I worked in wearable electronics back in 2013. At the time, everyone was trying to crack wristworn heart rate monitors. It’s a challenging problem to solve: having to detect a faint color change in human skin while ignoring the massive shifts in ambient light from sunlight to shade all while bouncing around on a wrist.
Different vendors had different solutions and couldn’t even agree on what color LED was best for illuminating the skin.
Anyway, when the next generation of Nike Fuelband came out and didn’t include heart rate monitoring, I’ll never forget one of the comments I saw on a review.
“Come on Nike, it’s not hard to add a heart rate monitor. Just use pulse tracking.”
Same with any game, “how hard is it to detect cheaters‽”. Turns out, very.
Being an engineer, you’ll know that the amount of shit that has to go right to get a single pixel to glow is pretty crazy, some when armchair dickheads that have never written so much as a Hello World say shit like “it’s not that hard!”, it just…
…listen, I’m not a violent man…
Elon:
*leans over shoulder of Tesla engineer, presses Ctrl+N in a code editor and writes this code into the new file*
There you have it. I just wrote the most safety-critical piece of code for Full Self Driving. Now just put it in the right spot in the codebase and sort out the dependencies while I go collect my well-deserved bonus. Don’t bother me with the low-level stuff like computer vision but if you find some new trolley problems the car might need to solve, you know where to find me. And don’t you dare touch this code. It’s perfect, first try. If all of you write code like I do, y’all be drivin’ home in robotaxis by December. I swear, it’s not that hard!Yeah, and nowhere in my code it uses that damn expensive radar. I think we can just do cameras. If I can safely drive by sight only, so can that thing. See, unengineering! Saves so much cost! I think I can have another billion in bonuses just for this.
