kylecordes

There is inherent conflict in having both an AI tool business and an AI tool detection business.

If the first does a good job, the second fails. And vice versa.

(On the other hand, maybe there is a lot of money to be made selling both, to different groups?)

I find it weird when people list hyperloop as a Musk failure. He had an idea, decided to give away the idea instead of pursuing himself. It's certainly not a success, it's just an idea. Will somebody eventually make a go of it, or something similar? Maybe, maybe not.

I have a complaint about Tesla on this one. In Europe they ship vastly better tail lights with a different color for turn signals. As I understand, the superior signals are acceptable, though not preferred, by US standards. But Tesla makes a separate, different, worse part to use in the US, rather than giving us the good stuff also and reducing their manufacturing variation.

It's quite annoying that Hyundai got this so wrong, while a long list of other makers got it right. Even without regulators demanding they do so.

I assume there are some conversion-optimization experts who think and consult data to choose the ideal timing and frequency to invite a visitor to sign up. I.e. the moment they are most likely to do so if invited.

... and the other 95% of folks who just grab an off-the-shelf email-list-invite popover widget and slap it on a web site.

Experiences seem to vary a lot. Some people report the Twitter feed changed radically for the worse. Others (including me) have found it's about the same. I think it must depend greatly on what accounts you follow.

Both. Elon's approach to all this is pointlessly erratic, alienating himself from numerous people and orgs he could really use as allies. He might be right that moving entirely to paid verification is needed... but even if that is needed, it could be rolled out over a long time, with much less alienation of the user base.

NPR could benefit from a bit of patience also: realize how erratic the counterparty is, and wait a bit to see what shakes out.

Would be slick if all the space-company accounts had a couple lines of detail identifying what % of their total sales comes from government, military, commercial customers, etc.

Of course this would require people wanting to move away from “how can I tarnish this account with a label?” and toward “how can I improve transparency without aiming to insult?”

I think people should be slower to act.

Around the time they left, the label had already been improved to mention funding instead of affiliation.

If they could just be a bit chill about it, is quite possible within a month it might have been replaced with a approximate-percentage-funding label, which should not be particularly offensive.

Would be really slick to see all media accounts have company ownership / funding listed.

Imagine an upgraded version of Musk - making some of these changes in a less contentious way.

I find the idea of labeling media outlets quite helpful. The initial state-affiliated label for NPR seemed like an unnecessary tarnishment. The updated "government-funded" label is better, but still not quite there. The idea elsewhere in this thread of labeling the approximate percentage of government funding is excellent and should not be offensive to anyone involved.

The essential characteristics of Buck2 look very appealing - but it's hard to see this catching up with the substantial ecosystem of language support rules for Bazel.

I was acquainted with Bob over 20 years ago, when he was a software developer in St. Louis, attending various St. Louis area developer meetings. I remember at the time thinking that he was a startling combination of very personable and incredibly sharp. I was not surprised at all to hear he headed west to Google, made his way up to CTO of Square, and onward from there.

I've seen this same argument made by lots of people on Twitter. But as far as I can tell, in at least the last several decades of bank failures in the US, every depositor has been made whole or close to whole, regardless of geography or industry or political favor. Usually the mechanism has been to arrange the failing bank be bought out, rather than to extend the FDIC limit.

While I moved away from Delphi over a decade ago, it is still reasonably popular in niche vertical market software and internal systems.

It is probably still a practical choice for both of those. Certainly I've seen sprawling internal systems developed with web technology at a multiple of what it would cost to deliver the functionality with Delphi.

Recruiting top talent will be tough though - those with the most choice often (rationally) choose to work on growing-adoption technologies.

Instagram used to be mostly photos from people I knew or followed or whatever. Nowadays it is 95% ads/sponsored/influencer content. Almost pointless to visit. But I think this might be a result mostly of people not posting photos as much.

Related unhelpful behavior of Google's auth system:

Dropping you from an online meeting, mid-meeting, and demanding you log in again right now. Perhaps because it had been X days since you last logged in or whatever.

I don't recall experiencing it recently, but it happened a LOT in 2020 and 2021.

Challenge is that the biggest, best customers are most inclined to get something that is part of a big product suite. So you can start a competitor, but likely stuck with with low end of the market where there is the least chance of actually eeking out a living, until you get big enough for a big company to come knocking.

Also even larger kidney grills, of course.

It appears so far that the good UI/UX Tesla offers is something other makers could replicate, but stubbornly refuse to.

Still... that doesn't mean the stock is infinitely valuable. Presumably the market will shake out and TSLA will end up with a valuation kinda high for a car company, but not in tech-company range.

