Interesting article but it doesn’t actually discuss how well it performs at playing the game. There is in fact a 1.5 hour YouTube video but it woulda been nice for a bit of an outcome postmortem. It’s like “here’s the methods and set up section of a research paper but for the conclusion you need to watch this movie and make your own judgements!”
It does discuss that? Basically it has good grasp of finances and often knows what "should" be done, but it struggles with actually building anything beyond placing toilets and hotdog stalls. To be fair, its map interface is not exactly optimal, and a multimodal model might fare quite a bit better at understanding the 2D map (verticality would likely still be a problem).
After 10 years batteries tend to have about 80% charge retention and a usable life of 20+ years and have basically no maintenance for the life of the vehicle. So, economics work out well for EVs.
The idea that complex Rube Goldberg machines powered by fire and explosions are somehow going to have a future compared to devices with minimal moving parts powered by a fundamental force of nature in its most pure form is absurd on the surface.
Americans and American companies often hold onto technologies long after they are clearly done for in the belief that hope and marketing and stubborn refusal to let go of some romantic view that gas stations and loud noisy slow devices that require constant maintenance are cool.
Toyota and others are rightly betting the American taste will be slow to swing, that our leadership is spineless and has no forward vision, and that they can keep monetizing old technology. What they are getting wrong is the inexorable force of economic and technological reality will strangle ICE manufacturers in a slow then sudden death. BYD, MG, etc are r through the regulatory grind while building their production and logistical capacity. Once they can penetrate the US market veil it’ll be over for Ford, GM, Toyota, and others. Tesla will have to cut margin so fast it’ll be dizzying.
If you’ve driven these Chinese EVs you’ll know the writing is on the wall, and as these legacy automakers cancel their last gasp attempt to be relevant in the future, they’ve ended their role in world manufacturing in the quixotic notion that hope is a strategy.
There is no such logic going on in the political calculus. It’s a fallacious call to a past where an uneducated man could get a good job in the mines, and by fallacious implication the entire ecosystem of work for uneducated men, that existed 50 years ago and does not now. It’s a symbol of something lost to “liberal” political ideology - something people who have never worked in a mine but also feel disenfranchised can get behind. There is no real belief coal is coming back into style, no one anywhere wants a coal plant operating near them and even if we built more, no one else on earth would buy our excess coal. It’s a canard and a red herring to distract disenfranchised under employed under educated and under skilled Americans, just like the anti-immigrant agenda, and all the other fallacies the modern conservative movement is built around. The goal isn’t to solve a single actual structural problem - it’s to appeal emotionally with things that sound like they could solve problems, despite the fact they wouldn’t if implemented and would make many other things worse.
There was once a time the conservative movement was built on pragmatic rationalism, and people keep looking for it in modern rhetoric. But it’s become built on fallacious populism recently as a short term way to grab power, then overwhelm the system to “rig” it towards their favored people. It’s not about conservatives or liberals, ideology or political goals are the foil. The goal is the appropriation of power and the blocking of democratic change in favor of cronyism.
So there’s no point in trying to find a rational explanation for the policy. There is none in the policy itself. It only exists to garner enough votes to do what’s happening in real time with the goal that with enough shenanigans voting won’t matter next time.
Despite their belief to the contrary the executive branch is in charge of very little in this country. They are harassing and extorting in legally dubious and often outright illegal ways, but companies and institutions and individuals are getting wise to the fact there’s very little power these guys really have because the law is structured to prevent executive abuse of power. All you have to do is get your suit filed and get a stay, and sooner or later the governments case likely falls apart. It’s frictionful for everyone involved and will sooner or later cause serious damage to the economy, but increasing as the initial shock fades, everyone is realizing the president is fairly weak and his antics and his hand picked but of loonies undermine any power they might have. It’s not Howard Lutnicks world, and as time goes on it becomes less and less so as they squander the reputation of the presidency tilting at windmills.
This is self serving nonsense. “ai infrastructure” here isn’t manufacturing its enormous data centers that have so few humans the lights are off in every area other than where physical maintenance is happening. It’s about building enormous caverns that consume enormous amounts of power and warehouse the products his company manufactures offshore. The only thing he wants to onshore is spending on those offshore made products he sells. There’s no meaningful jobs in “AI infra” that outlive for the original data center build. He’s advocating for huge investment in energy production to ensure there’s capacity to run his products he’s selling that his company produces off shore.
