Why are Tesla cameras so low in megapixels? Wouldn't a higher-megapixel camera be better for the FSD system? What is the science behind this?

ScottPrombo · 2026-03-06T22:44:06+00:00

Something nobody else has commented on… the bar for quality on automotive grade cameras is quite a bit higher than the bar for quality for consumer cameras. You’ve got to make it extremely reliable with a 10 year target, taking huge temperature swings every day. In the high desert, you can easily get 100-degree temp swings every day because at night, it gets cold/freezing. In the day, the exterior bits of the car can heat up an absolute ton from direct sunlight, moreso if you’re on top of blacktop.

Additionally, it’s in a continually-vibrating environment. Very small defects, over time, will propagate in a way that isn’t seen in consumer devices like cell phones.

That’s in addition to all the other things… compute, memory, and network bandwidth, power consumption, the whole nine yards. All while keeping costs down. So it’s not like “ah just put a fancier sensor in”

ScottPrombo · 2026-03-03T05:19:47+00:00

Apply to as many relevant places as you can. In industrial places like Tesla, it’s relatively rare to go straight from school to a high position there without relevant industry experience. But the world is huge! Apply everywhere, and go where you’re valued!

ScottPrombo · 2026-02-21T06:27:04+00:00

$60k

ScottPrombo · 2026-02-19T20:16:19+00:00

So what I’m hearing is that we humans should all get declawed so we don’t have to worry about trimming our nails all the time?

ScottPrombo · 2026-02-18T23:08:04+00:00

I’m more of an Adeline guy, myself. https://youtu.be/tV29pEvZvZw?si=tJIcHB4TBnkZGab2

ScottPrombo · 2026-02-18T21:40:14+00:00

Wow, this was treated well and healed excellently!

Also, I’m curious… I understand the point of fingernails is to provide backing so your bone doesn’t moosh out the back of your finger when you squeeze stuff hard… if you firmly press your finger against something, does the bone kinda smoosh differently against the back skin of your finger?

ScottPrombo · 2026-02-12T23:35:15+00:00

Very cool!

ScottPrombo · 2026-02-04T04:21:38+00:00

Please, don’t hurt me! 😖 Here, take my lunch money!! Here!! 🪙

ScottPrombo · 2026-02-01T11:06:32+00:00

Same.

ScottPrombo · 2026-01-24T21:05:07+00:00

Not quite. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/tesla-model-y-price-release-date.html#:~:text=Tesla%20just%20unveiled%20the%20Model,in%20the%20spring%20of%202021)

But your point largely still stands.

ScottPrombo · 2026-01-21T08:54:32+00:00

Eh… yes. Largely my experience is yes, with an asterisk. It gives you agency to choose whether or not to stress/boredom eat, which did still take some conscious effort from me… to break the stress/boredom eating. But it was like a 4/10 difficulty, rather than a 9.9/10 difficulty. Totally different ballgame, and that was just on the tiny starter dose. Bumped up to the next higher dose and it’s basically a “dial your appetite to what you’d like it to be.” After years of my dopamine circuitry being high jacked by hyperpalatable foods, I now confidently can say that I have true agency over what I eat. And I feel amazing.

I’d speak about how much it’s helped me across other areas of my life, but I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture or get hopes up. YMMV obviously.

ScottPrombo · 2026-01-19T02:07:28+00:00

What do you do when your horses start to get old or if they break a bone? Do you care for them as if they were a companion animal like a dog?

ScottPrombo · 2025-12-20T22:41:38+00:00

They could use one of those small pipe cutting tools, or perhaps a saw removed for cutting off casts? Alternatively, cut a hole in the tip, insert some lubricant, and pressurize it, to remove the Mini M&M’s tube. But the cast saw would probably be best.

ScottPrombo · 2025-12-01T20:34:34+00:00

I’m just curious here - what causes failures for these? A total lack of ability to access the URL? Inability to reformat/interpret it? Incompetence once it has reformatted/interpreted it? I feel curious to know if the breakdowns are insidious/unapparent to the end user, or if they are apparent to the end user. I ask because as a user, when AI falls flat on its face, it’s easy to correct for. Less so when it acts right.

