I won’t miss Scott Adams. I won’t shed a tear for anyone who is racist and misogynistic, no matter the size of their platform. We need less racists and in this case nature canceled him.
If I come across a Dilbert comic, I might still read it and laugh.
>> If I come across a Dilbert comic, I might still read it and laugh.
Just make sure the comic isn't "Dilbert Reborn", which Adams started after he lost his national syndication. Those are either unfunny, vile, or both. https://x.com/i/status/2011102679934910726
It's no secret that VC's are profiting massively from this administration. And all comments critical of the current regime are getting downvoted on HN. Something adds up.
this is not really about VCs as much as wealthy tech billionaires who have learned that no one listened to their political thoughts & beliefs, but they can now use their technology & money to circumvent the need to gain a democratic mandate. Peter Thiel has literally stated this strategy, and you've recently watched them all fall in line, even if it meant massive whiplash from their previously stated positions.
Reminder: when you are logged out, HN will show static cached content. Since there's no login session it doesn't have to compute parts of the page unique to the user.
When huge stories hit, and HN is overloaded, browing while logged out is the way to get through.
You're correct. The ban targets the supply chain and future imports/sales, not retroactive possession. New foreign drones cannot be certified for sale in the US market going forward. Existing drones you already own aren't being confiscated or made illegal to fly
Are you sure the difference didn't mostly come down to being a tourist in temporary accommodation vs having access to a familiar grocery store and your home kitchen?
In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance. That tasted disgustingly.
You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat. Those sauces are also disgusting. Good beef meat (and in the USA there’s very good meat), needs only salt and maybe a bit of pepper. Not those weird sugary sauces they put in the USA.
Seriously, for someone from Europe, some food in the USA is just disgusting (and it’s not due the quality of the ingredients, as those are usually very good) but due to the stuff they add on top.
All of the things you described are available, that's true, but any major supermarket, even in rural areas, will have plenty of healthier options available as well.
Take bread for example. Sure there will be some crappy sliced white bread on the shelf. But there will also be organic sprouted 7-grain high fiber next to it. In fact, there will probably be more healthy varieties available than just about any other country.
The options are there, but it can be exhausting to actually find them.
There are far too many products that try to position themselves as "healthy", but are closer to the rest of the crap on the shelves than actual "healthy" food. Even more frustrating is the insane amount of food now using sugar replacements to masquerade as a healthy option.
I personally, find it exhausting to shop at new stores because it can take looking at 2 to 5 items to find one that's actually made healthy.
French food having sugary sauces has nothing to do with American food having too much sugar though, and I'd wager 99% of the US has never heard of steak au poivre. We may know of pepper steak, but that doesn't always have sauce.
> In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance.
Were you eating sweet bread meant for coffee or desserts and thinking it was for making a sandwich? Most breads use just enough sugar to rise the yeast.
> You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat.
Were you eating barbecue, where the sauce is whole point? There is plenty of unsauced meat in the US. Any steakhouse will give you as much meat as you want without any sauce unless you pour it on yourself.
> America hides sugar in everything. Plain old white sandwich bread often has loads of added sugar.
It's not hidden, it's on the label, and expected. I just don't buy garbage bread.
> Sugar isn’t necessary for bread making. Yeast can break down the starch. That’s what it evolved to do. Flour, water, yeast, salt, done.
That usually means that malt is added to the flour (most bread flour). You can get breads without added sugar or malt, but you're going to have to go to a bakery that makes their own dough and buys flour without additives, which is getting rarer and rarer.
Every day another city or village in 4 different states. I won't go into everything I saw or noticed while staying there. HN doesn't like criticism of the US.
The ways in which Musk dug himself in when experts predicted this exact scenario confirmed to me he was not as smart as some people think he was. He seemed to have drank his own koolaid back then.
And if he still doesn’t realize and admit he is wrong then he is just plain dumb.
I think there’s room for both points of view here. Going all in on visual processing means you can use it anywhere a person can go in any other technology, Optimus robots are just one example.
And he’s not wrong that roads and driving laws are all built around human visual processing.
The recent example of a power outage in SF where lidar powered Waymo’s all stopped working when the traffic lights were out and Tesla self driving continued operating normally makes a good case for the approach.
Didn't waymo stop operating simply because they aren't as cavalier as Tesla, and they have much more to lose since they are actually self driving instead of just driver assistance? Was the lidar/vision difference actually significant?
The reports I’ve read said that some continued to attempt to navigate with the street lights out, but that the vehicles all have a remote confirmation where they try to call home to confirm what to do. That ended up self DDoSing Waymo causing vehicles to stop in the middle of the road and at intersections with their hazards on.
So to clarify, it wasn’t entirely a lidar problem it was an need to call home to navigate.
