Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[unk45]

hand made Rolls Royce production is about 14 per day

Yes but the core is BMW so there is much they need not do.
OTOH I cannot imagine a rational explanation for GM, much less one that would
provide expiation for their decades of indolence.
OTOH, traditionally GM top management were finance people. Mary was meant to be an exception. As someone who long ago made money from GM I am confident that nothing human can fix their woes.

 

[JoRoMo]

I posted this yesterday and it was deleted by the Mods !!. Humor banned in TMC?
I even put a smiley at the end just in case someone was confused..

View attachment 916079

I felt upset that this fake was not marked as such, even though it was quite obvious. It’s just not something we should do, or allow, IMO.

Edit: Without saying so, that is.

 

[Electroman]

I think its worth breaking the FSD challenge into 3 bits:

1. Getting data about the surroundings
2. Parsing that data into a 4d representation of your surroundings
3. Deciding how to navigate, given this 4d representation

As a programmer, I reckon 3) is WAY WAY easier than the other 2. This is stuff you can do in plain old-fashioned C++. You probably use a ton of fuzzy logic, and weights, and frankly using a neural net is likely very helpful here too, but its really not that hard, given the insane clockspeed of CPUs, and the relative slowness of the surrounding world.

1) is a hardware issue. Still a big unknown. The difficulty of 2) will depend slightly on 1), but adding cameras gets complex, and expensive very fast. Not just cost of cameras + wiring, but the extra CPU processing of more data...

2) is the meat-and-potatoes. This is the hard stuff. Object recognition in 3D is hard. Object recognition in fog, and rain, with light bouncing off nearby surfaces, water droplet distortion on the lens, mud on another lens... is seriously hard.

TL;DR: FSD is mostly an object recognition challenge. Logic/Planning is flipping trivial. Humans are amazingly good at object recognition, hence it seems easy to us. We suck at maths though.

Good one. And you need to all the 3 in real time in microseconds, and convert that into action on three control you have: accelerator, brake and steering. That is the easy part no doubt, but doing those 4 tasks in sub seconds is a real challenge.

 

[Electroman]

I felt upset that this fake was not marked as such, even though it was quite obvious. It’s just not something we should do, or allow, IMO.

Edit: Without saying so, that is.

Mods could have simply added a comment to that post stating it is fake. Anyway no big deal in deleting that post either.

In future I will mark any such post with a rider, "this is humor and fake"

 

[wtlloyd]

This is a reasonable 'first-attempt' approach, and was (generally speaking) the approach to implementing self-driving that was used in developing Tesla's highway stack and other 'first-attempts'.

There are two key areas which make the Dynamic Driving Task (DDT) a far harder problem to solve than it appears, and hence requires a far different and much harder approach:

1. Human drivers have an understanding of the objects in the world around them and how to interact with them that vehicles do not have. Procedural programming a car to follow the rules of the road could work fairly well for no-traffic (vehicular / bicycle / pedestrian), very well maintained roadways without any foreign objects. Without an understanding of the objects in the world around the car, self-driving likely cannot happen. LIDAR-based solutions are attempting to minimize the need for understanding the objects in the world around them in favor of a focus on object avoidance; this results in many limitations. Tesla's approach is to try to give the car the same understanding of the objects in the world around that a human driver has, based on the same optical-field input that a human has (albeit in 360-degrees). This is an extremely hard problem that the human brain has already solved (and is surprisingly good at, in fact) but which the car needs to solve to be on the same footing as the human driver at the start of the "learning to drive" phase.

2. Human judgement of competing priorities is both A) challenging to replicate in such an approach as the number of one-off edge cases is (for all intents and purposes) infinite, and B) frankly, quite variable from human to human. Even something as simple as "avoid the object ahead of you in the current lane" is often an easy judgement for the human only because of #1, but incredibly challenging otherwise. Is the object even real, or a phantom object based on infinite combinations of lighting / roadway conditions / etc? Is it a small cardboard box or a small piece of wood or a piece of wood with nails sticking up from it? Better to run over it and risk object impact or brake hard and risk being hit from behind or swerve and risk a side collision? Without #1 above, which the human driver already has but the computer driver does not yet have, making judgement calls other than "brake hard to avoid collision with any object" (the LIDAR-based approaches) is very challenging. This is where large training sets of how this judgement call was made by various drivers in similar situations is used to train the neural network to make similar judgement calls, much as the human being a passenger in the car for many years prior to learning to drive taught them by their parents' examples.

