"And, I'm sorry, how long have we been tracking it. I'm not going to go into all the details because I don't want to reveal sensitive information. But I will say we have been tracking it for some time. And we have had custody of it the entire time it has been over U.S. airspace, entered the continental United States airspace a couple of days ago."
I can believe that they've been tracking it for awhile, but it is unlikely that they can easily shoot it down. We probably literally don't have the technical capacity to do so reliably at this time.
I think it only makes sense for battlefield surveillance if its augmenting some small gap in existing ISR operations, combined with UAVs + satellites + whatever other aircraft. it definitely would not replace any of those aforementioned vehicles/technologies wholesale.
I don't think so. I don't know what altitude its at but I imagine aerodynamic control surfaces would not be that effective. F-22 would be better, which is what we deployed.
the ISR payload tends to be massively less as well, with a balloon compared to a satellite, since balloon payloads need to be really small. they are basically an obsolete technology since the development of reconnaissance satellites, UAVs, etc, so I really doubt this is collecting much valuable intelligence. also shooting down satellites is definitely a sketchy area (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon) because of in-space collisions etc.
also note in the DOD press briefing they stated that this was markedly different than previous incursions due to primarily the duration of loitering.
also what are these comments..? openly lauding an adversarial state which is conducting flagrant surveillance operations in the continental united states? yikes.
Not everybody here on HN is from US. Not everybody automatically likes that US can do whatever they want, wherever they want and its fine because dubious reasons at best, but as soon as anybody else does same its outrage, terrorists and other blahs that look frankly laughable to most folks outside US. TBH its mostly the opposite, world is fed up with that for past 20 years since it brought just tons of evil, death and fucked up whole regions for generations to come. Even most democratic and US aligned countries are fed up with that. Don't forget more than 95% of mankind doesn't live in US.
This is definitely one of those situations. If US can fly spy planes over say Russia or China, why shouldn't they be allowed the same? If you shoot their stuff, they can shoot yours. Fair game I say (not dragging current russian war in ukraine into this, to which I am strong opponent and even donated my own drone to AFU when it started).
Thats interesting. I assumed narco subs fell into DHS/USCG jurisdiction and since they have no ASW/ASuW functionality (I think?), getting the USN involved seems kinda overkill? Am I wrong?
As an engineer I can't help but be kind of impressed with narco subs, especially traversing the atlantic from south america to europe. I wonder where this arms race will go: unmanned narco subs? weaponized narco subs?? yikes.
By "hunt" he means "they're on the list of things we listen for and track and when the sonar guy finds one we pass the tip to the guys on land who'll pass it to the coast guard"
A submarine isn't gonna blow its cover to conduct what's basically a wet traffic stop except maybe in some edge case circumstances and even if they wanted to there's a bunch of other ancillary reasons not to do that.
Not that I know of, but I guess elements of the USCG can be seconded by the USN to assist in a law-enforcement capacity? it makes sense that the maritime forces get to play together though.
This is correct. The USCG often rides along with the Navy in order to conduct blue-water LE operations, as the Navy and DoD are barred from LE by Posse Comitatus.
Navy has vastly more maritime resources than the USCG and will pass info, but doesn't board ships or engage in pursuit on it's own.
It's actually a good system, as the difference between Defense and LE is important to maintain.
Depends on where. International waters? No problem. Close to shore? Need LE backup to be legal.
Navy VBSS teams can and do run interdictions on the regular in open seas.
The movie Sicario is basically premised off this idea of getting a LE Officer onboard for legality’s sake.
kind of amusing to say that, given the reason this is occurring is because the US is an incredibly popular country for immigrants to flock to improve their QOL and give their kids the best opportunities even though they know they're entering on non-immigrant visas. Yeah USCIS is infamously glacial and the visa situation these people are in is extremely frustrating, yet they persevere to live in the US.
