by genewitch | 2025-06-06 00:07:55+00:00
Suffice to say that the 600MB just lets you draw the roads on a plane, it's like comparing an ascii art drawing of the road (from .csv/shp) to a digital still of the road (the amount of information you'd actually need). you absolutely cannot rely on "a couple of sensor [types]". I mentioned i have nearly a half million miles on the road. All of that prior experience influences my driving when i am driving someplace new. in that 8TB disk, you have to find a way to produce that "experience", except instead of my 0.5mm miles, you are talking about the aggregate "experience" of 0.5mm miles per road per unit of time (day for some places like I-10 through Los Angeles, month for others, maybe a year for some "rural" roads.)

none of this has to do with visual or proprioception. It's knowing "every inch" of road. It's knowing how far i can leave the center of the lane if someone else crowds me or goes over the center divider, because the shoulder is soft through here because logging trucks have been exiting the forest onto the highway. It's knowing what part of I-605 floods - not the whole thing, some lanes, some places, and "flood" means 2+ inches of water on the road surface, hitting it at speed makes a tidal wave flying into other lanes. If someone hits that in front of you, you're blind for a couple of seconds minimum. If we want to have semi trucks be "FSD" it needs to know, for the traffic and other conditions, how fast to go and what gear to be in to climb each hill, and then the hazards that are over the hill - that a trucker would know. Where's the gravel bed on more mountainous passes? Or more simply, what time of day neighborhoods are more likely to have people approaching or going through / out of intersections, blind or otherwise. How many "bytes" is that information, times every neighborhood? If many cars brake at the same place, there's probably a reason, and that needs to be either in the dataset or updated somehow if conditions change. You ever used Waze and had a report of something on the road or a cop parked somewhere, and it's nowhere to be seen? And that's updated much more frequently than the radio-info on the GPS systems i referred to earlier. Some roads become impassable in the rain, some roads ice more readily.

If this was easy/simple/solved, waymo et al would be bragging about it, the tech in their cars. Waymo (or the other one) specifically, because they cover less than 0.1% of road surfaces in the US, in some of the most maintained and heavily traveled corridors in the world. So, if anyone from a robotaxi company happens by and knows roughly how much storage is needed for <0.1% of the road surfaces in the US, then we could actually start to have this dialog in a meaningful way. Also i am unsure how much coverage robotaxis actually have in their service area. A "grid system" of roads makes mapping and aggregate data "simple", for sure.

This reminded me a bit of the idea that somewhere in the US there's a database of every sms sent to or from US cellular phones. "it's just text; it'll compress well" - belies how much text there is, there.

for reference, the map in my lexus is ~8GB, for the US. And that's just "shapes" and POI and knowing how the addressing works on each road. It doesn't know what lane i'm in, it doesn't track curves in the road effectively (the icon leaves the road while i'm driving quite often), and overpasses and the like confuse all GPS systems i've ever used - like in Dallas, TX where it's 4 layers high and parallel roads stacked. furthermore, just the road data on google maps for the nearest metro area to my house is 20MB. i have a recollection it goes real quick into hundreds of MB if you need to download maps for the swaths of areas where there is no cellphone reception, like areas in western Nevada. given 20MB for my metro, that's 40GB of just road shapes and addresses for the US, which is much more than the 600MB incomplete GIS files i downloaded.

so we've moved from fencing 600MB "text" data; to the actual data needed by a GPS to give directions, 8000MB. Your claim is that a mere 1000x more data is enough to autonomously self-drive anywhere in the US, at any time of day or year, etc...

you know who actually has this data and would know how big it is? Tesla.