>Back in 2016, Musk personally pushed for almost all vehicle functions, including the door handles, to be controlled by electric buttons or touchscreens. His own engineers and executives warned that this is a huge safety risk... They argued for traditional, fully mechanical door handles, but Musk vetoed them for purely aesthetic reasons. He even pushed for the mechanical override, meant to be used in such emergencies, to be hidden
Did anyone catch the source for this? I hadn't heard this detail before.
EDIT: I found a source[0], but that characterization is pretty misleading. The article even say that in internal discussions, "Musk wasn’t alone in pushing for electric controls." All it says about Musk is that pushed for "virtually everything" to be electric, but it doesn't say he pushed anything about the door manual release (you know they'd include that in the article if they could).
Tesla was winning because they had insight and balls to make electric cars that actually looked and worked like normal fucking cars. Everyone else who was making EVs failed to resist the temptation to reinvent the definition of the car, throwing out a century of wisdom and natural selection of features of good car design, to the point that it seemed like nobody wanted to succeed.
As soon as they forgot this, their downfall began.
> I am still asking myself what the fuck happened?
I think the Scott Adams piece the other day[0] described the system dynamics well:
"Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the other will pile on you so massively and traumatically that it will force you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security."
I think Biden giving credit to GM[1] and being used as a political football, prior to Musk entering politics in a big way himself, drove him away from the left and (by process of elimination) toward the right. Once you're down the rabbit hole, the rest is history.
The big event just before he announced he was now voting Republican in May 2022 was newspapers reporting on him sexually harassing an employee 6 years earlier.
I was always confused and intrigued what was going on behind the scenes when Tesla was so obviously and publicly rejected by the Biden administration in that manner.
Musk was even then a polarising figure, but given Tesla was arguably more “American” than even the self-proclaimed traditional American car companies, it seemed a weird, self-defeating, perhaps emotional, position for the administration to take.
That 2021 event was very much not about EVs-in-general, but about supporting UAW as a union at a time when a lot of their jobs were about to be disrupted because Biden just signed an EO (14037) that pushed traditional automakers towards making more EVs (target being 40-50% by 2030, but it was non-binding).
So, why were Ford, GM and Stellantis there but Tesla wasn't? Because Tesla was already making EVs only, because none of its workforce is a part of UAW (due to Tesla being anti-union) and because this EO had no impact on Tesla's workforce what so ever. Elon being butthurt about it doesn't change the fact that it would've made zero sense to have Tesla there.
You don't have to take my word for it, Jen Psaki directly addressed this at a press briefing:
> Asked if Tesla being a nonunion company was the reason it wasn’t included Thursday, Psaki replied, “Well, these are the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”
Tesla not being unionized was the main guess I heard about it at the time. The legacy auto industry has a history of outsized political influence leading to many dumb decisions on politician's part from an administrative success perspective.
I don't know either really, I'm just reporting remembered second-hand sources.
Are you implying that "moving right" necessitates lying about basic things constantly?
Also, didn't Musk publicly quit Trump's advisory councils over exiting the Paris Agreement back in 2017? Why does that rift not qualify for your "separating politics" hypothesis?
I think as the left has become more homogeneously college educated they are less likely to wholesale accept blatant lies and falsehoods. For someone like Musk this will naturally push them to the right because he incessantly lies/bullshits so often and has a visceral negative reaction when being called on it (the cave fiasco comes to mind).
If the right will welcome people like Musk with open arms (always a natural fit anyways, he's rich as hell) then why wouldn't he pull the mask off? Despite most Tesla customers being presumably left leaning, his heel turn doesn't seem to have had much negative impact on the things that matter to him so far, for example his net worth.
Except there is nothing in musks history that suggest this. His actual behavior was always consistent with who he is now. He just became more aggressive as people pointed it out.
He did not leaned a little right. He had the same political opinions, but less of narcissist rage over not being admired.
He obviously always held the normie billionaire libertarian "taxes bad, regulations bad, unions bad" right positions, enjoyed "politically incorrect" jokes and had some weird preconceptions like obsession with male heirs that might not be overtly political but line up with certain more fringe right views. Maybe he chose to hide some spicier views about the apartheid era.
But there's also definitely been a change. He publicly endorsed Democrat candidates on numerous occasions, including against normie business-friendly Republicans. Think his metamorphosis in actual unfiltered views is best shifted from the "I absolutely support trans but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare" to his current campaigns...
In the past (early Tesla - SpaceX - Boring Company - Hyperloop - crypto) he seemed apolitical and only to really care about setting up the building blocks for a new, different society on Mars. Maybe a pipe dream, maybe megalomaniac, but just very cool and very futuristic. He didn't seem very political aside from a libertarian bent.