That's the crux though, no? The US could be a legitimately incredible place, and there are glimpses of that all the time. The fact that her parents were able to immigrate and raise their child there is a great success story. I won't hesitate to say they contributed to the US's economy and tax system as much as any native born citizen. But then the US turns around and does this to the children of immigrants who would continue to contribute meaningfully?
It's insanely wasteful, destructive, short-sighted and, most of all, cruel.
If I had to describe the US in one sentence, that would be it. If I had to present an example of how paradoxically destructive the system is in the US, I'd pick her story, because it's oddly reflective of probably most stories I hear out of the US. Great deeds marred by evil, intentional or not.
The US has by far the most foreign born residents of any country, and is always in the top 2 or 3 countries accepting immigrants every year! So, if you're going to measure the cruelness of a country by the immigrants they take in, the US would fair well on that scale.
I mean basically everyone I know is either a first, second, or third gen immigrant.
Tell that to the 19 year old girl who might get deported and who'll lose the only life she knows. I'm sure it'll comfort her to know how good other immigrants have had it. Cruelty can't be measured the way you're trying to.
I feel like this idea of no need for responsibility is a massive trend in the US here and imo it needs to stop. You are completely blaming the us here when in fact the responsibility of this is on the parents. If the law had changed then while the child was growing up, sure say this is cruelty on the part of the US but in this case if you are going to say its cruelty then that cruelty falls on their parents who knowingly put them in this position.
If I tell you not to go to the top of mount Everest as you will die and no one will come save you, then you choose to go to the top of Everest and freeze is who is at fault? The Nepal government or you? Imo that is 100% your fault.
I'm just not going to reply to the heartless comments from (clearly) Americans. I don't have an infinite amount of time nor the responsibility to teach any of you compassion or economic common sense.
It's a tragic story, but it is simply not the story of the US. There are lots of people looking out for Dreamers, too, I'd be surprised if she wasn't able to stay when it's all said and done.
I moved from the US to a northern European country. Taxes are high, but not as high as taxes + health insurance premiums + copay was in the US.
And I can tell you this: If I were to have children, they are going to have plenty more opportunity here than they would if I still lived in the US. Even if they are poor, they are likely to have food, housing, and medical care.
If you lack things like food, housing, and medical care, moving to the US might seem like a viable option, though.
I want to make one thing clear: the US is paradise for immigrants.
You would not believe the pure economic calculations and soullessness that my northern European country visits upon refugees and migrants.
The State is an all powerful and all encompassing entity that crushes anyone in its path.
This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO.
Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) if you want autonomous cars to work with anything less than AGI. Until companies start pursuing that, they are actually unknowingly using all that money to push for AGI and obviously coming up short because they don't even understand what they are trying to do.
Why should we change city infrastructure to work with less than AGI driven cars? It sounds instead like yes, AV companies are over selling what they can do and they should be restricted to things like highways and the like where the easier, less complex driving environment already exists.
Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in cities, cars should be much more restricted because of health effects and traffic deaths, and the less complex areas (highways) are already the bulk of the drudgery in driving, but are much easier to automate, so why not do it for there?
Not all driving outside city areas happens on the highways.
My brother lives in the countryside (somewhere in the EU), and, as a driver, he shares the paved road just outside his house with the village’s cows (including his two cows). I don’t see any non-AGI system being able to negotiate that, as at times is difficult even for me, a reasonably AGI system, to make sense of it all when I encounter a herd of loose cows on the road.
Sparsely populated rural areas are really the only place where personal autos make sense. Long distance highway travel is better serviced by train. And transportation inside the city is better serviced by literally anything except a car (bikes, e-bikes, subway, trams, scooters, walking).
Even cities with decent public transport networks (such as Prague) tend to have a problem with tangential relations. Most lines go from some periphery to the center and to another periphery. If you need to travel between two peripheries, you have to be somewhat lucky to have a line connecting them at your disposal. Going through the center and back to the other periphery is possible, but usually takes too long. (e.g. 1h 30 min instead of 15 minutes by car).
