Without knowing what they actually use, I feel comfortable to state that the industry has moved on from Contraction Hierarchies to somewhat more flexible techniques. These allow you to take traffic information and road closures, and user preferences, and whatnot into account without requiring a full re-processing of the input data with each traffic update. The state of the art is a two-step preprocessing that first decomposes the road network into cells, and then processes these cells independently. Sometimes it goes by the name of customisable route planning, sometimes it is called multi-level Dijkstra.
Storing the distances for all pairs is prohibitively expensive. Also, you'd need to store the path information as well. Fortunately, road networks exhibit a lot of hierarchical structure. For example, when going far away, you will almost certainly use the long-distance sub-network, i.e. highways. It is possible to exploit this in a preprocessing step that adds a linear amount of information, which is in turn used to speed up queries.
Classic bait and switch setup. Selling people the future in 2 years time with little to nothing to show for today. Timelines will slip, plans will change, software won‘t be ready, prices will change. And that doesn’t even account for where Waymo is in two years from now, or what the Chinese EV industry is able to pull off until then.
Even this underwhelming event was originally announced on short notice to prop up perception when sales looked bad in April [1], delayed by two‘ish months, and then didn‘t even start on time. Oh, and implementing the robo taxi was a two-months project back then [1]. It‘s a ruse, folks.
Tesla at a forward P/E of 80 is massively overvalued as a car company. You can get Mercedes or BMW at a P/E of 6, with a 9% yield. Sure, the EV market is still growing, but Tesla is not the only player. All brands now have EVs, there are both cheaper and more luxurious Chinese EVs, that's some massive competition.
The only reasons Tesla could be valued differently are FSD and Robotics, which Musk and Tesla-friendly analysts are heavily pushing. Since Musk has made massive loans against his Tesla stake you can expect that he will keep highlighting those narratives as well. A revaluation of the stock to sane levels would certainly cause him some financial difficulties.
> They had 2 dozen vehicles with no steering wheels taking attendees around the venue.
To quote a participant[0]:
> After over 10 years of Full Self-Driving development, @Tesla
is limited to a 20-30 acre geofenced 5mph ride on a preprogrammed, premapped and heavily rehearsed route with no traffic and no pedestrians.
I saw pedestrians walking in front of the cars in the live stream. The rest is true though. It reminded me of taking the classic car ride around an amusement park where the cars all follow each other on a track.
There are countless videos on youtube of people recording their experience with FSD's open beta. It is probably 90% of the way there, if not more. Anyone who thinks Tesla won't get there first is peak delusional. Hate on Elon as much as you want, but Tesla are top-tier engineering.
Real funny seeing a bunch of web devs on HN talk shit about Tesla's engineers too lmao
Even if you'd be right about the 90%, I highly doubt they'll be first.
How long did it take to get to that 90% ? AFAIK they first mentioned FSD ~2016(Self-driving itself even earlier).
As the last 20% of work are often 80% of the effort we can estimate that those remaining 10 % take ~ 40% of the time. They've been at it for ~8 years , which gives an expected release of ~ 2029.
We'll see what Waymo and other competition has until then.
I feel like there’s some software adage about the last 10% being the hardest. It certainly holds true from my experience - even if they are 90% of the way there, it’s not a linear path to 100%.
A.K.A the Rule of Credibility: "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule
> Real funny seeing a bunch of web devs on HN talk shit about Tesla's engineers too lmao
It's not "talk shit about Tesla's engineers", it's just a very hard problem to solve. It's easy to get it "most of the time" but extremely difficult to finish it. It's obvious it will take decades, not years to get us there. Whereas Musk insists he will solve it "this year", every year from 2014.
Tesla has the world's best autonomous vehicle offering by some way of measuring things. There are many ways to measure things, but at least in some "category" they are indeed leading: Level 2 systems for the US which you can privately buy.
US competition with Tesla isn’t even close and the only way anyone has able to get a functional charging network up and running was to piggyback off of Tesla. I know the Trump stuff is annoying, but there’s way too much criticism of Tesla out there that is our political emotion.
Elon knows Trump is a transactional person and as long as he supports Trump, he can get the necessary governmental treatment his companies need to survive (tax credits, Chinese EV tariffs, some sort of asinine Mars mission).
EV tariffs are going to happen throughout the entire west with or without Trump.