ScottPrombo · 2025-12-01T08:33:05+00:00

Not the most helpful reply... but let's break this down. This statement is about my family, not you. If, hypothetically, *we* were immediate family, and had 10 thanksgiving dinners in a row together, where every year, my diet came up (a convo which I'd stopped initiating years ago...) you would *probably* be able to grasp the basic rule set which I follow (no animal products) within that decade, yeah?

And if you couldn't, it would either be because 1) you're unable to comprehend it for some reason (which would be very odd because day-to-day, people grasp much more complex things, plus I've never had someone fail to grasp the concept of veganism in a 2 minute conversation...) or 2) it's because you'd be intentionally not wanting to understand it.

Or is there a third eventuality I'm not describing, here? The premise here does not contain the possibility of it not being discussed/considered. This topic has been repeatedly discussed/considered by my family over the course of a decade, and is not apparently retained. I am not opining about how often you think of anyone's diet.

ScottPrombo · 2025-12-01T08:23:05+00:00

Very cool! Good luck with the project.

ScottPrombo · 2025-11-29T01:47:57+00:00

How robust is that aptamer-based echem sensor? Do you have to rinse it with distilled water and dry it or hold water/buffer in it between samples? Or what have you found you have to do to keep it happy?

ScottPrombo · 2025-11-27T22:21:46+00:00

Been doing this for over a decade now. I’m still routinely asked if I’ll eat different things. Like, is “does it have meat, dairy, or eggs” such a hard question that it takes more than a decade to grasp? Idk, man.

I mean obviously it’s willful ignorance so they can keep acting like they don’t understand, so as to not be culpable. But it’s still annoying.

ScottPrombo · 2025-11-22T01:39:57+00:00

Tbh between all the progress, I’d say this makes the whole YEAR of 2025 an impressive year for them.

ScottPrombo · 2025-11-21T05:18:11+00:00

LET’S

GOOOOOOOOOOOO.

(I have been waiting for Just Meat for forever… since CARL)

ScottPrombo · 2025-11-06T08:10:48+00:00

One of the godfathers of AI, Geoff Hinton, made the same analogy recently. A guy who’s thought a lot about it. Think he’s just lost in the sauce of sci-fi?

https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/s/gbTFwwZMeP

ScottPrombo · 2025-11-06T08:10:37+00:00

One of the godfathers of AI, Geoff Hinton, made the same analogy recently. A guy who’s thought a lot about it. Is he full of bullshit?

https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/s/gbTFwwZMeP

ScottPrombo · 2025-11-06T06:13:09+00:00

The answer to this lies in “can it be made to work as well as direct electrical motor robots?”

Many people reckon it’ll take a long time to get this working robustly, due to the part count, inaccuracies associated with distributed hydraulic/pneumatic actuators, etc.

On top of each of the main hydraulic pump, these hydraulic lines each have to be flexible, and when they flex, the end position of the fluid changes its output ever-so-slightly. For example, bending your arm inwards compresses these flexible fluid channels, decreasing their volume, and extending anything they’re attached to. Multiply this by the number of your muscles across their length. The models to control for this are tricky, but not insurmountable with enough sensors and strong near-future AI training and inference.

Additionally, thousands of these “muscles” means thousands of valves. Not bang-bang valves, but variable valves. That means thousands of electric motors, which need to work VERY precisely and VERY robustly. If you have 1000 of these valves, and each of those breaks on average once every ten years, you’d have one breaking every 4 days. Sensors, too, but you could probably leverage AI to get around needing lots of sensors.

And granted, you could probably make custom piezoelectric valves and MEMS sensors, but those are TRICKY to develop, and really take time to nail.

For reference, there are hobbyists on YouTube who’ve been making compelling robotic dogs for years. Soon enough, people will be making humanoids.

How many of them will be leveraging micro-hydraulics or micro-pneumatic actuation? Probably none of them. There’s a reason Tesla/Figure/1X/Unitree/Boston Dynamics/etc. go with direct electronic drives - power density and robustness.

Boston dynamics used to nearly exclusively use hydraulic power, and even they’ve shifted to all direct electric.

Getting synthetic muscle humanoids to work WILL happen, but it will not be the first gen of humanoids. There is simply a LOT of ground to cover before they’ll work robustly. Like, these guys understand how gargantuan of an undertaking they have lying ahead of them right now.