Having kids makes car sharing very unattractive. Finding car sharing with enough (and high quality) car seats can be quite challenging. And as much as I like public transport, with kids using the car is often much faster.
And this is just a single clip. The huge advantage Tesla has is their massive amount of training data. If it happens in the real world, they probably have a clip of it and can train on it.
One good reason is to help the AIs make better decisions through greater certainty. For example, if a road sign has machine readable data there is a greater certainty that an AI will interpret it correctly. This could affect safety and ease of implementation.
The question is what value would a city get after, what seems to be, a very expensive process? What value do they get from unlocking semi competent AI cars that's worth the time, effort, and requires dedicated street space and an inconvenience to everyone else who travels a different way? It doesn't seem like it's replacing public transit and if someone needs a private vehicle to go beyond the area that's optimized they'll need a different transportation solution. It seems like a lot of cost for a very small benefit.
A very small benefit for society but potentially a very large benefit for a select few stakeholders.
Musk largely became the richest person on the planet off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do), nobody else would have the battery production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production), AND the promise of fully self driving cars (which will happen for Tesla immediately after flying cars).
I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption: a few benefit at the cost of everyone else.
> off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do)
That just simply not true. He became one of the richest people in the world when Tesla cracked really high volume productions of EVs at a quite amazing margin. That is what people didn't believe was possible when they did it in 2018.
And at the same time SpaceX, where Musk owns much more stock off, managed to re-usability operational and started to launch Starlink.
> production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production)
Tesla is by far largest BEV producer in the world so its actually true. And if you think all Tesla does is partnering with Panasonic you have not been paying attention.
Telsa has its own battery production and also is one of the largest costumers of CATL, LG and Panasonic. For quite a while Panasonic and Tesla have co-developed technology that Panasonic can just sell to anybody.
As you can see, Tesla has to be both a producer and a major consumer of most battery companies in the world to achieve the volume they do.
And others can not simply replicate it because the industry is supply constraint.
> I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption
Tesla is the largest BEV producer in the world, and just recently made a larger profit then Ford/GM combined (if I remember correctly). Tesla has industry leading margin and is still the fastest growing car company of any size.
SpaceX is one of the most advanced technology companies in the world and I don't think you will find anybody serious who disagrees with that.
The only argument you have that makes sense is that Musk over-promised Self-Driving. That is certainty true, but I wouldn't call it corruption. And I don't think that today the stock price of Tesla is hugely inflated by this as there is so much pessimism on self-driving.
If Tesla or SpaceX were to disappear tomorrow nobody would experience any existential crisis.
If you disappeared Microsoft, Apple or Amazon or Walmart overnight the whole economy would come to a halt. Same for JPMChase,WellsFargo, BoA etc.
Musk is the first guy to reach the top of the Forbes list while being at the helm of an aspirational company, not one that is structurally important one in the present.
It’s a dangerous precedent, and in fact soon enough it was repeated when bitcoiners and owners of exchanges such as Coinbase and FTX reached the top 10 of the Forbes list.
This is an awesome point, you put into words something I couldn't describe very well. A large part of the current economy, in multiple fields, is aspirational, not foundational.
It's an enormous benefit to society. A huge number of people are killed or seriously injured in car crashes every year. Plus the quality of life benefits and reduction in property damage.
How is my example, street signs, an inconvenience to others or needs dedicated street space? Signs need to be replaced anyway, just add a code at the next replacement.
You're thinking back and white "it's not replacing...". What does that matter? To me what matters is "can we make transport better"
I thought the question was "can we actually make fully autonomous vehicles?" If we have that, the value is pretty obvious.
Then someone spray paints the sign, a taxi parks in the bike lane just behind a box truck blocking half the entrance to where you're going, meanwhile a cyclist rides the other direction directly toward you because human agents are chaotic and cities are full of them. Oh, a racoon!