Western governments have discovered the Chinese plan to decimate western manufacturing by subsidizing it at over 10 X the rate required and seen in the west.
Vehicles matter because they are a means for war machine production.
- I believe he can launch rockets into space and land them on their own footprint.
- I believe he can revolutionize auto manufacturing and disrupt a 100 year old industry replacing fossil-fuel burning dinosaurs with clean electric vehicles that outperform them and that appeal to the general public
- I believe he can allow quadrapelegics to interact with the world in ways never thought possible
- I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times
- I believe that innovation is hard and just because he boldly claims he is going to Mars or make cars drive themselves - and hasn’t done it yet, is no reason to discount the possibility that he might actually pull it off one day
Mostly I agree, modulo "he knows how to make teams to do XYZ", which I'm happy to count for the same reason I'm happy to blame him personally when those teams he's ordering around do something I don't like:
> I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times
I strongly disagree with this.
Even if I ignore the proxy of all the investors writing off their buy-out loans by 75%, even if I ignore that when people link me to random threads I can only see the specific one linked and not any reply because of an invisible paywall^w account-wall, even if I ignore that loading a random tweet now often takes 26 seconds or more (yes, I did just record my screen to get that number), even if I ignore that undesirable stories can be buried by an avalanche of alternative narratives and not just by censoring the truth…
There's still the problem of Musk intervening politically in ways that, although totally legal, are exactly the kind of thing he was complaining about before the takeover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
I'd like someone, eg Musk, to define "free speech". Start with some of those "first principles" he likes so much.
Then, per "theory vs reality" cliché, I'd like someone, eg Musk, to explain or demonstrate or larp or interpretative dance what "free speech" looks like in practice. Maybe even point to an existing example.
For bonus credit:
- explain relationship between "free speech" and news feeds (algorithmic hate machines)
- explain operation of "free speech" multinationally
- explain how to balance "free speech" and moderation
- enumerate the tradeoffs of, downsides due to, and consequences of "free speech"
ElonJet was a live geotracking site for private jets. You can post cisgender, it just comes with a warning.
Before, people were being banned for using "him" instead of "her" to describe biological males who self-identified as women. People were secretly de-amplified for criticizing the government policy of lockdowns. It was censorship on a whole different magnitude.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Either you’re a “free speech absolutist” or you’re just a lying charlatan. Elon is clearly the latter, the evidence is right in front of your eyes and you choose to make excuses.
ElonJet is posting publicly available information and isn’t banned on other platforms. Something coming with a warning is the same as restricting speech.
> Something coming with a warning is the same as restricting speech.
Placing a warning is generally not considered a restriction on free speech but rather a tool to inform or protect audiences.
In contrast, restricting free speech involves preventing someone from expressing their views or censoring content outright. Warnings are typically seen as a way to balance free expression with the responsibility to inform audiences.
> In contrast, restricting free speech involves preventing someone from expressing their views or censoring content outright.
You mean like suing people for saying true things, and encouraging the government to criminally investigate for people for saying the same? Because that is exactly what Musk has done in the past year.
The warnings undoubtedly come with a derank in the Twitter algorithm, so it's very much not the same.
But if you want to get really technical then this isn't even about "free speech". A platform restricting speech has nothing to do with "free speech" as it is defined in the US constitution. That's all about governments creating laws that punish people for certain speech.
But hey, we're in a world where Elon spouts nonsense about being all about "free speech" so the world has lost that meaning anyway.
People are only being banned for impersonation and live geotracking. In the previous Twitter, you were banned, shadow-banned, de-amplified, etc, if you expressed views that the political left disagreed with.
You want to justify and downplay the latter my presenting Musk as equally villainous. It's disingenuous mental gymnastics to advance your censorious and authoritarian agenda. Getting Twitter back to being censored is what motivates the incessant attacks on Musk.
Let’s say you’re right. There is only one side claiming they are “free speech absolutists”. There is only one side demonstrably lying to you. It’s Elon Musk. You’re being duped by a billionaire and you’re too blind to see it.
I'd much rather X under Musk while he doesn't live up to his free speech absolutist claims than X under the establishment, where you must use left-wing gender pronoun conventions or be banned.
You're okay with the previous authoritarianism that was imposed that's why you'd prefer a return to the previous setup. If you believed in political neutrality and Free Speech, you would be hardly annoyed by Musk not being as committee to Free Speech as he claims, while he reverses what had been an overwhelming censorship program.
