Kevin Chen
Real estate is one of the hardest open problems in scaled self driving
I’ve had a minor obsession with Waymo’s autonomous vehicle depots recently.
Over the past few...
3rd Sep 2024
I’ve had a minor obsession with Waymo’s autonomous vehicle depots recently.
Over the past few months, I’ve flown a drone as part of a stakeout to understand how they work. And I’ve taken a deep dive into an apparent Waymo outage to find the company charging its electric vehicles...
Kevin Chen
How autonomous vehicle simulation works
When autonomous vehicle developers justify the safety of their driverless vehicle deployments, they...
7th Jun 2024
When autonomous vehicle developers justify the safety of their driverless vehicle deployments, they lean heavily on their testing in simulation. Common talking points take the form of “we made our car drive X billion miles in simulation.” From these vague statements, it’s...
Kevin Chen
Why autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
Recently, The Verge asked, “where are all the robot trucks?”
It’s a good question.
Trucking was...
10th Jan 2024
Recently, The Verge asked, “where are all the robot trucks?”
It’s a good question.
Trucking was supposed to be the ideal first application of autonomous driving. Freeways contain predictable, highly structured driving scenarios. An autonomous truck would not have to deal with the...
Kevin Chen
Inferring Cruise occupancy from Kyle Vogt’s fleet dashboard screenshot
Background
Last month, Kyle Vogt (CEO of Cruise) tweeted a screenshot of Cruise’s fleet management...
5th Jan 2023
Background
Last month, Kyle Vogt (CEO of Cruise) tweeted a screenshot of Cruise’s fleet management dashboard:
The press: AVs are over-hyped and are still 5-10 years away.
Us: At this moment there are 100 @Cruise AVs in driverless mode in SF, and many are currently carrying...
Kevin Chen
Tearing down the Rewind app
Rewind is a Mac app that records your computer’s screen and audio, allowing the user to scroll...
25th Dec 2022
Rewind is a Mac app that records your computer’s screen and audio, allowing the user to scroll through a timeline of past screen recordings. Rewind also recognizes text, including text in videos and Zoom calls, allowing the user to perform full-text search on anything that has...
Kevin Chen
Analyzing Tesla AI Day 2022
I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s Tesla AI Day. Tesla’s architecture has always been...
2nd Oct 2022
I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s Tesla AI Day. Tesla’s architecture has always been interesting to me because their hardware limitations drive advances in their software. Relative to other players in the industry:
Low-spec sensors require ML- and data-first...
Kevin Chen
What’s on my ballot: June 2022 California primary election
Here’s how I’m voting in the June 2022 primary election. While
preparing for this election, I...
6th Jun 2022
Here’s how I’m voting in the June 2022 primary election. While
preparing for this election, I consulted the San Francisco
Chronicle and SPUR endorsements.
Contents
California
Governor
Lieutenant Governor
Secretary of State
Controller
Treasurer
Insurance Commissioner
United...
Kevin Chen
What’s on my ballot: November 2020 general election
Here’s how I’m voting in the November 2020 general election in San Francisco:
Contents
Federal ...
2nd Nov 2020
Here’s how I’m voting in the November 2020 general election in San Francisco:
Contents
Federal
President & Vice President
US Representative, District 12
California State Legislature
State Senator, District 11
State Assembly, District 17
San Francisco City & County ...
Kevin Chen
Speeding up code with vectorization
I’ve been writing a lot of math code with latency requirements these days. When
I talk to people...
17th Apr 2020
I’ve been writing a lot of math code with latency requirements these days. When
I talk to people about my problems, they usually suggest multithreading and
general-purpose GPU computing.
These both have downsides. Multithreading might not be the best option in
systems that...
Kevin Chen
!!Con West 2019 Notes
!!Con is a conference held every spring in New York
City. It’s two days of lightning talks that can...
24th Feb 2019
!!Con is a conference held every spring in New York
City. It’s two days of lightning talks that can be about anything related to
computers!
At the beginning of last year’s !!Con, I wrote:
This conference is a great showcase of the diverse backgrounds of the NYC tech
scene. I’m...
Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List 