comfysocks

Railroad looks huge on the GDP (estimate) chart because the US transcontinental railroad was built in the mid 1800’s when the US economy was relatively tiny.

Yeah, EVs are completely mundane now. Not sexy enough of a story to justify the high PE ratios anymore.

I think this is the reason for the weird pivot to humanoid robots and for taking SpaceX public even though he originally said he wouldn’t. Better story for the investors than EVs.

Fair enough, I see that online all the time. Here’s my take.

Raising your hand alone is a common gesture that pretty much everyone has done. Saying “my heart goes out to you” gives plausible deniability. But making the hand gesture while clicking your heels together and snapping to attention with a stern jaw-jutting look on your face is pretty unmistakably a nazi salute.

Elon has publicly denied it was a nazi salute, but any normal person would go a step further and also disavow neo nazi ideology in the same breath. But doing that would break the dog whistle effect.

Some people say he’s just trolling, and yes, Elon likes to troll. But trolling or not, it has the same effect if you don’t also renounce neo nazism. It normalizes and shows you are comfortable with it.

Can I prove he’s a neo nazi? No I haven’t gone through his wallet and found his membership card. But his support for the AfD and all his great-replacement-theory adjacent talk are strong signals.

I wonder if going public will mean that SpaceX engineers are no longer going to be able to concentrate on rockets, but instead need to work on a variety of distractions meant to excite investors like dancing robots.

Yes, but this is for national (midterm election) security, so we need gas prices down before November.

Can you imagine the targeted ads we’ll have when they do deep psychological fingerprinting off of chats from AI therapists, AI girlfriends/boyfriends, etc?!

Not the first time Trump has wagged the dog.

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

Lex’s position at MIT would make sense for a grad student or perhaps someone early in their career as an academic. But Lex is neither a student nor faculty member at MIT. So what’s he doing? This type of thing is usually unpaid or low paying for non-faculty.

Lex got his PhD at Drexel over a decade ago. If he had pursued an academic career, he would most likely be an associate professor by now. Working as a researcher at a lab at a university that you aren’t a faculty member of is basically “failure to launch” at this stage.

But Lex is a successful podcaster. His dad is a successful academic and scientist (at Drexel.) Lex is not that, but he plays one on the internet.

Well he did try to overturn that election, but he failed. So I guess that makes him a failed fascist last time around. This time he’s trying much harder. Let’s make sure he fails again.

To be fair, “guidelines” and “rules” are two different things. There’s no strict prohibition on politics in the guidelines. If you read the whole thing in context, it’s trying to discourage topics that are mundane, frivolous, or vacuous — not to prohibit all politics.

“MOST stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”

Emphasis mine

If someone screams at you, they are actively invading your space.

On the other hand, if you actively click on an article, read it, and make multiple posts on it, well that’s on you.

This article is #1 on news.ycombinator.com/active right now. Obviously top of mind for a lot of us right now. Pretty hard to find it without the /active, though.

In the eyes of some in leadership, tech workers should be apolitical worker drones. Weighing in on politics is for people like David Sacks, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk.

No one will be held to account as long as Trump or his collaborators are in power.

If anyone views the current situation as a problem, there is no viable solution that doesn’t involve removing MAGA from power.

That’s true if you want to keep the peace. The way to read their actions is that they’re trying to incite violence.

If Trump can incite violence then he can invoke the insurrection act, or perhaps declare some form of martial law to seize more power. Perhaps even parlay this into cancelling the midterm elections.

It’s easy enough to avoid clicking on articles containing “Greenland”, “ICE”, etc. if you don’t want to talk about those things. Is it also necessary to make sure that none of your fellow nerds talk about those things either?

I consider tech workers to be “my tribe” and am curious to know what others think about what’s happening in the world around us.

I’ve considered Elon to be a bit of a bullshitter for almost as long as I’ve followed him. Back when he was an opportunistic Democrat, and now that he’s an ideological MAGA, his public statements always seemed to set off my bullshit detector. It seemed clear to me that his intention was more to manipulate perception rather than to disseminate factual information. While most business leaders are guilty of this to some degree, with Elon it seemed more cynically and nakedly so.

I’ve also come to consider him to be a skilled business person. He negotiated a ridiculous low price for the Fremont ex-NUMMI plant. He secured funding to enable Tesla to survive the GFC. The list goes on. I’d argue that Elon’s biggest wins were business related, not technical. Not that there weren’t technical accomplishments, it’s just that the technological accomplishments were more incremental SV type stuff whereas the business accomplishments were more heroic. I also give Tesla credit for the success of model S. But I consider that to be a function of good execution, not of technology. If that would have flopped it would have been the end. But there were many possible ways for Tesla to die back then.

