MetaWhirledPeas

> All those accidents you mentioned are "breaking a few eggs". The omelette is speed.

False. There is no omelette. This is all happening because Pandora's box has been opened, and we know that attempts to slow it or regulate it are playing into the hands of the big AI firms who desire regulatory capture.

So it could end up terrible, or not, but either way there's just no way to stop it. The big AI firms getting their way would only slow progress in the countries where they operate. The rest of the world would progress unimpeded. So Big AI would get its paycheck but AI as a broader concept would hardly be slowed at all.

> DOGE was impressively criminal. The team tried to remove the CVE reporting system

Honest question: what would be the criminal purpose for that?

I would think the only real application would be military, which is probably not what they were going for. This one was just for fun.

Hah! It sounds exactly like that, except that's not what I meant at all. I see all of humanity as a collective. We work together to achieve things without any single power dictating our decisions. So in my mind I'm actually thinking more libertarian. And maybe a more accurate replacement for "bureaucracy" would be logistical friction or something like that. The lure of highly concentrated leadership is the elimination of this friction, at whatever cost the leadership decides, irrespective of your wishes. When all power is concentrated in the hands of the few, personal liberty doesn't stand much of a chance.

By all means, enjoy your Renault.

> it just feels like they are playing around with toys instead advancing humanity

You don't think electric vehicles and battery storage advance humanity?

On the contrary I would rather my big companies didn't try so hard to advance humanity. Elon has a lot of takes around creating a Utopian society which do not sit right with me. Really it's not the advancement that's the problem, it's the requisite power and resources necessary to achieve the elaborate visions. Humanity should be advanced by a collective, not by a few gifted individuals, even if that means more bureaucracy and less efficiency.

> still better for long trips

I own an ICE car and an EV. We use the EV for long trips and it is great. The only time we hesitate is when we are going out into the middle of nowhere.

EV advantages on trips:

- Smooth ride

- Always-ready A/C

- Pet mode

- Self-driving

You do have to plan a bit more. The Tesla route planner is excellent. Having a charger at your destination really seals the deal.

> Let others do it, find out how late it arrives, what glued panels fall off at speed and wait for the inevitable recalls.

Sound advice for people looking for a practical car. But if you have Lambo money who cares? I have never seen a supercar described as reliable.

Imagine how boring the world would be if we refused every idea that didn't have an immediately practical purpose. Rocketry was probably overkill here but it did achieve at least one thing for the Tesla and SpaceX engineers: you can do things you did not believe were possible.

> Nobody is offering this.

They are trying. Inflation keeps moving the bar. It's not like they want their cars to be expensive; the components and fabrication prices just are.

Used you can achieve sub-25k easily.

I used to feel the same way, namely that the tunnel driving would be the signal that unsupervised driving was ready to go. But now that I see their geofenced robotaxis in operation I sort of get it now. Those things do well at driving autonomously, but there are edge cases where the car's safety response is to essentially shut down and wait for human intervention rather than risk uncertainty. That's not something you want happening when you have a single lane of traffic with no passing, leading to a situation where every car in the chain is now forced to deal with the situation in unison. Humans can figure that out pretty quickly, but training the cars to do it will take time. I do expect autonomous tunnel rides any day now, but I can see why they weren't the first use case for autonomous vehicles.

I'm not saying it was a production-ready car, but the notion of it being styrofoam is stupid. These demos are as much for the morale of the engineers as they are for the entertainment of the public. Tesla doesn't need to demonstrate a rocket car.

Were the hypothetical "paywalls everywhere" scenario to play out, sites would quickly consolidate their subscriptions. So a subscription to something like Engadget would get you access to a wide swath of sites, making the paywall a lot more palatable overall. This would be the inevitable outcome because it would be the most natural way for sites to compete with other sites.

There's nothing worse than trying to watch a movie with a fresh mind and being bombarded with some over-engineered DVD or Blu Ray menu that shows scenes from different parts of the movie, like some sort of absurd ad for a movie I already decided to watch. OK I guess it's worse when the UX is incredibly bad too, which it usually is.

> every rocket launch and deorbit by starlink et all also put toxic pollution into the atmosphere

Bringing up Starship launches in the same discussion with car emissions is like bringing up skateboards when talking about traffic jams.

One big help for car emissions would be to make them electric.