> Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are, even if the company is pragmatic about achieving their goals.
Jonah Goldberg (speaking of foreign policy): "you've got to be idealistic about the ends and ruthlessly realistic about means."
I distinctly remember one Christmas in the mid-70s where my grandfather and uncles all got these ash trays shaped like a house (when you set your pipe/cigarette/cigar down the smoke coiled out the chimney). Everyone was smoking indoors, despite my grandmother was quite fussy and tidy about pretty much everything.
For that matter, my childhood art classes almost always included making an ashtray.
I spent two weeks in Caracas in 2000, and was shocked by the amount car exhaust. It probably wasn't excessive, but compared the US city I lived in it was always noticable.
I'd been a casual user for a while (very sporadically in illegal days, regularly once legalized). I happened to going through a fairly traumatic breakup, and felt that if it didn't actually help me get to sleep, it at least made the insomnia tolerable.
My life settled down, but I continued to smoke a tiny bit. One puff really, before bed pretty much every night. When things were crazy and awful, I didn't care about feeling mossy the next day, but as normal life resumed, it definitely started to affect my attention.
Then, the "intrusive thoughts" started. It's like having an edge lord in your head. Whatever you think about, the idea gets lensed(?) from the worst/most extreme possible viewpoint/conclusion. It's hard to describe, but it was very distracting, and often just depressing. And of course, waking up at 3am every night, this is what I had to look forward to. And sometimes, I'd take a little toke in the hopes I'd get back to sleep.
Here's the punchline: I quit smoking and it went away in two days and hasn't returned.
My current FSD usage is 90% over ~2000 miles (since v14.x). Besides driving everywhere, everyday with FSD, I have driven 4 hours garage to hotel valet without intervention. It is absolutely "Full Self-Driving" and "Autonomous".
FSD isn't perfect, but it is everyday amazing and useful.
I'd guess my Subaru's lane-keeping utilisation is in the same ballpark. (By miles, not minutes. And yes, I'm safer when it and I are watching the road than when I'm watching the road alone.)
My favorite feature of Subaru's system is when you change lanes, and it stays locked onto the car in the slower lane and slams on the brakes. People behind you love that.
I don't want minimize the efforts of other manufacturers (I'm sure they'll all have Tesla's features in the next generation), but: my wife has a Subaru Outback, and the two systems are as close in functionality as humans are to chimpanzees. The differences are many, stark and subtle (that Subaru screen), I'd just say take a test drive with FSD.
Liability is a separate matter from autonomy. I assume you'd consider yourself autonomous, yet it's your employer's insurance that will be liable if you have an accident while driving a company vehicle.
If the company required a representative to sit in the car with you and participate in the driving (e.g. by monitoring and taking over before an accident), then there's a case to be made that you're not fully autonomous.
> it's your employer's insurance that will be liable if you have an accident while driving a company vehicle
I think you're mixing some concepts.
There's car insurance paid by the owner of the car, for the car. There's workplace accident insurance, paid by the employer for the employee. The liability isn't assigned by default, but by determining who's responsible.
The driver is always legally responsible for accidents caused by their negligence. If you play with your phone behind the wheel and kill someone, even while working and driving a company car, the company's insurance might pay for the damage but you go to prison. The company will recover the money from you. Their work accident insurance will pay nothing.
The test you can run in your head: will you get arrested if you fall asleep at the wheel and crash? If yes, then it's not autonomous or self driving. It just has driver assistance. It's not that the car can't drive itself at all, just that it doesn't meet the bar for the entire legal concept of "driver/driving".
"Almost" self driving is like jumping over a canyon and almost making it to the other side. Good effort, bad outcome.
Disagree. I appreciate their viewpoint tethering corporate claims to reality by illustrating Tesla is obfuscating the classification of their machines to be autonomous, when they actually aren't. Their comments in other thread chains proved to be fruitful when lacking agitators looking to dismiss critique by citing website rules, like the post adding additional detail to how Tesla muddles legal claims by cooking up cherry-picked evidence that work against the driver despite being the insurer.
A couple of friends with Teslas have told me it's not perfect and you do still have to pay attention but they do regular long drives and say it mostly works and they use it all the time.
(They also say there's still the handoff issue if a human needs to take control but it's still a big net win.)
Counterpoint: I like my Tesla, and I find the AI assistant diverting and useful. I have very little doubt the functionality of the limited on-board voice assistant will be merged into Grok (it's literally on the coming features).
Whether you like this or not, who cares? The pace of improvement in Tesla software compared to any other manufacturer is astonishing, and astonishingly good.
I have no love for the CEO, but my Model Y is a very interesting (and intuitive) car.
I have it set to the "Gork" personality, which is occasionally correct and useful, but is very often genuinely funny. It's like a Spicoli-with-a-PhD that answers your query when it "feels like it".
I have a RULES file for my coding agent which I invoke when I get bored. It basically simulates a real office environment saying things like "while the queue is full our worker is sitting in the corner with its thumb up its ass looking at the wrong queue".
Which is hilarious, but when I'm driving on the freeway and trying to add milk to my grocery list or add a navigation stop at the hardware store (no idea if these are things you can actually do, I'm just using what feel like plausible use cases for a car voice assistant) I wouldn't want the additipnal distraction of the voice assistant being funny.
I've got a 2025 Model 3 and was blown away by what a great vehicle it is for the price point. I'd be curious how much of a difference there is between and S and a Model 3 Performance.
Even if the acceleration numbers were equivalent, the S is roomier, the seats are more comfortable, the dash screen is helpful, the ride is plush and quiet.
> Real FSD for me at least, means I can sit in a 'car' open a laptop and work.
Sure. Meanwhile, I'm literally using FSD 90% of the miles driven in my Y (the last update added a counter). I can appreciate a non-existant better product as much as the next guy, but as it is my daily commute is vastly improved.
FSD isn't perfect (probably about 90%!), but it's everyday amazing and useful.
Jonah Goldberg (speaking of foreign policy): "you've got to be idealistic about the ends and ruthlessly realistic about means."
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