Paean to FSD, Tesla Automatic Driving

I drive a Tesla Model 3 that has "FSD," full self driving. It is a safer driver than me or anyone else I know. I never touch the accelerator or brake pedals, and I never use the steering wheel. It has avoided two accident accidents in the last week. One of those near-misses was dramatic. I had merged onto w/b Clayton Road in Ballwin. I was in the right lane. All of a sudden, my car lurked to the right (toward the shoulder) and I was thinking "what's going on?" The car reacted like a cat before I even knew what was happening. Just then, a car driven by a crazed maniac came within 2 inches of smashing the left side of my car. My car immediately moved 2 to 3 feet to the right upon seeing that car approaching with its left side and rear cameras.

The car's reaction time is instant, whereas human reaction time would be one and a half seconds. It is is able to see things that I cannot see, and this is also often critically important. In this case, I was looking ahead. If you review postings on X you will see dozens of these cases of near accidents that were recorded by the dash cam of the Tesla owner involved. In some of them, lives were saved without doubt. My passenger was amazed when this happened (as was I) and we both concluded that in five years, all new cars will be self driving.

This was two days after the car drove my co-counsel and I all the way to Jefferson City for a court hearing and back (about 250 miles) without any human intervention except where a traffic light was burned out. I nudged it through the intersection although it actually would have eventually figured that out too if I had just given it a chance (based on prior situations). It drives through construction zones without any hesitation, ignoring the road, signs and road markings and, instead, follows the construction zone signs. This technology is truly something to behold and the FSD software is continually being updated, just like with an iPhone.

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About Tesla Self-Driving (FSD)

Four months ago I bought a Tesla Model 3. Prices have fallen over the years. The base model (already loaded with features) is now $38K with a range > 300 miles. For those who haven't yet experienced self-driving, you are in for a treat. The software (now vers 14.2) is incredibly smooth, intuitive and safe. Stats show it's 7 times less likely to get into a major or minor collision than when you drive a car yourself. This technology has already saved many lives. The self-driving completely handles the car, but at this point you still need to supervise-you sit in the driver's seat and watch this miracle unfold, trip after trip. The plan is that eventually all Teslas (including those currently on the road) will be completely self-driven and won't need any human supervision. If you are not on a public road (e.g., a store parking lot), you can already use your phone app to summon your car from its parking spot to pick you up at the door.

The self-driving relies on 8 cameras and AI, which it shares with hundreds of thousands of Teslas already on the road. It emulates human vision, which requires an immense amount of data compression. As Elon Musk explains: "The single biggest technical challenge of Tesla self-driving AI is context compression of 1.5GB/s of video to ~2kB/s of control outputs using a puny inference computer without making any mistakes. Super hard to avoid overly lossy compression at any given step."

Even if you are not in the market for a car, if you're curious about the technology, go take a self-drive at a dealer. Every time I've introduced a friend to self-driving, it has been a jaw-dropping experience. And that's in additional to all the other safety and performance features on this amazing computer on wheels. And the base price includes an 8-year battery guaranty and 4-year bumper to bumper warranty.

BTW, I'm not getting paid to write this. This is an amazing car and many people aren't aware of this technology because Tesla does very little paid advertising. Its happy customers spread the word for Tesla.

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Our Demon Haunted World

Carl Sagan:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

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Discover Speechify: Enhance Your PDF Experience

With Speechify. I can multitask and boost productivity with natural voice capabilities. I cannot say enough good things about Speechify. I've scanned most of my books over the years and I have saved them, as well as thousands of articles, in Dropbox (as pdfs). Now, with Speechify everything in my vast collection can be read out loud to me as I'm working out, cooking, cleaning. It's as if everything I own as a pdf can now be a podcast. You can also have Speechify read a live web page.

Further, they offer dozens of natural sounding voices in various languages. I've been listening to articles in Spanish (at slightly reduced speed) and it has been very helpful for improving my Spanish. I'm not making any commission for this recommendation, but I wanted to share this because I just discovered Speechify and it is a game-changer for me. Maybe some of you are looking for this capability on your phone or laptop. If so, consider Speechify. It's not free, but for me it will totally be worth $140/year.

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