Nice them them to remind all the crypto people to deduct their 2022 losses!

I don’t have numbers in front of me, but my impression is that carmakers have done a much better job in the last decade with front-rear balance decent on nearly all cars. Versus decades past when some were wildly front-heavy (or occasionally, wildly back-heavy, ouch).

No idea why; one guess is that it didn't occur to Tesla to worry about test-drivability and rentability yet. Probably hasn't harmed them so far because the brand has a fan following, of people happy to spend a few hours learning these details up front. Could become more of an obstacle for Tesla when there are five brands of really good electric cars, designed to test-drive well, available for immediate purchase at dealers.

I've had a Model 3 since 2018. You can see earlier in the thread that I am not a raging Musk fan, in particular of his public behaviour over the last few years.

But a couple of these concerns are may be just because of the short experience renting?

Door handles: for the first week or so they seemed awkward, but I've been opening with a single hand ever since. The design is very similar to various exotic sports cars - and not well suited to a midpriced daily driver. Tradeoffs for aero, I think.

Unlocking and locking: bad experience on a rental with the card. As an owner, it locks and unlocks based on the phone-key automatically in daily use. I tried the key card a couple of times in the first month to understand how it worked - it's great as a backup key that fits in a wallet.

Touchscreen: I've used the touch UI in various brands of recent cars, and find the Tesla experience by far the best. Though I agree another $50 worth of physical buttons for the most commonly used features would be nice.

Steering wheel controls: after a few weeks you remember what they do and the physical minimalism is totally fine. Design optimized for owners, at the expense of renters.

Lane controls: there are about a dozen switches that control this behavior. It can be incredibly annoying, or no problem at all. Sounds like the defaults nowadays (or what the rental place sets) are awful, since as configured it ensured you won't buy one.

Price: they're selling all they can make at the price the market will bear. Would be nice if it was lower. Many industry watchers predict lower prices are all brands in 2023.

Fortunately it's a big industry, there are now some great electric cars competing with very different dashboards. I like variety, I'll pick a different one when I am ready to trade in.

I'm not defending him - repeating an earlier comment: Musk's behaviour is harmful to his personal reputation, his businesses, his investors, and sometimes beyond. Also utterly unbecoming a CEO of companies which routinely have human life at risk, serve critical national security interests, etc.

But I stand by the analysis that Musk's ventures are (so far) opposed to Russian interests. Who knows though? He's pretty erratic over the last couple years. Maybe next year's Tesla model will switch to gas, with a preference for Russia-supplied gas? Am I joking? Mostly, but not 100%.

I agree - Musk's behaviour is harmful to his personal reputation, his businesses, his investors, and sometimes beyond. Also utterly unbecoming a CEO of companies which routinely have human life at risk, serve critical national security interests, etc.

(Yet I would not bet against him making a success of Twitter, as he has Tesla and SpaceX.)

It appeared to many observers that Musk was mocking the Russian propaganda, he then made the mockery explicit later.

I don't understand the thesis that Musk is somehow pro-Russia. Generally his ventures are against Russia interests:

SpaceX, launched in the aftermath of Russia being uninterested in selling a leftover rocket to Musk, now dominates the launch industry to the detriment of Russia, among other things halting the cash flow from NASA to Russia to carry astronauts to ISS.

Tesla and former-SolarCity, reducing use of oil, while Russia is a major oil producer.

Starlink provides communications capability to the country Russia is attacking.

However, a likely macroeconomic slump in (electric and other) vehicle demand and Musk’s erratic way of running Twitter are real problems. I think these get the blame for stock issues, rather than the bizarre Russian thing.

Seems like a pretty narrow law could fix it. Easement of 3 feet at corners of very rural land where there is public land on either side. Surely such a "taking" of 0.000001% of private holdings could be tolerated - incredibly tiny compared to large swaths of easement on most properties across the country.

This seems great in theory but unlikely to work well in practice.

Your close friends are already in touch routinely via email, phone, text, in person.

Your extended network of acquaintances though? Connecting on a social media site is much less of a hurdle than: make them aware you have a newsletter. Get them to click and subscribe to the newsletter, get their email client to route that newsletter to their actual inbox so they see it, etc.

A newsletter seems best suited to those with a bit of fame, enough to have a bunch of 'followers' - who will seek out and subscribe to a newsletter.

For commuting, you charge at home with a much slower charger than this. You start each morning at a high charge %, and never stop at any charger at all.

The fast charger is for road trips - at the moment, the number and reliability of high-speed charge points is probably a bigger constraint than the relative speed of this model versus others.

It's hard not to be reminded of Howard Hughes. And to be reminded that such is a tragic outcome.