Less tongue in cheek: I think we should optimize city centers for human scales and activities, rather than sending cars right through them at all. We already sacrifice so much for cars in their current state, if we have to optimize for their mobility even moreso we are going in the wrong direction I feel.
I'm not saying get rid of cars, just keep them out of the denser parts of cities and the CBD. Put them on roads, not streets.
Cars should just be blocked from cities unless very special situations. Removing cars from cities has huge health and economic benefits. Car free city centers are universally better then car invested cities.
Cars where they are still allowed should move significantly slower, on much thinner roads.
Self-Driving will not solve anything for cities. They will solve even less then EVs.
This bullshit shows up in every HN thread on autonomous vehicles. Really only on HN. It's wrong, uninformed, and won't seem to go away.
The challenges self-driving cars have nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the other moving objects on the road. It's not that the vehicles can't detect the other things on the road. It's that they can't anticipate reliably what they're going to do.
(However you may be correct that we need AGI or something close to it to do autonomous vehicles robustly)
Object detection is an issue, but it doesn't only apply to "moving" objects. The current state of the art is having trouble differentiating between a "solid" stationary object like a tire or chunk of metal that must be navigated around, and something like an empty plastic bag that can be safely ignored. Regarding infrastructure, AVs also seem to have a lot of trouble with faded lane lines on roads.
If you're relying only on cameras, then yes, that's an issue. Level 4 vehicles can locate themselves without the need for lines on the road. Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time.
> Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time
This doesn’t scale. This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
There’s also no such thing as a Level 4 Autonomous vehicle. It doesn’t exist.
Many of the original Google self-driving car project members came over directly from Google Street view, which has since scaled all over the world. Autonomous vehicles have big scaling issues, but it's not the maps holding them back.
Street view is not an ultra-HD map for autonomous driving. Cruise isn’t using street view, or anything so primitive and easy to collect in comparison, to navigate SF. And it doesn’t scale in and of itself without being backed by a search ads monopoly that prints money at will.
Telsa doesn't have such ultra-HD maps at all. They build some maps for some simulations and training but the car does not locate itself in such maps when driving.
> Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube
This is certainty not what Tesla does, from Tesla vehicles you will find literally 1000s of videos uploaded by Testers on every possible routes.
And Tesla has also never relied on VC funding for any of its self-driving tech.
> Telsa doesn't have such ultra-HD maps at all. They build some maps for some simulations and training but the car does not locate itself in such maps when driving.
They do have such maps, but only for the routes of their demo videos. That’s the entire accusation — it’s a Fugazi. A man behind a curtain. A mechanical Turk. Fake.
I have never seen a Tesla perform as well as the one in that video in ANY user video. I drove a Model 3 with FSD for 4 months and it never came close to performing that well. Not even close. They either recorded a special map for that scam video, drove the route a thousand times and took the best recording, or both.
> This is certainty not what Tesla does, from Tesla vehicles you will find literally 1000s of videos uploaded by Testers on every possible routes
In the real videos, the cars fail to navigate simple scenarios constantly. You can’t even watch the videos without cringing at the constant mistakes and dangerous maneuvers. For Pete’s sake, just search “Tesla phantom braking” on YouTube and behold.
> And Tesla has also never relied on VC funding for any of its self-driving tech.
No, just unsophisticated customers paying $12k for vaporware and massive government subsidies. So sorry — they’re not scamming VCs. Just real customers and the taxpayers.
Well, it's been mostly done once with Google maps and street view. Presumably once it was done once and in use cities would have a vested interest in keeping it updated themselves. Judging by how many large potholes stick around for years near me I wouldn't keep my hopes up about it being well maintained though
This pretty much. You've got to be able to rapidly identify everything you see and predict what it's reasonably likely to do, which sounds like an AGI-scale problem.
Unless… the infrastructure change they propose is removing the “other things on the road”. Sounds brilliant. You could call that system a “rail” road as the cars would be on rails in a manner of speaking
This is where I see the problem being with autonomous vehicles, too. They can only react to other vehicles, they can't predict them.
