- Wake up
- Grab a coffee and two cigarettes
- Go take the big pile of pills "against" depression and autism
- Read some world news
- Get some more pills
- Take a shower, thinking about killing myself, but telling myself "pills will start working in 20 minutes"
- Get another coffee and another two cigarettes until second batch of pills kick in
- Start coding
I recently dropped $99 to get the Financial Times delivered to my door six days a week. If something truly important happens, I'll have the chance to read about it. But I can't doomscroll for hours.
Yep, I've adopted that mentality. Finally. I wish it hadn't taken me so, so long. My wife even commented that I'm much less on-edge, much less prone to find the negative in things. It's sort of like a switch inside of my brain has been welded permanently to the off position, it's pretty wild how it only takes 2-3 weeks for the brain to sort itself out after many years of being stuck in some cycle.
I haven’t watched/read the news in years and I feel so liberated from it.
When something worth knowing happens, I still hear about it. But not consuming news gives me the space I need to think independently about things from the influences of mass produced media.
It’s beautiful
Basically, yeah. I find that the aggregation here is a dozen cuts above what I can find elsewhere and the "news" is tends to be things that are at least tech adjacent and when they're not they're genuinely "newsworthy."
Yeah, I don’t frequent many websites. I go on Facebook occasionally intermittently, but go through phases where I deactivate it. I also go on my university website for my online learning but I don’t go on many websites.
Doesn't work for me. I feel much safer tracking the disintegration of civilization in real-time, making predictions based on that information, and adapt the timing of my escape plans accordingly. So I must newspapers from all around the world every morning, even if it's painful.
I have to admit though: Yesterday I cheated. On new years morning I skipped all world news to beat 2025 to it, delaying the inevitable by a day. Worked well, as it turns out. And I wasn't too smelly due to it, either :)
Very off-topic here, but no, money is not the key when trying to find a spot on this planet that nobody does have on their radar when it comes to fucking up the planet on short notice :)
Also: Different people, different coping strategies. I don't want to wait until the "Active Shooter!" cell broadcast message finds its way to my phone. :)
For some people, potentially especially those on the spectrum, having as much information as possible to work with might bring mental security and stability.
I'm also on team Keep An Eye On Things™, and approximately none of it really feeds into an anxiety loop. (There's a tiny sliver of the pie that does, but it's easy enough to talk myself off that ledge and go engage in a Weltschmerzspaziergang[0].)
I know it's stuff I can't control, and that's sort of the point. I want to know what I can't control so that I can know what I can control, if that makes sense.
Closely tracking things you can not control may provide a sense of control to some.
Or the other way round: Crunching enough data and building reasonable predictions based on that takes away the element of surprise, and the element of surprise for some translates to anxiety.
For me the only things that scare me are in the "I have no data on that" category.
It's all part of the actuarial mindset. The entire point of the exercise is to arrive at a model of reality that has some degree of predictive power.
> For me the only things that scare me are in the "I have no data on that" category.
I feel exactly the same way. It means that I have no idea what those things will wind up costing me, and that's the anxiety trigger as far as I'm concerned.
Genuinely interested what the downvoters find offensive or unreasonable about me having a coping strategy that works for preventing me to kill myself...?
After all, I am not criticizing those who have different coping strategies to protect their mental health, including to keep world news at distance. That just does not work for ME.
Civilization might not be disintegrating, but we sure are living in “interesting times” compared to the life two or three decades ago. It definitely feels worse, so I can empathize. I certainly struggle with home affordability, or lack thereof. Plus other things but home ownership is a big one.
Maybe you’re better off financially and emotionally, so you find it sophomoric - like a parent looking at a kid in high school struggling with their emotions.
While I do think wealth inequality is a big issue of our time, I don't think it is an issue of civilizational level disintegration -- that would look like the total amount of wealth in our society decreasing, which by all accounts doesn't seem to be happening.
While I'm far from rich, I have done well the last couple years after many years of being poor. But even when I was poor I looked around and saw lots of people who were wealthy and doing well, which I took as a general measure of how society was doing, instead of using my own situation or those in my immediate circle as a measure of that.
