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Self-Driving Cars And Television

2026-01-28 · 16:00 UTC ·The Browser ·3 min read

Brief

The Browser’s 28 January 2026 newsletter is a curated pointer to two unrelated but technically flavored reads: one on autonomy perception stacks and one on early television history. The more relevant item for technical readers is Andrew Miller’s Asterisk feature comparing Waymo and Tesla Cybercab’s fundamentally different approaches to machine perception. Waymo is described as using lidar and radar to construct a rich 3D representation of the world, while Tesla’s camera-only system pushes 8 video feeds into a neural network to infer objects and spatial relationships without active ranging sensors. That distinction gets at a live engineering and business debate in self-driving systems: whether expensive multimodal sensing or vision-led end-to-end learning will prove more scalable. The second recommendation is a historical vignette on John Logie Baird’s improvised prototypes and the underappreciated early demonstrations that helped launch television a century ago.

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title: Self-Driving Cars And Television

author: The Browser

content_type: newsletter

publication: thebrowser.com

published: 2026-01-28T16:00:55+00:00

source_url: gmail://19c055a04e97a321

word_count: 701

How self-driving cars see, and the first television

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Self-Driving Cars And Television

By Kaamya Sharma • 28 Jan 2026 | View in browser

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Seeing Like A Sedan

Andrew Miller | Asterisk | 26th January 2026 | UA Waymo and a Tesla Cybercab, both self-driving cars, see the world very differently. The Waymo uses lidar and radar for a detailed 3D model of its environment beyond what humans can see. A Cybercab has no lidar or radar. It has 8 cameras which send video feeds to a neural network to identify objects and gauge dimensions. “Which technology wins out will determine the future of self-driving vehicles” (6,100 words)

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Television Is 100 Years Old

Diamond Geezer | 26th January 2026 | U

In a rented room in Hastings, John Logie Baird built the first TV-signal-transmitting equipment using a hatbox, tea chest, darning needles and bicycle light lenses. It caused a 1000-volt electric shock which burned his hand. Three years later, he gave the first official demonstration of a television from his attic workshop in London. Most present failed to realise the significance of what they had just seen (1,400 words)

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