Humans are good at predicting.
You don't consciously know you've seen the guy a couple of cars in front checking his mirror and his shoulder but you're hanging back because you just know he's going to pull out any second. The guy that's wavering a bit in the middle lane is about to dash across to the far lane of the sliproad that's coming up, clipping the zebra stripes a bit, because he's concentrating on the sat nav not the road, but you just know - out of all the other drivers in your space at the moment - that red Ford is the one that's going to do something boneheaded.
Autonomous Vehicles won't be able to do that, probably not ever.
I recently drove a rented Tesla 3. On a highway in Norway it failed to detect speed limit signs in like 25% of cases. And if the speed limit sign was a temporary one due to road repairs it failed with those like 50% of times.
And this is with stationary objects designed to be seen and easily grasped by humans.
Teslas do not read speed limit signs or basically any signs other than stop signs, including not reading “Do Not Enter” street signs. It is using the wrong speed limit because their maps do not list the correct speed limit.
Signs are nice but the simplest way to know the speed is to store it in a database and look it up from position.
In fact roads should have barcoded position markers everywhere. That way you could navigate without gps and all road signs could become virtual. Just download a road marker update.
That's not really how speed limits work though. People take their cues from road design and conditions, not what the speed limit actually is. Virtually changing speed limits is dangerous because it causes you to think you are altering the behaviour of traffic without actually doing so.
This reminds me of something the Rocket League devs said. Something to the effect that bots wouldn't be effective at the game because it's too challenging.
This is -not- my line of work, so I have no idea if that's true. But if it is, I don't see how we could have perfectly safe self driving vehicles.
Teslas, despite the ludicrous promises of "full self-driving in 6 months, just you wait", completely choke if there is so much as a traffic cone or a road-work barrier for it go around.
But here is Karpathy explaining how vision can be used to measure distance to objects accurately[0]
Here is the fact that LiDAR doesn't work in the rain[1]: "... In heavy rain, for example, the light pulses emitted from the lidar system are partially reflected off of rain droplets which adds noise to the data, called 'echoes'."
Which logically implies you need to revert to vision, as see [0] also for why Radar is unreliable.
Extra sensors also generate a lot of extra complexity in fusing all the sensors into a common consistent view of the world. And if your goal is just 'more data' then you might as well just add more cameras, that's also 'more data'. I guess what you wanted to say way 'diverse data'.
As with everything else there are benefits and costs to those approaches.
Cars are bad. Electric cars are a bit better than ICE cars, and self-driving cars might one day be better than human-driven cars. But they're still terrible: they're still big, inefficient, polluting, loud, dangerous, and take up precious space. Cars are completely unsuited to cities, and cities which are designed around cars are terrible.
This to say: the future is having cars removed from cities entirely. Focusing on self-driving technology, or on electric cars as if they're going to "save the planet", is entirely the wrong direction imo.
EV promotes energy independence of a country. In the worst case they can use electricity from coal that is widely available on this planet. And as long as the coal plant is modern they still will generate less CO2 than petrol-based cars.
Personally, I think while probably too futuristic large drones that are autonomous and deliver people would be safer. Its arguably easier to avoid objects when you can dodge in 360 degrees of direction.
It's also easier to avoid pedestrians as most can't fly.
It also could save on gas and energy as you can go directly as a bird flies to your destination instead of taking 20 minutes it takes 3.
Of course this would be a huge infrastructure ordeal as well probably and require a damn good system as you don't want vehicles landing on houses all over the place, but it'd be amazing for people with long commutes.
You could probably have airbuses that pick up like 30 people say in a small town and fly them to the city to be delivered individually by smaller vehicles locally. What took 45 minutes, now maybe takes 15.
These would be better if maybe electric with gas as an emergency backup system, and then just have good batteries and solar power fuel most trips.
