My guess is Tesla is desperately in need of Q1 revenue and they want people to scarcity buy FSD lifetime @ $8K. Otherwise the strategy doesn’t make any sense. They’re saying FSD and basic Autopilot will go behind subscription and that subscription prices are expected to go up. Basically laying out that they’re planning to lock you into a subscription and then price gouge. It’s so transparent that I think the point isn’t actually the gouge but to make that threat move lifetime FSD sales.
2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.
3. Some consumers were sold that they would get hardware upgrades for FSD. I'm pretty sure Tesla would like to minimize that, and I expect incentives for those people to purchase new vehicle without FSD.
4. Subscriptions drive our economy, I don't know the details but it seems like every company wants subscriptions over one time purchases.
I honestly don't think they want a lot of people with lifetime FSD, it's disappearing without a lot of news.
>2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.
That wording is misleading because so far as I can tell, that payout is in tranches, and the FSD subscriptions milestone is only tied to one of the tranches. Therefore it's not as if 1 trillion dollars is riding on whether he gets enough FSD subscriptions, only 1/12th of that.
The subscription model seems to profit off of inertia/inaction/forgetfulness/laziness.
There's a whole app called rocket money to fight back against the subscription model by helping you find and cancel subs. I've never used it and don't plan to but it would be cool if it helped push back against the modern shift towards subscription-everything.
Although if we're talking about software or anything else that could easily be one-time/up-front or ongoing, then I guess there's a case to be made that monthly subscriptions let you try before you buy, like rental skis. In that sense they are user friendly.
Rocket Money is an app designed for millennials to hand over their important banking information to Rocket Mortgage in exchange for "help cancelling subscriptions".
It's always seemed to me to be targeted at people too young/poor to buy a house. What does rocket mortgage want with random people's financial statements? Of course when you actually do take out a mortgage you find that you're forced to give up an absolutely shocking amount of personal info (usually via very insecure feeling channels). So if you are offering mortgages you don't have to do all that extra work/advertise so much on tv to get data.
Genuine question because as mentioned I don't use the product (nor do I care enough to rabbit hole).
4. The details are pretty straightforward. Continual passive income is more reliable than the boom bust cycles that is buying cars. The latter requires you finding more and more customers. The former is extracting more money from an assumedly commuted customer.
In theory, subscriptions are cheaper for users as well when done right and it works better with how people are compensated. But as usual, greed consumes all and if everything is a bill, that's more ways to eat at your long term wealth.
A lot of entrepreneurs hate the saasification of everything, and don't want to create sub services. They tow the line because investors LOVE subs and will look at you like you're insane if you disagree.
The reason is a very simple one - predicting future revenue is extremely difficult if you're selling an $X package one time (even with upgrades etc), but knowing that you have Y subscribers with a $Z subscription and a churn rate of N% gives you some kind of future forecast.
Anything you can do to operationalize cash flows is a huge boon to continuity of business operations
There's also the fact that people are bad about cancelling when they don't use them, and it makes it easy to jack up prices.
I don't argue that they're great from a predatory business perspective. The consistency you state comes on the back of negative value for customers though. Particularly now that everything is a subscription. People are worn TF out by keeping track of the people hoovering their money away.
Yeah personally I think it's absolutely awful and a clear example of the way that financialization has negatively affected a lot of things these days, but if you're in that mindset the reasoning is perfectly clear and valid - it's just lacking the larger picture.
> I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription.
There's a huge car finance market where people do exactly that. How much they pay a finance company monthly vs. how much they pay the manufacturer monthly makes little difference to them. It's all about the monthly fee and what they get in return for it.
That is neither here nor there. I was making a tongue in cheek comment that companies wanting recurring revenue is not notable, because everyone wants recurring revenue. The only thing limiting it before was lack of technical ability.
> You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me.
If I'm buying something that has recurring costs to deliver services, I feel better if I'm covering those costs, so I'm buying something with a sustainable business model.
Subscription service for heated seats - outrageous.
Subscription service for premium, ad-free mapping - reasonable.
With all the top heavy population age histograms around the world, the rent seeking is built into all the economies to provide benefits until it becomes too top heavy and revolution occurs.
The price is high, but it's not unique to Tesla. Ford has Blue Cruise, which is about $500/year.
