Yeah, this isn’t great today. We have been exploring Webhook bundles/groups for common integration shapes that make a bit easier to make the right choices based on what you’re doing and hope to have something out here to help soon.
Having to figure out which of the 100s of Stripe event types we need to handle and which ones overlap was the most stressful part of adopting their system. Simplification here is welcomed.
My experience (I’m a hiring manager) is that a LARGE number of big US-based tech companies are only hiring in Canada right now for pretty obvious reasons, and are competing aggressively for top talent here. Many companies are backfilling American roles with remote Canadians when someone in the US exits right now. It’s the best I’ve seen in the ten years I’ve been here.
This is a candle in the dark, thanks for sharing. Hopefully this has residual effects outside tech, for my spouse's sake and that of many others, but it's good nonetheless.
This is great! AFAIK our Stripe Docs were first to ship the copy for LLMs button about 14-16 months ago, which Mintlify copied the pattern (and some other patterns at the same time) from and proliferated everywhere since everyone uses them for docs out of the box now. It’s really cool to see how it’s quickly become a standard now to have that button! I do think we can do deeper integrations with LLMs that are probably more useful over time.
I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone who actually owns a Tesla (I own a Model Y). Full self-driving is just _bad_ in comparison to technology from Waymo et al; it slams on the brakes suddenly for shadows, veers into the wrong lane, hesitates in pretty standard intersections, and doesn’t even understand basic concepts like school buses or trains. Here in BC, it completely ignores the 30kph school safety zones, which seems pretty basic.
My experience with FSD is that while it feels “magic” at times, it’s like a teenage driver that you have to baby sit constantly. It’s genuinely impressive how well it works given the really limited hardware, but if you use it routinely you know it will make at least one weird/dangerous choice on every trip.
Generally, I really don’t trust it in most situations except properly delineated highways, but even then it can be a crapshoot. If you’ve experienced FSD then get in a Waymo, they are night and day different—a lot more predictable, and able to navigate uncertainty compared with what Tesla has built. It’s likely down to a combination of both software and their insistence that radar doesn’t matter, but it clearly does.
I would never get in a Tesla that purports to drive itself, there’s no way it’s safe or worth the risk. I won’t even use it with my family in the car.
I know a handful of others who own Teslas and feel the same, despite what the fans spout online. I generally like my Model Y, but I definitely do not trust FSD—I find it hard to believe that it’s even being taken seriously in the media. Not a great endorsement if even your own customers don’t trust it after use it.
A fun anecdote - a lot of people may remember Roomba from forever back with their automated little vacuums. Roomba's market share declined significantly because they failed to adopt Lidar technology as quickly as their competitors, instead they depended on the bumper for as long as possible. This put them at a disadvantage in navigation and efficiency as their competitors started using Lidar. Combined with aggressive pricing from rivals, expiry of its patented roller in 2022, a weird insistence to not combine vacuum and mopping into one device, Roomba (or iRobot now) is a just little fish in the sea it made.
https://maticrobots.com/ - Lidar seems like a stopgap, check out this robot vacuum which works with vision only. I am not conflating a car and a vacuum, but it's an interesting technological exposition.
The reason I brought up roomba wasn't to talk about Lidar or vision necessarily. It's more a story about how the first-mover in a technological space became entrenched in what works and became resistant to investing in newer technologies. The result was rival companies taking away marketshare from a market roomba once defined. Roomba has since incorporated lidar and other innovations after being stagnant for a decade, but its too late - their competitors now dominate the market.
To complete the analogy, Tesla is invested in vision-only technologies, while its competitors are making gains with Lidar and other tech that Tesla refuses to acknowledge. It's very reminscent of Roomba in the mid 2010s.
100%—I enjoy telling life-long Roomba users about how far behind the technology is when they try to convince me to buy one! I've been using Roborock for a long time and it's pretty astounding how far ahead they are; full on item analysis + avoidance (including poop!) being the big one for us, let alone just knowing their exact location within the house. And there's a number of others that have pushed it a whole bunch... the folks at Matic seem to have pushed it even further (not ironically, with just vision, which actually feels appropriate here) it's a shame it's not available in Canada and no obvious plans to roll out here, would love to buy one: https://maticrobots.com/
Meanwhile Roomba seems to have done...pretty much nothing? Reminds me of the death of Skype when everyone transitioned to literally everything else while they floundered around.
I mostly agree with you. I use both FSD on my Tesla & Waymo regularly (LA region), and Waymo just feels way safer in comparison. While FSD has improved significantly the last few iterations, I have seen it do "strange" things often enough that I don't feel safe just sitting in the backseat like I would with a Waymo.
Even if it's hypothetically 99% as good as Waymo at the moment, 99% is not good "enough" when it comes to something as critical as driving.
It's probably also got to do with some magic behind the curtains; Waymo hasn't expanded much beyond their initial regions, so they've been static for years in terms of region. They very well may have hand-crafted expected paths, and obviously as the region coverage goes up that kind of hang-crafting doesn't scale (due to changes in the environment, at least) economically. So we can't really say how much work Waymo is putting into each mile. That's true of Tesla also, except that kind of work is totally antithetical to their entire approach from the very beginning, so it would be really surprising to find Tesla getting stuck in that specific local minima, wheras we can almost expect it from Waymo.