This is extremely succinct and helpful, and should be marked of particular value and interest.

 

[lafrisbee]

Why do you like him? Does he help you make money or does he help you feel better about losing it?

he gives me another perspective that seems to be valid. And often helps me feel more comfortable with the market because I am less educated....(i think?)
As to he helps me lose or make money.... he helps me feel better about holding most of the time the stock is going down.

 

[AndrewZ]

I don't think LIDAR is all that different in purpose from the new High-resolution radar, which is now being touted as a cheaper supplement to reduce LIDAR sensors or even a replacement for LIDAR altogether.

You have someone like Ross Gerber who notices this and questions if it's not basically the same thing, and people hit out with "come on Ross, everyone knows LIDAR uses lasers!" Does it matter if it uses lasers or electromagnetic waves? It can shoot out tiny little cake donuts and track whether they hit something, but the end goal would be the same: object detection beyond vision-only, sensor fusion for conditions and situations cameras alone cannot handle, and further risk mitigation.

 

[lafrisbee]

Mods could have simply added a comment to that post stating it is fake. Anyway no big deal in deleting that post either.

In future I will mark any such post with a rider, "this is humor and fake"

Mods don't provide editing nor proof-reading. But just to make sure let me Bob plays mary dibblecan do giblets scream piercing wobbledy bits.

 

[lafrisbee]

Mods don't provide editing nor proof-reading. But just to make sure let me Bob plays mary dibblecan do giblets scream piercing wobbledy bits.

If half of this does not make sense then the mods failed to proofread or edit..if it is all gone they were just pissed.

—

Mod:
Othermod: Yes, to both. --ggr

 

[BrownOuttaSpec]

Article from WSJ on opening of the Tesla network. Written for a basic understanding of charging with some good cost comparisons on charging at home versus the road and comparison to ICE vehicles.

Paywalled. Factual but it does not mention the reliability issues with the other chargers.

How Tesla Opening Its Supercharger Network Alters the EV Charging Map

American car buyers are increasingly choosing electric vehicles, but the country’s map of public highway chargers has a lot of gaps.

www.wsj.com

Nothing ground breaking in that article but there are some informative info-graphs on that page:

 

[mongo]

I don't think LIDAR is all that different in purpose from the new High-resolution radar, which is now being touted as a cheaper supplement to reduce LIDAR sensors or even a replacement for LIDAR altogether.

You have someone like Ross Gerber who notices this and questions if it's not basically the same thing, and people hit out with "come on Ross, everyone knows LIDAR uses lasers!" Does it matter if it uses lasers or electromagnetic waves? It can shoot out tiny little cake donuts and track whether they hit something, but the end goal would be the same: object detection beyond vision-only, sensor fusion for conditions and situations cameras alone cannot handle, and further risk mitigation.

Lasers use electromagnetic waves.
Big difference in frequency (wavelength)
Lidar: 0.75um to 1.5um
Radar: 4mm (76GHz)
A beam is blocked based on wavelength, beam, and object size. Radar beam is larger, lidar is basically points. You only need a opaque particle the size of your lidar ray to block it. Wheras you need something much larger and rf opaque to block radar.

Concider air traffic control uses radar in all weather conditions.

Fermilab | Science | Inquiring Minds | Questions About Physics

 

[growler23]

Nothing ground breaking in that article but there are some informative info-graphs on that page:

View attachment 916096View attachment 916097View attachment 916098

View attachment 916099View attachment 916100View attachment 916101

Thank you! Informative about the article.
I wonder if they included a link to PlugShare, or possibly supercharge.info (still my favorite for the Tesla-only world) so people could get a feel for what these numbers of chargers actually look like for covering a map.

 

[Unpilot]

indolence

avoidance of activity or exertion; laziness.
"my failure is probably due to my own indolence"

I am just a trifle too comfortable with this.

edit to say the 180 tractor beam has been activated.

 

[scaesare]

I’m still waiting on this Elon promise..

https://twitter.com/x/status/629305813912326146

That link is to Tesla sharing the experimental robo-snake charger proof of concept.

Can you please provide the link to Elon's promise to which you refer to waiting on?

