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FAA Begins Retiring Decades Old Floppy Disks from Air Traffic Control (faa.gov)
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Out with FDD, in with GPT! (!)
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hopefully not with pendrives
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why is this "historic"? the thirst for this admin to use the most bombastic language possible is so tiring. Just... modernize the thing already. thats your job. It's not impressive that you did this. You're supposed to do this. You dont get extra kudos for doing the thing you signed up to do... and dont forget to put Trump's name at the beginning. Or he might get cranky
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Everything they try to spin positively has to be 'historic' because: 1. The party leader is a fragile, dying narcissist who is desperate for his name to be attached to anything other than the misery he's inflicted upon the world. 2. Their _actual_ historic achievements are all war crimes, human rights violations, and policy changes that would terrify their average supporter if they actually understood the long-term consequences.
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You could call it histrionic.
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> replacing outdated floppy disks that contain vital weather and other critical information with a streamlined, 21st-century system What does this even… mean?
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Micro-services with docker running out of a kubernetes compliant blockchain with somewhere some "AI" added in the mix. I guess this news is more for PR than anything else because I don't see how the replacement of 69% of copper wire is meaningful in any way. What copper wires? Where? Is it because you removed landlines and replaced with voip?
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Probably something something fiber optic
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https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2026-04/Modern%20Skies%20Summit_digital.pdf#page=11 https://sysatl.com/ids4/
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I don't want the FAA to make changes at "lightning speed" or "rapidly moving to make upgrades" or "record pace". Safety must be further down the list for these guys.
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Using outdated computer systems with aging storage media is a safety issue.
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Just turn WinRAR error correction up to max /s
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Replacing them with cloud-based systems (if this is the "streamlined, 21st-century system") is a safety issue as well . I hope they are not.
Where Each U.S. State Gets Its Tax Revenue From (visualcapitalist.com)
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New York getting less than 30% from property taxes is surprising. I guess yuppies mostly rent and then leave to Jersey or Connecticut if and when they're ready to buy?
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I wonder if Delaware's massively oversized license tax portion is simply because so many companies incorporate there.
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that website is cancer, just for an image
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That is why I read the HN comments before going to the site :). Thanks!
RIP Cybertruck. You Were Unloved, Unwanted, and Utterly Absurd (wired.com)
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I noticed that the cyberpunk wedge cars that inspired it are 2 seaters… maybe this shape isn't right for much larger cars? DeLorean is the real life 80s reference of course, but in cyberpunk revival media like the coupe in Ghost in the Shell 2017, the spinner in Blade Runner 2049—those cars are all much smaller cabins than the cybertruck
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Truly the peak of 2020s antisocial car design. The car looks designed to plow through other vehicles, barriers, and pedestrians without slowing down to count the bodies. "Bulletproof bodypanels" is only a selling point on a mass production car if you routinely piss people off enough to make them grab iron. Folks who need pickup trucks for the utility they provide have stuck with trucks that are actually fit for purpose. It was a way to signal to the world that you had extremely poor judgement and low standards.
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I have very little interest in electric vehicles, Tesla, Elon Musk, etc. But I still think the Cybertruck, at least the design, looks awesome. It looked like something you'd see in the "Another World" or "Out of this World" intro cinematic.
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Personally, I think it looks like a silver dumpster.
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For an "unwanted" truck, I sure see a lot of them on the road.
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Agreed. I see it as the successor to the angular style of the Lamborghini Countach, which far more people are willing to admit looks cool.
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Both look extremely cool to me but Elon's behaviour is the only reason I'll never buy a tesla. Even though the cybertruck looks awesome but it's impossible for me to be seen in this. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd used a cybertruck in a BTTF remake
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As with most marketing gimmicks, they have little to no value outside of their insane marketing.
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Unloved and unwanted is outright false. Go to cybertruckownersclub.com for a more balanced take. Somehow Wired managed to completely miss the best U-word description of it: Ugly.
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Just because someone likes a given piece of trash doesn't make it not a piece of trash
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That's not how the ancient idiom goes..
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>go to a forum for the owners club for a more balanced take hilarious sentiment
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I mean owners are often quite regretful? It's certainly more balanced than a forum of non-owners who's only knowledge about the issue is that they hate Elon with an undying passion.
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Go look before you have a knee jerk reaction.
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>blaming the problem on the wrong type of glue, a new adhesive “not prone to environmental embrittlement.” That quote was about the new glue, not the old glue? >some RWD Cybertruck owners merrily driving along could be disconcertingly overtaken by their own wheels. If they read their own link, that never happened? Who's doing the proofreading at Wired now? Is it all just AI?
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whatever this author writes should to be taken with a grain of salt ... i mean, he's paying his mortage and putting his kids thru school by professionally critiquing everything Elon does .. at leaat based on his wirted article history .. https://www.wired.com/story/how-tesla-made-its-new-230-mph-car-fly/ ..
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> If they read their own link, that never happened? https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/tesla-recalls-cybertrucks-over-fears-wheels-could-fall-off-while-driving > The issue stems from the brake rotors, and the report says more severe road conditions "may strain" the stud holes in the wheel rotor, causing cracks to form. If the cracks persist and worsen, it may result in the wheel detaching entirely. https://autos.yahoo.com/ev-and-future-tech/articles/tesla-cybertrucks-off-road-adventure-153000527.html > In a recent off-road escapade at the King of the Hammers event in Johnson Valley, California, a Tesla Cybertruck experienced a mechanical failure resulting in one of its wheels snapping off. The incident, captured over the weekend, has raised eyebrows about the durability of Tesla's much-touted electric truck.
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Elon truly was inspired by Delorean
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That's disrespectful to a guy who made a nicer car and had a less destructive drug habit.
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No Wired love for the Incel Camino? The Deplorean?
Discussion (194 points, 240 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50391456
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Thanks, was bound to miss it https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=50391456
Ask HN: What in the world is taking Ubuntu so long?
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This is a problem with LTS distro kernels in general. You're trading the feeling of stability at the kernel level for security updates.
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It's Canonical. The company that literally asks for high school grades and a multi-page essay on any job application and will pass if you're not in the 99th percentile of year 9 maths even while requiring many years experience (which means you probably don't even know what your year 9 maths scores were). All the while they pay a fraction of any other Bay Area tech company. What i just described isn't a joke or an exaggeration either. It's literally part of the application process and you can look this up. Anyway they are quite simply hopelessly mismanaged and no one should be touching Canonical products at this point.
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Can you share the backstory behind your gripe, this comment feels oddly specific to what appears unrelated to someone outside who doesn't know what you know. Makes me think there's some personal and deeper roots behind it
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It's pretty straightforward, go have a look at their careers site and application form. What parent is saying I believe is that they're leaving a lot of talent on the table because of questionable hiring practices; talent that would help proactively (or at least reactively) mitigate things like this.
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Aren't the patches out since a day?
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Holy crap, they are showing in apt… why in the world wouldn’t they update the dang CVE page?! I agree though, this took too long.
"People Don't Want to Work Anymore" Duh? (blog.absurdpirate.com)
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OMG the swearing on this article. Whatever message the author wanted to convey is lost on me - I could not go beyond the first paragraph.
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I’m going to take it a step ahead and say no one has ever wanted to work the kind of hours most people work. Left to their own devices people might work 15 hours a week but very few would voluntarily work 40-60 hours per week. It’s always been about it being a necessity for survival.
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He talks about that in the article, but people did less work than they do now when all they did was survival. We are working more than people who were at subsistence levels.
Wealth inequality will destroy America. Tax wealth. Tax wealth violently.
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each technological advance increases wealth inequality. Problem is not wealth inequality its things getting worse for ppl low on totem pole vs getting better. I am sure ppl wouldnt mind inequlity if things were getting cheaper, healthcare being more accesible ect. Thats what AI promised but never delivered. Nothing has gotten cheaper like predicted.
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Maybe raising the minimum wage was never a good idea and we should instead consider a wage cap that taxes heavily those that make above some insane figure everyone should be happy with... $10m a year? That seems generous enough for now until someone turns the money printer back on.
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No, it’s definitely the insane amounts of inequality we have today. The inequality is why there is less money flowing through the economy, why folks with incredible amounts of wealth can buy media outlets and attempt to buy elections to further their interests to hinder attempts to make things cheaper for average people. The inequality gives them their power, it’s the whole point.
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People don’t mind mild inequality. Some people have more, that’s fine. When it’s extreme it’s a problem. 100% we need to make sure everyone is taken care of before we worry about if someone can have even more money than they will ever need.
University libraries are being swarmed by AI bots, putting public access at risk (cbc.ca)
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These days, AI attacks are indiscriminately targeting personal websites, and they've become far too severe. They even come in disguised through referrer spam, so they're tricky to block. In my opinion, I suspect such scraped data is being used to classify and train AI models.
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So these bots are going to get the Aaron Swartz treatment, right? RIGHT?
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11 THOUSAND searches in one day? What's the problem? If anything, libraries should be becoming more AI friendly, not less. Instead, we get this sort of bullshit from the ACM: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3832783.3834511 It's a canonical DOI on what was a download server. It says exactly which file is being requested. (I chose a random recent one.) At the very most, they should serve a static page with a bibtex entry, and a few other metadata fields, and a link to the PDF and whatever other formats are available. Instead, we get piles of captchas, login-gate spam about how they're "open access" now and have some initiative to be LLM friendly. Getting back to the problem of people doing stuff that requires access to library materials: What sort of server-side cost multiplier do you suppose this ACM page has vs. just serving a few S3-compatible URLs that point to a few mirrors? (Or, got forbid, Anna's Archive / libgen, since ACM is open access, and those sites would be doing nothing wrong by mirroring ACM content.)