As a counter anecdote, I do use FSD with my family in the car, I also have used it on snowy roads, logging roads, and it does quite well. Not unsupervised well, but better than I expected given that I'm running FSD on a nearly 6-year old car. The number of trips around town that have been totaly interventionless has definitely been going up lately, and usually interventions have been because I wanted to be more aggressive, not because the car was making a major error or even being rough.
> doesn’t even understand basic concepts like school buses or trains
Yeah, it would be hilarious if it wasn't so horrifying, I remember watching a level crossing be represented as a weird traffic light that would go from red to off to red erratically, with a similarly erratic convoy of trucks representing the train.
Mind you I remember people claiming FSD was "nearly done" because they'd "tackled all the hard problems, and were now in clean up", and how as a result that meant they could let their FSD take itself through a roundabout, not just straightlining it through. Never underestimate the power of denial.
Today’s “FSD” has its limitations and requires supervision, but your description of it is not anything like my experience even on a HW3 vehicle. In fact, in many years of using Autopilot and various “FSD Beta” and “FSD (Supervised)” versions for several tens of thousands of miles I’ve literally never seen it “slam on the brakes suddenly for shadows” or “veer into the wrong lane”. I’m not a cult member and my next car won’t be a Tesla because I cannot support Musk after the horrible things he has done these last 2-3 years, but “FSD” is phenomenal when used appropriately and with the right expectations about what it is and what it isn’t. And it has improved a ton over the years, too.
The end-to-end solution was a real game changer, and while the previous solution was still useful and impressive in its own right, moving to the new stack was a night and day difference. With V13 finally taking advantage of HW4, and all the work they’ve been doing since then (plus upcoming HW5 introduction), it’s totally within the realm of possibility that they achieve viable L4 autonomy beyond this kind of small scale demo (and I hope some form of L3 maybe on HW4 before long for customer vehicles).
I can give you a number of locations to visit in B.C. and the time of day for the shadows if you want to experience it for yourself! Hasn’t been fixed in four years yet. It has gotten less frequent in general though.
I have a Model 3 and it drives amazingly well, in Florida of all places. Ive taken it all over back roads in FL/GL with a little bit of AL and MS as well. The issues you described were much more prevalent when I got my car in '23, and I have genuinely been watching them become fewer and further between as time passed. I've driven at least 10000 miles on it in the last two years and I have only had to intervene twice.
I have no motivation to be positive; I own no Tesla stock or position and just like it because its the best car for me currently. I cannot emphasize enough just how different my lived experience has been from how you describe it.
I am confident that two things can be true:
a) it can be better significantly in some places than others, especially like Florida, which has a lot of large, wide roads, that are probably mapped more than a lot of places which creates a more stable experience
and
b) Their choice of hardware and software approach is obviously less safe given their limitations, and has a number of compromises that introduce unpredictability vs other approaches.
It definitely has come a good way since I first got my car, but it's still _unpredictable_ and even seems to progress, then randomly regress, between releases. The big one is just navigating unpredictable environments, which is where Waymo is clearly far, far ahead.
In the real world, I think their approach has clearly hit a ceiling and I definitely feel a lot safer sitting in a Waymo than a Tesla, I'm not sure the gap is going to narrow unless something drastic changes.
In my experience, Canada does an excellent job where this program fails. I entered on the high skill “express entry” visa for a tech job. After 18 months we had permanent residency. After 3.5 years, we had citizenship. It was all online and easy enough for us to do ourselves with minimal stress.
During the express entry period where you are employer sponsored, unlike in the US, if you get fired, you have until your visa expires to find another sponsoring job (the visa is valid for 5 years IIRC).
I’m pretty happy with how it went and glad we can settle, I’m not sure we would have chosen Canada if a rapid permanent path hadn’t been clear up front.
Were you very specialized in a certain field, filling a senior position?
As a Canadian with a CS degree who's been trying to get into tech for years, this is horrible to hear. We have thousands of new grads in Canada who end up working in fast food because they get passed over for cheaper immigrants. I've seen it first hand, all my tech friends have seen it. We're worse than the US for this, and we have even less tech jobs here.
We don't need to be bring more entry level talent, we have tons of that not being utilized here.
There's plenty of talk about greedy corporations until the topic of using immigration to increase their profits comes up. Then it's silence.
I was coming in as a ‘normal’ developer design manager, but that is likely fairly specialized. I’m guessing that was in my favor. I know others with a couple of years engineering experience under their belt having a similar experience. But yes, the lack of jobs can be an issue. Lots of folks I know, myself included, now working remote for US-based companies.
In tech in Canada, usually we aren’t hiring immigrants because they’re cheaper—visas, moving someone, etc, is a huge expense. It’s often more that they’re the best possible fit for the role. After Covid with remote work etc, I don’t think there’s as much of that immigration going on, though—I don’t know of many Canadian companies sponsoring right now.
