stetrain

I find Tesla’s interface to be inferior as soon as you want to use an app they haven’t built. Like my podcasts app. Or receiving / replying to a WhatsApp message. Even the built-in text message support can’t handle replying to a group text.

Personally I’d stick with Tesla’s nav and use CarPlay for media and messaging, and that’s the optionality and user choice I think this post is trying to get at.

Have any CEOs been held criminally liable for bribing government officials lately?

The positive viewpoint is basically like the Industrial Revolution or the post-WWII consumer/convenience boom.

If productivity can increase significantly per worker, the result will be major overall economic growth.

It might be sold to consumers the way vacuums and washing machines were. With these automated modern conveniences you'll spend less time working and have more time for leisure.

Of course the reality for the actual workers on the line is that their job and industry may be disrupted and the overall benefits of that economic growth may not reach them during their lifetime. The Industrial Revolution was followed by a century of major and sometimes violent disputes over the relationship between corporations and labor and the rights of workers.

The post-WWII promises of convenience and leisure were replaced by the reality of the baseline adjusting and households needing to work the same or even more combined hours to make ends meet.

Even if the optimistic levels of economic growth occur, the benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed.

Sure, so the economic anxiety from people with careers in the horse and cart industry was fully justified.

Rich people are stealing all the jobs.

The AI promoters are themselves saying these things because it is the positive case for their business, that other businesses can pay them for AI services that are cheaper and better than keeping existing jobs.

Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement.

“Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/22/openai-sa...

The current market cap of SPCX and TSLA combined (~$3.8T) is about 3 times the total value of all BTC (~$1.3T).

You can't shift productivity by 10X and expect the rest of the supply/demand equilibrium to stay the same, with you working 10% of the time and sipping drinks on the beach while retaining the same job opportunities and expected salaries.

There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.

And some foods are a lot more water efficient than others to produce.

it's "when," not "if."

That has always been the question since Elon started making self-driving claims back in 2016. If you believed him any time up until now you'd have been wrong and potentially own a car that will never drive without a responsible human in the driver's seat.

Another question is how many resources each "self-driving" car needs to complete its task. All of the major self-driving taxi providers do have monitoring staff who need to intervene occasionally to get the car unstuck from some situations.

If you need to pay one monitor per 10 cars you can run a taxi service in specific markets but it's pretty hard to roll that out to a fleet of millions of personally-owned cars.

Tesla's own expectation six years ago was that they would be selling 20 million cars annually by 2030:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

Tesla's recent annual car sales:

2023: 1.81M

2024: 1.79M

2025: 1.64M

Elon's failed timeline predictions about self-driving and Robotaxi fleets are too numerous to attempt to cite here.

What has mostly exceeded expectations about Tesla is their stock price compared to actual productivity.

We have already reached the point where solar and wind produce new MW of power cheaper than any other power source you can build.

Of course that energy generation comes with the caveat of being variable with sun and wind. It can still be a net benefit to the grid but the variability means alternative energy sources are still needed.

The cost trend of installing solar/wind plus enough storage capacity to provide steady grid power will eventually cross over to also being cheaper than other sources of energy. At which point the only reason to be against it is if you prefer artificially subsidizing another energy source.

A big question about this push for AI/LLM features in products, and I think very related to public sentiment on AI, is that if these features were so desirable and useful why do they need to be so forcefully promoted?

If these features were so useful, the internet would be full of articles and viral videos about how to turn them on and use them.

Instead, every single software service you sign in to now has to stop you with popups, chat windows, and sparkle animations to show you all of the shiny new AI features they have added, like they're all Microsoft trying to convince you to switch your browser to Edge.

ARM Windows laptops are a pretty different scenario now than when the Surface came out. They have pretty seamless x86/64 emulation built in similar to when Apple started their Mac transition to ARM. In contrast the OG ARM Surface didn't run any existing Windows software.

Most people could pick up a modern Windows ARM laptop and everything they do would work just fine, just potentially with less heat and longer battery life than their older Windows laptop.

The primary annoyances would be Windows itself and its ad and engagement driven UI reminding you about Copilot and Edge every chance it gets.

They've discovered that it's more efficient if the money flows directly from the private enterprise to the politicians without going through tax revenue.

There will be no single moment when that happens. It will be a stack of years and years of innovations and improvements each of which take time to roll out into mass production, start expensive, and get cheaper.

Well except that there were incidents of cars getting stuck in floods with passengers before they paused the service.

A closer analogy would be ""Chicago O'Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm after 3 planes slide off the runway due to ice"

Absolutely I think there will be a disconnect between when people think they should be able to drive somewhere (ie to work in a no-visibility blizzard) and when ideal self-driving cars would allow themselves to operate. Maybe society will adjust to be more flexible to natural conditions, or maybe people will get frustrated and drive themselves into the poor conditions as always.

Unless you're betting that a thing he has said will happen will actually happen when he said it would. Or even 10 years later.

We don't like LLMs throwing giant walls of code in PRs at repos and expecting devs to read and respond to all of them.

That's kind of similar to written content being posted and linked. There's an expectation that you are asking someone to take time to read it, and with LLMs now the cost to generate things to be read is a lot lower but our attention and capacity to read them remains the same.

They're all over the place in Mexico City. It'll be interesting as these EVs start to show up along the northern and southern borders traveling within the US.

Well currently commenting on PRs isn't working. I'd say we notice this kind of issue once every few weeks or so. It's not the end of the world but also not great for a service that we pay for and which used to be more reliable.

As far as I know there's nothing preventing third parties from building and selling hardware with SteamOS or a similar software stack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS

They aren't going to let you advertise them as Steam-branded hardware without an agreement, but there are multiple handhelds that have done so to be branded officially Steam Compatible.

In this case, the issues under dispute are the cases where the trademark was used outside of the GPL-covered code.

Specifically the port author using the Notepad++ name and logo on their website, in addition to the photo and bio of the original Notepad++ author, in a way that could mislead others to think that this was part of the original Notepad++ project.

A post with screenshots is here: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/npp-trademark-infringemen...

Hosting a copy of the GPL'd Linux code, represented as such, and making a website claiming to represent Linux or the Linux Foundation with Linus's face and name on it are different things.

You're having a hard time seeing the side where one side has a trademark on the project name and logo, and the other side is using those without permission?

'Kapybara Space Program' has actually already been done as an April Fool's post by the previous studio that worked on Kerbal Space Program 2:

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/216143-kapybara-s...

You're absolutely right!

Not sure "sitting out" is the right way to put it. They've been publicly trying to ship a next-gen Siri for years and haven't been able to get something good enough to release. The latest plan is to base it on Gemini so we should be seeing progress on that next month at WWDC.

To some extent yes. Your output at work is based on a combination of inputs from others in your organization, and is being paid for by your employer, so the organization owns the copyright on what you make for them.

I think from this view it makes sense that an LLM is a tool, and the operator of that tool (or their employer) can own the output.

The tricky part is when you squint and view an LLM with training input and prompted output as a machine that launders copyrighted input into customized output that is now copyrighted by a new owner.

A machine that vacuums up film reels and splices them according to a set of instructions by the user to create a compilation of recent animated Disney movies with the Shrek soundtrack superimposed would probably not pass legal challenges if the user of the tool attempted to claim full copyright on the output.

They could add rollover balances and be back to cell phone plans in the early 2000s.

When a company packages this tool up and makes it part of their product they are taking some of that responsibility. The end user isn't supposed to need to know what an LLM is or how it works, that's what they're paying Canva for.

I don't know whether the newer electrically-releasing battery adhesives would count, but they do allow cleanly removing and replacing the battery without proprietary tools.