I remember hearing a while back that Musk made an executive decision at Tesla to not use LIDAR. I thought: "That's a stupid decision. At least invest in making it better if you think its not sufficient" and I had a quite negative view of his engineering abilities ever since. Seeing as a Tesla can be fooled by a projector these days, I'm willing to die on that hill. I will admit that he is an exceptional businessman, most people would piss away a fortune if given one, but an engineer he is not, not by a loooooooong way.

[–] vis4valentine@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He is now pissing away a fortune with twitter.

[–] vcmj@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

True that, he did good on that front for a while though. He got too confident

[–] TheYang@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, you still need object detection and recognition with lidar, don't want to stamp on the brakes for a leaf.
And using only the primary sense of humans does kinda make sense.

still think it's tough call. Would be great if you don't need it. And don't know how expensive it would have been, especially at the start for all the people needing the hardware but not actually getting the use out of it.

otoh the only really successfull company in the space - waymo - uses it, that seems like a really strong sign

[–] vcmj@programming.dev 10 points 1 year ago

Yeah, in my mind I thought of it more as a "why not" in addition to vision. Like why make it only as capable as the humans its trying to replace when it can have even more data to work with? Probably would have been even more expensive though