Self driving is the next big thing

Just a few years ago the idea of a self driving car was seen as a futuristic technology that would take decades to arrive. Now it is only a matter of when it will be available and this thanks to startups that are shaping this segment. Here’s  a list (incomplete) of autonomous driving related companies, hardware, software and services, some of which have recently raised money from vc and investors :

  • lvl5 : computer vision software to crowdsource high-accuracy maps for self-driving cars.
  • starsky robotics , embark : self driving trucks
  • ouster (raised 27M$ ) : best lidar to date
  • AIMotive (raised 38M$ ) : full stack autonomous driving software
  • Nauto (raised 159M$ ) : self driving safety
  • drive.ai (raised 50M$ ) : self driving full stack
  • cruise ( GM bought for 1B$) : self driving full stack
  • pony.ai (raised 112M$ ) : claim safest self driving full stack
  • zoox.com raised 250M$ ) : self driving automaker

Driving a Tesla Model S in Paris

My brother in law owns a Tesla model S in Paris and I had a chance to try it out last week. One of the most exciting experiences (Miles Davis would have added “with my pants on”) of the last times. You are driving with almost no noise ( I know Jeremy Clarkson will hate this but I like it so much) in total comfort on a car that comes from another planet : this is what it looks like.

First of all I must say that I hate cars and what they represent : I’ve always considered them a necessary evil. I spent tons of money around my cars (smashing them so many times when I was in my twenties), doing maintenance and repairing them that I developed what is my personal requirements list for a car :

  1. accident prevention : a car that foresees a potentially dangerous situation and takes control to avoid an accident/crash. With a car like this I would have saved tons of money and a couple of broken ribs
  2. no maintenance or lowest possible : if I have to use a car I want to have the lowest possible maintenance. Brakes, oil and filters, clutch, distribution belts, sparks …. There is always something to do with your car
  3. do not contribute to city air pollution or do it the less possible

Tesla ( and probably other electric cars in the future will )  is matching exactly my requirements for what I want in a car.  Autonomous driving with all the available variants which range from lane/speed/front car distance control to full autonomous driving would make driving safer and reduce accidents and damage to the car.

And electric traction will make maintenance a distant memory : with the Tesla I tried which was set at maximum engine brake I barely never had to use the brake pedal; the cars brakes by using the electric motors as generators so you recharge you battery just by using the engine break

And performance comes last in the sense that I’m not a super car fan but pulling the gas to the floor on the Model S is a breathtaking experience. The picture on the left shows you the warp effect 🙂

Creating logstash development environment for core or plugins

I had to develop a ruby logstash plugin recently and I going to recap all necessary steps to create a clean jruby env for development :

  • i had to uninstall ruby and install a clean jruby only stack. Not saying that this is necessary but in my case it only worked this way
gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3
curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby=jruby-9.1.10.0
rvm alias create default jruby-9.1.10.0
source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm
ruby -v
jruby 9.1.10.0 (2.3.3) 2017-05-25 b09c48a OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM 25.151-b12 on 1.8.0_151-8u151-b12-0ubuntu0.16.04.2-b12 +jit [linux-x86_64]
  • Install and compile logstash just to see if everything works. Check out logstash and from inside the directory :
jruby -S gem install rake bundler
rake bootstrap
rake plugin:install-default
bin/logstash -e 'input { stdin { } } output { stdout {} }'
  • Now compile the plugin from the plugin folder
bundle install
bundle exec rspec # test it
gem build logstash-filter-<yourplugin>.gemspec
  • Install the plugin gem and test it
bin/logstash-plugin install logstash-filter-<yourplugin>-1.0.0.gem

 

When all 450.000 Tesla model 3 will hit the road …

In a 2 or 3 years all 450.000 model 3 tesla (and probably more) will hit the road and start making an average of 16.550 miles per year. Considering :

this will translate in around 2.5 Tera Wh/year more consumption on the electric grid. Let’s say that in 5 years 10% of all new cars sold are electric. We’ll have an extra 10 TWh per year to reach 1% of all electric consumption in US (in 5 years) and this will just be around 1% of the total number of cars on roads in US. So 1% of electric fleet equals 1% increase over total electricity consumption.