Optimus is complete vapourware. The quoted 1M units a year would be utterly unbelievable from any company, let alone Tesla with their history of over-promising.
My dad found it extremely amusing that Elon said "we just have to solve the 'AI problem' and we'll have robots doing shopping for us", or something like that. I can't remember the exact verbiage, but that was the gist.
The word "just" is doing a lot of work there. Going by that logic: We "just" need to figure out cold fusion to have effectively infinite energy. We "just" need to develop warp drives to travel across the galaxy. We "just" need to figure out the chemo problem to cure cancer.
It is like me at the climbing gym: "This problem is too hard for me, let's work on a harder one instead, then I at least look cool while failing."
"Since we failed on self-driving since 2016, robotaxis since 2020 (1 million on the road), and ASI since 2023, we might as well start on failing on robots now".
I find it amusing listening to his Q1 earnings calls; every year the same exact blabber of robots everywhere 'end of the year', self driving tesla's everywhere after the summer, mars next year etc. Every Bloody Year. The real clever thing of this guy, no matter how smart/not/nazi/whatever he is, is the fact that investors KEEP throwing money in even though the major ones are on those earning calls every year for a decade already and of course that these stocks are not cratering.
But I recommend listening to those calls, start 5 years back; because on reddit but also here, you get wide eyed awestruck people who say 'ow optimus is december this year! ow self driving everything in september!'.
And why would we even need or want robots shopping for us? I mean, most of us. For some disabled individuals it could be a benefit. For everyone else, it seems like the height of laziness and absurdity.
I am also certain given time this problem is achievable but the problem is what we expect after that ????? mass unemployment or we just convert all human into robot repairer ???? what the end goal there
> I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.
> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
> One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”
> And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines
Its classic Elon over-promising. Problem with robots is that they are useless without AI, while cars can be driven by a human, so as long as controls work and range is good they are viable
We "just" need to figure out the terraforming problem then we can all move to Mars and be interplanetary explorers. Imagine how cool it would be to have corporate leaders who had vision--environmentally friendly automobiles, cheap space travel, etc.--without the clammy snake oil grifter bullshit. Reality is cool AF. The things that are actually achievable are amazing. We don't need to spout nonsense to do great things. We don't need "AGI" (whatever that might be) to do neat things with machine learning. The Jetsons is a cartoon. Trying to make it real is dumb.
The Mars obsession absolutely blows me away. Like, he's obviously read KSR's Red Mars. He's obviously aware of the conditions out there. Mars is a fuckin' bummer. It is absolutely hostile to human life. Sure, we'll land people there, and maybe set up some sort of station if we really want to throw a few trillion dollars away from actual problems here on earth... but it's not going to be pleasant. Not anytime, ever. The gravity sucks. The dust and fines suck. The storms suck. And last for months. The temperatures suck. There's no "outside". There's no trivial way to generate power at scale. There's no magnetosphere, so you'll get cancer. The soil is poisonous.
Elon's stuck with this 12-year-old-boy absurdity about "becoming interplanetary to save the species" as if Mars could ever be a practical lifeboat when we inevitably drive the planet into the ground or a meteor hits. It's... absurd, puerile fantasy.
Doing such seemingly impossible things have been what humans have been doing. The tech developed for Mars would definitely influence our Earth society. Hard to say how and when, but it has been historically the case. I think instead of spending billions on election influence campaign, spending that on Mars has a better impact to society.
An interview with a Silicon Valley big shot finally explained this.
The concept is that you can convince smart people to work extra hard for you by selling them the story that no-no-no, they’re not merely tweaking some dystopian algorithm to sell Chinese plastic crap to people, they’re saving the world.
Once you recognise this pattern, you’ll see it everywhere: Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon all do it.
Hence the “AI safety” rhetoric. Those CEOs will gladly take the safeties off and make an army of Terminators to sell to the highest bidder! The safety talk is for their employees, to convince them to work like slaves to “save the world”.
I think there's value in space exploration even for its own sake, but I think it's utterly idiotic to think that we're going to realistically be able to terraform Mars in the next century if ever.
Even if I do think it's worth exploring space, including Mars, I think it's silly to assume that it's going to be a way to guarantee the permanence of humanity.
This is precisely my point. Folly. (But the knock-on effects of the space race and exploration and on and on are valid and I'm a big space fan... it's just that caging it as some sort of potential lifeboat beggars belief.
Interview in Davos. The “right” has the same touch than the “just” here:
> MUSK: Yeah. But I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point, right? And Tesla’s rolled out a sort of robo-taxi service in a few cities, and will be very, very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S. And then we hope to get supervised full self-driving approval in Europe, hopefully next month.