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It's 11 THOUSAND searches ON JUST THAT ONE TOPIC in one day when they are used to seeing less than 11 THOUSAND searches in one day TOTAL. None of these systems were built for this type of traffic. The total traffic from these crawlers is many times more than just 11,000. It's more like 11,000 searches on 100,000 topics.
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The problem is unintentional DOS due to traffic can constitute a felony under the CFAA; the case in question being Pulte Homes, Inc. v. Laborers' International Union 2011. After Pulte fired an employee represented by the union, LIUNA urged members to call and send email to the company, expressing their opinions. As a result of the increased traffic, the company's email system crashed. The Sixth Circuit ruled that the LIUNA's instruction to call and email "intentionally caused damage," reversing the lower court's decision. Now thankfully we have Sandvig v. Barr, 2020 where the DC Federal Court ruled that the CFAA does not criminalize the violation of a website's terms of service, but imo all bets are off in terms of interpretation of the law in the wild west of AI.
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I was not aware of that (terrible) court decision. Wow. I suppose this is one of those laws that doesn't apply if an individual is a victim? I have a email box that rejects mail due to commercial spam. Can I sue the ~ 100 corporations that filled it up?
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Get with the times, university libraries. "Open Access" means supporting users. Now your users are also bots, and the people that deploy those bots. You need to be able to serve those users too.
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I wonder if Internet 2: The sequel is infested as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2
What I still don't understand is who is doing it? I assume it's not the big companies like OpenAI or Google or Anthropic, right? So there are a bunch of small things out there doing the scraping and then they sell it to the big places? Or are these just smaller AI models doing the scraping and using it for themselves? Is there an underground ecosystem where people buy and sell this stuff? I understand why it's valuable to the AI companies I'm curious about how all this work, the economics of it all.
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We're currently in the middle of an AI goldrush. There are probably hundreds of companies trying to do model pretraining. Anthropic and OpenAI and so on probably care about optics and implementing their crawlers properly. But there will be many firms few of us have heard of. I would guess some of them are Chinese, for example.
LLM bots are the easiest to spot. Rate limit them to 16kb/s and 1 request every 5 seconds. Give them a friendly multilingual WCAG status 429 page that says to slow down or status 444 and drop them into nftables ipsets if they continue to be aggressive. Ask your favorite LLM how to set this up. If your LLM gets session paused, ask Gemini or Grok. Tell it if you are behind a CDN. Enable logging of ssl curves, ciphers, etc... Show your LLM some examples from your access logs.
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LLM bots make only a part of traffic and really easy to set up (and I think this will eventually throttled by OAI or Anthropic themselves). But there are bad actors - bots that try every possible urls and traversals and cross scripting and so on… I see it in our access logs. This cannot be solved otherwise than some greylisting/blacklisting on ISP level. E.g. this is so huge that we have started to block all Chinese inbound traffic. I am sorry for that because Deepseek and other good actors are probably blocked as well but IP rotation made it impossible to filter bad ones only… (and I suppose that DS uses EU or US addresses as well so they shouldn’t be blocked in full).
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eventually throttled by OAI or Anthropic themselves Indeed, they use an edge SSL Bump proxy that is already bandwidth limited and has to speak real HTTPS. I do not focus too much on IP addresses but rather the behavior that they can not hide. LLM's can help you spot this behavior. Good LLM vs. Bad LLM. Gemini knows a few tricks but you have to coax it out of them. It seems to not want to overload people with information. That said there are some good IP lists that can be used in blackhole routing tables, nginx geo tables, etc...
I get tens of thousands of IPs making 1 or 2 requests against pages on The Consensus (job search, code viewing, etc.). They're not super expensive pages. But I don't want to deal with the bot traffic (mostly because it messes up view counts I use to sell sponsorships). But then if I require an account (even a free one), valid readership is also going to drop with the new friction. I could build something more complex to discover the patterns, or use Turnstile maybe. I'm not really sure at the moment.
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I mind a public access website for a government entity and this is exactly the pattern I see. US residential IP make a couple of requests then never come back. The bots may have layer 7 signatures that make them "easy" to block, but I'm dealing with COTS software with no ability to make changes to the stack. Even if I could by the time they're blocked the work is done and they're never coming back anyway. I don't think I'm seeing the LLM bots in the scraping on this particular site. This site's data is highly sought-after by data brokers, legal services advertising, debt collectors, etc. I tend to think I'm seeing homespun scrapers. This site has been up for 20+ years and the scrapers seem to be well-adapted to using the HMTL as an ad-hoc API for the data. The difference in the last few years has been the availability of vast numbers of residential proxies to mask the traffic.
I know you can't be super specific because you'd just be enabling the companies who get around this (who, funnily, I also index on The Consensus), but I have spent a few rounds on this over the months and haven't yet been able to cut them out. Some of the things that seemed like they'd cut out lazier bots/scripters involved browser fingerprinting that I didn't want to yet have to deal with disclosures or approval for. But also even some of these browser fingerprinting things were disable-able via flags when you start up Chrome or whatever. I think what would work overall is to track all requests for a pattern of page access and start blocking other systems that are part of that pattern. But that also wouldn't account for like... landing on the front page of HN, which happens not infrequently. All of this is aside from per-IP or per-user proof of work. Whenever someone lands on a more expensive page I make the browser do proof of work and store it in a cookie, unique to the IP or user. (Signed in users don't have to do proof of work). This is a perfect solution except for the IP rotation I'm talking about above. edit: ah also, I don't do SSL termination so can't spot the SSL configuration. But Cloudflare does. And all of this is even after Cloudflare paid bot traffic systems are in place. edit 2: > tiny percentage of bots will still get through but the load becomes much more manageable. The load is not the problem. It's only at most a few bot hits per second. I'm just having trouble removing bot attribution from view counts.
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You can consider adding in a small amount of js that tracks if a person actually engages with the content before "counting" their view. Eg, did they stay on the page for more than 15 seconds. Youtube wont count a view until you watch for some percentage of the video. Maybe consider something similar.
Protesters break into Microsoft data center site in Amsterdam (theverge.com)
Is this the setup to some joke? There is no standard European keyboard. Netherlands uses a combination of ISO and ANSI qwerty, France Azerty, Belgium a special Belgian flavour of Azerty, Germany Qwertz, etc etc.
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Also, a lot of european-country-language layouts do have a Euro currency symbol, either as modifier+number or as alt+e
If government is unwilling to meditate these kinds of conflicts then people are naturally going to take matters into their own hands, what other outcome would you expect? Obviously the threat of prosecution wasn't enough of a deterrence so now what?
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No, the country shouldn't be held hostage by a small group of agitators. They can vote like the rest of the country, and if they don't convince enough people to join their cause then they should suck it up and try to be more convincing.
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Liberal democracy sounds good in theory but it doesn't work in practice. Like it or not populism is a powerful force that must be reckoned with, always has always will.
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They might convince a lot of people though, see the midterm outcomes in the US. We didn't have an equivalent election here yet.
No, they did not choose that path unless you include beating up reporters to make sure no images of the 'protest' came out as part of that path . All they have done is add 'datacentres' to the OmniCause , this is also made clear by the rabble who they linked up with. Here's a quote from a newspaper article on this break-in, in Dutch: Journalisten ter plaatse zijn geslagen om te voorkomen dat er beelden werden gemaakt van de actie, die georganiseerd is door Geef Tegengas. deze actiegroep wordt gesteund door klimaatbeweging Fossielvrij, Actiegroep ZO, DeGoedeZaak, Leitmotiv, XR en Scientists for Future. That translates to *journalists were beaten up to keep images from the action from coming out. The action is organised by 'Geef Tegengas' (loosely translates to 'resist', literally 'give counter-gas') which is supported by 'Klimaatbeweging Fossielvrij', 'Actiegroep ZO', 'DeGoedeZaak' ('the good cause', i.e. the omnicause), Leitmotiv, XR (Extinction Rebellion, high-brow climate hysterics who regularly block motorways in the Netherlands) and 'Scientists for Future'. Wanna bet they all pranced around with their fruit phones to record their 'rebellion'? There's plenty of ways in the Netherlands to protest without beating up journos since a large fraction of the press tends to be on activists' side, double so for the public broadcaster NOS. They're just doing it this way because they want to be 'radical' and see themselves as 'revolutionaries' for 'the cause'. They're spoiled brats, the lot of them, playing Che Guevara in the knowledge that the Dutch authorities tend to let them off anyway. [edit: deleted double post, that's what you get trying to post from a train in Germany where mobile networks should be declared endangered species. Quo Vadis, Wirtschaftswunder?]
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> Klimaatbeweging Fossielvrij, XR, Scientists for Future Ah yes, "rabble". And I have no idea what an "OmniCause" is.
But if the press tends to take their side, then why beat up the journo? Just to feel edgy? Seems like bad tactics.
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Have you ever BEEN to a protest? Especially the ones where people are doing something clearly illegal? The nicer people will tell you to fuck off with the cameras. The less nicer people will break your camera and/or beat you.
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It is, bad tactics. They're caught in the 'revolutionary mood' which has set France on fire. Those journos are 'part of the establishment' after all. Well, yes, they are and also they tend to side with activists, two things can be true at the same time. There are exceptions to that rule, maybe they very selectively beat up reporters? Anyway, that's still outside the realm or 'normal protests'.
This is AI though. You may as well protest water being wet, or 5+8 being 13. Besides to stop the job losses, all they really need to do is to stop the Dutch government from saving money on labor (and to stop or at least reduce importing everything from labor to software). Of course, knowing the Dutch government ... good luck. What I mean is, the problem here is not AI. In fact AI can solve so many problems for these protestors, they just know, and I kind of agree with them here, their own government, democratic or not, will use AI against its citizens. And it being the Dutch government, especially against paying its citizens a decent wage, but also in many other ways. The fix for this is not "stop AI". It's a decent social contract, AND it's the government actually obeying its own laws. Like national insurance actually forcing doctors to use police data in treatment decisions. Or should we call that what it actually is: the government forbidding and persecuting medical doctors for treating people for a number of things based on interactions with the police. Everything from drug arrests to being illegally in the country. It should be called that because with a national insurance, of course the insurance is just a proxy for the government, not an actual company that makes its own decisions. And once you persecute doctors for something, it isn't really their choice anymore either.