> HE can do nothing of the sort because he is an idiot with very few real skills.
Management is a real skill. Salesmanship is also a real skill. I may not approve of the showboating, but drumming up enthusiasm for a future that most consider to be fantasy, was a necessary (though not sufficient) part of building an electric car company in an era when most people thought hydrogen was the future and that "electric car" meant "a milk float" and, if they had memories of any real personal electric vehicle, those memories would have been of the failure of the Sinclair C5:
Pretty sure nobody except Toyota thought hydrogen was going to be a useful intermediate fuel: handling is ridiculously difficult compared to room-temperature liquids, energy density is ridiculously low.
It would have made more sense to sell Fischer-Tropsch synthesized carbon fuel from purpose-grown crops, at a mere 3x the current production price of fossil carbon fuels, using the existing infrastructure for distribution into existing vehicles.
I don’t like the guy but he’s built companies that are implanting brain chips to give people vision and parapalegics the ability to interact in the world, has blanketed the globe in true high speed internet, have built spaceships that launch more frequently than any nation has ever done their own. And then there’s the EV thing which many see as key to fighting climate change. If he wasn’t so unlikable and part of this twitter debacle, the world would be praising each of these efforts.
Most of the passionate (embittered? salty? flavourless?) critiques of Elon always sound like a confession: His critics can't explain why he is successful, why his companies are successful, nor why he is wealthy. When they attempt an explanation, it's less an explanation and more a dismissal: luck, other people, teams, theft, subsidies, corruption, "the system is broken!", a technoaccelerationist cabal secretly pulling the levers of power.
But, fundamentally, the question whose answer eludes the majority of humans especially Elon's critics is: Why am I not as wealthy and relevant as Elon yet I'm obviously smarter and more ethical than he is? (Their implicit answer is that "life is unfair and doesn't reward the best people.")
Because if any of his critics actually had a meaningful critique that corresponds to reality, they would simply build better products and companies, become billionaires themselves and exemplify rather than pontificate about a better mode of billionaire behaviour and grandeur of vision.
I wonder if Musk fans realize that constantly deflecting all criticism with "you're just jealous, bro" says more about them than about the people they're limply trying to discredit.
> I wonder if Musk fans realize that constantly deflecting all criticism with "you're just jealous, bro" says more about them than about the people they're limply trying to discredit.
I wonder if the critics of Musk's "fans" realize that deflecting all criticism with "they're just Musk fans, bro" says more about their own anemic ability to imagine the legitimacy of another perspective, their utter lack of humility and complete poverty of intellectual honesty, than about the so-called fans they're flaccidly trying to discredit?
Any day now a Tesla Semi truck will stop by to deliver my solar shingles. I can then use them to charge my Tesla robotaxi. My Robotaxi will ferry people around when I'm not using it and pay for itself in under 2 years. Then I can start saving for my ticket to Mars, where I'll be safe from the woke mind virus that is consuming everyone here on earth.
I don't think the argument is that everything he touches turns to gold. Transforming two industries and going from in debt to the planet's richest is an achievement in itself.
I do recognise his major contributions: Made electric cars commonplace sooner than I thought with the Model S, financed SpaceX's doubtlessly awesome progress, and... well that's pretty much it.
Thing is, the illusion is fading, his previously "inscrutable" politics are on his sleeve, and you can't just pretend he's not a complete liability for any company because of his irrational, and frankly childish, behaviour.
> Made electric cars commonplace sooner than I thought with the Model S
You mean financing and leading the largest EV maker in the world and fundamentally changing a 100 year old industry.
Car industry has been considered for a long time a incredibly hard place to get into for a startup. Most new companies happened when industrial powers rose and supported local companies.
There are decades of failed car companies. And at the same time as Tesla, there were other companies who promised EV revolutions and failed.
People point to the Model S, but the Model 3 was actually just as or more important. When the Model 3 showed profitability ever car company in the world massively increased their investment in EV, before that many companies were pretending and doing research. For years the story was EV can't be profitable below 50k and you can't build them at volume.
> financed SpaceX's doubtlessly awesome progress
If with 'finacned' you mean founded and lead the largest SpaceX company in the world that has revolutionized the whole space industry and is the biggest rocket company and the biggest sat company that can also fly people to space and build the biggest rocket in the history of humanity.
