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I feel like we need another effect for people on hacker news that consistently do the opposite - take obvious intelligence and pretend it's equivalent to Eliza.

Because that’s the group that’s captured it

Someone (throwtato@protonmail) sent me a death threat from my hacker news email alias over this thread - ridiculous, but not surprising given the left wing extremist violence. The most hostility I've see on HN is from trans leftist activists.

I don’t know why I spend time on HN anymore - it used to be a place to learn things and interact with interesting people. Now it’s just a crappy subreddit. The interesting people mostly fled to private channels (or X) long ago.

With PG’s retarded “Free Palestine” arch, it’s probably best to just leave.

Anyone saying “misogynistic domestic slavery” has bought into a much dumber political religion, maybe without even realizing it.

This guy’s entire post is about riding a sad Caltrain to some Palo Alto job and being disappointed his memorization of obscure computer trivia or generic software job didn’t provide meaning in his life.

My point is that marriage and kids provide a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment and a certain kind of narrowing clarity and that ideas of what leads to a fulfilling life are well established in old cultural communities for a reason. He’d no longer be looking for the meaning in obscure trivia - which was never the correct place to find it anyway.

The other bit is a lot of jobs are bullshit (probably most) with enormous amounts of waste building stuff that doesn’t matter. You can fix that by working at Tesla, spacex, etc.

I suspect nothing you believe about either of them is remotely true.

I didn’t say I was committed to the religions - I said they’re a battle tested adaptive cultural technology we should be careful about throwing away because there will be unintended consequences. They are very effective at helping people live meaningful lives and have community.

You can choose to be obstinate and read what I wrote through a political lens with no charity - that’s kind of the political religious substitute I’m talking about.

People are looking for meaning in the wrong places - it’s not a huge surprise, it’s something secularism has largely failed at.

There are places you can work that are more meaningful or where there is a culture of cutting down on bullshit. Elon Musk is famously good at running places that do both.

More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. Religion is in some ways a battle tested cultural technology, throwing it away will have unintended consequences for most people.

Alex Karp touches on some of these ideas indirectly in The Technological Republic which is worth reading anyway for other reasons. A lot of people in the west today grow up without a cultural core and end up aloof believing in nothing, or worse substituting some bullshit political ideology as a poor substitute religion.

iPhone 5(s) was peak case design imo and the last to have a flush camera iirc. The 12 and 13 mini were close, but still had the bump.

My personal favorite would be that style with modern chips and a full glass display. Basically an updated mini without a camera bump.

They'll never make this though because the minis proved the market is tiny.

I loved the mini and bought both the 12 and 13 mini. Also bought it for my siblings. Unfortunately after its sales Apple is very unlikely to ever make a small phone again.

The configurator is interesting and something I haven't heard of before!

It's a double edged sword because the amount of time I spend online (X) has been directly responsible for the most valuable opportunities and generally knowing enough of what's going on to leverage that for big financial and career returns. It was pretty easy to drop all non-X social media though (all meta) and just avoid short term video generally.

I've been tempted to try the lightphone 3 though - theory being if I have a separate hardware device that might be enough to help because I can leave the iPhone at home. In theory the Apple Watch could do this, but in practice it hasn't.

Another thing I think can work is committing to avoid using it for one day a week - you get a lot of the benefits, it's more doable, and the downside is minimized.

You downplayed what Tesla FSD can do and said I was being narrow minded and the Bay Area driving is "easy mode" and said vision isn't a general solution. I think none of this is true.

People here just whine and complain - yes they’ve “only” just sent a skyscraper to space for now and caught the booster on reentry, it’s a work in progress (along with their reusable rockets, earth scale telecom side project etc.)

My point is people will still be calling him a fraud when they do get it to mars, no evidence is sufficient for the HN cynic that thinks their “above the fray” ethos makes them smart.

Tesla has had massive success despite the haters, the model y becoming the literally best selling car on earth and you wouldn’t know it from HN. FSD has gotten really good, good enough to use more than not as they continue to improve it.

The best thing about capitalism is the losers here don’t matter - the winners get rich and keep going.

You don’t need hands on the wheel anymore, just looking out the window. It’s way more relaxed.

It’ll be nice when that’s not required anymore, but even today it’s way more comfortable.

If humans had ten eyes always looking simultaneously and never got tired they would also not hit stuff.