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> and to stop or at least reduce importing everything from labor to software I mean, the data center they were protesting is literally built, operated and owned by Microsoft. I agree, AI as a technology is here to stay in some form, but wouldn't you be a little pissed if some foreign company takes your data, builds a data center in your community without you having any control, puts you out of a job and then sells your own knowledge back to you? Doesn't sound very sovereign to me.
Can Democrats effectively abolish Electoral College after midterm wins? (snopes.com)
Maybe a more interesting question is do they have the strength and/or guts to jettison the supermajority rule, impeach the top two executive branch officials in one go, and appoint the Speaker of the House to the top slot? There is no constitutional or legal reason why they couldn't do both at once in one resolution and no really constraining definitions of the necessary "charges". It's all convention and tradition, which we've seen at this point is basically fictional rules for the meek and incoherent.
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You're mixing up two things. There are potential paths to jettison the Senate filibuster rules. I hope they have the guts to do that. OTOH, the 2/3rds needed to impeach is part of the constitution. Same with the 2/3rds needed to override a presidential veto.
The real answer here is nobody knows, and it will likely be up to SCOTUS. Everyone saying it needs a constitutional amendment doesn't understand what NPVIC is. The whole point of it is to do an end-run around the constitutional amendment process - a hack if you will. Whether this hack is legal is a complicated question ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutionality_of_the_National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact ) that realistically can't be answered by anyone but SCOTUS. If states pull the trigger on NPVIC then I would bet good money that it ends up in SCOTUS, but who knows how they will rule.
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And if the sentiment toward such sleight of hand is as negative as the sentiment toward Trump last Tuesday, then the pendulum could swing as swiftly to the right as it did to the left.
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So what? Did the right ever consider the pendulum effect when they invented "plenary authority?" Or on Jan. 6th?
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This was pretty clearly a backlash against the high gas and groceries prices. Oh and data centers. The average voter doesn't care about things they think are too complicated.
Nope. That is not going to happen because it will require a constitutional amendment which does not benefit supremely rural states. Even if these extremely conservative rural states completely flipped to hard blue they would still be rural. The Electoral College is not a bad idea. It is just implemented poorly. It would work better if it actually represented the voting constituents instead of a controlling party. Nebraska and Maine have it correct.
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The Electoral College is a bad idea whose primary purpose was to keep slave-owning states in the union. It's absurd that we still keep it around.
Umm, none? Are you asking how often they are divided in their decisions? As often as the matters are ideology-driven: conservative vs liberal. And if Democrats try to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices, then again: civil war.
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https://wordhistories.net/2019/08/23/how-many-divisions-pope/
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Oh... so what exactly are you trying to say? Word what you're trying to get at plainly.
Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash (blog.google)
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It seems to me that LLMs are using simulation for cloth generations. They move a lot like 3d models.
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It’s not the LLMs themselves, it’s the training data that they are trained on being supplemented by synthetic video from simulations / 3D rendering.
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I desperately wish Google would focus on improving the Gemini capabilities that are built-in to their office suite (docs, slides, etc.). The current built-in Gemini is terrible, and if I could use e.g. Claude natively with those products my workday would be an order of magnitude more productive. I'm shocked that they don't seem to be investing in agentic capabilities there at all.
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It's amazing to me how poor adoption has been for video models, at least in my corner of the internet. I see considerably more Code to Video content from libraries like HyperFrames than any native AI video. It seems that users are much more open to AI coded "Explained style" videos than anything else.
If I understand correctly, the use-case for this is video B-roll? Because what else am I supposed to do with 15s of videos. So, to badly impersonate N-Gate, "Business Model: Uber for Getty Images"
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The average length of a shot in full length feature film today is like three seconds. Even back in the old days, the average shot was like 12 seconds. Most movies are made up sequences and scenes made up of lots and lots of shots. Increasing the available range of shot lengths from 10 seconds to 15 seconds gives film makers a wider pallet of options, if the longer shots have continuity, which is the other claim here. I'm not aware of any "one-shot", one and done, use cases that are much more compelling the clip is 15s vs 10s. But that's not relevant to many people actually using AI video models like this on a daily basis.
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That's cool, but I don't see why one would want to watch a movie like that. For B-Roll it's different. I can somewhat see the why behind that. It's just to give your brain something to look at so that you don't have a voice-only podcast. But movies OTOH are these creative endeavors where the shots _are_ the content instead of just augmenting the content. This won't stop the industry from still trying to use this tech like that, of course.
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Imagine a hybrid movie, where film maker spends $5000 filming a couple of actors, but uses $50 of AI shots for special effect or other footage that would have been completely out of budget before. I mean, if you just want to claim that AI lacks soul, and its an abomination if every frame in film isn't make by a chemical process involving silver nitrate, like the good Lord intended, that's fine. But there are certainly film makers who don't share that sentiment.
The rollout is so confusing. Going straight to the Gemini app and asking when I can use this model gets me vague and contradicting answers. Ultimately it sounds like the Vids rollout will take 1-3 days, and you can go to vids.new on desktop to see if you’ve won the lottery and have it available now, apparently on any free Google account. Business accounts can use it too. Meanwhile the Gemini app is getting it on paid plans, but with different video length limits and no clear rollout timeline. If you pay for the API, it’s available now apparently. Why is this so difficult to figure out?
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>Going straight to the Gemini app and asking when I can use this model gets me vague and contradicting answers. In other words, business as usual.
https://flow.google.com/ is where most people would use the model. You get credits with your monthly sub that you can spend on flow.
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Uhg that’s my issue. I keep getting it mixed up with https://wave.google.com/ Go with the Flow, don’t ride the Wave.
It's insane how Google has dropped the ball almost completely with AI. I literally don't care about their models anymore because I can't even try them without paying for them? I already pay for the plus plan but whatever their latest model was, is locked for me. Or otherwise it's just not accessible for me. If I try to add balance to my Google payment account, it shows me errors and is asking me to verify my identity through government documents. --- Not to mention the extremely confusing terminology. "Flash", "Experimental". Why are most of your models either of those two? I don't get the confidence that your models are any good because of such names. Give me a normal reliable model! Even if Google releases AGI tier models in the future, I'll always look for other models because Google clearly thinks their models are too good for any of us.
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I can't use it. The webpage reloads continuously after logging in. It's probably some ad blocker add-on, but it's the only web AI that doesn't work, so I simply don't use it at all.
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skill issue?
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Google is a dying company. Abandon the ship! Everything they do in terms of AI is really worthless.
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People really seem to struggle with this and I can't figure out why... Like it kind of just reads like astroturfing in every thread. I downloaded agy, purchased a subscription that the splash page said "includes Argon" and it... works? 3.8 flash and argon have been great FYI. Can't tell a difference between any of the claude models I use at work, minus actually being able to read what it writes.
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I can tell you that I have a Gemini plus subscription I still don't have anything more recent than 3.6 Flash. In consequence, I never use Gemini anymore, and instead have a PAYG plan on Deep Infra. So, no, it is not astroturfing.
This sentiment is the top comment I'm seeing on every recent Google release. That it's impossible to actually access the tech, or even pay for it. I heard someone say on the last such thread that you can use their models thru OpenRouter, and that this is much more pleasant than trying to use them thru Google directly. Looks like it's up there already: https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-omni-1.2-flash
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Also Vercel: https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/models/gemini-omni-1.2-flash If you're using any sort of router middle-man new models are usually easy to try.
They may have dropped the ball on AI-for-programmers, but the Google slopbot is the one the normies use. As much as their AI summaries used to be the biggest joke in the industry, today they're the one I think normies who aren't "AI people" are using the most day-to-day. I see a lot of people doing it: Search with Google, see the AI summary and the search results, realise they want more detailed info, and put that request for clarification into the AI reply and now they're off to the races on a Google AI conversation. Now, it's questionable how "sticky" that is and latest financials revealed it was extremely unprofitable, but in terms of raw "who's using AI" it seems to be working for them.
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Bingo, this is exactly how I use AI personally. There’s just too much SEO spam to wade through on search results anymore, and Google’s AI Mode RAG is pretty good at citing trustworthy sources when I want to dive in. DuckDuckGo’s equivalent feature is unfortunately too prone to hallucination, especially whatever cheap model they are using for AI summaries. Once you click in it switches to GPT Luna, which will sometimes hilariously correct the previous response.
I think the gap here is you're thinking that you are their customer.
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We literally paid them for a Gemini subscription. How does that not make us a customer?
What's Carbon then? I haven't been paying much attention to Google but their naming has been confusing me. Luna/Terra/Sol/Astra was a bit pretentious but at least the sizing makes sense. (I imagined the meeting... "Ok guys, we're getting mogged on naming... what's more epic than a Myth?" -"The SUN!") Anthropic makes sense with the literary "scale" naming, mostly. Is a Carbon bigger than an Argon though? Maybe it has to do with the atomic number?
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A B (not released) C
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Carbon is to Argon as Mythos is to Fable.
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Carbon is to Aragon what Fable is to Mythos.
Argon is not same tier as Astra and Fable. the upcoming, similarly unavailable Carbon maybe is.
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Argon is totally in those tiers in my experience. And you actually get to use it for a few days before you run out of tokens...
AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet. For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent, I just don’t get it. Give nearly anyone else a few hours alone with that codebase and Opus-5.5 and it will be looking 1,000x better.
