FeloniousHam

I don't own shares in any Musk company, and agree that Tesla as a car company is grossly overvalued. But as the parent states, dude gets shit done.

It is _hard_ to start a successful car company, let alone one on an untested platform. He did it, and it taught China how to build the future of cars.

It is _impossible_ to build a successful rocket company from nothing. He did it, and SpaceX is now ~60% of _worldwide_ launches.

He's had plenty of failures, but Musk is what people are buying. He's gross and annoying, but I wouldn't count him out, and I'm rooting for his success.

I've never understood Tesla's valuation as greater than the entire automotive industry combined.

But as a 95% FSD user, I'm living (and loving) the Full Self-Driving lie.

> is that current "conservative" politicians are actually more neoliberals than conservatives.

I suppose "neoliberal" means whatever anyone wants it too, but perhaps you were looking for "postliberal". From the AI summary:

> Postliberalism is a political and social philosophy that rejects the core tenets of traditional liberalism. It argues that liberalism’s hyper-focus on individual autonomy, free-market capitalism, and secularism has eroded social cohesion and community.

"Conservative" is used to describe the current US administration, and I suppose they imagine they're conserving _something_, but they seem very eager to attack the liberal foundation of the Republic.

The AI numbers are huge, but I remember similar arguments about residential high-speed internet. According to Gemini, the "price for internet" is down 12% in real terms (ugh, capitalism!), while speeds are staggeringly faster.

The providers have spent a fortune on wireless, pulled a lot of fiber/cable, and it's cheaper than it was when it started.

We always called it "the nubbin"

"hellscape"

Ugh, capitalism.

We tried it, it was fun. Conspiracy mode just sounds like talking to my kids.

I only use Grok through the "Gork" personality in the Tesla, but find its responses to be very realistic, often genuinely funny, and occasionally useful.

It was a weak joke I made-- I _could_ quit or go without, but I was always nearby to real addicts and ended up smoking a lot for a long time. Also, I didn't inhale deeply or hold the smoke like the "professionals".

+ all the complexity that makes the stuff coming out the backend less polluting

> And cars lasted much longer back then and were much easier and cheaper to maintain.

I lived through those "amazingly affordable" decades, and while the engines were simpler (if you're driving a '68 Caprice 327 V8 without all those pesky environmental gadgets), no way they were more reliable. What was reliable was oil leaks, and burning oil. My parents popped a bottle of champagne when the station wagon hit 100k miles! 100,000 miles is table stakes for auto reliability these days.

My father was a quite capable home mechanic, but most people weren't. I guarantee you cars spent more time in the shop then than now.

Go to a car show and compare the interior of anything from this Golden Era to Nissan Versa somebody else mentioned, and tell me you'd take the old thing.

I have nostalgia for the decades I grew up in, but it's for the people I loved and simpler life of a child, not the stuff.

Totally agree. I was non-professional smoker for a long time, and quit many, many times. Even after years, I'll get this "you know what'd great?" tap on the shoulder.

One cigarette is not a slippery slope, it's a vertical cliff drop.

I love booze in all its forms, but it doesn't have the same pull.

100% on sleep. I drink regularly, and very much enjoy it, but I'm always cognizant of the price I'm going to pay in good sleep.

I've started not drinking at home as simple way to curb consumption without giving it up entirely.

I acknowledge the complaints, I love a good complaint! My issue is that these superficial, and in many cases, easily remediable annoyances add up to a "crappy OS". MacOS has to satisfy a very diverse userbase from Paris Hilton-types to grumpy Hacker News readers (but thankfully not Bank of America), and I think they do a better than decent job at it.

Also: I don't use Mail.app.

It has been a while. And I should say when I stuck to distro-tested options, I didn't have many issues. But I always ended up installing and configuring things that ended up causing conflictions, and all too often did clean installs instead of in-place upgrades.

> Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.

Windows 11 is perfectly cromulent. I don't prefer it, but with WSL, it's like a slow almost-MacOS. The anger over the transparency is I guess personal, I genuinely don't notice it. I certainly haven't stumbled over it. (I might have changed a setting?)

> Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.

I just hit Play and the music comes on. I'm not crazy about their search, but it's not that big a deal. The Podcasts app now... THAT is a complaint I can get behind. I would use something else but for the integration with the car.

> Spotlight and Launchpad

Spotlight seems good enough to me. I tried Alfred and Raycast, but never used any of the helper functionalities. Just used it to open apps and files.

I never used Launchpad. I do forget the names of apps, but I just open Applications.

>"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zoom/comments/1i0j9db/how_do_i_disa...

I do appreciate that your list is specific, but I think these complaints fall well short of "crappy" :).

Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago.

Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that accepting some limitations of the excellent OSX was a worthwhile tradeoff. Today I couldn't tell you what I'm missing that can't be fixed with a 30s Google + `brew install`.

And complaints about default choices, or limitations with easy work arounds, on Hacker News are just weird. No one typing on this message board runs default anything.

Please share specific (legitimate) gripes and win my sympathy.

Strong disagree. I gave up my Macbook for an iPad + (Mini + Jump). I do a fair amount of penciling and consumption, but most of my time is booping around in the window environment with the Magic Keyboard case. Emails, YouTube, WhatsApp, Obsidian, Remoting into more capable machines, sometimes I touch the screen, most times I'm using the trackpad or a mouse.

I'm a >90% FSD user, and I approve this sentiment. My wife hates it for the mistakes it makes (eg. seems like there is recent shadow recognition regression) and "errors in judgement" (not getting in the turn lane in a timely manner), she would never use it on her own.

I've got plenty of experience, and (feel as though) I know most of it's failure points. I had to drive my 30 minute commute last week, and it was decidedly unfun. I have seen the future and I don't want to go back.

Probably flagged because of lack of tech relevance.

(I listen Ukraine: The Latest daily, I'm reasonably up-to-date big issue European politics).

Finally, the Real World use case for Bitcoin!

> It’s not a bad movie.

I hadn't seen it since it came out, but had a that kind of general movie recollection that it was as funny as it was prescient. Watched it again with my wife who had not seen it before: it's not funny. Maybe I'm getting too old.

(I do still laugh at the "Ow! My balls!")

This sounds like so much Eurocope: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/eurocope

> Microsoft's best work is also pretty damn far in the past, at this point.

I would almost reflexily agree except for VSCode. It about the most perfect piece of software (to the point where now there aren't any user facing feature updates) I've ever used, and I use it all day everyday. It's absurdly flexible, excellent defaults--it really, actually improved my view of MS from somewhere subterranean to a height of respect.

I'd include WSL, but thats kind of backhanded praise and it is frustratingly slow a lot of the time.

Out of curiosity, was the camera view compromised? I would probably take over too, but like the poster above, I get the warning in all kinds of conditions.

I think we agree :). There were plenty of wrong ideas in this thread and I must have clicked on yours accidentally.

I use it everyday, I love it. Native unix, great apps and ecosystem.

Have you ever had a wife having her first baby?

There are many decisions young parents make that from the remove of a keyboard in a happily single or child-free relationship seem irrational or (mon dieu!) _inefficient_, but there is a emotional depth to these choices that are _very_ meaningful to the people involved.

I have a engineer relative who worked for German companies for 20 years in the US and Europe: "You can tell a German nothing."

(He loved his time there and the people of course).

I agree. The military component was a resounding success. The "de-Baathification" was a disaster and gets lumped into the decapitation of Sadaam's regime.

We'll never know the counterfactual, but it seems likely that the banning from public life everyone with ties to the current government was a large contributor to the collapse of the country and rise of the terrorist groups.