People can, however, opt for openpilot/comma (https://comma.ai/openpilot), which random Youtubers tested and say it's about as good as Tesla's FSD, but has a simple one time fee of $1K But whether you want to trust open source is up to you.
Comma/OpenPilot is actually amazing. One of my cars is a Tesla Model 3 Performance 2025 and I love it, FSD on HW4 is great. Super fast.
I also have a Lexus ES 2025, I bought the Comma for it and it works better than Tesla’s AutoPilot (the thing they’re taking away new new Teslas). AutoPilot isn’t great to begin with, I kinda always hated it. But I do like cars that can drive themselves when I have long road trips and wanna be able to look at work. Comma makes that completely doable on the Lexus.
I’m a fan of what Comma is working on, but to say it’s about as good as FSD (!!) would be a big misunderstanding of both products. Comma is L2 assist: basically in a lane it will keep the lane, and if a car stops ahead it will stop. It’s equivalent to Tesla standard Autopilot, but FSD is an L3 bordering on L4 system. It navigates traffic lights, intersections, indicating, merging, etc none of which Comma can do. Still good product though.
Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company, including mine. Inside it’s all sprint meetings, KPIs and terminology that are either intentionally or unintentionally designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people. It’s easy to convince a 25 year old whiz kid to optimize human assets, it’s just like Factorio and it feels good to see the number go up. In-jokes and dark humor fly and it all feels not real and just like a game. Sometimes on purpose by management, sometimes automatic as a coping mechanism. Defense (my field) is very much the same way.
Engineers are completely blindsided by technology. I work with some brilliant people, technically speaking, but in some cases they seem to have 0 awareness towards the things they are building and how that affects the people using the things that we built. I had a couple of months ago an engineer that's working on various AI things in our company telling me how we can use and build an AI tool to rate the performance of people in the company and people that use our platform (let's say similar to all these mini-job platforms) just to know who to fire if they are not efficient. At no point in time was he thinking of the people, all he could think of was the algorithm and AI and how amazing it could be to do this.
I also sometimes think about how to make computers supervise/control human activity. It's like a inner engineering rush, but then I come back to my senses and think of how outraged I would be.
However for some colleagues, as long as is not affecting them, they don't see any issue with such propositions.
> Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company
I used to be in a mobile application team for a bank, where I had genuine meetings with the loans department where it was discussed if we truly wanted to make it easy and obvious to users how they could pay their loans on time (their logic was that those who default and have to pay extra fees were the banks "best" customers).
We obviously pushed back hard on that. But I can imagine these scenarios playing out in other places and with other results.
In my new credit card app I can set if I want to repay 3%, 5% or 100% at the end of the month. If I set it to 100%, I have to pay $2 per month. Banking is already actively hostile against the customer.
Banks make money on interest. Perhaps the principle itself is the issue, if it's legal to earn money on loans, no surprise a bank incentive is to make you take loan, and have you keep them for as long as it can.
Typically a mortgage does not allow over repayments. Why? It would get people in the nasty habit (from the perspective of the bank) to pay back a little more every month with the spare they've got.
Mortgages have amortization schedules, Banks love it when you pay more as it only reduces the tail end of your loan. You still pay the interest up front.
Not all banks are the same, some have other incentives to pay off early.
With my mortgage, interest is monthly on the remaining principal and paying extra in a month is entirely on the principal - it reduces the total interest paid, so the bank gets less.
The idea that you pay the interest up front is a very common misunderstanding of how mortgages work and more broadly the concept of an amortization schedule.
Yeah, I see people describe it like that all the time, it's never corrected, and doesn't match how I always thought mortgages in general work (and definitely doesn't match mine), so I'm never entirely sure if it's a different system from another country or just a version of the blind leading the blind. Which is why I made my comment so specific to myself.
The parent of that comment mentioning "a fee to overpay" is one I've never even heard of before. Definitely not the case here, free to pay down the principal as much as I want whenever I want as long as the current interest for the month is paid first.
Banks don't care at all how or when you pay your mortgage. They only originate and service the loan. The loan is sold to Fannie & Freddie and isn't on the banks' books anymore.
Only credit unions and small regional banks still hold mortgages on their books. The overwhelming majority(90%+) of mortgages are agency - ie sold to the federal government.