Somewhere along the road he devolved into a petty and weird character, and then went off the deep end into full spectrum alt-right weirdness.
He is the same type of talented hype man as Jobs was, with the same sort of reality distortion field. Otherwise SpaceX reusable wouldn't have happened. And even Jensen Huang was supremely impressed how fast xAI built up data centers.
This is just the beginning. Expect FSD to eventually go fully Per Mile pricing.
This solves Level 4, which is really a liability problem. With per mile pricing, companies can simply bake their self-insurance into the price, so safer systems have lower prices.
Mourn not. These were purpose-built structures erected in record time to support a single program (and pressed into service for Shuttle & friends). They were first so they were by definition pioneering, but we've learned a lot since then.
The sad part isn't that they're gone. The sad part is that we didn't make them obsolete until just recently.
To be clear, NASA has an entire field center dedicated to rocket testing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stennis_Space_Center). This is where everything gets tested now. You may remember the "green run" tests of the SLS - those happened at Stennis.
Stennis didn't exist at the start of the space race or Apollo. Marshall is colocated on Redstone Arsenal, a legacy of parts of NASA being bootstrapped out of the Army ballistic missile program. Marshall had test stands because that era of NASA (aka von Braun) sought to colocated engineering, prototyping and test.
One challenge with continuing tests at Marshall is that... it's actually really close to population centers. Large engine tests would be ridiculously disruptive. There are comments in the Ars article noting that people living in Huntsville could hear the demolition work.
Yes, the replacements for this equipment has been around for a long time. The Propulsion and Structural Test Facility was built at Marshall in 1957 and used for design testing of the Saturn engines, and by 1966 the A1 test stand was built at Stennis, to perform production qualification of Saturn engines. And unlike the PSTF, the A1 and A2 test stands at Stennis have been maintained over the years, and continue to be functional today most recently being used to test the new RS-25 engine design that the SLS will use when we are out of SSMEs.
Thank you for acknowledging the elephant in the room. I've literally seen people on HN argue that AI's increased power demand isn't bad for climate goals, because the money will encourage renewables.
It's astounding how people don't see it, even when it's the invisible hand of the market that's choking them to death.
It's that the majority of AI deployments are happening in a country which has a has had very poor renewable adoption and is now actively sabotaging renewable projects with an active opposition to climate goals because a particular group wants to protect their existing revenue.
Renewables are cheap and highly profitable, and money talks - even in the US, as can be seen in Texas. But it's hard to fight against your government when they want to force you to buy their rich friends' fossil fuels instead...
This is a pretty gross mis characterization of what’s happening. There’s been a lot written about the fluff that is a lot of these AI company “purchases” of “green” energy. In practice there’s no way to get that power from (insert middle of nowhere location with green energy plant) to (insert location of AI datacenter) so to actually power the data center the utility is forced to power on some clunky old coal plant to keep the chips powered.
The AI company is issuing press releases saying how they bought all this clean power but in practice they just forced some old clunky power plants back online to meet their demand.
What your are describing is purchasing certificates from renewable energy vendors, which while technically a small investment (more money to the renewable energy vendor → renewable business growth → more renewable energy projects) has very little to do with renewable energy projects like those I was talking about.
It is technically possible for the AI companies to decide to become self-sufficient or enter into the energy production market if things tilt far enough in favor of that, but it is somewhat unlikely and unexpected.
Big renewable projects are run by electricity producers, not consumers, and they are the ones being actively sabotaged in all sorts of ways.
"At BigGridCo we're proud to switch AI to 100% renewable power. On paper we just send all the dirty power to (scoffs) pesky houses and industry, leaving the clean power for AI."
Nuclear power works too, it’s clean and low carbon impact.
Can Microsoft and Google not afford to build a battery factory or nuclear power plant? Are they broke or something?
Why is the solution to scarcity of supply to bend over backwards and roll back regulations? The scarcity of supply itself should be a hint to society to stop supporting unfettered growth. Or maybe these mega-corporations need to get over it and pay fair market value for the projects they want to build.
Why do we have to breathe coal power emissions so that we can have one more ChatGPT wrapper nobody asked for?
> Nuclear power works too, it’s clean and low carbon impact.
You want an AI company to invest in a project that takes decades to complete? What are the chances they're around when it completes and what powers their datacenters while that takes place
Just to be pedantic: The median construction time is 7 years. With very slow planning, it is a decade, not decades. It can be done faster though.
Our power consumption won't be going down, and it generally wouldn't be the AI company itself running the project but the electricity companies that earn money supplying power that see dollar signs in all that extra electricity consumption.