Make the boardwalk wider (so you can have fun things like restaurants on the boardwalk), add 2 direction bike lanes on both side and have thin single direction car lane in the middle.
I live in a small American suburb, have lived in large cities, and travel to Europe, NYC, LA, SF on the regular. And I wouldn’t trade my car and the ability to drive somewhere for anything in the world.
There are a lot of great things about cities but you are dependent on other people for everything in your life, and it can go sideways incredibly fast. I.e the energy situation in Europe, or with COVID-19. Personally I don’t know how it’s not obvious to the millions of people who live in places like that.
I always imagined the future of self driving cars wouldn't lie in cities (except maybe some main ringroads or arterial roalds) but in highways. Just tell the computer to go to highway X exit Y, and from there the driver can drive the last few miles.
Basically geofencing known 'sane' locations, which cuts down on the boring bits of driving significantly.
And then in those safe geofenced locations we could put down metal guide rails so that navigation is easier. And then use metal wheels with flanges to reduce rolling resistance. And then hook many cars together into one long vehicle. And ...
That could be more than just a joke though: special lanes for computerized slipstream driving could make cars and trucks approach railroad efficiency. A "driver agent" posts its itinerary to the routing network, finds peers going the same direction at roughly the same time, accelerates/decelerates to find them and hook (contactlessly) into the moving paceline, at a position that fits the vehicle's frontal area (you wouldn't want small cars breaking the slipstream between trucks). The routing network bills some of the slipstream savings on behalf of the vehicle(s) in less favorable positions at the front.
Like the visionary dream of individually routed rail cars, but built bottom-up, with cars/trucks that are perfectly useful in standalone driving on regular roads. And it could scale even closer to rail: perhaps some long-haul connections get metal rails integrated in the floor like tram rails, that some long-haul trucks with a special bogey option could slot in, in the fly? That would be an impressive stunt if performed by humans, but easy for computers. Perhaps some connections add overhead wires? Perhaps some trucks, with the overhead wire pantograph option, add a robotic power handover arm because that's cheaper than wear and tear on two pantographs? Could all start bottom up, with few installations.
I'd be impressed a train service that had 8 parallel lines plus dedicated lines at each station so that it was economical for 1-5 people to alight directly at their destination.
That would be great. But the minute I have to get out of my car to get in another vehicle to then get in another car at my “destination” then you’ve lost me.
Are there even any racing/sim games with solved driving AI? All the ones I can think of cheat, replay hardcoded paths, and/or are terrible. And thats with perfect information about the world and other cars.
Those games ai systems get substantially less budget and time than the automakers. There's also been a lot of talks about players not really having fun with ai that is too good, the players will always assume the ai is cheating whenever it out maneuvers them if you make it too well done
Practically all the AI-assisted automation systems I'm familiar with, whether its identifying objects in an image or parsing documents, have the same problem. They work for 90-95% of problems but get trumped up by edge cases and a human has to intervene.
That's not a problem when you're transcribing a video, but becomes a matter of life and death when you're driving a car.
> autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans.
This is really an astonishingly large claim without any evidence.
I question if you understand what AGI actually is? It's not "AI that can solve game theory" or "AI that can play cooperative games" - conventional video game AI's do this all the time in a myriad of permutations.
Statements about X specialized task requiring AGI are questionable now, just like they were questionable when they were said about Chess, Go and Video Games.
Show me a chess engine that can deal with a chess peice that has been mangled so you can only tell what it is with context clues. Also a plastic bag occasionally obscures one of the other pieces. There's also construction on one side of the board every few turns that it has to route around using lanes that arnt normally legal. It has to do this while a drunk human is also moving the pieces, sometimes in ways that arnt legal, and if it takes too long it can hit a wall and die
"And, I'm sorry, how long have we been tracking it. I'm not going to go into all the details because I don't want to reveal sensitive information. But I will say we have been tracking it for some time. And we have had custody of it the entire time it has been over U.S. airspace, entered the continental United States airspace a couple of days ago."