We have vast amounts of resources. More than enough to supply the basic needs of everyone in the country.
The US is currently choosing to divert absolutely staggering amounts of those resources away from things we have traditionally valued—science, art, infrastructure, taking care of the least fortunate among us, etc—and using them instead to enrich the already-wealthy, in the most blatant and cruel ways.
There is no possible way this can be spun as being about "available resources". The grift is utterly, 100% transparent.
<< There is no possible way this can be spun as being about "available resources". The grift is utterly, 100% transparent.
Eh, I mean if you put it that way, I suppose all those budgets are just a show and not at all an indication of how utterly fucked we are as a country unless we both:
a) massively reduce spending
b) massively raise taxes
In very real terms, there is only so much money. Some additional money can be borrowed, but we a slowly ( but surely ) reaching a breaking point on that as well.
The issue is: no one is willing to sacrifice anything. And I am sympathetic, but if hard choices are not made now, they will be kinda made for us anyway.
We need to claw back billions and billions and billions of dollars from people for whom it will make zero difference in their daily lives, so that we can spend it on people for whom $100 can change their month, and $10000 can change their life.
Lol. No. We have to massively raise taxes JUST to keep this country afloat financially. The poor people are still fucked. I know it is exactly massively popular to say, which is why you don't see major proponents sans rando online like me.
“Now, there's this about cynicism, Sergeant. It's the universe's most supine moral position. Real comfortable. If nothing can be done, then you're not some kind of shit for not doing it, and you can lie there and stink to yourself in perfect peace.”
So long as they don't give them the capability to consume arbitrary biomass to fuel themselves, I think we're safe from a Faro Swarm situation for the foreseeable future...
Poe's Law applies here. Especially on HN, especially with respect to Musk. There are a disturbing number of people here who have fully bought into his lies.
Are there any known examples of Musk cult members being successfully deprogrammed? I know there are a couple examples of hardcore MAGA people seeing the light.
There's zero chance that Musk will have suddenly "solved" FSD in a day, a week, or a year. He's not an engineer; he's a money man, and a grifter.
That's why people keep giving Tesla money: because Musk has fooled so many people into believing he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight—and, moreover, has gotten them to buy into it so deeply that they have tied their identity into that belief, and so in order to continue to cling to it, they reject empirical evidence of both his lack of qualifications and his outright crimes.
Well he certainly wouldn't but the engineers working for Tesla might, with a probability that is very low but greater than 0. It's much higher (but still low) in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. Tomorrow is a metanym for the future.
But to be very clear I not only don't think they will but I don't think that they think they will, or they wouldn't be shifting focus to Optimus. I'm not invested in Tesla except for my exposure through
index funds.
If anyone who is a fan of Tesla can get through this article without changing their mind. Well. Bless their heart.
To be maximally reductive, FSD will never work because the sensor suite is deficient. There are other reasons but that one's enough.
Same for a rocket that's ridiculously large for orbital missions but can't go beyond orbit without 15 to 25 refueling flights of the same enormous rocket.
The reasons for both these failing are going to be manyfold and complex, but there are enough simple reasons that everyone should understand.
It would be actually fun to see where the limit is on echolocation with serious ML processing these days. Apparently people did quite well in 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9655721/
> Do Tesla shareholders think the rest of the auto industry are in a coma?
I have no idea what institutional investors think, and they're probably the relevant group here.
From the way I've observed individuals discussing it, defending it, on HN… it pattern-matches to my understanding of what people these days call "main character syndrome", i.e. that the other companies are just a supporting cast to provide an interesting challenge for the only one that's not an NPC.
Or, they're stuck in a narrative that stopped making sense only gradually. Tesla solving self-driving ten years ago would have been a triumph. Solving it today, meh. They would be ahead of others by a couple of years, max.
I appreciate when my vocabulary expands. I understood this by context and similarity to 'synonym'. I may have encountered it before (probably), but I didn't know it. Excellent use in a post.
You really thought the poster meant that Elon Musk personally went and implemented FSD? Just for your information, Musk is also not personally assembling every Tesla vehicle.
Well if there are plenty of posters then it should be easy to give me 5 comments of different people where it's clear they believe Tesla R&D is a solo Elon Musk operation.
> he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight
Even if thay were true many people hate Elon now. Enough that they will pass on any technology he is the only purveyor of.
After he celebrated letting children starve (USAID) by dancing on stage with a chainsaw many people decided to never buy any Musk product for any reason. Now there are the Epstein ties.
Worse, many people who dont care about politics at all won't get involved, because Musk is an unstable drug user and its not wise to entangle yourself in his business affairs.
That's a simplified example I used to explain the point. Of course you rarely have people whose job is nothing but hiring, but often you have people whose all responsibilities revolve around inefficient processes, and making these processes efficient threatens their jobs.
TurboTax is a great example of this - the entire purpose of their existence is to make sure that filling taxes is as complicated as possible so that people keep using their services. In other countries simpler and cheaper tax systems are used, but if such a system was adopted in the US, the entire business model of TurboTax would immediately collapse, so they will fight tooth and nail against any improvement.
> There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
This is only true because real income has barely budged since the 1970s.
If real income had tracked productivity during that time, we would have plenty. But it didn't. All the increases have been siphoned off to feed the ultra-wealthy, in a variety of ways.
All the increases have been siphoned off to feed the ultra-wealthy
No, the productivity gains are eaten up by expensive items with low perceived value. You don't think about the $1000 catalytic converter in your car, or $5,000 set of airbags. You just think you are paying more to do the exact same drive to work that you could have done in a $2,000 1970s car. And that's true! Nonetheless, there is real added cost and value to the car.
Indeed: particularly given that—just as a nonexhaustive "for instance"—one of the fairly common things expected in AGI is that it's sapient. Meaning, essentially, that we have created a new life form, that should be given its own rights.
Now, I do not in the least believe that we have created AGI, nor that we are actually close. But you're absolutely right that we can't just handwave away the definitions. They are crucial both to what it means to have AGI, and to whether we do (or soon will) or not.
I'm not sure how the rights thing will go. Humans have proved quite able not to give many rights to animals or other groups of humans even if they are quite smart. Then again there was that post yesterday with a lady accusing OpenAI of murdering her AI boyfriend by turning off 4o so no doubt there will be lots of arguments over that stuff. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020525)
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