It's so painful. We have funders come to us saying they love what we do, they want us to do more of it, they have $X million to invest, but only if we use "AI." Investers have their new favorite hammer and, by gosh, you better use it, even if you're trying to weld a pipe.
Weren't we supposed to have Tesla robotaxis making everyone $10k a year back in 2021? I will be shocked if there is an actual product that is actually usable within 6 month of August 8.
That $10K a year figure never made any sense. Let's say it was true -- you could hire out your Tesla for 10 hours per day while you weren't using it. Sure it's making you $10K/year, but you're putting 100,000 miles per year on your car and it wears out after 3 years rather than after 20 years. Having a way to monetize depreciation may be useful in some cases, but it certainly isn't making you money.
I believe that million-mile electric cars are quite possible, but 2021 Tesla's certainly weren't that.
That guy who put thousands of working Internet satellites in orbit, is currently the only way for U.S. to get humans to and from ISS, essentially created a non-existent electric car market from nothing, and built the heaviest self-landing rocket in history, among so many other things.
That charlatan? If that's how you define charlatan, I wish we could all accomplish that much.
(what other accomplishments did I miss; tbh I don't even like electric cars from a practical or even environmental perspective, and yet even I can admit that what he did was simply incredible.)
Hard to know if you're being sarcastic or not. I'm not a fan of how they handle FSD marketing, but they are very good at automating car manufactory. I believe they are more or less the only company that can mass-produce EVs at that scale _for a profit_.
The traditional car brands are losing money on EV's and/or can't scale the production up enough. BYD is probably the only other manufacturer that can compete with Tesla on scale and cost.
Elon Musk keeps proving he is a charlatan who will happily take money on a lie and then fight tooth-and-nail to give it back when people give up on his outlandish lies.
I'm a Tesla owner and want Elon fired because I want my car to be supported far into the future. I don't want him to tank the company like he did Twitter.
How do you know he tanked twitter? It wasn't profitable when he took over and now that it's a private company you don't have insight into the financials.
Whether you like or don't like the politics/policies of the company since he's taken over, it's not clear whether he's made Twitter more or less viable as a company going forward.
Fidelity, who remains a stakeholder in the private company and gets insight to internal financials, has cut the valuation of their holding by 75% so far [1]. While twitter might not have been profitable when purchased, it was structured as a growth stock (that is, expected to invest most profit back into the product, in order to continue to multiply revenue) and had yearly revenues of $5B.
Elon wants to run an AI company and not a vehicle manufacturer. Since he doesn't own a majority of the stock, he's chosen to make his vision inevitable by tanking the vehicle and charging-related parts of the business.
AI is happening, but it doesn't mean Tesla should destroy its successful vehicle, energy or charging businesses. It also doesn't mean Tesla is going to win on AI. That's why you do don't destroy the underlying company to make AI inevitable.
> "He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner"
Either Prabhakar Raghavan is abusing his employees or spewing bullshit. Given that working 120 hours in a week is working 17 hours a day, I'm calling bullshit.
But even if it's not, the idea that a multi-billion company like Google wants their employees to "step up" and work 17 hour days 7 days a week is actually disgusting. That he would praise such an idea shows a moral rot within Google that almost certainly goes beyond Prabhakar. No matter how much they're making, these are people being exploited by Google and Google is holding them up as an example to the rest of their employees.
"Look at these drones sacrificing their health, life, and families to squeeze another few cents out of my stock compensation package. You should be more like them."
Prabhakar has been enabled by Sundar at every step. The two are in alignment. If you are disgusted by Prabhakar, you should be disgusted by Sundar too, he has just as much contempt for the workers, he just hides his cards better.
Could you expand on the points of vandalism and threats? The article you linked to only had some vague corporate speak about vandalism, which could easily refer to the banner they hung. The only reference to anyone feeling threatened was a reference to another employee who "felt scared," but it doesn't say the protestor were doing anything threatening.
And then the Israelis put that target they only have partial confidence about into a system called "Where's Daddy?" which will track their target until he goes home to his family at which point a kill order is sent out to drones and warplanes to massacre his entire family. [0, 1]
Is that the "pro-Palestinian nonsense" you were referring to?
See the part where I said aiding and abetting a known target makes you a target. "What about the children" is a very poor argument. Would you rather a fireteam kick down the door and have to shoot the entire family when they all scurry to a room and grab arms because daddy told them to? Because that's what happens - all the time. There's no "put down your weapons" like you see in movies. You have about 50ms to make a decision to neutralize a target.
I know people who are very screwed up after having to shoot children carrying weapons because their parents told them to. I know people who've had to make the kill/no-kill decision on a woman and her child approaching a convoy. It's a fucked up situation. That's why we try to avoid war.
You can't just deploy operators when a guy goes home to his family. It's expensive, dangerous, and difficult. If you leave him alone he could be ordering people from his home to kill your people. Unconventional war is by definition unconventional. If they fought like a regular military their families would most likely not be targeted. I have no data but I can tell you absolutely no one wants to kill women and children. Except for hamas, that is.
At this point, "aiding and abetting" seems to be "existing while inside Gaza." See the
deliberate execution of the world central kitchen workers in a three-phase strike to ensure maximum casualties as an example.
I mean, that's not true. But you won't agree with me as it's en-vogue to be pro-hamas. You should actually be ashamed of yourself how little you understand about how these terrorists operate and how boldly you claim shit like "genocide" and "execution".
I am against systems designed to target and slaughter civilians. I am against using starvation as a weapon of war. I am against rules of engagement so loose that it allows the military to kill a convoy of people coordinating directly with the Israeli military on a aid mission who are using GPS devices to transmit their location to the Israeli military using three separate strikes over 2.5 km. I'm against dropping 2000-pound bombs on dense civilian areas. I am against rules of engagement so loose it allows the Israeli military to kill three of the hostages it was purportedly trying to save while they're waving white flags. I am against using snipers against people hiding in churches and hospitals. I am against an approved collateral civilian kill rate of 15-20x.
I consider these positions to be pro-humanity.
If in your view, holding these positions makes me pro-hamas, I encourage you to examine if you are using an unnecessarily binary framing to analyze the death and destruction going on.
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