Ah, see, no, and this is why you'll never be rich^. The rich people don't ever listen to that "if I tried that people would call bullshit" voice. They just try it. And try it again. And keep trying it. And then they become CEOs or President or whatever. They literally just keep doing it. It doesn't matter how untethered what they're saying is from reality. It doesn't matter that it's pure bullshit. They just keep going and pick up enough followers and the rest snowballs from there. Twas ever thus. How do you think every cult or religion to every form has come about? How do you think every dictator has come to power? They vehemently, psychotically ignored "if I tried that" and just tried it and kept repeating it until the cognitive dissonance wore down into oblivion and the pathological washed over them.
^Sociopathic rich, I mean. I'm sure you're doing fine.
I don't dispute any of that; I really hate plugging my own stuff but I actually wrote a blog post about a similar topic last night [1]. TL;DR Billionaires are sociopaths who act sociopathic and then define anything that doesn't benefit their sociopathy as a "disorder".
It's not that I'm surprised that they constantly lie, I'm just surprised anyone falls for it. Like, we were supposed to have "full self driving by next year", every year as far back as 2018, if I remember correctly. You'd think after the third time that FSD didn't happen, people would say "maybe this guy is actually full of shit".
MUSK: Yeah. But I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point, right? And Tesla’s rolled out a sort of robo-taxi service in a few cities, and will be very, very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S.
He said that would happen in 2025. And probably earlier, too.
From the comment you're replying to:
"Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile"
So I wouldn't assume they've only used Windows. FWIW I also primarily use Windows 11 currently, but have also used other OS'es. I've experienced frustrations with all of them. Just because it's fast for you doesn't mean it's fast for everyone, and vice-versa. I could certainly buy that more people are having problems with 11 than they did with 10, though it hasn't been my personal experience. Just saying we shouldn't assume our own experiences are universal.
It seems optimistic to me at this point that he could be replaced by a Republican not largely crafted in his image. It's possible, but I certainly wouldn't take it for granted.
It's something of an open question whether MAGA will follow him or not. I would bet against it, for the same reason few of them followed Jeb after George. I would bet on some in-fighting between Don Jr, JD and some of the others, and a new MAGA champion will emerge (maybe not for a decade) who we aren't really paying too much attention to right now.
Neither did Biden, and he won. Neither did Clinton and she didn't, but still got more votes than Trump. And the Republicans are leading on the issues: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-americans-trust-rep.... In an election between a boring Republican and a boring Democrat, the Republican probably wins.
Vance will "have the charisma" of being the focus of the palace cult (around a quarter of the country) while Trump's corpse is still warm.
These people aren't people anymore, they're cultist NPCs. They have suspended personal agency and independent reasoning about their interests in favor of the vibes, in favor of the grift, and in favor of arbitrary Strong Executive Leadership. They will say literally anything Fox News et al tells them to say.
Vance's job was always to end democracy by replacing Trump with somebody more subservient to capital who could stay on-script, while seeming less crazy to liberals. He was practically raised for this. MAGA has been trained to water at the mouth when somebody jangles their keys, and will happily transfer their utter loyalty and devotion to somebody else who can jangle keys.
This reads kind of like you see half the population of the country as subhuman. This is often used by radicals as the first step in justifying extreme measures to achieve policy goals that would be considered unthinkable otherwise.
I know you think only the Right could be fascist, but most of the extreme left has become so distraught over their recent losses that they are losing most of their own ethics as well. "These people aren't people" is a shitty look when it's a white-supremacist saying it, and it's an equally shitty look coming from Team Blue.
I read the "not people" comment not as describing the general population but rather the collection of camera-seeking characters roaming around the POTUS. Obviously they are human beings but they do demonstrate a remarkable lack of personality and agency.
All administrations have toadies, but cabinet members and proxies now snap to the latest tweet without even a fig-leaf attempt to bridge obvious 180 degree shifts. Sometimes in the same sentence.
Part of what it shows is that traditional DC has debate-club graduates from a culture than prizes verbal fluency, and when you hire based on other criteria, the messaging is incredibly clunky.
It's not 25% per climb, but it's not near zero either, especially in aggregate. It only takes one mistake. A fairly high percentage of famous free soloists (I'd say over 25%) have died prematurely, either while free soloing, or during other extreme sports.
>A fairly high percentage of famous free soloists (I'd say over 25%) have died prematurely
Yes but I'd also say Alex is a bit of a different beast. He's clearly not a thrill seeker who attempts climbs he isn't sure about. And as he has once said, there's a very real risk of dying when you get in your car, play football, are a boxer, and so on.
People have a stark reaction to the visual of a guy being 200 meters above the ground but the reality is if you're a circus acrobat and you're 10 meters up the air you're also likely dead or maimed if something goes wrong. It doesn't get more dead than dead and in many ways he's probably more calculated and less reckless than people in other sports or performances.
> People have a stark reaction to the visual of a guy being 200 meters above the ground but the reality is if you're a circus acrobat and you're 10 meters up the air you're also likely dead or maimed if something goes wrong.
No, it's the large number of free soloists that have died. And the small number of circus performers who have died. People's intuitions about the relative risks are actually very accurate here.
reply