Refining the ideas behind pasta, noodles, lasagna to create a simple dish for reliably ending hunger across the world. I came up with the unique name "french fries" all by myself!!1
(this document is a first draft, and is not intended to be implemented in its current form. But I am posting my trivial 5 minutes write-up with a click-bait title to Hackernews, anyway.)
In case you really have two eyes pointing in a single direction, you should see an oculist urgently. Mine are doing a perfect 3D picture. Also, unlike the eyes of my Tesla which becomes blind when it rains, or if there is any light reflection, I can still see things.
Also, should your eye cameras be in fixed position, you even more urgently should see a doctor. Mine can be turned 180° on the X-axis, and 120° on the Y-axis.
And finally: My eye cameras have working high-speed auto-focus, HDR, are protected against rain or snow, can operate at very low ISO, and have retina resolution.
The worst thing about my Tesla are the phantom brakes and "emergency lane assist" function (which should be called "steer into opposing traffic for no reason". If I forget to turn those off before starting, my ride will be pure horror.
LIDAR probably would help to make Phantom Brakes happen less often, simply because there would be another info source for "is there REALLY an object that is dangerous to me?".
Those who say that FSD is "pretty good" are living in a fantasy world. There is hard data on miles between critical disengagements (which really should be called "if the driver doesn't respond within a fraction of a second, people will die"), and depending on region, model, weather etc it's between 13 and 115 miles right now.
Over here in Germany there are statistics that a human driver will have the equivalent every 155,000 miles.
"Pretty good" just doesn't cut it when it's about the risk of killing people.
My Model 3 right now detects about 60-70% of school children crossing the road (keep in mind roads in Germany are narrow, and humans including kids are using the roads, too). 30%-40% of those I would kill every morning on my way to the office.
And the thing is: 70% isn't enough for this, 80% isn't, 90% isn't, 99% isn't, and 99,999% isn't.
Side note: People constantly claim that Waymo is autonomous. It's as autonomous as a tram. They only work because it the cities they operate every single road they use have been mapped by hand and is constantly updated. Send a Waymo into my city over here, and will also kill a couple of kids per day. Years ahead of Tesla? Yes. Good enough? Hell no.
Looking around at the percentage of drivers around me on the road with their face looking at a phone, while moving, is probably in excess of 5%. These people won't see the kids crossing the road, either.
It's good that more and more countries are following the EU's lead here. I guess in a couple of years, maybe after North Korea has decided to also force Apple and Google to stop running app store monopolies, the US will also take action.
I know that everybody got used to this, but please remind yourself: You have BOUGHT the phone. It is yours. You own it. It's your decision, and your decision only what software you want to install on it. The current status is not normal.
What really blows my mind about all this is how long are we expected to give our computing over to corporation? 100 years? 200? A thousand? In 500 years will people be running some personal OS cobbled together from a shared heritage or will we be stuck with one mega-corp running it all. It's sort of dystopian what we have now.
For 30 years we had proportional scroll bars as a standard control. You could see how much of a document your current window is showing. You could click onto the bar to easily jump to a section relative to the document size. You could use the arrow buttons on the top and bottom of the scroll bar. You could tab to it and use the keyboard. If you were impaired in vision or motion, you could use your operating system settings to increase contrast or make them bigger.
And now it's 2024, and people on the web routinely cripple scroll bars to make them an UX nightmare.
The enshittification of UI/UX in browsers due to CSS allowing to completely ruin OS-provided standard controls that used to work just fine is a disgrace.
I'm using Windows 10 and Linux, and both provide working standard controls.
Just because Apple is on a mission to ruin their standard controls does not mean those on other operating systems should artificially be forced to also get their UX ruined.
I know HN looks dated. But the very textarea control I am writing in right now can be resized with a standard grab handle, and has working scrollbars and keyboard navigation.
With Windows 11 Microsoft is trying to copy Apple's homework. The Windows 11 standard controls are still subtly better than Apple's, as Microsoft still has a lot of dedicated accessibility teams that have strong voices, but some of Microsoft's designers in the Windows 11 era are giving the impression that they want to be as bad as Apple, if not worse, if they were given the choice and didn't have accessibility teams to be accountable to.
