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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Heh, I guess I should have phrased that differently.

    But yeah, it’s actually really courteous. Sometimes a little too much. It’ll move over to the left side of the lane if it sees a cyclist or pedestrian on the shoulder to the right. Unfortunately, it doesn’t understand when there’s a 3 ft concrete barrier between me and the pedestrian and will do it anyway. Makes some narrow bridge crossings a little scarier than necessary.


  • The first Model X has Autopilot 1 which was a system designed by Mobileye. Tesla’s relationship with Mobileye fell apart and they replaced it with an Nvidia based system in 2017(?). It was really really bad at the start as they were essentially starting from scratch. This system also used 8 cameras instead of the original 1.

    Then Tesla released AP hardware 3 which was a custom-built silicon chip designed specifically for self-driving which also enabled proper navigation of surface streets in addition to the just highway lanekeeping offered in AP1. This broadened scope of actually dealing with turns and traffic from multiple angles is probably where the reputation of it being dangerous has come from.

    My HW3 enabled Model 3 does make mistakes, though it’s rarely anything like hitting a pedestrian or running off the road. Most of my issues are with navigational errors. If the GPS gets messed up in the tunnel, it’ll suddenly decide to take an exit that it isn’t supposed to, or it’ll get in the left lane to pass someone 1/4 mile from a right-exit.







  • There was an extensive amount of refurbishment required to re-use the SRBs. Not to mention they had to be physically recovered, and salt water certainly made the process more complicated.

    The shuttle itself needed each of its heat shield tiles replaced, which due to the shape of the shuttle were all unique.

    The fuel tank was not reused.

    The shuttle was meant to be a leap forward in rocket reusability, but it didn’t really pan out that way. There’s good reason the program was scrapped and not replaced with another space plane.

    The Starship booster has the potential to launch multiple times per day. The only refurbishment period is how long it takes to refuel it.






  • Moore’s law factored in cost, not just what was physically possible.

    The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.