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Agreed. When I signed a few devs at work up for Gemini for Code I had to go into Google Cloud, jump through several different screens, assign special permissions to each dev to make it work and even when it did work...it was insanely confusing compared to every other option out there. It's to the point where I'm better off asking Grok Bot set it up for me rather than ever deal with figuring it out again.
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They're banned from using Opus-5.5 or other competitor models so they can't fix it.
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>For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent Right. They lack no resources. Therefore, what is happening must be what they want to happen.
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If you have ever worked for a large company you can quickly imagine why they cant execute. Google is old now and entrenched. We will see how long it takes them to become IBM/GE etc. (if they are not already headed that direction). Do they still have 5 messaging apps or did they finally trim it down.
I wanted to pay them money to try their things. I just literally couldn't figure out how to do it. I think I then managed to get some trial credits but I never managed to activate anything with them and hit API limit after basically one prompt.
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I paid for their AI models on the app because I wanted to try the Gemini experience on my device but its utterly incohesive, I just cant use my subscription anywhere else. Anthropic is close but at least they started offering API credits recently so my workflows dont break, but with google man.... its a horrible experience. Won't renew, thats for sure.
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Me too! I wanted to just make an api call to get my current spend on google models.. and like 50 steps of creating this and that and linking it to here and then giving it this and that permissions, and being told this isn't acruall real time, you've just set up a query to be run against your data into this new data lake, and come back and check tomorrow.. I still couldn't get anything to work..
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A year ago I was trying their enterprise code offering and for the life of me I could not get it let me use a gemini 3+ model. I enabled everything in like 5 different interfaces and the GeminiCLI and UIs would only show me 2.5. Eventually I gave up. Anthropic/OpenAI took < 10 minutes to get things going.
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Our team figured out the only stable way to do this was to either use OpenRouter for API, or for subscriptions, to get Ultra Gemini accounts on personal Gmail accounts (no way to do this for individual members of an org without upgrading the entire org!) and hook those to the Antigravity CLI which Claude Code can then orchestrate for second opinions. Which are amazing! Argon’s insights on code review and copywriting are phenomenal, and make these hoops well worth it! But geez, it’s horrifying that we had to figure this out!
Google has an near monopoly on Internet ads (or rather a duo-poly combined with Facebook). Having such an monopoly makes them have hindsights on what they are doing and how they are failing, or even if they do, the incentives and management just aren't cleanly aligned with what ought to be the case.
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Google has always been a bunker corporation, they exist only on shielded campuses and never interface with normal people or reality. One of the additional consequences of never concerning themselves with providing customer service for most of their products. They have no idea what's actually going on on the ground, until long after it has shaken the world (ChatGPT). They're deeply isolated from the front and from proper feedback iteration mechanisms.
There have been months where we've paid 1500€ for my AI models, but I can't bother with Google's models because I literally don't know how to get them. Every time I look it up it looks incredibly cumbersome and confusing. It's not clear which models I get, if I can get them on my personal accounts or need the work account. It's just too confusing. I am a Google Workspace customer by the way (have multiple accounts, actually!). Google must really not care about me as a customer, and instead only care about the enterprise.
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> get them on my personal accounts Would want assurances they won’t permaban a Gmail for a false positive for something on their LLM offering. Like the risk with Google Photos (thinking about the dad sending a doctor a photo of his son’s rash).
In the past, whenever benchmarks used to show google as being on par with the rest, I tried them and found them extremely lacking. It's been maybe 6 months since I last tried them in any proper fashion (other than my usual benchmark which is non-coding related), but I was so let down previously, and found it so exhausting to just figure out how to get a subscription working with them, that I really feel like I've given up. I'm sure I'll get around to trying them. Heck, it could happen today if the mood hits, but....it does need a specific mood. The mood to get over bullshit UX and a profound disdain for the company.
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Fwiw the homepage serves as a current demo - for better or worse. Practically vibe coded (I haven't really looked at the code), but not one-shotted. YMMV
Tesla winds down Cybertruck production after years of poor sales in few markets (msn.com)
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Archive link https://archive.is/Q8NSx
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Reading through some of the comments in this thread feels like being in the Twilight Zone. This is the company of a man who poured almost half a billion dollars into the US election to try to buy favor in Texas. He tried basically bribing voters in Wisconsin before. Weeks ago, he used Starlink for political retribution against Ukraine. He’s unelected, unaccountable and has repeatedly and brazenly tried to undermine US democracy and insert himself in international affairs. And yet some of the comments talk about this like these cars exist in a vacuum, detached from the realities of the person behind them. Some of them even praise this hideous, low quality, overpriced, impractical abomination of a truck. Parts of the tech world really do live in a bubble.
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This is the world that the Supreme Court dreamed up for us in their Citizen's United ruling. Now that money is equivalent to speech, we all have to carefully weigh if our purchases will be used against us in our political system. To anyone who is/was a crusader against cancel culture, recognize the source of it. Become a crusader against Citizen's United instead. It would be a much more productive coalition.
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We know. A lot of people want him dead. Let's talk about the car instead.
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Try leaving your bubble sometime, and live somewhere where people generally have good lives and don’t care about politics. Orange County, for me. Lots of teslas and cybertrucks everywhere, mostly owned by first generation immigrants who don’t care about the political noise, just want a practical electric car.
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it sounds like the bubble is in Orange County. Not everyone is able to ignore the side effects of "political noise"
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Yeah I find myself in the same boat. I don't know if it's a thing with just Bay area tech folks or what. (btw dope earthbound reference in your username if that's what it is)
- Federal EV tax credits are over. - The emissions credit market (where Tesla made most of its money) is dead due to lowered standards. - Manufacturing costs haven't come down. - EV sales share in the US is down to 6% (and falling every quarter). - Chinese EVs are dominating every market outside the US. - All the overhyped moonshots (sub-$30K car, unsupervised autopilot, autonomous robots) are nowhere to be seen. It's hard to see where Tesla goes from here as a company. The stock is still surviving on Elon hype but has been stagnant for 5 years. The day he gets bored and decides to resign to focus on SpaceX full time the company is basically done.
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It’s slightly amazing how persistent the Elon hype is. Quite a few of those problems are at least partially due to own goals that Musk himself has been scoring. I realize that some of it is just a cult of personality, and that part will be unusually sticky because of things like cognitive dissonance. But that can’t be all of it. My next best guess is a bunch of it is a whole bunch of institutional investors are privately thinking these companies are way too risky, but keep it to themselves because it’s not their money they’re putting on the line and taking a contrarian position would risk angering a presumably vocal subset of clients of unknown size. Which isn’t a great way to make yourself popular with your boss.
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> EV sales share in the US is down to 6% (and falling every quarter). It's not every quarter, but it's steady and that spells absolute disaster for US car manufacturers: https://www.coxautoinc.com/insights/q3-2026-ev-sales-report-commentary/ US car companies have been protected and bailed out too many times and are now not only completely uncompetitive on the global market, but set up to be completely demolished as EVs take over. Their bad leadership and overall inefficiency mean that either investors are going to pay a massive price, or US consumers are going to pay a massive price. If we keep on pushing up consumer costs by propping up bad manufacturers with protectionism and bail outs, the US's entire economy is drug down by that. There needs to be some creative destruction, ruthless culling of the least efficient manufacturers, so that their best workers can go to the better manufacturers, if the US is ever going to be a top tier car manufacturer again. I hadn't followed just how bad US manufacturers were failing at EVs the past two years, what with all the other disasters unfolding, thanks for the wake up call. Two years of wasted time, of the US falling even farther behind... such a massive fail and yet not the most massive.
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> Two years of wasted time Try two generations. I think it was obvious since the oil shocks that fossil fuels were not a good bedrock of the economy.
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Not sure why you didn't mention Elon Musk zeig heiling at the inauguration he helped buy which led to a mass boycott.
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Elon resigning from Tesla and just letting it run as a reasonable car company making just regular incremental quality and price and new model improvements on normal vehicles people want to drive could be the best thing for the company. The Model 3 is a huge success. That they didn't follow that up with just a regular pickup truck in a similar niche, and instead got distracted by this cybertruck nonsense is an indictment of Musk's poor leadership at this point. They should just be the Toyota of EVs -- mass produce quality vehicles people want to drive -- instead he's trying to be Tony Stark and keep pumping it as a meme stock. Tesla remains excellent at engineering and manufacturing. They need not seek the exotic. He's a liability to that company, not an asset, at this point. And his name has become a brand liability.
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> - Chinese EVs are dominating every market outside the US. Not so in Europe, where the top 10 EVs sold in 2025 [1] has not a single Chinese car. [1] https://autorai.nl/tesla-van-de-troon-gestoten-als-populairste-ev-merk-in-europa-in-2025/
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Elon's honestly their biggest problem. Can't focus on finishing one thing to save his life and alienated the shit out of the European market with his fascist beliefs.
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Hundreds of Cybercabs are driving around cities right now with no steering wheel or pedal making money and growing 20% a week, Model Y is the best selling car (of any type) in the planet. European sales are going through the roof, they are doubling production. Cybertruck was a mistake but rest of the business is printing cash hand over fist.
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> European sales are going through the roof A side effect of Trump's war with Iran is that every country which doesn't have sufficient domestic oil production, which is most countries especially in Europe, has accelerated their EV transition. Buyers are grabbing every EV they can get their hands on, and yes Tesla are the leader there. https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-electric-car-registrations-surge-54-capture-third-market-2026-11-04/ "Tesla (TSLA.O), led the UK BEV market year-to-date, with registrations up 25.4% from a year earlier and a 9.53% market share South Korea's Kia (000270.KS), and China's BYD (002594.SZ), continued to compete for second place, with market shares of 6.9% and 6.8%, respectively" The Kia model breakdown: https://www.kiapressoffice.com/releases/1975 (mostly Niro, now withdrawn, then EV6)
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> It's hard to see where Tesla goes from here as a company. Probably will get acquired by SpaceX to hide the poor financials
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Also, the truck was ugly, awkward, and not good at being a truck.