Yes, now it will no longer kill 40% of school children crossing the road, but only 39%.
LOOK AT THE PROGRESS!!!1
And with FSD 34 it will be able to take the easiest highway exit ramp there is on this planet, Mountain View on HWY101, without killing you.
And what does "manual programming" even mean? Do you REALLY believe the xbox360-grade hardware in the tesla is doing AI inferencing? It's not. It's a heuristic.
They are doing inferencing on the vehicle for lane keeping, traffic sign detection, emergency braking, etc.
The biggest problem is really how do you get to 10^n miles per disengagement, for n>=5. Waymo is kinda getting there, Tesla isn't anywhere near that today.
Getting there is really hard, because that's when you get all of the long tail events like bears, moose, wild turkeys, horse mounted police officers, costume conventions, pickup trucks carrying traffic cones and road signs, flooded streets, construction pilot cars, vehicles driving the wrong way on the highway, downed electric poles, NYC steam plumes, and tons of other scenarios. Highway driving in nice and sunny conditions is easy compared to that.
I am not sure how much really is done via inferencing, if at all. Just the way how "Tesla Vision" behaves in a parking garage does simply not look like what I would expect to come out of inferencing. It looks very, very, very much like a pretty bad heuristic. Just look what it makes out of blind spots, the parts the cameras can't see. There is absolutely nothing like "according to my model, there should be X on this spot". The same goes for their distancing sensing in these situations. "Oh, there is a pipe on that wall, which likely has difference distance to me than the wall. I might not wanna crash into that" is trivial on a level that nobody would even use that as a Captcha these days. A model that does not "know" what the third dimension is?
Do you know of any reverse engineering that proves that there really is running anything in regards of inferencing on the NPUs?
Also, just as you said - there are tons of corner cases in the real world, especially once you aren't on a 10-lane US highway which has been designed for monster trucks driven by 16 year olds (no offence) but one of the roundabouts of hell in Paris.
Where would the training data been coming from?
So, I have my doubts.
During summer, there is a red flower growing near the entrance of my parking garage. It constantly is seen as a red light, and the entrance of my garage is often mistaken for a huge truck suddenly magically appearing. Again: Nobody would use a Captcha these days: "Is this a red flower or a traffic light?".
Again, smells like heuristic. "Amount of red pixels in a certain form and spot".
Typically, inference in a machine learning context means feeding a model some input and looking at its output. I'm pretty sure that they are running some model on the vehicle that takes pixels as input and says this part of the image is a car/truck/traffic sign/lane line/etc. It might be misclassifying things (eg. the flower as a red light), but would still be running some kind of model.
As you point out though, the model only seems to do some simple object detection, but doesn't have much of an understanding of what it sees (eg. does it make sense that there would be a traffic light at this location). There are plenty of videos of it getting confused by all kinds of situations (eg this one from a few years ago https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-fsd-full-self-driving-... ).
But this feature simply does not exist. It's a myth spread by Tesla fan boys who do not want to admit they got screwed over.
To be clear: If I drive a very easy street through my town, which is near a school, my Tesla - just like EVERY Tesla - is able to detect about 90% of trash bins on the side of the road (impressive detection rate), but only about 60% of pupils crossing the road.
If I would use Tesla's "full self driving" feature, I would be on average killing about 20 school children EVERY SINGLE MORNING.
And yet billions of miles have been driven on FSD, there is no epidemic of mowing down school children, and Tesla is ranked as having the best automatic emergency braking in the industry ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2022/09/07/tesla-m... )
There is absolutely no actual data to verify this claim. How would you know how many "billions" of miles have been driven with "FSD"?
Tesla isn't publishing any data. They just have been caught actually hiding crash report data to the NHTSA.
"My" anecdotical data is simply watching the amount of trash bins vs kids vs other objects the Tesla I am driving is able to detect. But that is still better linking to an unrelated Forbes article talking about damage done to a car when crashing it into a wall, which does not have anything to do with "FSD" in any car.
