Sunday, September 17, 2023

Scaling

Never occurs to our very stable genius that this is a problem for everyone, and therefore the concept.

 

The scoop comes from Walter Isaacson's new biography of the tech magnate, simply titled "Elon Musk." Per its chapter on the launch of the driver assistance tech, Musk would learn firsthand that a curve on Interstate 405 caused Autopilot, thrown off by the road's faded lane lines, to steer into and "almost hit" oncoming traffic. 

 Whenever this happened, Musk would "furiously" storm into the Tesla office and proceed to chew out his engineers.

"Do something to program this right," he repeatedly demanded, as quoted in the biography.

Paid to have all the lanes repainted. Amazing stuff.

Clearly, nothing was getting through to Musk. It was only his chief of staff Sam Teller that was able to appease his CEO's complaints. He came up with a simple solution: getting the lane lines repainted on that pesky curve — which of course, didn't actually address the underlying problem.