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There’s a severe lack of focus and the only endgame that still makes sense to me for Tesla is basically turning into a cab service like Waymo. Perhaps you own the car perhaps not.
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He'll just fold Tesla into SpaceX to cover up the ashes.
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This is the most realistic scenario. Hide the stock losses by folding it into SpaceX. Dare the US government to nationalize it. Walk away a “business martyr”.
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> unsupervised autopilot They are running a fleet of taxis around the Bay Area. It's kind of scary because they aren't that safe, given the lack of LIDAR. But they are doing it anyway.
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Photogrammetry + AI has developed to the degree, that there are 3D scanning apps on iPhone that don't even use the Lidar when available, so you can certainly make do without and get comparable results.
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I don’t see why it’s scary. Most cars on the road have a driver and no LIDAR. The cybercab is no different.
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They intend to take the driver out, and they are already running them without a driver in Texas and Florida.
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Yep, very safely https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi/safety
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For now, their goal is to have no driver and no lidar. That is what said the commenter is scared of.
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They all have someone behind the wheel. Tesla doesn't have a driverless permit in the Bay Area.
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Yes, they have safety drivers for now, but they are still running them as an autonomous fleet. And also, they are driving fully autonomous in Texas and Florida.
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> for now So let me guess, fully unsupervised self driving is rolling out "next year" right?
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I think they have a future as a "normal" car company, but in order to do that they'd have to manage to deliver a new "normal car" model at some point, and accept normal stock prices. That EV market share direction in the US, though .. really bad compared to non-petrostates (except Norway)
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They’ve never been a normal car company. And that’s the problem. They don’t do a good job at the car company part. They make nice cars, but the company part has issues. Quick example… I was very happy to drive a model 3 for many years. But the constant changes in price of their new cars destroyed any resale value mine had. Every time Tesla was having a bad quarter, the value of my car dropped. That’s not the way to get me to buy another one. There are certainly other areas where they could improve too. But my point being - they’ve never been all that good at (or interested in) what it takes to drive long term success in selling cars. It’s just too long of a time horizon for them.
48v and other tech lives on in Semi and Cab https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/tesla-cybercab-48v-system-400v-architecture/
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Wow, its real! I just looked it up on iPhone.
I get so much joy from seeing these on the road. They are not to my taste, but it’s so nice to see something new on the road. I still remember years ago seeing one in a grocery store parking lot, with a banana yellow wrap and the Zelda unlock sound as its lock chime. A brief moment of inconsequential joy. Lastly, having the cyber truck drag race a Porsche 911, while towing a Porsche 911 (and win) has to be one of the best marketing stunts of all time.
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[delayed]
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Agreed. Even if the design is polarizing, has quality issues, whatever about elon and politics, it is refreshing to see something different and distinctive on the road in a sea of blobby SUVs and extended cab trucks.
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> Lastly, having the cyber truck drag race a Porsche 911, while towing a Porsche 911 (and win) has to be one of the best marketing stunts of all time. I suppose, if you don't really like cars much, this was interesting. No one debates the ability for EVs to have absurd 0-60, 0-100 times, but there's almost no overlap between why you'd buy a Cybertruck versus a 911 besides status symbol, which gets back to... maybe it's neat, if you don't really care about cars much.
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I agree. I was personally getting really sad on how all design appeared to be converging on one 'allowed' shape without considering any other possible -- ah ha - angles. I posted on this before, but I will repeat it here, because it is relevant. Those cars did have uses, but those uses revolved around drawing attention ( think advertising ). Whenever I saw one in my neck of the woods, they were selling something.
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As a pedestrian I certainly don’t enjoy being around them, or any of the absurdly oversized American trucks.
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Why you discriminate on differently mobile, fam?
I feel so much anger seeing these on the road. A bad design that costs too much, the only people who bought these were ideologues committed to the vision of a man responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths, the gutting of the American state, and some of the most destructive politics of hate in living memory. I celebrate their passing.
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You sound very ideologue yourself.
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I own one. I hate Elon and everything that he has become. I wanted an EV truck that can drive itself on my road trips.
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What you do matters more than what you say.
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Some of us just got one because it’s a fantastic self driving electric family car. I have a family and live somewhere nice, life’s too short to get so wound up about politics. And you’ll still be seeing them on the roads for many years to come :)
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Yeah, why worry about the politics you’re supporting with your money? Presumably you believe you aren’t a likely target for the hate and violence Musk spends that money you gave him advocating for. Must be nice not to have to worry about your or your family’s personal safety or emotional well-being. Thanks for the advice about “getting wound up” over politics.
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Have fun driving a Scarlet Letter, bro.
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Life's a lot easier when you just close your eyes and pretend the problem disappears, huh?
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Life is certainly too short to support nazis
I’ve been seeing complaints on the internet about how all cars look the same nowadays. I think the cybertruck proves why. A lot of design has coalesced around the same thing, not just for cars but for websites and apps, logos, furniture, etc. because people like that stuff. Something new and fresh can be accepted and loved, but it still needs to be familiar and somewhat iterative. A radical change like the cybertruck is hated for that reason. (People also hate it because of Elon, but they don’t hate the other Teslas nearly as much as they hate the cybertruck)
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There’s a school of thought that anything is better than blandly conformative design. In that school, the Cybertruck counts as progress. To me, it’s more like answering a complaint about the blandness of pop music with electric bagpipes and nails on chalkboard: if you can’t be different and good, maybe don’t try so hard to be different.
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The design isn't what led to its demise, the $80K-100K sticker price did.
I think a lot of the reason most cars look the same is they all have to pass similar pedestrian crash standards. Once you account for all of that, the basic shape of the vehicle is set and there is only so much unique styling you can attach.
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Have you seen any of the videos where they push fake kids in front of Teslas versus other cars? I don't think the safety argument holds up here when you're comparing Teslas with standard automobiles.
When the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently. By the time of its delayed release, Musk had become deeply unpopular with many of that original coalition of fans and buyers, the truck was more expensive than originally promised, his new ‘base’ probably couldn’t afford to buy many of them, and it was structurally a fairly normal car underneath the steel panels. It also suffered plenty of embarrassing issues, which people were of course gleeful to publicise. It could have been a cool funky status symbol, but Musk screwed it all up.
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> Musk was still the darling of the left I can assure you he was not.
> When the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently. People still hated it when it was announced, the online discourse was largely negative surrounding it. I remember being in my tech office at the time and we were all talking about how bad it looked.
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Not universally. Your tech office and online spaces may have disliked it, but I also saw a lot of excitement and positivity about it, both online and IRL.
I love that they took a swing for the fences. Car makers are so fucking safe these days. Sadly it didn’t land, but it’s awesome that it exists. I think if it had used a more conventional design it would have done so much better. Owners report an incredible driving experience. I also think battery technology held it back. It was originally advertised as having much better towing range, and production came in very underwhelming. This made it much less appealing as a utility vehicle. It ended up being used for picking up groceries and this wasn’t broad enough a market.
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For better "swing for the fences", have a look at Renault.
I disagree. Teslas used to be nice designs and pleasant to see on the street. Cybertruck and Cybercab designs are an affront. Intentionally ugly. I’m glad we don’t see a lot of trucks on the street, and I despair at the thought of millions of Cybercabs about. The 3/Y and the screens had lots of design and product innovations. Iterating on those lines would’ve been quite nice.
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The Y redesign to adopt more of the "Cyber" ethos is such a mistake. It won't age well, but then again neither will the brand.
The Cybertruck is today’s DeLorean
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The owner has not (yet) been arrested for cocaine trafficking, though. (The history of John DeLorean is quite the read!)
https://www.slate.auto/ ?
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Oh man, I was wondering if anyone was gonna bring up Slate. I try not to get excited about stuff, but the idea of The Next Big Thing in Cars being a total lack of garbage nonsense screens and giving us back CRANK CRANK WINDOWS -- this is pure joy. Wheels. Seats. Motor[1]. Box to keep rain off. Done. Oh you attached a bed to that? Double awesome. [1] Enough top end cruise speed for American interstates.
"Safer than the average driver" is great if all the below-average drivers start buying Teslas. But if you're converting drivers on the other end of the spectrum then the roads become less safe overall.
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I wish someone who had access to the data would address this. I do know that there is not much better than average driver! There is much worse than average: people who drive drunk, and a few other classes of people who shouldn't drive at all. However the vast majority are all about equal: in reasonable mental health and limited to the same eye and reaction times. A few people have and follow better training and so are slightly safer - but this is slight. Most people think they are better than average because they excuse their mistakes as a "one time mistake", while confusing "the other guy's" mistakes with the other guy must be a bad driver.
They are not selling in USA. Chinese are buying the Chinese made ones.. https://evwire.com/etrucks/market-share
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These aren't pickup trucks.
Well, if you're dreaming, instead of a cyber truck at 40K, wouldn't you want instead a Chauffeured Rolls-Royce and the Swedish bikini team to keep it maintained?
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That depends. When I want to go to the symphony I want a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. I don't care how it is maintained, that is the chauffeurs job. If I want to see under dressed girls I'll go to a strip club after if, or maybe hire an escort to sit next to me. When I want a truck to "go mudding", the fun is driving it through the mud. Maybe my chauffeur is tows the truck to the mud pit, but I'm getting it stuck in the mud myself. Sometimes the local cheerleaders are holding a fund raiser and I'll pay them to clean the truck after I'm done. When I want a truck because I need to haul things - I want to pay someone else to take care of it when I'm not around. In reality I'm not rich enough for the above. I do a lot of maintenance myself because I can't afford to pay someone. I have one vehicle that is a bad compromise for everything because I can't afford more. In reality I have moral objections to under dressed girls and so I'm not going to the strip club or hiring escorts. But if I was that type I wouldn't be paying them to maintain my car. I have had the cheerleaders clean my car while I watched, but I wasn't paying them to be "eye candy" even though I did enjoy looking, and the next week is was the boys wrestling team (which I don't enjoy looking at) that got paid just as much for the same job. In reality I'd prefer public transportation, but that is a different story.
but electric trucks are very successful in China. Why not in the rest of the market?