SpaceX Starlink literally fundamentally changed the largest war in Europe since WW2.
But I guess all he did is 'financed progress'. You got to be fucking kidding me.
> and you can't just pretend he's not a complete liability
Can you spell out in actual real terms what this means? SpaceX is going from success to success and has been for 25 years now. Tesla is still a large company doing pretty well. Both companies are much bigger and much more important and powerful then they were 4 years ago.
In the real world, customers don't care about 'childish' behavior. And claiming he is irrational when his companies mostly act rationally on net (no companies is perfect and never makes errors) also don't really work very well.
The only reason you consider him a liability is that he opposes far-left ideology and promotes free speech. If that makes you a liability then I want every business leader to become a liability.
At the very least, if you are going to impartially assess his business accomplishments, you should completely disregard his political views when making that assessment. Otherwise you're giving him a dishonest business leadership assessment as a ploy to punish him for his politics.
That's the reason he was able to get this rich with SpaceX and not stall sooner — most of the other space companies were (and in the west, still are) busy scratching backs rather than developing successful products.
It's possible that Tesla, which Musk didn't found, would have given us an EV by another name. Rivan also got us an electric truck before the cybertruck came out. Fisker's not doing so well though.
Possible sure - just as it is possible my next startup could be the next Tesla. In reality, when Elon joined Tesla they had nothing but early concept prototypes of a high-end sports car with the name Roadster. Elon took it from concept, to launch, to production. Then he did the same with the Model S/X/3, sold 5 million electric vehicles, made them so compelling that it completely disrupted the ICE vehicle market and sparked a gold rush of elecrification in the car industry resulting in a Trillion-dollar company.
It's possible "which Musk didn't found" is doing some heavy lifting in your statement above.
The Tesla Robotaxi seems similar to the prototype car without steering wheel or brake pedals that Google announced (or demoed?) in 2014: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/technology/googles-next-p.... It seems likely that Waymo is 10 years ahead of Tesla in autonomous driving, and not 2 years.
Like someone said before, he's lost all credibility. As someone who picked up FSD some years back, I'll prob never get a Tesla again based on some future promise.
Well, apart from tax cuts for the rich he never followed through with anything he said and his voters will never hold him accountable for anything, ever, so you can safely ignore every thing he says.
He is going to say exact opposite in a month and flip again and again until he does whatever random thing will ensure him random thing he wants in the moment.
Good. They don't work, and they wont work. We are a decade into the hype cycle on 'cars that have self' and the proponents are stuck pretending that their best case demo, which is always going to crash into stupid stuff that a human would easily understand (in it's highly tested and constrained route) has 'self' to preserve.
This is a reductive and far-too-pessimistic take when Waymo is completing more than 14,000 driverless trips per DAY and has completed over 15 million miles of driverless trips.
That's not a "best case demo": it's a real system, working in real world environments, and even if they're "constrained" (and go ahead and look at the Phoenix service area and tell me how constrained it really is), they are functioning, now, today. There's one driving by my house as I type this. It's not mowing down children. It's not causing fatal accidents. Its incident rate is dramatically lower than human drivers, and its severe injury rate is lower still. We're a decade into the hype cycle because of how hard a problem this is to solve, and we're finally catching up with the right confluence of technologies at the right time (mostly around machine learning, machine vision, sensor fusion, LIDAR, reinforcement training, and computer power) to make it actually work.
I can understand if you live outside a Waymo market that you might still believe this is still fairy tale "won't work" stuff, but when you live in a market where you see dozens of them every single day, doing their thing _unremarkably_, it's... well, it feels quite a bit like the future.
Note that I'm speaking explicitly of Waymo here. Tesla FSD still terrifies me, vision-only seems like a horrible oversight, pun intended, and while it's meant to be non-constrained, it still has a very, very far way to go to close the gap with Waymo.
It wouldnt work even if you asserted a perfect record. The result is taking a robust fault (emergency) tolerant system and converting it into a fragile one without so much as a steering wheel.
Just days after Musk appeared and spoke strongly in favour of him at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania [1]. These are interesting times and people make very strange bed follows.
Then again, can we trust a word the man is saying? It all feels like shallow pandering. Plus, it may be worth going through the entire event at the Detroit Economic Club [2] to check the quote more clearly as at least one source quotes him as referencing PRC car automation with that statement, while expressing some general personal scepticism of autonomous driving [3].