 

[Skryll]

Is Tesla exposed to silicon valley bank debacle?

 

[Krugerrand]

I don't think LIDAR is all that different in purpose from the new High-resolution radar, which is now being touted as a cheaper supplement to reduce LIDAR sensors or even a replacement for LIDAR altogether.

You have someone like Ross Gerber who notices this and questions if it's not basically the same thing, and people hit out with "come on Ross, everyone knows LIDAR uses lasers!" Does it matter if it uses lasers or electromagnetic waves? It can shoot out tiny little cake donuts and track whether they hit something, but the end goal would be the same: object detection beyond vision-only, sensor fusion for conditions and situations cameras alone cannot handle, and further risk mitigation.

Let me explain to you why it matters in this case what comes out of his mouth -

*TSLA trading way below its actual value*

Because this guy is part of a much larger group of thieves and scammers.
Because this guy is a *professional * analyst (gets PAID to *know* of that which he speaks!) working on behalf and for the larger group of thieves and bandits.
Because what he says gets used for or against the company, the SP, us retail investors.
Because when he clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about but still feels a need to open his mouth, it adds substance that he’s either in league with the crooks or he’s not half as talented at his paid profession, which in both cases means he can’t be trusted no matter what he says.

I can go on if you like?

I know you want to hold Elon to an impossible standard (I’ve read enough of your posts over the months), let’s see some consistency from you and hold every other person on the planet to the same standard including Ross Gerber.

 

[BrownOuttaSpec]

Thank you! Informative about the article.
I wonder if they included a link to PlugShare, or possibly supercharge.info (still my favorite for the Tesla-only world) so people could get a feel for what these numbers of chargers actually look like for covering a map.

They didn't link to those sites specifically but they showed a zoomed out view of the comparison of charger networks. I didn't include it because I thought it was meaningless and not a useful comparison:

Ideally something interactive like Tesla (supercharge.info) vs Others (fastcharger.info) would have been linked as a helpful comparison for the readers of that article so they could more easily judge locations/routes applicable to them .

 

[FireMedic]

Mods could have simply added a comment to that post stating it is fake. Anyway no big deal in deleting that post either.

In future I will mark any such post with a rider, "this is humor and fake"

I feel like grandpa explaining another downvote, but you’re joking I hope.

Please don’t rely on moderators to modify your posts. If it’s not too much to ask; please proof read your own post prior to hitting that sexy red button. As we’ve seen from MSM; being first isn’t always best.

 

[AndrewZ]

Lasers use electromagnetic waves.
Big difference in frequency (wavelength)
Lidar: 0.75um to 1.5um
Radar: 4mm (76GHz)
A beam is blocked based on wavelength, beam, and object size. Radar beam is larger, lidar is basically points. You only need a opaque particle the size of your lidar ray to block it. Wheras you need something much larger and rf opaque to block radar.

Concider air traffic control uses radar in all weather conditions.

Fermilab | Science | Inquiring Minds | Questions About Physics

The technical aspects are super interesting, but the end purpose is the same. People trying to claim HD Radar is any different from LIDAR in terms of end purpose just seems like missing the forest for the trees, it's a step away from Vision-only and I would fully expect further steps away in the future as we strive to figure out what a generalized Level 4-5 robotaxi even looks like.

 

[generalenthu]

Is Tesla exposed to silicon valley bank debacle?

Can't say for sure, but even if Tesla has some cash at SVB, it is unlikely to be significant and even if it was, they will eventually recover it all. SVB simply is not a bank to serve large corporations like Tesla. May be 10 years ago it would have been a good fit, but not now.

Either way, not much for SVB depositors to worry other than the fact that their immediate liquidity needs may take some time to be met. There is plenty of equity cushion and bond markets are rallying a bit now, paradoxically supporting the investment securities on the balance sheet of SVB.

The longer term issue for startups in the valley seems to be that they have lots of common / preferred / option stakes in a lot of companies they deal with. All these will likely come to market enmasse as FDIC tries to dump it all with no liquidity.

This will likely deepen the recession in Bay area. The startup ecosystem will feel this acutely. This will be a negative for demand in one of the biggest markets, but hopefully be more than offset by a likely lower path that rates will likely take. SVB is after all a pretty big bank to fail. And fail it did with a bang.