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
I had to take Computer Ethics as part of my degree, but it didn't really anticipate the sort of problems that software engineers run into today. It mostly focused on Therac-25 and integer overflows. Indeed, letting your integer overflow kill a bunch of people is horrifying and is something we should avoid. But we have a much wider reach than people thought at the time. Software is pervasive throughout society and touches every area of life: food delivery and banking are among the examples listed in this thread, and were never touched on in any class I took.
Software didn't create the gig economy or the microloan economy, but as engineers, we had the opportunity to step up and say "hmm, this doesn't seem right, I don't think we should do that". We didn't.
AI is a whole 'nother can of worms. I watched a lot of my friends deactivate social media over the holiday as their pictures got posted to Twitter and got live AI edited by Grok into things that horrify them. You probably wouldn't have gotten an A in Computer Ethics if you said "yeah, we should publicly show women nude pictures of themselves if someone asks in the comments section", but here we are.
It's not great. As a field, we have been remiss in our duty to society.
IMO: historically engineers have had a little bit more leverage to negotiate, so IF they did not think something was right to do, they MIGHT have pushed back. So the likelyhood of wanting to do bad things might be the same, but the agency was a bit higher in terms of the Employer/Employee relationship.
I hear what you’re saying, there are definitely just amoral engineers who truly don’t care. I think the plurality though (and this goes for all disciplines, not just engineering) will start to feel queasy if the impact is too clear and visible. Those people need to stay with the program, as there aren’t enough purely amoral engineers/marketers/PMs/etc to keep the ship afloat alone.
One reason we might assume "engineers" tend to operate with better ethical frameworks is that (in Australia at least) you generally have to register for accreditation via a large organisation like Engineers Australia, IChemE, etc, to actually practice professionally. These organisations have standard codes of ethics that, if breached, can result in your removal and an inability to continue professional practice.
Naturally, software engineering has none of this, and in most cases explicitly doesn't want it.
It’s not a special class, but teams of engineers tend to spook together and are more likely to discuss topics “uncomfortable” to the employer (but not to unionise, apparently). If the degradation of fellow humans is too on the nose for the engineers, they will make noise and move.
My believability is stretched by them disclosing they "put in my two weeks yesterday." That's highly identifiable and incongruent with "posting...from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop."
There are two datapoints in the text. One is the 2 weeks notice, the other is that they knew of this since 8 months ago. If this were me, I would give random made up information of this kind to throw off anyone trying to investigate this. Also, this is not that far from what we already know from whistleblowers of similar gig economy companies so my believability is not stretched at all.
Other comments pointed out the semi-obvious use of AI due to em dashes.
I'm honestly at a point where every suspicious aspect of that post could as well be counted as a countermeasure to getting caught. Said engineer could still be working at the company or could've left years ago. In my opinion the mentioned financial adjustments could've been a discussion topic for higher ups far far earlier than 2025.
Considering how ruthless Uber has acted thorough the years[0] I am almost 100% sure other startups with similar opportunities have at the very least committed crimes on a similar scale to the linked Reddit confession.
Bonus option: The Reddit account starts astroturfing in a few weeks and this was just a run-of-the-mill bot automation to gain karma which happened to overlap with HN interests.
Counterpoint: I've been using em dashes and bulleted lists in my writing (especially in work emails) since around 2015. There are dozens of us! Or maybe I'm just an LLM in a meat suit — who knows at this point.
Yeah ... If true, that's almost enough to identify them. Probably 5 people max at each food delivery company that could be, and their supposed role would be enough to single them out if the company can correctly guess it's talking about them
First step here in terms of terminology is to call it "defense" instead of "weapon technology to maim or kill human beings". Having said that, I do believe we need weapon technology to maim and kill human beings.
Hannah Arendt wrote the fantastic "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" about exactly this observation. That one of the principal enablers of the Holocaust seemed obsessed, not with the effects or outcomes of murdering Jews, but simply the expediency of doing it.
If you're interested in the subject I can very much recommend reading it. I can also recommend "The Ethic of Expediency" which deals with the same subject, but attempts to indict all technical writing instead. I personally changed my writing style after reading it to inject more humanity into it.
reply