Reading any HN thread connected to Musk is so annoying because all the political obsessives come out and crapflood the thread with rants about "manbabies."
Imagine what it was like just a couple of years ago when these threads would be flooded with "he's trying to save the world, what have you done?" type comments.
Well its true. We can use other terms but they describe underlying fact of a brilliant but deeply troubled person with serious mental issues and sometimes infantile emotional reactions. Plus a horrible parent. The times when such successful persons were unanimously celebrated and their flaws were ignored are luckily over for good.
Call it what you like, this is reality that very few are happy about. Imagine if this guy would be more mentally and emotionally stable, how further he could actually get. And the respect he could actually achieve. Its a sad view, really.
The thing is, people's failures define them and their legacy 100x more than their successes. Nobody cares how loyal friend say Epstein was (ie to Trump), do we.
Imagine if every time someone brought up something about Linux the thread was full of people doing psychoanalysis of Linus Torvalds instead of actually talking about the features of the new release. Imagine how useless those threads would be. Your post is an example of this with regards to Tesla.
Reading HN threads ranting about “manbabies” when referring to arguably the single greatest innovator and entrepreneur of our time was not on my bingo card on a site purporting to promote innovation and entrepreneurship.
So, going back on topic, how is the robotaxi business going, that Musk promised you could start 2020? His success relies on delusional people believing his bs. No amount of real world facts will convince his followers he was wrong, as you just publicly displayed.
Power plants, lots of them. Then they hired Wall St MBAs who thought executive compensation should be based on how well they can pump the stock. Sounds a lot like Tesla come to think of it.
Tesla Cybertruck was announced as vapourware in 2019 and got limited production only in 2023. It was also delayed. Wonder whether it would have been also considered "bait and switch setup" according to your stance.
In the case of the Cybertruck, it was never a question whether it is even possible to do such a thing, because they had all the technology, the only question was if they were stupid enough to build it.
Just as in the case of the "Hyperloop": in theory, it is perfectly possible, but anyone who got as far to build a few meters of it (or something resembling it) quickly realized the practicality problems, and what would happen if you scaled those problems to a few hundred kilometers...
On the other hand, autonomous driving is not a solved problem, not even in theory. One could argue that it would require some sort of a generic AI, which we don't have, and nobody knows if we will in the future. So selling anything based on that is simply fraud, in my opinion.
What do you mean by "stupid enough to build it?" It's the best-selling electric truck in terms of shipped units, by a large margin (approximately equal to every other EV truck manufacturer combined, including Ford's electric F-150).
Could you please cite sources on this? Just looking at Rivian [1] they delivered 37,396 units this year alone. Tesla doesn't officially publish numbers, but the Cybertruck recall from few weeks ago tells us around 27,185 total [2]. I know that the July sales were high, over 5172 units [3], but that's a single month. And just to put everything in perspective here: over 13 million trucks were sold in the States in July alone [4].
Rivian's delivery numbers include the R1T pickup, the R1S SUV, and their EDV delivery van for Amazon and other fleet customers. The R1T pickup is likely half or less of their total production number.
We don't know how profitable it is. They're already running out of folks willing to pay $100k and have begun offering the $80k version. Will that version be profitable to build? It takes more than unit sales to make a good business decision.
Even if it is profitable, it still needs to be weighed against the opportunity costs of using those resources to pursue a different strategy. Would the same resources in terms of designer, engineers, hours, and capital outlay on factory production lines have been more profitable if they were applied to a different vehicle?
It's very possible. The Cybertruck is always going to be a limited demand vehicle. It may do well versus other EV pickups in the US market, but Tesla is a global company and the Cybertruck is not a global vehicle.
Look at the announced price and all the claimed features then. We were promised a bulletproof amphibious truck for (IIRC) $40k, and we got a truck whose warranty is void if you drive in the rain, costing $80k for the base model. Also it won't even stop .22LR bullets.
We were also promised micron panel gaps. the panel gaps on the cybertruck are both visible and visibly uneven.
It's really weird to see anyone even imply that the Cybertruck has vindicated Tesla.
The body panels are pretty thick, and they're made of an austenitic nitrogen steel -- a modified form of 316LN -- which should perform nearly as well as any "armor grade" steel alloy. (Against steel fragments, it likely performs poorly, but against lead handgun rounds it is likely even superior to the average high-hardness armor steel.) Just on the face of it, I'd expect the Cybertruck's body to stop any threat up to .44 Magnum.
