages where possible.&lt;p&gt;But there&amp;#x27;s no way I would bring this up in their GitHub, for example, because it isn&amp;#x27;t the culture of the project - and that&amp;#x27;s the problem. For example, their &amp;quot;leader&amp;quot; shows up and makes commits to their safety code like &amp;quot;WTF WHY WAS THIS SHIT EVERYWHERE.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;To Comma&amp;#x27;s credit, they have made great strides in safety since the first two years of their product - since 2018, they&amp;#x27;ve introduced safety checks that (while undocumented), seem to be somewhat consistent (or trying to be) across vehicles, are written in MISRA C which is at least something that&amp;#x27;s actually used in the field, and exist at the low level of the system. Commits are signed now, and their founder seems to make fewer non-documenting troll commits to the product. These are all signs that the company is growing up (and, if we look at the history of the company and their leadership, we certainly see some signs as to why this may be the case...).&lt;p&gt;But, these are things that should have been in place since day one, and the founders and company were certainly not unaware. It is absolutely fair to judge products and companies for the decisions they make, ESPECIALLY when their product is purportedly &amp;quot;world-changing,&amp;quot; and in the case of Comma, safety does not seem ingrained into the decision-making process.&lt;p&gt;As an aside, this blog post is killing me, between extensive Peter Thiel quotes, random jabs at California&amp;#x27;s COVID policy, Elon worship, and a lionization of a startup company with an immature founder building safety-related hardware.</text></comment>