One of Elon’s key business skills is his ability to sell a narrative. I guess that goes hand in hand with the “bullshitter” thing. He seems to have a magical ability to hypnotize fanboys and investors into believing that Tesla is more than it actually is.

The auto industry is not very sexy from an investor point of view. It’s a mature market, very capital intensive, high risk, low margin. Yet somehow Tesla achieves an outsized market cap.

As humorously noted in the HBO Silicon Valley “no revenue” scene, investors reward you for future promises and punish you on actual delivery. But what if you could promise a future that remains perpetually in the future? And every delivery is not an end, but only a step along the way to this utopian/distopian vision? What if you “promise the moon”, er, I mean Mars? If you did this, then maybe you could have a perpetual pure play that never expires.

So back to the article. Is this the demise of Tesla? I don’t know if Tesla necessarily has “no path forward” as “just a car company”. But I think Elon’s ability to sell the “sci-fi future” is wearing out. Tesla has delivered on some difficult business cases with incremental technology, but the track record on the “impossible future“ stuff isn’t good. Also, the mainstream EV industry will become increasingly commoditized with new Chinese entrants, eroding margins. Tariffs keep you in saturated markets and don’t help you in growing markets. So maybe a bit of a demise for all?

There may be some truth to that. But if we get too cynical, the battle is lost before it’s begun!

That I can think of, there’s Jesse Welles.

Since the current traffic infrastructure was built for human drivers with vision, you’ll probably need some form of vision to navigate today’s roads. The only way I could picture lidar only working would be on a road system specially made for machine driving.

Yes lidar has limitations, but so does machine vision. That’s why you want both if you can have it. LIDAR is more reliable at judging distance than stereo vision. Stereo vision requires there to be sufficient texture (features) to work. It can be thrown off by fog or glare. A white semi trailer can be a degenerate case. It can be fooled by optical illusions.

Yes, humans don’t have built in lidar. But humans do use tools to augment their capabilities. The car itself is one example. Birds don’t have jet engines, props, or rotors… should we not use those?

Most practical navigation systems employ some form of sensor fusion. It’s more the norm than not. I’m sure even Tesla’s FSD does too for fusing vision, inertial sensors, wheel speed, multiple etc.

It’s great that starlink is there, but it can still be shut down on the whim of its owner as seen in the past. So hurray for starlink! (unless the opportunistic tides of politics change)

You know, not everyone on this site has an absolutist binary opinion on the Elon. Some people can give him credit for what he gets right, while simultaneously calling bullshit on his bullshit.

In a way, America didn’t ask for what it got. America voted for a guy who claimed to have never heard of Project 2025. It got Project 2025.

Also, Trump ran on a populist message. Yet if you look at what he has done materially since he got into office, it seems his true allegiance is with the billionaire elite.

No, I’m intentionally speaking of the leadership. Yes there are dissidents in China (and Russia and NK…) but the governments have been able to make their work seem futile.

There are also some Chinese who are happy to live in a police state. There are also some US citizens who would like more of a police state, provided the police are on their side of the culture wars.

The fantasy is that capitalism automatically breeds liberal democracy. Sometimes it does, but don’t forget it can work the other way too. It was the excesses of capitalism in the gilded age that led to the rise socialist revolutions in the first place. Sometimes might say today’s billionaire capitalists are becoming like the robber barrons of the gilded age.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Larger than Saudi Arabia and the US, yet produces very little of it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/business/energy-environme...

Squeeze Ukraine for rare earths and Venezuela for oil. Neither has nukes, easy targets. Give lucrative contracts to mining and extraction buddies, give pardons to financial criminals, get protection from powerful new allies after you leave office.

True, but both SK and Taiwan had always wanted to be more aligned with the West as they needed to be under the US defense umbrella. The liberalization could only come after gaining stability.

On the other hand, China has always sought to regain what it considers to be its rightful place as a first world power and to recover from its “century of humiliation.”

I think the CCP has been pretty consistent in this stance. Policy makers in the West that didn’t notice were blinded by corporate wishful thinking.

A bit hypocritical for him to say that after his reaction to people commenting on Charlie Kirk’s murder.

On the one hand, in interviews, Tarantino always seems to have contrarian opinions about everything. When Kill Bill came out, he’d verbally knock Lee and praise lesser known movie practitioners.

On the other hand, if you watch the movie until the end, it’s obvious that the movie has an unreliable narrator. We all know how the Tate/Labianca murders actually turned out. Not at all like the movie…