The entry positions are FLOODED with new comers. We aren't hiring them because they're the best fit, we have plenty of unemployed locals begging for work. To say we only bring in the best because we cannot fill the roles is a blatant lie.
You sound like you're describing senior position, which I would say is fair.
I’m talking about intermediate to senior—we haven’t had junior roles for a while, and junior roles have never _really_ been good for immigrants anyway. I’m a hiring manager and can tell you that it’s true in my experience that it’s not about money or being ‘cheaper’ but who is the best fit.
The weirder thing that’s going on right now that’s counter to all of this is US-based companies _only_ hiring Canadians, rather than Americans, when people leave because Canadians are cheaper overall—even though American companies tend to pay more. It’s kind of a paradox, but works out well.
But this one of those places where I with a boomer voice have to scream, “stop being a victim”. The picture you are painting is a complete misrepresentation of reality. I think this stems from the fantasy of thinking that tech workers right now, are akin to factory workers and are being exploited by greedy capitalist overlords, who are using immigration as cudgel to ground them down further. Tech is nothing like a factory job. The demand for talented people in Tech has never gone down (probably higher because of the AI boom). Just consider the fact that openAI is willing to pay 800k+ to employees and it is not even profitable yet. And OpenAI has hired quite a bit of immigrants, and most immigrants come from much poorer backgrounds than natives. Develop your skills and you will easily find a place in the tech industry that will pay you 200k+. The fact that your friends can’t means they did not put in enough effort to develop their skills, while an immigrant from a likely poorer country did.
This was probably true a few years ago, but Canada’s tech market has shrunk a lot. I had the option to move to Canada or Germany, and I chose the latter, even though I wasn’t happy about having to pick up German and dealing with EU bureaucracies. I had trouble finding a well-paid job in Canada that would give me an okay lifestyle in somewhere that's not Alberta.
The market is still going, it’s just pretty tight right now, yeah. For what it’s worth, I lived in Europe for 5 years (NL) before this and honestly I think you’ve made a great choice there too. I learned a lot working in the Netherlands, and there’s lots of great things about living there you can’t find in North America. I miss not being bound to a car!
It's remote and gets extremely cold in the winter. Life is sort of lonely there if you come from a warmer region. However, at least for me, all the opportunities I was getting was there.
I’m only on my first Model Y, and it’s a great car albeit a bit cramped with a kid and a dog, and some pretty dumb UX/design choices. Rivian seems to be the only company building thoughtful, well-sized EV SUVs rather than trucks. Definitely going to choose the R2 for our next car; nice to see some competition while Tesla is asleep at the wheel with the cybertruck.
I find Rivian design to look boringly conventional. I’m guessing they use the same body fabrication machines as other auto makers? Vs Tesla who build the machines in house AFAIK. If they didn’t look so much worse I would consider them.
Disconnect that 2022 model as soon as you can. Samsung can and does deploy permanent, unremovable ads on the system menus that are cached even if the connection is lost. It’s terrible! The only way to avoid them is to not receive one in the first place.
I've got a TCL TV and wanted to see if I could stop using the Amazon FireTV. It was a laggy mess and started showing ads, and kept showing placeholders and crap like that after I disconnected it. But this all went away after a factory reset.
I don't think this is true. I live in Canada and the worst costs involved in charging my Tesla at a supercharger are maybe $20 for a full 'tank' but compared with $100+ for a gas car given gas prices here there's no way this is true. Here in BC there's a ton of charging competition too, so you can find far cheaper than superchargers—plenty of places where I live offer free fast charging right now if you look for them.
Also, most of the time you're charging at home. In BC, electricity prices are $0.09/kWh... so dirt cheap.
BC hydro does not reflect the whole country. In NB we pay close to $.14/kWh, and as I said that's going up this year, and the next. PEI and NS are even more, so already today we are seeing ~$40 a charge. That's with just a handful of people driving EVs. Our province needs another power station, we sell a lot of power to Maine.
Across the border in Maine it's ~.36/kWh which is getting close to your $100 a charge, granted Maine is not Canada.
As electricity demand goes up, gas demand will go down and according to economics it will just get cheaper.
I don't know what gas prices are like in Canada, but I'd expect about $40 to fill a car of Tesla size in the US. (from empty it might get up to $50). Yes gas is more, but not that much more.
I also expect most people are charging at home for much lower electric rates.
Ideally, yes—it’s very close to downtown and accessible by public transit. A lot of people in cities don’t need or want cars, and this type of development will attract them because it’s likely to be cheaper than an equivalent with a parking space.
People here might own cars, but it’s up to them to find parking and pay for it themselves, rather than building it into the cost of buying/renting for everyone in these buildings—building without minimums means much cheaper building costs. It’s working in other cities where it’s being deployed and is a great way to incentivize cities to invest in car alternatives.
It is fairly expensive to fix a Tesla panel too. I received a small dent on our trunk thanks to a driver nudging it while parked and it cost $8,800 to fix just that panel.