Oh please - people excuse and dismiss major accomplishments, you can send a skyscraper to mars and people on HN will still be calling you a fraud.

The Bay Area has massive traffic, complex interchanges, SF has tight difficult roads with heavy fog. Sometimes there’s heavy rain on 280. 17 is also non trivial.

What Tesla has done is not trivial and roads outside the bay are often easier.

People can ignore this to serve their own petty cognitive bias, but others reading their comments should go look at it for themselves.

Thank you for exemplifying what I’m talking about. I should really buy more TSLA.

Yeah it’s amazing

He argued the case in 2016 iirc.

The position against lidar was that it traps you in a local max, that humans use vision, that roads and signs are designed for vision so you're going to ultimately have to solve that problem and when you do lidar becomes a redundant waste. The investment in lidar wastes time from training vision and may make it harder to do so. That's still the case.

I love Waymo, but it's doomed to be localized to populated areas with high-res mapping - that's a great business, but it doesn't solve the general problem.

If Tesla keeps jumping on the vision lever and solves it they'll win it all. There's nothing in physics that makes that impossible so I think they'll pull it off. His model is all this sort of first principles thinking, it's why his companies pull off things like starship. I wouldn't bet against it.

I use FSD in my Model S daily to commute from SF to Palo Alto along with most of my other Bay Area driving. It does a better job currently than most people and it drives me 95% of the time now I haven't had the phantom braking.

I'm in a 2025 with HW4, but it's dramatic improvement over the last couple of years (previously had a 2018 Model 3) increased my confidence that Elon was right to focus on vision. It wasn't until late last year where I found myself using it more than not, now I use it almost every drive point to point (Cupertino to SF) and it does it.

I think people are generally sleeping on how good it is and the politicization means people are under valuing it for stupid reasons. I wouldn't consider a non Tesla because of this (unless it was a stick shift sports car, but that's for different reasons).

Their lead is so crazy far ahead it's weird to see this reality and then see the comments on hn that are so wrong. Though I guess it's been that way for years.

The position against lidar was that it traps you in a local max, that humans use vision, that roads and signs are designed for vision so you're going to have to solve that problem and when you do lidar becomes a redundant waste. The investment in lidar wastes time from training vision and may make it harder to do so. That's still the case. I love Waymo, but it's doomed to be localized to populated areas with high-res mapping - that's a great business, but it doesn't solve the general problem.

If Tesla keeps jumping on the vision lever and solves it they'll win it all. There's nothing in physics that makes that impossible so I think they'll pull it off.

I'd really encourage people to here with a bias to dismiss to ignore the comments and just go in real life to try it out for yourself.

There’s no point in continuing our discussion (are you a Wikipedia editor - this thread feels like I’m talking to one), the articles I link to show it’s much worse than you suggest.

It’s beyond inherent bias, it’s explicitly weaponized for a particular point of view which it does a lot of work to try to hide.

Wikipedia fails at its purpose is more my point - it pretends to be something it’s not.

The bad part is people (including many in the comments here) don’t realize this.

A good encyclopedia doesn’t push an ideological agenda.

I seek out individuals I think are smart from a variety of places and read a lot - I'm not sure if there's another way. The more I do this, the more I have a general dislike for wikipedia.

The problem with wikipedia is it pretends to be above the fray and as a result it's deceptive. People think they're getting a neutral topic overview when they're actually getting something that's been designed to persuade based on the editors that control it and the editors are generally bad power hungry reddit mod types with extreme bias. It's particularly insidious because the people reading wikipedia are the least able to detect this deception. It launders their pet ideology through pseudo neutrality.

I think most alternative options are better.

The encyclopedia point is at least it is a static record from a point in time vs. a sort of "we were always at war with Eurasia" kind of fluid that bends to the times.

Wikipedia has major issues - there are a lot of topics with coordinated editing from bad actors. The verge article is paywalled so I can't read more than the first page + headline, but I can guess the case it makes.

- https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

- https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-editors-cant-decide-...

- https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit...

It's similar to the problem on Reddit, I wouldn't trust it on any topic that is even mildly controversial. Wikipedia will have a strong progressive left slant it launders carefully through seemingly neutral language and selective sourcing.

Honestly it's gotten worse over the years too - makes me see more value in printed encyclopedia, they go out of date but at least they represent a slice of time. They're not endlessly revised to meet some false ideology that has edit power at present.