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That's electric semi trucks. The market for pickup trucks in general in China would be pretty small.
High volume, low margin is a completely legit strategy.
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That works for foodstuffs but not the manufacturing industry. Because you know people need to eat, always. They don't need a new truck all the time.
I really thought it would have had a lot of potential for cheaper manufacturing. No paint process is huge. And originally they were talking about basically building it like origami from a sheet of steel.
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A folded stainless exoskeleton without paint has the potential to make low volume car manufacturing much cheaper. A press brake is generic and cheap. Molds for presses are cheap if the cost can be spread over many vehicles, but are expensive for low volume manufacturing. Paint shops are similar. They're not expensive if you're running a lot of cars in the same color through it, but at low volumes with custom colors they are fabulously expensive. Of course the final production Cybertruck didn't use the exoskeleton design so it was the worst of both worlds, but it does feel like the original design wasn't expected to sell well and was designed for low volume manufacturing.
Thats not really fair, the $40k promised price is not that much higher than your average middle class car purchase. I think anyone willing to go to the site, sign up, and hand over $100 would be willing to to take on a payment plan for a $40k car.
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The average buyer in the US can't afford a new car of any kind. The average car sale is a used car. Used cars outsell new cars 3 to 1. And the average used car sells for $27k. Entertaining the idea of a new car purchase is an upper-middle class thing, and a fully-refundable $100 is impulse buy territory for most of them. Yes, many of them would have been capable of taking on a $40K purchase, but $100 is not a serious indicator that they were serious about doing it. People who have this money are doing relatively well and blow $100 on much more inane things that aren't refundable. A traditional dealer would ask someone with much less money looking at a used Nissan Sentra to put down $500 to hold a car.
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> $100 is not a serious indicator that they were serious about doing it OK, but I think it is. So can we agree to disagree, is that ok with you that I have a differing opinion?
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You are fully entitled to your opinion but the data shows very little overlap between the groups of people who buy new cars and the groups of people for which $100 is a significant amount of money.
Possibly, but as it cost $100 to put down a deposit I would be surprised if that many people were willing to actually pay for something they only tolerated.
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It was a refundable deposit (and small), so I wonder how many people were even that serious - no real commitment. 2019 USA annual car/pickup sales were ~17M. I find it very hard to believe that 10% (2M cybertruck pre-orders) of those purchasers were seriously interested in a cybertruck - it really is not a design made for mainstream tastes.
I mean once you buy the tooling, it’s still probably cheaper to produce stainless steel trucks than paint normal steel. I agree on everything else though
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If that’s true it would only be the case if you could amortize that tooling across enough vehicles. Selling 10k-20k per year from a production line planned with a capacity of 125k per year won’t get you there.
It’s staggering how much money they wasted because Musk didn’t want to listen to real experts. It was years late because stainless steel is so much harder to work with, especially when it has so many complicated geometries, and every one of those delays was a chance for him to say “maybe the people I hired for their expertise know something I don’t” rather than “I’m the boss, make it work”. They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
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Part of the delay was also the 48V architecture. So in addition to the obvious new things like stainless steel panels they also had to redesign mundane parts like window motors and interior lighting. The Cybercab is also using a 48V architecture so even though they've never talked about it being an R&D platform maybe they'll retcon it that way.
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That forces a redesign of all the car electronics. While it might well be a good idea anyway from an R&D point of view it's undeniably expensive. (I have a very slight visibility on 48V car audio R&D, for example. Most digital electronics could be adapted with a different DC-DC converter but the audio power amp stage takes direct supply voltage)
Real experts said reusable rockets were impossible ...
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No, no rocketry expert ever said that reusable rockets were impossible. They would have told you that the cost to develop them would not recoup itself based on the then-existing demand for orbital payloads, and that banking on such demand materializing would be a massive gamble (which is why Starlink exists).
Did they?
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A real expert told Elon that self landing rockets were possible over chutes. The retconning to build the myth of Elon is ridiculous. Lars Blackmore was doing self-landing rocket research before he went to spacex. Musk's reusable rockets (who doesn't want that, this is why the shuttle exists) wanted to use parachutes.
Yes. Is my comment ambiguous or something? Seems to me like a sentence that's quite easy to understand.
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Lots of false sentences are easy to understand.
> They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier. They could have Roadstered it. Buy Ford Transit 350 "gliders", work out how to make them FWD, RWD, or AWD using your own transaxles and batteries. Pickup, van, or just a bare chassis-cab to go to a coachbuilder, it doesn't matter. The Transit has been around for 61 years. Sticking electric motors in it that you already have is a no-brainer.
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Arguably the longest lived successful British vehicle, the Transit. https://www.fromtheroad.ford.com/eur/en/articles/2025/transit-60-years-in-numbers-show-how-this-van-means-business
And the "real experts" left us dependent on Russia for launching a couple capsules a year to the space station. They could have done what Musk did with Falcon 9 in the 90's. Instead they chose to mess around more with solid fueled heavy lift vehicles, all the while proclaiming that they were the experts/science.
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The fallacy you are committing here is making all the non-spacex experts a homogeneous straw people.
An engineers isn’t going to say “EVs will never work” or “reusable rockets are impossible”. They’d say things like “we’re really going to need to minimize weight and try to build better batteries to hit that range goal” or “it’s going to require a lot of money to do the R&D for reusable boosters, you need to land a NASA contract so we can afford dozens of tests”. Engineers express tradeoffs far more than absolutes. Musk has enthusiasm, yes, but he’s let his luck at PayPal and successfully buying Tesla from the original founders go to his head. Nobody is right all of the time, and no serious project goes perfectly according to the original vision without adjustments. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of an electric truck — companies with better engineering culture are making great ones — but the Cybertruck failed exactly the way everyone who isn’t a superfan expected: it’s designed in a way which guarantees high costs and it just doesn’t deliver corresponding benefits for most people. Diving into the culture wars against a large chunk of potential Tesla buyers was a bad idea but even if he hadn’t, there just aren’t that many people who have that kind of money to spend and the ones who do usually won’t accept so many limitations and flaws.
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It's not just high costs, its high costs that are only there to appease one man. The stainless steel sheets don't provide features that the average consumer even considers and has more than a few drawbacks
That’s a little bit revisionist. I don’t like Musk much either but to be fair: - no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible. Sure, there may have been individuals, but it didn’t make it into corporate strategy or product delivery. The Model S plus the Supercharger network changed the face of the car industry. - none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality. They had an infinite head start vs. SpaceX and failed to innovate. Even now, having their lunch money regularly stolen by SpaceX, where is the reusable competition?
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The clever brains at JPL worked on self landing rockets before they went to spacex. Your tax dollars at work. https://www.alphaxiv.org/@lars-blackmore https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Blackmore https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xZvK9z0AAAAJ&hl=en
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> no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible No executive in the established "expert" car companies had any reason to rock the boat. Establishing EVs as a credible alternative to ICEs required a build-out of charging infrastructure that none of them were willing to commit to. But non-established companies had no such risk, and the emerging companies in China would have developed no less quickly even if Tesla never existed. > none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality All of them would have told you that there's nothing impossible about a reusable rocket, only that their customers were happily served by their current offerings. Without Starlink, there would be no commercial demand that would make up for the cost of R&D.
> Mass to low earth orbit is what matters For a company, matching products and services to demand is what matters. Being able to get more mass into orbit only matters if enough people are willing to pay to get stuff there. The analogy is that jumbo jets exist, but almost no passenger flights bother with jumbo jets because it's not economical. Unlike with civilian aviation we have yet to observe a natural experiment which would allow us to place an economically practical ceiling on rocket payload size, but it very much still remains plausible that something Falcon 9-sized is actually the sweet spot, especially given that Starlink is the only commercial offering that's pushing the existing Falcon 9 capacity. And yes, this completely ignores any mention of going to the moon or Mars, because although there may be incentives to do so (e.g. scientific incentives, political incentives, philosophical incentives), there is no economic incentive other than getting some government contracts which will be just as short-lived as Apollo was once the public loses interest.
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Starlink is SpaceX's biggest revenue stream by far, and they are retiring Falcon 9 and quitting the contract / launch market, so they are matching very well with their own product, which is what they actually care about?
Somehow everything turns into a misdirection with Elon, where failing to innovate yields ridiculous distractions. When the Cyberjunk was clearly a poor product, they pivoting to "doubling as a boat" and being bullet "proof". And also you can play shitty ports of video games, awkwardly, on your in-car screen. At some point this gimmick misdirection nonsense has to stop working. Oh look, if you have a transport-truck sized massive compressor in your garage and use 100kWh to spend a day filling a tank, your ComingSoonNow(TM wink) Roadster can do some silly stuff if you dedicate much of the interior to a giant explosion hazard.
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Another prediction from the Simpsons comes true. The 1991 episode "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" where Homer designs a car with zero input from anybody besides himself. The result is an overpriced behemoth with random features nobody needs and nothing customers want (fuel efficiency, affordablility). https://youtube.com/watch?v=gRBDLE06qNY Today, we'd called "founder mode".
Who are their customer base? Musk seems to have decided to fire his actual customer base, but getting a new one more ideologically aligned with him hasn't quite worked out.