Besides, 9mm and .22lr are very different things. .22lr is one of the very weakest ballistic threats. 9mm has much more mass, usually more velocity, and a much higher (~3x higher) average KE load.
Yeah of course I can't find it now, there was some lame Youtuber memelord that let his buddy shoot at it with a handgun and at least one bullet went through. But I also see that it can resist it, so IDK and retract my statement.
I do know the difference between the calibers though, having shot a few different weapons in different calibers (as a hobby & in the military)
Wasn't it also released at a significantly higher price than announced?
"""In 2019, Musk claimed that the Cybertruck would be available in late 2021, starting at $39,900. The date was later pushed to 2022, and eventually it was pushed to late 2023, with a starting price of $60,990.""" - according to the Wikipedia page.
I'd definitely count that as bait and switch from the price change alone.
Thats a 19.32% price increase in one of Tesla's other cars over 15 years, compared to a 52.857% price increase of the Cybetruck in the 5 years between it being announced and today.
The cheapest Model Y right now is $44,990. You have to remove the "gas savings" and other subsidies that individuals may or may not qualify for to see this cash price.
So the announced price for the ~300mi, dual-motor version in 2019 was $49k.
Today that price is $79k. ($99k if you want the first-edition Foundation series which has been the only one delivered to customers so far).
CPI inflation calculation puts $49k in 2019 as $60k today. So inflation means the price should have gone up ~$10k, but it has actually gone up ~$30k.
Also in 2019, $69k was supposed to get you 500 miles of range. The highest range configuration of the truck they shipped is 340 miles, with potentially up to 470 miles if you fill half the bed with an additional $16k battery pack that is only installable/removable by a Tesla Service Center. Nobody has seen this pack demonstrated yet or how it will handle things like Supercharging. Having half the bed taken up to achieve the max range was definitely not part of the 2019 sales pitch.
50% increase in price point, 3 years delay. Inflation is only a small part of this. The delay is more telling than the price increase.
The cybertruck was promissed as a cheaper way to make cars, its more expensive tha n the others that suffered the same inflationary forces. Save that its a new product, if they trusted that scale was going to cheap it down more than they current methods they would take a loss at the start to make a larger profit later.
Could you give some numbers to back it up? Considering the loss due to inflation from 2019 [1] I would have expected the truck to get to around $49,200.
Whats your point here? We said they broke their promise (bait and switch, because they knew it was not assured expectation for price and delivery).
You say they have the right to brake promises, which is true.
So we agree they made a promise, broke it and raised the price beyond inflation, likely due to screwing up the production cost targets. All of that after they took reservations.
So we agree but you don't like that we're judging them badly for it?
Tesla previously announced that all of their cars had the hardware for Level 5 Self-Driving in 2016 and would be capable of driving fully autonomously within 2-3 years.
This isn't just a bait and switch, it's a new bait and switch to redirect from the existing one.
If Tesla wants to make a new announcement about autonomous vehicles now, 8 years after originally announcing that they were already shipping them, it should be that they are actually operating autonomous vehicles in the wild somewhere.
Not showing off a new car design that isn't needed for such a demonstration and that is coming 2-3 years from now.
Although they didn't "show" it on the event, Tesla self-driving is steadily improving each month. It is now also available on the Cybertruck, and the miles per intervention metric is steadily improving. You can find many videos on YouTube. Note that this are real cars on the real road.
In 2016 Tesla said that "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That was a lie: https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s...
Tesla even lies about things as dumb as Cybertruck quarter mile times:
I donno. I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Yes in your examples they were not completely honest. That’s true. But they have been innovating and shipping real products too which really work in the real world. If I have to choose between a company that does not innovate and never lies, and one that innovates but sometimes lies, then I think I rather have the lying innovator. At least as long as the lies come from a certain optimism and ambition. If the lies come from fear mongering then I’m not so interested.
Having said that, I agree fully that taking the full self driving money in the order of thousands of dollars and not delivering is highly problematic.
Maybe in the US. It still does nothing in Europe, which is disappointing because the company happily took my money in February 2019 on the promise that this feature is imminent.
I paid 7,500 euros for something that still doesn’t exist in any usable form. (I thought it would be good for my elderly parents who were the primary users of this car for a time.) It’s actively dangerous because it doesn’t even see speed limits correctly. The car will probably be at the end of its life before this feature ever ships.