Even if the AI companies all die, our global electricity consumption will keep going up margins will be better than the retired plants, so it's a good investment regardless.
I think you should look up actual construction times on reactors in developed countries. Be VERY happy if you can do it in less than 15 years.
> Even if the AI companies all die, our global electricity consumption will keep going up margins will be better than the retired plants, so it's a good investment regardless
If the company putting up the money goes bankrupt, what happens to the project? Maybe it's picked up by someone else?
I think AI companies should try to make it to 2030, my guess is at least a few of them won't make it. Don't commit to projects that won't even complete in the 2030s
I think you should look that up. I was even being conservative: Korea and China seems to be managing consistently around the 6 year time scale, while Japan has done it in less than four years from construction start till operation.
Granted, the US would have to import professionals to do it at that speed, and politicians will of course try to hinder the process with endless bureaucracy as their sponsors would rather sell fossil fuels...
> If the company putting up the money goes bankrupt, what happens to the project?
If people didn't start such medium-length projects out of fear of hypothetical future bankruptcy, there would never have been any infrastructure projects. Investors do not worry about them going bankrupt, they worry about losing momentum and would generally rather light money on fire than stagnate. We live in a time where business people start space programs out of bloody boredom.
However, what happens in these cases is just that other investors flock the carcass and takes over for cheap, allowing them to reap the benefits without having to have footed the whole bill themselves. Bankruptcy is not closure for a company, but a restructuring often under new ownership.
The only realistic scenario where such project would be dropped is if the world situation changed enough such that it would no longer be considered profitable to complete, such as due to other technology massively leapfrogging it to the point where investing in that from scratch is better than continuing investment, or demand being entirely gone such that the finished plant would be unproductive. Otherwise the project would at most change hands until it was operational.
(Particular AI companies making it to 2030 is not really that important when it is electricity producers making these investments and running these projects to earn money from AI companies, EV charging, heatpumps, etc.)
Finland, Olkiluoto, license application 2000, construction started in 2005, planned operation in 2010, actual operation 2023.
France Flammanville 3, construction started in 2007, planned operation in 2012, actual operation 2024, so 17 years
Hinkley point UK, construction began 2017 projected commissioning is in 2029/2030.
Vogtle USA, permits 2006, construction started 2013, operation 2023/2024.
South Korea, shin kori 3 and 4 took 7 and 10 years. And those aren't new designs.
Japan, the newest commissioned reactor is from 1997? Sure, France built really fast in the 80s... Different requirements/rules/public opinion.
And this is all from the start of construction. The beginning of the project is actually waaaay before that.
Please send me some links when you've done your research to prove me wrong. And yes, I did leave out china because I don't see the us building a Chinese design reactor... And even if that was possible it wouldn't meet us standards so you can effectively start over.
> If people didn't start such medium-length projects out of fear of hypothetical future bankruptcy, there would never have been any infrastructure projects.
And who finances that? Not banks by themselves, governments always have to give out some loan guarantees or favorable treatment. No private investor can deal with that amount of risk. So the bureaucracy that you speak of, without it no nuclear plant would exist.
So why don't you point me to a commercial nuclear power plant that was privately funded without loan guarantees by a government and all of that.
> We live in a time where business people start space programs out of bloody boredom.
So if you're referring to SpaceX, no Musk started that to make life multi planetary. And he understood that no one will finance that so the company needs to first make money to finance that mars shot.
Bezos I'm less familiar with but I know he has a collection of space artifacts so I think it's an interest of his and he probably wants to show he can do what musk can.
Google/MS/Meta will be around, probably. The other AI companies? Certainly not all of them.
I wouldn't rule out the current expenditure on AI to be a risk to the big players either. They're putting so much money in this. And with all the off balance sheet tricks that are happening now it'll be hard to know the real exposure.
Again it's a supply chain problem. Regardless of how much cash you have, you can't just order a new battery factory or nuclear power plant and have it up and producing in a couple years. We have eviscerated our supply chains for those things and no matter how much money we throw at the problem now it's going to take decades to reindustrialize. Rome wasn't built in a day.
If the concern is over externalities such as CO2 emissions and other types of pollution then sure, let's tax those directly. That will help accelerate solutions through free market mechanisms.
It's the same song as with crypto. Just as silly as then - of course many people will burn whatever is the cheapest fuel right now, even if they maybe invest in something else in the future. But the total goes up anyway.
Industry is perfectly capable of calculating its own costs, and advocating for its own motivated self-interest, thank you very much. This is not a bug we need to fix.
The purpose of agencies like the EPA is to "see the [Pareto optimal] forest for the trees" and counterbalance industry's [Nash equilibrium] profit motive.