I had to go to El Salvador for a work trip a while back and brought a bunch of fresh $2 bills with me. They use USD as the currency there, but they're constrained by what's in circulation. I thought it would be fun to have my $2 bills there for maybe years, I'm not sure if they have any others!

Yes! It's fun to just order 500 $2 bills and carry some everywhere for tips. I do this all the time, it's an easy way to add a little whimsy into someone's day.

Wozniak famously went further and would order sheets of them uncut (costs more), then pay a shop to perforate them for him so he could peel them off for people (making it look really fake).

He had a funny story about doing this at a casino for a slot machine and getting interrogated by the secret service iirc where he handed the guy a fake ID where he had an eye patch and it said he was a laser operator or something. He played dumb about the bills to look more suspicious instead of explaining the truth.

Hard to tell if it was just a tall tale, but given that it was Woz it was probably mostly real.

I had a funny experience with a French cheese shop in SF for this - I tipped a $2 bill and he called me back in confused thinking it was fake, but was good natured when I showed him it was real.

Yeah it could be insanely valuable and it'll give them an advantage by letting them add more features to the free ad supported product to expand their reach and cement their position.

You’re unable to engage substantively, so you fall back on moral posturing and dismissal.

The “dictator” framing also reveals your own unfalsifiable assumption - that Trump is inherently authoritarian regardless of policy outcomes or democratic processes. It’s the kind of tribal reasoning that makes genuine political discourse nearly impossible.

Pretty much proves my point about ideological capture better than any argument could.

So much for your “critical thinking”.

Iran having a nuclear weapon is not a random thing to be concerned about, it's an e-risk to our allies in the region and your dismissal of this says a lot more about you than it does about me when it comes to "thinking critically". Iran funds a massive amount of terrorism and is explicitly interested in the destruction of the west.

Millions crossed the border illegally under Biden, that was reduced to near zero after the election, no bullshit bill required. The bill was vetoed because it was bad policy, the new bill got the ICE funding without the concessions. The immigration is having negative effects, but they're primarily experienced by the poor in areas that have to live near them, deal with crime, and can't afford to live elsewhere - you're likely insulated from it. This is true generally for the luxury beliefs held by the left, they don't experience their failures, those that do don't vote for them.

"Project 2025" policy suggestions include a lot of things I (and others) think are good.

State is different than federal, but democrats are hardly good on this at the federal level either and every blue state where they have power is worse on this issue.

Refusing to recognize the trans nonsense doesn't take ownership of how much that issue is pushed by the democrats. It's poisoned the brand and alienates all but the hardest line lefty progressives. That ideology has lead to real harm - it should be trivial to come out against that, same with the ignorant mainstream democrat jew hatred.

The DEI stuff is a deep rot - anti-west and in directly conflict with American values about equality and individualism. The public hates it.

"Republican policies can lead to lives where you are concerned about being able to feed your kids"

This is retarded. The likely Mayor of NY is running on government run grocery stores - famously known for their scarcity and failure. Harris ran on price controls for groceries and Elizabeth Warren embarrassingly tried to defend this. Democratic economic policy has lead to enormous waste and failure. SF, LA, etc. lots of examples of bad policy and bad outcomes. Mediocrity driven by decision making that focused on identity over competence. The inflation experienced under Biden was extreme and driven by their bad policy decisions. The level of Biden making any decisions at all is unclear given his capacity, a lot of it was probably his unelected staff.

Then there's also the political violence and celebration of it. Luigi Mangione, Trump assassination attempts, "Free Palestine" execution of two jews in DC etc. The stars like AOC hold open contempt for capitalism and this is mainstream in the party.

If you can't appreciate what Musk has achieved that again says more about you. Nobody is perfect. I'd much rather see people trying hard to earnestly solve problems than what we saw with the Biden/Harris campaign. Tesla and SpaceX are amazing. Even the smaller projects like Neuralink described in this post are getting important results.

You've aligned yourself with a losing coalition - there's a reason the republicans have expanded their tent while the democrats have reduced theirs to a smaller and smaller out of touch ideological extreme.

I don't excuse Trump's behavior on 1/6, but a choice is forced between two options and I (and the majority of the voting public) thought Harris was worse, this again should be pretty damning of how bad the problem is on the democrat's side. It's why he had a decisive democratic electoral victory including the popular vote. There are good reasons for this, you dismiss them at your own peril.