> roads and driving laws are all built around human visual processing.
And people die all the time.
> The recent example of a power outage in SF where lidar powered Waymo’s all stopped working when the traffic lights were out and Tesla self driving continued operating normally makes a good case for the approach.
Huh? Waymo is responsible for injury, so all their cars called home at the same time DOS themselves rather than kill someone.
Tesla makes no responsibility and does nothing.
I can’t see the logic the brings vision only as having anything to do lights out. At all.
Yes... but people can only focus on one thing at a time. We don't have 360 vision. We have blind spots! We don't even know the exact speed of our car without looking away from the road momentarily! Vision based cars obviously don't have these issues. Just because some cars are 100% vision doesn't mean that it has to share all of the faults we have when driving.
That's not me in favour of one vs the other. I'm ambivalent and don't actually care. They can clearly both work.
They do, but the rate is extremely low compared to the volume of drivers.
In 2024 in the US there were about 240 million licensed drivers and an estimated 39,345 fatalities, which is 0.016% of licensed drivers. Every single fatality is awful but the inverse of that number means that 99.984% of drivers were relatively safe in 2024.
Tesla provided statistics on the improvements from their safety features compared to the active population (https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety) and the numbers are pretty dramatic.
Miles driven before a major collision
699,000 - US Average
972,000 - Tesla average (no safety features enabled)
2.3 million - Tesla (active safety features, manually driven)
5.1 million - Tesla FSD (supervised)
It's taking something that's already relatively safe and making it approximately 5-7 times safer using visual processing alone.
Maybe lidar can make it even better, but there's every reason to tout the success of what's in place so far.
No, you're making the mistake of taking Tesla's stats as comparable, which they are not.
Comparing the subsets of driving on only the roads where FSD is available, active, and has not or did not turn itself off because of weather, road, traffic or any other conditions" versus "all drivers, all vehicles, all roads, all weather, all traffic, all conditions?
Or the accident stats that don't count an accident any collision without airbag deployment, regardless of injuries? Including accidents that were sufficiently serious that airbags could not or were unable to deploy?
The stats on the site break it into major and minor collisions. You can see the above link.
I have no doubt that there are ways to take issue with the stats. I'm sure we could look at accidents from 11pm - 6am compared to the volume of drivers on the road as well.
I wonder how much of their trouble comes from other failures in their plan (avoiding the use of pre-made maps and single city taxi services in favor of a system intended to drive in unseen cities) vs how much comes from vision. There are concerning failure modes from vision alone but it’s not clear that’s actually the reason for the failure. Waymo built an expensive safe system that is a taxi first and can only operate on certain areas, and then they ran reps on those areas for a decade.
Tesla specifically decided not to use the taxi-first approach, which does make sense since they want to sell cars. One of the first major failures of their approach was to start selling pre-orders for self driving. If they hadn’t, they would not have needed to promise it would work everywhere, and could have pivoted to single city taxi services like the other companies, or added lidar.
But certainly it all came from Musk’s hubris, first to set out to solve the self driving in all conditions using only vision, and then to start selling it before it was done, making it difficult to change paths once so much had been promised.
> And if he still doesn’t realize and admit he is wrong then he is just plain dumb.
The absolute genius made sure that he can't back out without making it bleedingly obvious that old cars can never be upgraded for a LIDAR-based stack. Right now he's avoiding a company-killing class action suit by stalling, hoping people will get rid of HW3 cars, (and you can add HW4 cars soon too) and pretending that those cars will be updated, but if you also need to have LIDAR sensors, you're massively screwed.
> The ways in which Musk dug himself in when experts predicted this exact scenario confirmed to me he was not as smart as some people think he was.
History is replete with smart people making bad decisions. Someone can be exceptionally smart (in some domains) and have made a bad decision.
> He seemed to have drank his own koolaid back then.
Indeed; but he was on a run of success, based on repeatedly succeeding deliberately against established expertise, so I imagine that Koolaid was pretty compelling.
To be frank, no one had a crystal ball back then, and stuff could go either way with uncertainty in both hardware and software capabilities. Sure Lidars were better even back then, but the bet was on catching up on them.
I hate Elon's personality and political activity as much as anyone, but it is clear from technical PoV that he did logical things. Actually, the fact that he was mistaken and still managed to not bankrupt Tesla is saying something about his skills.
Fair. So in a sense, the lidar vs camera argument ultimately can be publicly assess/proven through human babysitter (regulation permit) and accident rates. or maybe user adoptions.
I relaunched one of my Dutch agricultural communities to reach a more international audience. I’m starting to see great traction and it’s very rewarding:
https://www.tractorfan.us
Also, the entire industry profits from the work that’s done at the bleeding edge. That’s the case in every industry.
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