When I bought my model 3 three years ago, I was amongst the first to have a Tesla in my (small) city. I bought it because I wanted an EV, and Tesla was the only one you could actually buy instead of having to wait for your car being delivered months or years later.
Then, for a long time when I stopped at a Supercharger, every conversation went like this: "TeslateslateslateslaTesla!".
If I stop at a charger today, where both Teslas and other EVs are parking, you typically hear the Tesla people apologize in shame. "I bought it before Elon became crazy", "Yes, I have looked at the hyundai, too!" etc.
In the US I think it is very common these days to deal with very powerful people who are VERY crazy. So it has become normalized and no longer appears to be a concern.
I'm also part of a very big fan German Tesla online fan forum. Mentioning Elon is now banned there. And "In MY tesla the windscreen wipers really work now!" these days will get you a request for a video proof.
Over here, people have shame. They don't want that anyone associates them with a psychopath.
I still like my M3. Not because it does what was advertised (it does not), but because I like the nerd humor in it and the acceleration.
But: I have a M3 because I bought it before Elon turned bat shit crazy, so next car will be a Hyundai. There I don't know anything about the founder or CEO, and he probably will never push himself into my daily newsfeed, and I like that idea.
> In the US I think it is very common these days to deal with very powerful people who are VERY crazy. So it has become normalized and no longer appears to be a concern.
I think a lot of potential Tesla customers in the US have been put off by Musk's behavior. There are even bumper stickers for Tesla owners that say something to the effect of "I bought it before I knew he was crazy".
I don’t think it’s a shame thing. It’s just that some of us don’t care to partake in the American culture wars. Especially us Asians. We don’t tend to use Reddit or X or read that much Western news media, which relentlessly push the anti-Elon opinions. That’s why almost every Asian family I know drives an X or Y, and will continue doing so as long as the cars are still good.
They don't have to push "Anti-Elon" opinions. It's more than enough, FAR more than enough to simply quote what Elon is writing on "X" in verbatim.
But where I agree: Tesla's image and stock sure would be in better shape if nobody would publish what Elon says at all. But here is the problem: He bought a social media company due to his narcissism.
Again, I'm from Germany. Yes, it's relevant to the news here if the (ex) richest person on the planet is spewing conspiracy theories and bullshit that quite often in some form or another feels like praise for the Nazis, and support for the Neo-Nazis.
Those in my country who may actually like his positions typically are not able to afford a Tesla, so at least when it comes to Germany and a couple of our neighboring countries who also aren't exactly in the Hitler fan camp, all in all that's just not a very good marketing strategy when it comes to Europe.
This really doesn't get expressed enough IMHO: Musk is a liability to Tesla at this point, and obviously unfit to lead the company.
Of course if he gets fired and the drama/fanboyism stops, what's left is a car company that is losing market share, with shitty cars rapidly becoming obsolete compared to the competition. So I don't expect shareholders to act.
To cut them some slack: There are German car manufacturers who have the nerve to in 2024 release new models that do not even have a heat pump build in.
When it came to the actual EV technology, Tesla really had the lead. But they stopped innovating in this area, sadly. Now you are seeing the first 800V vehicles driving around, and suddenly charging at a Supercharger does no longer feel Super.
If they'd change direction and immediately focus on what they are good at, they might stand a chance. But thanks to Elon it's become a huge circus of one distraction after another.
In Europe for a complex set of reasons car manufacturers tend to put out SUV designs only, while most potential EV buyers want SMALL cars. The "model 2" (or whatever it would have been called) would have beat German car manufacturers here easily.
Cancelling this project and to instead launch the Cybertruck... lunacy.
> There are German car manufacturers who have the nerve to in 2024 release new models that do not even have a heat pump build in.
I mean, yeah, you can get a trim without a heat pump. And if you live somewhere with mild weather, then you should probably do that, as the heat pump's contribution to range will not be significant, and it's extra cost and maintenance vs resistive heating.
> In Europe for a complex set of reasons car manufacturers tend to put out SUV designs only
It’s interesting to see the interplay of cultures here. On the one hand you have the ultra conformist German (die welt says elon musk is bad now so you must apologise for driving his cars) and the ultra individualist American (musk).
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