Otherwise let's just rename it the Shareholder Protection Agency, because that's all it would be.
Well, they very successfully advocated for their interests, and now the administration they helped install handed the EPA over to them. Maybe they should rename the EPA to Environment Destruction Agency, same as they renamed the Department of Defense to Department of War...
It depends. If you're someone like, say, Trump, then truly nothing matters because you're far too old to care. You can pretty much burn the whole world down and suffer zero consequences.
This is one of the biggest downsides to letting the most old, and "wise", among us run the show. They have no incentive to help future generation or even current generations.
Nobody can (and should) stop you from learning and educating yourself. It however doesn't mean just because you can use Google or use AI, you think you can become a doctor:
Educating a user about their illness and treatment is a legitimate use case for AI, but acting on its advise to treat yourself or self-medicate would be plain stupidity. (Thankfully, self-medicating isn't as easy because most medication require a prescription. However, so called "alternate" medicines are often a grey area, even with regulations (for example, in India).
>only UTC is in-scope for this project
>tools for astronomical calculations
Pity, since UTC is objectively the wrong time for astronomical calculations. Among other problems, UTC runs slightly slower or faster depending on how far the Earth is from the Sun. UTC does not run uniformly (outside of Earth-at-sealevel), instead the length of 1 second will slightly grow or shrink depending on the current configuration of the Solar system.
As you allude to, the correct time scale for this purpose would be TBD (aka Barycentric Dynamical Time), which applies relativistic corrections to act like the atomic clock is fixed at the barycentre of the Solar system. This is the only clock that actually runs "smoothly" for the purposes of astronomical calculations.
> Among other problems, UTC runs slightly slower or faster depending on how far the Earth is from the Sun. UTC does not run uniformly (apart from Earth-at-sealevel), instead the length of 1 second will slightly grow or shrink depending on the current configuration of the Solar system.
That is completely wrong. UTC seconds are exactly SI seconds, which are all the same uniform length (defined by quorum of atomic clocks).
At sea level on Earth, UTC seconds are all exactly the same, yes. That's the definition of UTC.
The trick is, when you're working with things on the scale of the Solar system and larger, it no longer makes sense to assume your frame is "at sea level on Earth." Your relativistic reference frame has shifted, so (thanks Einstein!) time literally changes underneath your feet.
The primary mechanism (but not the only one) is that a clock on Earth will tick slower when Earth is closer to the Sun, due to the effects of gravitational time dilation.[0]
So yes, a clock on Earth always runs at a uniform rate. But because the universe is fundamentally Einsteinian, that still means that eg if you're working with the orbit of Jupiter or a millisecond pulsar, you will see small introduced timing errors if you try to use UTC (or even UT1 which is UTC without leap seconds) instead of TBD.
But it's all relative, all reference frames are different and relative from each other and there is no one reference frame that is somehow special. TBD runs unevenly relative to UTC as much as UTC runs unevenly relative to TBD.
That strikes me as a weak argument. We have vehicles with legs, but wheels are just better, practically speaking.
The argument is that humans provide a proof-of-concept that vision + neural net can drive a car, because (for some reason) some people doubt this is possible. However there's no need for a "proof of concept" that mechanical legs can be built, because everyone already know that building mechanical legs is possible.
Maybe, but those claims have yet to be shown in the real world.
Waymo has certainly had its share of issues lately on the "practicality" axis. The cost of (actually good enough) LiDAR hardware doesn't help practicality either.
> Maybe, but those claims have yet to be shown in the real world.
They surely have as Waymo have a much better safety record than Tesla and that's even with Tesla hiding and obscuring their crash data - probably outright lying about most crashes if Musk has any input to their processes.
The big advantage of Lidar is that it can easily pick out obstructions and that's a good ability for a driver to have, whereas Teslas can get fooled by shadows etc. It seems obvious to me that having cameras and Lidar allows for much better analysis of traffic and pedestrians.
>They surely have as Waymo have a much better safety record than Tesla
Tesla is already closing in on Waymo to within a factor of 2[0], and this is less than 6 months in, with Waymo having 125 million autonomous miles and Tesla having under a million. Bet on whichever horse you want, but this trend is not looking good for Waymo.
>It seems obvious to me
Oh thank goodness! Fortunately this style of argument has never been wrong before. ;)
EDIT: I found a source[0], but that characterization is pretty misleading. The article even say that in internal discussions, "Musk wasn’t alone in pushing for electric controls." All it says about Musk is that pushed for "virtually everything" to be electric, but it doesn't say he pushed anything about the door manual release (you know they'd include that in the article if they could).
[0] https://archive.ph/BwZTx
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