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Based on my casual observation, middle school boys :)
Yet again I consider the disparities between the US market, as described by commentors, and the UK market. Cybertrucks never made it to road legality here, and would probably have required an HGV license (if the maximum manufacturer permitted vehicle+load weight is over 3500kg). The US style pickup is pretty rare. There are some Ford Ranger/Raptors, which look comically large but are apparently smaller than the common F150 (??). People who need a truck bed get a Ford Transit or similar with the bed variant. Agricultural use cases are handled with actual tractors (who can use the cheaper "red" diesel!)
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The pickup in the US is a staple of the plumber, roofer and other tradesmen, and as you say; this use case as a tradesman’s tool is broadly filled by the panel van in Europe. To some extent you even see this in New York too. Certainly there’s a need for these vehicles in rural areas where road conditions may be poor or absent altogether and the work needs done regardless. The cybertruck on the other hand isn’t a work vehicle, it’s bought by the same people who buy the super kitted out models and who have no interest in using it for work, let alone taking the thing off road. Ultimately I think of it as the modern Delorean, but I don’t think it will engender the same level of good will when it ages out and becomes less common due to the increasingly negative profile of Musk and his connections to the politics in which the vehicle was created.
I might be ignorant here as a german but how often are people towing something big 100 miles and more were they do not have time to just charge? I would have said 2-4 times a year (lakelife location far away twice a year?). I mean for sure, if you are the person who constantly need this, EVs might need a little bit more advantages, but what does an avg F150 owner would tow 100mi every day / regularly?
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For towing, 75% of truck owners claim to use this feature once a year or never. More than 60% of truck owners use the bed to haul at least once per month; but it's difficult to determine the percentage who could have used a car instead. A small car can fit quite a few bags of soil in the trunk, for example.
I think regen breaking only helps if the load is on the bed. If it's on a trailer, the trailer will have normal breaks and a lot is lost.
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It also doesn't help if you have a long freeway trip where you don't brake.
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Trailers may not have regenerative braking today, but that's a chicken-and-egg problem; trailers already have wiring hookups, and once EVs become the default for personal vehicles, it's easy to imagine that regenerative braking will become standard.
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braking
If you would be using it just locally, as opposed for road trips, note that it has an LFP battery. LFP batteries are perfectly happy to be always charged to 100% and discharged down to 10% (lower is OK but most people want to keep some spare in case they aren't able to charge when they expected to). Lithium nickel batteries suffer accelerated aging at high charge and at low charge, so it is usually recommended to stay in the 80-20% range, only going to 100% shortly before a road trip. A Slate with a 200 mile range operated 100-10% would give you 180 miles between charges. That would be the same range as a lithium nickel battery EV with a 300 mile range operated 80-20%.
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I only have one car at a time (not married). I frequently visit family that lives about 80 miles away that live in a charger desert. I used to own a Chevy Bolt and it could get me to those family and back on one 100% charge with a little bit for grocery runs etc. while there. Even that I wish had like maybe another 20 miles of range lol.
Personally I live in the Midwest. I make fairly frequent drives of around 200 miles to visit friends and family. I drive a pluggable hybrid. EV charging stations exist at both destinations, but are very spotty in between. During the winter, range plummets. That 200 isn't getting me all the way from A to B. Having a hybrid fueling option is just much more practical for me. I'm not saying I couldn't get it done, I could, but sitting for hours waiting for some slow-ass EV charging station in the middle of winter is not bullshit I'm signing up for.
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Not that I am trying to argue with you, I'm not, but people have a "gas station mindset" about EVs and it leads to confusion, so let me spell out how this trip would look with a "charging station" mindset: Leave home at 100%/200mi Drive to destination (approx 3 hours) arrive with ~0%/0mi Charge while at destination to 80%/160mi Begin driving back home with a 20%/40mi deficit of range. Stop anywhere/anytime after you get below 60%/120mi Charge for 20%/40mi (~10 minutes) Complete drive home and fully charge again. Total extra time on 400 mile trip vs gas (assuming 300 mi tank range, so 1 fill-up): ~5 minutes (or 8 minutes if you stop for a quick charge on the way so you don't have to white knuckle down to 0%). For cold driving in the winter, it would probably be closer to an extra 20 minutes.
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I love my EV, but you're really not being at all realistic here. That's more of a perfect possible case scenario based on numbers from a website, not a real world scenario. I take a ~350 mile drive to Milwaukee in our 300 mile range car (2025 Ioniq 5) and we have to stop three times on the trip in each direction. You're not actually going to get 200mi from 100% when you have 2 people and baggage loaded and traffic exists, and no one sane would be comfortable arriving with literally 0% battery. Charging stops take minimum 10 minutes just accounting for getting off & back on the freeway; usually more like 30-40 minutes because why would you not just charge back up to 80% since you're stopped anyway? Your destination hotel almost certainly does not have a charger, or if they do they charge an idle fee, so you can't just leave it overnight, so really that has to count as another charging stop. Realistically you're talking probably two 30 minute charge stops in each direction. That's not completely unacceptable (eg just have some lunch at one of the stops) but your 5-8 minute quote is absolutely not realistic.
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> Charge while at destination to 80%/160mi If you can. I have some family that doesn't have any power near where I park when I visit. I'm also there for less than the _many, many_ hours it would take to get an EV from ~0 to ~80% on a standard 15A/120v outlet. In one case, they have a pretty big tesla super-charger something like 40 miles from them so I can top all the way up just before I get there if I go slightly out of my way. In the US, we still have a long ways to go in the US before _high current_ charging options are as ubiquitous as gas.
Slow ass ev charging? My f150 charge from almost dead to almost full in 35-40 minutes and it has 300+ mile range and 135kWh battery. And its still a 400v architecture
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> Slow ass ev charging? My f150 charge from almost dead to almost full in 35-40 minutes Unfortunately a lot of people only really have a level1 class charger at home and that's a 10+ hour charge on a F150. Probably somewhere around 5-7 hours for a level 2 charger but that's only a "given" on new construction. If you live close to a level3 charger than you can get topped up in under an hour but that also isn't as convenient as plugging in when you get home and forgetting about it since you have to drive to the charger.
most people don’t use the capacity of the pickup trucks on the road today. I’m not going to tell people what to drive, but I know personally a smaller pickup with occasional bed use and better efficiency and parking the rest of the time would be an easy sell.
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My '96 Toyota T100 is exactly that. I would never want to downgrade to a modern monster-pickup.
> I don't really see the point of them. Then you need to get our and do more real work of lots of different types. Exposed bed is often an advantage! I have a welder, the safety instructions include "Never carry the gas tanks in an enclosed vehicle" -if there is a leak the gas tanks (nitrogen, argon, helium) can quickly displace the oxygen inside and I'll die before I know what happened. Most things I carry don't need to be inside constantly. A little rain won't hurt anything, I wouldn't want to store anything outside but just a couple hours won't harm most things. Also it is a lot easier to load things in a truck than a van. I can lift it over the sides (perhaps with a forklift). I can stand up in the back while arranging things - even when it is full I can stand upright. I have used both trucks and vans to carry things over the years. Both are a compromise - and like all compromises there are negatives where something else would be better. Overall I fall on the truck is better side for what I do most often - but that is overall and I recognize there are good reasons some will choose something else.
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Every Saturday I fill my truck bed with garbage cans and dump them at a transfer station across the highway from where I live. (We have no trash service in this rural area). I used to cram bags of trash into the back of my Honda CRV, which worked, but was often messy and stinky. You can hose out the back of a truck bed. I used to think trucks were mostly useless, but have found that many people have weekly uses that make a lot of sense. I do question the logic of lifting your truck so high you can't reach into the bed.
I live in a rural agricultural area and these are all over the place. Replacing crazy expensive side-by-sides. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j76f6E0oOW4
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I bought one in the US for $8k for hauling equipment around. I love it. 40mpg, gets the job done.
A people mover that moves the minimum of people (2)
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90% of taxi rides are 1 person 95% 2 so its based on, you know, business intelligence rather than your hot take which is anti Elon rhetoric like most of this thread or any for that matter here (keep thinking this is reddit)
It's Tesla Assisted Driving in Europe. In the US, it's still FSD.
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Yes thankyou for confirming my point. How did I know you would come and be pedantic about it? I live in Europe, and here its not called Full Self Driving because regulators disagree with you that the car is driving itself. Therefore your original statement of "It's called Supervised Full Self Driving (FSD) and that is an accurate name given it controls every aspect of the vehicle's operation" is not true here at all. If the US is happy with Elon lying about his cars abilities then thats on them. Not surprising really judging by the mess that is the USA in recent years.
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European regulation is a joke, that why they are failing, look at the riots in France, businesses strangled by regulation.
We've built an open-source feature flag server for 11 years (github.com/Unleash)
Wow a server that can help you manage your booleans. That's so useful. Let me just add one more thing to my infrastructure so my list of booleans can be managed.
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managed in the sense that values keep getting thrown onto the pile and then people somehow manage to never think about or touch them ever again regardless of their temporary nature
This domain needs some better ontology and taxonomy, there's so many overlapping and conflated terms whenever I hear about it. To name a few: - Feature Flags used as Configs; - Configs used as Feature Flags; - Live Ops, Control Groups, Experiments, Analytics, and more bundled as "extras" to Feature Flags as if they were the right parent term; I think classical systems/engineering see feature flags as boolean state in some data store, but these PaaS are pushing it as a new thing and struggling with marketing. I wish they took the gaming companies lesson and started using the term "Live Ops"
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This article does exactly that, you might find it an interesting read: https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html
To me there two type of feature flag. For tech and not for tech. If you have good CI/CD practices, an ENV for the environment has what feature is simplest. No new dependencies, change code commit deploy. Non-tech folks need something else that allows them to switch it on and then off. For a variety of reasons.