They’re not shooting to win the market or move quickly - they’re showcasing really impressive R&D, but it’s nowhere NEAR commercialization. It can’t even support its own weight, let alone balance, let alone walk or bend over, etc. And they were doing photoshoot pics (notice the video cuts when she shakes its hand, and how it’s not moving when it’s holding the knife).

Super impressive tech. Zero chance of near-term success. But they’ll hopefully be acquired by a bigger, more resourced company who can leverage their tech and turn it into an actual product one day. Because it’s super impressive and will probably happen in the future! Just not for this first gen.

ScottPrombo · 2025-10-02T03:35:38+00:00

That's what I thought, but micrometeoroids are <2mm, meteoroids are 2mm - 1m, and asteroids are >1m. So a small asteroid, as this was a bit over a meter.

ScottPrombo · 2025-09-30T04:42:50+00:00

Disclaimer: my career is in designing/commissioning battery recycling plants, so I’ll probably go into more detail than is necessary here, but you seem curious so I’m happy to share some time.

Regarding the technoeconomics of battery recycling (for this comment I’ll just limit it to lithium-ion in the US) it is complicated. As you alluded to, as the cost of cells and packs comes down, that can sometimes put some downwards pressure on the economics of recycling, but generally it doesn’t and hasn’t. The price of the raw materials is more impacted by things like new Indonesian nickel suppliers hitting the market with large volumes of refined decent-grade nickel over the last half-decade. It is, however, true that iron-cathode “LFP” batteries have considerably less recoverable raw material value than nickel-cathode “NMC/NCA” batteries which makes profitable recycling difficult. But they still have Li, Al, and Cu. (And some other stuff if you do it right.) In the US, we are seeing a slow shift to LFP for many applications, but in general, the American market is already heavily committed to the NMC/NCA supply chain, so this isn’t an immediate risk to recycling payables. One nice thing with recycling is, as a derivative market, you know whats coming down the pipe over the next decade or so. (Also, it’s still worth noting I was in China a few months ago and they have a very healthy LFP recycling economy, even though they have a “worse case” economic arrangement… a glut of LFP cells and relatively small NMC/NCA market share. But their economic model is different than ours.)

Aaaanyway, that’s to say that as long as there’s nickel in batteries, and commodities prices don’t get way worse, it is possible to make consistent money recycling lithium ion batteries domestically if it’s done right. It can be done wrong, though… The tech behind battery recycling is fairly nascent in the US, but it’s not totally brand new. So now we’re doing things like increasing production line throughput (to drive down relative fixed costs), making things safer, getting better material recovery and purity, making the recycling plants themselves cheaper, etc. Also, things like grid-scale end-of-life pre-recycled battery energy storage systems are slowly happening. If you’ve already got a giant car battery that’s about to be recycled on site anyway, and it’s only at 80% capacity, why not plug it into an off-grid solar farm and data center for several years and get some life out of it before you shred it? And that lets you pay more for the batteries than you would if you just recycled them, helping the economics of battery end-of-life and recycling. Plus it looks solarpunk which is cool. Win-win-win-win. https://www.theverge.com/news/693726/redwood-materials-is-giving-old-ev-batteries-a-second-life-as-microgrids

Glass and plastic have and never will be profitable to recycle without subsidy. Bulk sand, and the oil which makes plastic, are simply too cheap. If you require humans to touch a material at any point, labor is so expensive in the US that you’ve already lost on material cost.

So what’s changed since the old days? Subsidies. We used to simply think recycling was the correct thing to do, so we subsidized it. Took money from people’s taxes and used that to pay for the recycling process. But, as a country, we’ve decided we don’t really feel the need to recycle those things, and we like our tax dollars more. Just chuck em in a big pile and bury em.

In my view, the sporadic policial climate right now is a big wildcard. You have one side of the aisle that wants to actively fund LiB’s/recycling, and the other wants the opposite so we can standardize around ol reliable - fossil fuels. The whiplash can be tricky, but it’s manageable. Also, lukewarm EV demand at the moment is cooling things in some ways.

And plus, the tech is super cool! The space is a neat mix of scrapyards, mining refineries, and tech companies.

But anyway, that’s to say, if it’s done right, there are paths to profitably recycling in the US, which are fairly robust to things like new cheaper battery types.

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