The figure of speech is about a typical divers lifetime. I believe you’re confusing it with “once a generation,” which refers to the collective human experience type of rarity.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never heard that phrase in that context. My only real frame of reference is the 1981 Talking Heads hit single which I always took to have the “once in a generation” meaning. What’s a diver’s lifetime?
To be fair stock price is not a great indicator of much. Sales are down YoY with no prospect of recovery. Stock price has no bearing on current operations unless they raise capital by selling equity. It’s also been the case that Tesla stock price has been disconnected from performance often. The amount of ill will he’s generated among his core market is enormous, and the tailwinds he had with green policy have been replace with significant head winds with an aggressively (and bizarrely) pro-pollution administration based on a retribution model than a technocratic model. This is especially bad for Tesla as musk actively sought retribution so there is no reason to believe this is going to go well for Tesla over the next few years. He dumped all over his customers to curry favor with someone that now hates him and has a history of actively seeking revenge - what a mess.
As an owner of two Tesla and a frequent user of autopilot with FSD, I don’t believe we will be seeing a significant rollout in any but the easiest to travel areas. SF, LA, Seattle or the other places Waymo currently is either running or preparing to operate are much more challenging road environments than Austin, and Waymo is already fully autonomous with years of track record in these areas. There’s no chance robotaxi will overtake Waymo - I use them often, use FSD often. They aren’t comparable - Waymo is considerably more advanced and capable.
Sorry man, I wished Tesla was going to win out, but by shifting focus to ever more bizarre efforts away from their core cars (when’s the last time a real X or S model refresh happened?) they lost the initiative. BYD and the other legion of Chinese EV are going to eat Tesla alive within 5 years. I’ve had the chance to ride in and drive many of the brands overseas and they are a fraction the price and about as good. It’s over.
Stock price is certainly a better indicator than any numbers coming out of China. The question isn't whether the numbers are fudged but how many times were they fudged, at each step in the reporting chain.
Yeah this stuck out at me - the hubris of the stateless web stack supersedes the 18 years of hard unsung work at building and end to end stateful pipeline that ties out to the penny and handles all the complex business logic and reconciliations seamlessly across god knows how many integrations. No fancy diagrams or pictures of the nameless faceless heroes that had accomplished that act of heroism. For sure recognizing the value is something to trumpet, but that’s the Herculean hero story I want to hear - the DOGE bros who tied it all together with JavaScript frameworks, yawn.
The only way the database could be harnessed to do something useful is after all the people who were standing in the way in management for the last 18 years likely having been sacked. You can bet any useful project to put it to use was blocked by paper-pushers threatened by the spectre of automation, until most people had forgotten about it.
Nobody believes the database sprung forth from the earth or was created accidentally. The fact that 18 years later that project had borne no visible fruit, and that most people who could have used it, didn’t even know about it, is proof of the problem. It’s a problem of terrible management. That is what, regardless of your politics, is being slightly jostled by DOGE. Personally I have dealt with enough of our absurd government processes that I don’t think they can make anything much worse, and it cannot be less efficient.
The challenge with this way of thinking is what handicaps a lot of cultures education systems - they teach how to find the answer to a question - but that’s not where the true value lies. The true value comes from learning how to ask the right question. This is becoming even more true faster and faster as AI becomes better at answering questions of various sorts and using external tools to answer what its weak at (optimizations, math, logic, etc).
You don’t learn how to ask the right questions by just having facts at your fingertips. You need to have lots of explorations of what questions can be asked and how they are approached. This is why when you explore the history of discovery humanist societies tend to dominate the most advanced discoveries. Mechanical and rote practical focus yields advances of a pragmatic sort limited to what questions have been asked to date.
Removing arts, culture, philosophy (and its cousin politics) from assistive technologies will certainly help churn out people who will know answers, but answers the machines know better. But will not produce people who will ask questions never asked before - and the easy part of answering those questions will be accelerated with these new machines that are good at answering questions. Such questions often lie at the intersection of arts, culture, philosophy, and science - which is why Liebnitz, Newton, Aristotle, et al were polyglots across many fields asking questions never yet dreamed of as a result of the synthesis across disciplines.
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