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Ex-LaunchDarkly engineer here. Feature management goes well beyond and env. Sure an env change is fine on it's own, but a change of the feature flag (essentially a release) requires a deployment. Feature management separates these two. You can deploy without releasing. Because the code is there, but dormant behind an if that can change at runtime, you can actually target users, segments, or even do progressive rollout, and so much more. What this also means is you can test your changes in production without causing prod to go down. Best of all, a release doesn't mean a bad deployment. It's not just about non-tech folks. It separates deploy and release in the SDLC, and that opens up a whole new world.
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This seems a bit reductive. What if you want to do a progressive rollout of the feature? What if it has a problem, and you want to disable it without needing to redeploy across multiple regions? What if you want to A/B test it?
The flags are often not static, though. Varies between environments, markets, user cohorts and whatever rules you can come up with.
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So plenty of parameters that could be exposed in Redis as well. No?
So if you want to slowly roll out a feature flag, you need to get a different app involved that can do everything the feature flag tool can do and a whole lot more? What’s the point of the feature flag tool? Analytics is a much broader set of tooling. It can (and should) report similar things.
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The point of the feature flag tool is to control feature flags. They are not just for A/B testing and slow rollouts, and most products are not on the scale of Amazon, where you need to have a feedback loop for the rollout. Of course there is always going to be some overlap between tools, where many analytics platform allow you to do the rudimentary version of this. The main point of a FF system is that you have a runtime-controllable mapping from user attributes to feature flags, where a set of logic rules can dictate who is exposed to what feature. With most analytics-tool based rollouts, you would be able to only directly set an attribute and you then hard-wire that attribute to the feature toggle in app code, which gives you a lot less flexibility and always requires a engineer in the hot path when it comes to doing rollouts.
Put flags in your own DB(s)?
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Ex-LD engineer here. This was a classic mistake we saw most of our customers make, before they had to switch to LD or its competitors when they scaled a little bit more. Using a db is fine but can put heavy load on the server depending on the number of flags. In addition, it doesn't give you various features such as tagetting by users, segments, etc. Nor does it give you things like progressive rollout or automated rollback (yes we were using that in house and had saved us at least a few times). I'm not advocating for LD, I'm advocating for any feature management system.
What if your DB is down?
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Wouldn't you be having bigger problems if the DB is down (especially if you have good defaults for the flags)?
Dutch 'idealist' bank ASN blocks non-Google Android, including GrapheneOS (github.com/PrivSec-dev)
Well guess why they do that, they're not taking your freedrums, Americans, this is a legitimate anti fraud framework step, dont ask, I work in payment processing. This.is.a.good.decision
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The EU banks are mandating that all their systems be backdoored by Google. Trump has started forcing US companies to deplatform people in Europe that he does not like. This is not a legitimate anti-fraud step.
There is an actual Peter de Vries? Is that a coincidence? Or something Frank Herbert deliberately put in?
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The reference: https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Piter_de_Vries
If they banned all outdated roms why not but you can use all the banking apps on something not updated since 2019 if it's stamped by Google
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I'm sure that will work for a while, but that doesn't solve the problem of that banking app sitting on an unpatched OS.
> If Wero becomes the pan-european solution for online payments It most likely won't, because people want the security that cards offer when they order online. Wero could be good or even great for other things, but not for making online purchases from another country.
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The Dutch do nothing but use Ideal, Wero's predecessor, for online purchases. People very much want to simply transfer money from their bank to a shop, just as they can with a debit card. Most Wero transfers will be to shops in your own country, but don't underestimate its potential. Valve offers Ideal on Steam, and has done so for years now, and they can probably give some very appealing insights into how that unlocked a massive amount of gamers in the Netherlands.
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Nobody is worried that Valve isn't going to deliver what you purchase on Steam. Likewise few people are worried that they're going to be scammed by a well recognized national brand. That's why I specifically mentioned cross-country online shopping, where methods like Wero which offer no benefit at all to customers will have difficulties finding success. Unless there's a massive media campaign to tell people what they should do.
Walt looks great. Though I'm not sure I'd trust my financials to a service that posts "Launch dat shit" as a milestone in their roadmap on their homepage.
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I actually love that about it. Look at those photo's, what a guy. Contrast this to some "pro" looking vibe coded website, I'll take that guy launching dat shit over that any day. Why do we trust soulless orgs? Trust this dude who puts his own face on his product!
Blocking people from rooting their own devices isn't meaningfully contributing to security, even if they think it is. Not relying on security through obscurity is one of the first things you learn when studying the subject.
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Not relying on security through obscurity doesn't mean obscuring things is bad for security, it just means this is not sufficient. Relying only on this or getting a false sense of security due to this would be bad.
> But banks specifically are among the most obnoxious shitters when it comes to "you aren't allowed to do things except the way we want it". > Over and over again you have to contend with bullshit like 120MB APKs full of obfuscated code, root detection, custom firmware detection, "non-mainstream device" detection, VPN detection, and even more obscure spyware-flavored functionality. Ok, the question is then: exactly why do they go through that much trouble? Because that's a lot of trouble.
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in order to minimize chances of someone stealing 6 billion out of them that's why
Whilst not PSD2/PSD3, I've been super happy with Wise; an excellent API, good quality docs. A _proper_ test environment that you can drive using hooks they expose. Nothing but praise for them, including their support, which has helped me around the clock even on weird questions such as why my custom integration fails to send a transaction (mismatched currency between recipient and transfer in my code).
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Not going to be a good day when Wise or Plaid are breached and accounts start being drained. Adding middlemen is not a solution to poor banking services.
I recently had a family member with a medical emergency in a foreign country with only 1 direct flight to cross an ocean, and there was a narrow window of time to buy the very limited supply of lie flat seats needed to make the trip so medical care could be resumed as quickly as possible. It was nice to be able to spend $30k+ on short notice. With modern security features, there is no need to enforce an arbitrary time limit if the payer accepts the risks.
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What exactly do you mean by sending that $30k at your own risk? Like are you suggesting if you sent it to the wrong entity (say they turned out to be a scammer) and the bank shrugged, you'd be fine with it because you took the risk? If yes, do you think most people would? I feel like most people expect more safeguards and recourse when the transaction amount is higher, not less.
AI for scientific discovery: How researchers use Claude (anthropic.com)
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> Using privacy-preserving methods, we study 207,000 Claude and Claude Code research sessions to understand how Claude is used across scientific fields and research tasks. Did they get permission to use researchers' data or did they monitor and extract data without consent? Considering the kerfuffle OpenAI generated with their math proofs, you'd think Anthropic would take a hint and be clear that they did the research with consent, though that assumes they got consent. Seriously, all the industry researchers at these companies went through IRB training during their PhD; have they just conveniently forgotten?
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"If AI could carry out all non-physical research work, output in fields such as computer science and statistics could rise as much as 15-fold, while output in bench sciences such as chemistry and biology, which are held back by physical bottlenecks, would rise three- or fourfold. In our survey of researchers who actively use AI, about 40% expect AI models to carry out full research projects on their own by 2030." Ok, so the creep wants us all unemployed. We can start porn companies like his wife.
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They are very good research assistants. I would never trust an AI to make a scientific conclusion, but they're very good at some things: - Plotting with natural language: "Create a scatter plot of column A versus column B, log scale Y and use stars sized by column C." Every plotting library (except maybe ggplot2 / plotnind) sucks, and the boilerplate never gets less tedius. - Literature search, e.g. "Have there been any peer reviewed papers where they applied X method to Y domain" - Complex visualization, e.g. "Make a self contained HTML file with a 3D interactive visualization of this graph. Add ball and spring position optimization and let me move nodes" - Trying random stuff that would normally be too time consuming to be worth it, eg "Here is a dataset. Try regression methods A, B, and C and report a table." In this case, usually it will screw up and overfit, but it's a good smoke test. Note how in all of these, it's being used for tedious things that provide some value, but ultimately they are only providing information to make a decision on. Granted, I would like to have a research assistant I could train, but if your company will not create a position then there is not much you can do.
Multiplayer tanks that demolish real buildings from OpenStreetMap (worldstrike.fun)
I'm surprised by the comments defending this, I also think it's in poor taste. I wouldn't say cynical, in my opinion it's worse than that, it's too real.
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You're on HN, where people celebrate YC companies that in "defense". The majority of people in our networks would bomb a house if it completed their next round. Let's not pretend that we're surprised people defend this.
NO FUN ALLOWED
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Fun is very much allowed. But people are also allowed to question if one person’s fun is another person’s pain. Like, if a bunch of kids caught a stray cat, tied him up, and started shouting in his ears and laughing, would you stop them? And if they complained “no fun allowed”, would you think that was fair? What about if there was a video game in which you beat to a pulp deepfake representations of your friends and family? Do you not agree it would be reasonable for some people to find that in bad taste, including those who have suffered from domestic violence in real life? You may say that this is just a game, but media affects people too. There are thousands of games where you can shoot at fictional infrastructure, is there really that much to gain from destroying representations of real buildings?
This kind of outrage takes away from things that are actually distasteful and cynical. Conflating unproblematic things with actual harmful things is a you problem. Policing tone, while people are actually dying out there, is more cynical that this game. The only outcome here is there you guys feel better about yourself.
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It's not really outrage, I just think it's in poor taste. Unproblematic is a matter of opinion, which we're each entitled to.
I think it's fun, not cynical at all. I'm sure if my close one was shot, I'd be uneasy playing call of duty, and so on. I'm sorry for your friend.
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As someone who was personally a victim of a violate car accident when very young, causing permanent facial scarring; I give everyone permission to play GTA, Wreckfest and Burnout 3. I would hope my friends would never use me to say otherwise.
sorry, that's on me! Way more people showed up than I expected and the server couldn't keep up. When it falls behind it drops your inputs and yanks your tank back, so that's the bouncing. I found the culprit (collision checks looking at way too many buildings)
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Still same lag for me. But love the effort. :)
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