Sure, it’s a lesson for me. But don’t underestimate how much goodwill Musk has burned with his customers. I’m never buying another vehicle from this company, no matter the price or features. His political activism is just the cherry on the top of his poop-cake of lies.
For sure. It wasn’t my usual type of purchase, but more emotionally driven.
My dad, who is in his seventies and an early-adopter type, was really into Musk and FSD. I thought it would improve their quality of life to have access to this car, and I had recently found myself with the means to give back to my parents.
For a period, FSD was up to $15,000 USD... For heretofore still unshipped vaporware. And I say this as someone paying the $100/month for the current very very beta, sometimes absolutely terrifying form of it.
Feels very relatable. A couple of years after Y2K I was asked by the employer at the time to join an multi-billion internal project that was run almost exclusively by contractors. I think the task was to convert a Fortran monolith into Java, but after 20+ years it could also been Cobol.
The biggest contingent of contractors came from a company of the AA universe that has survived the Enron scandal. My task was to advise on how to interface with a certain internal system. Easy job. The amount of actual code written was minimal and theses folks were big on generating class scaffolding from UML paintings.
Funnily, there was a constant rotation of contractors and they didn‘t realize I was internal. So, I was treated by them as one of their own. And it was six weeks of education that you can’t get in university or business school.
I learned the art of being billable which is miles away from doing any work. Matter of fact the hour didn’t have 60 minutes but a hundred. And whatever you faked doing, you did it with double digit precision. You documented that you documented someones proposed, ie. documented, code change that day. Two minutes spent, 1.89 hours documented. Yes, Github and stuff would only come the following decade. We are talking word documents here. Being billable meant that people would propose changes and retract the proposal with another one proposal. At least, the amount of side effects was limited.
I also learned the art of fake process. The contractors didn‘t necessarily know what they were doing. But they knew of doing things. So, lots of meetings were happening and random „specialists“ and „experts“ were flown around the planet to delight meetings with stuff they knew of. Having these people disseminate some talking points from recycled slide decks was .. uhm .. fashionable.
Third was the art of faking yourself. I vividly remember the guy coming in from Tuesday to Thursday who would bring and arrange the same set if golf balls at his desk. I must have asked him if he played or something. In the end it turned out some important dude made him caddy for an offsite golf event of some partners. And he picked up the balls that were lying around the course. Some consider that a big nono. But apparently it gave some status since every thought the guy had played at said offsite.
Highlights from the weeks being embedded with the contractors include a contractor-only dinner. No idea anymore how I managed to be there but some partner gave a rousing speech how they were at the fore front of innovation with this project. And that everyone frenetically clapped at the end. Memory has that the red wine was good, the food less so. Another highlight was an educative session by one of the flown in experts on what a FIFO queue was and how that aided in-order processing of arriving events. Frenetic clapping ensued.
Now this is all 25‘ish years ago and perhaps memories are more pointy than reality was. What is certain though is that the number of lines shipped into production was zero. Zilch. And that was not because someone realized all of it was fake. It was because the company went out of business eventually and was bought, sold, merged for its customer base and not its systems.
Ugh, upvoted because I've seen this too. Lots of "businessing" being done so it could be billed, but nothing actually gets produced besides reports and talks and dinners and meetings and documentation, and then, the project gets quietly scrapped until the next one starts and it's rinse-repeat. It feels like perpetual money laundering of shareholder value into contractors (and employees, honestly, too).
> It feels like perpetual money laundering of shareholder value into contractors (and employees, honestly, too).
I've come to view the economics of tech this way too (although much more so true of contractors than employees). Workers are supposedly the downtrodden sucker class beneath BigWigs. But, if positioned the right way, workers can make out like absolute bandits, often at the expense of executives and majority shareholders. I've worked many useless, bloated projects that lined consultants' pockets before ending in layoff-inducing/executive-firing failure, projects that - ironically - were initiated at the behest of said executives themselves.
In a general sense, I don't really understand where the value is being generated in tech anymore. One of the higher-level things that has slowly gotten me disillusioned with the industry. Just a constant parade of companies either 1. never turning a profit or 2. milking one cash cow built in the 90s, both types of companies just churning stupid projects over and over so that engineers can write new things on their resumes and executives can go from Director to VP.
