IDK how many people on HN have read When Prophecy Fails, but it's a seminal paper as I understand it. If you want a more contemporary and readable book on the same topic, When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Cult by Diana Tumminia is very readable and covers the same ground.
Super interesting to see the original research challenged.
Electrek is a highly biased source, the editor has a grudge against Elon and Tesla. It's really unfortunate since it used to be one of the best EV sites.
One of them is a bus hitting a stationary Tesla - hard to paint that as the teslas fault.
A few are low speed reversing into things, the extreme majority of which done by humans are never reported and are not in the dataset comparing how many crashes Tesla have had vs humans.
I would say they’re facts, but they’re being used dishonesty
> One of them is a bus hitting a stationary Tesla - hard to paint that as the teslas fault.
Since the narratives are redacted, who's to say the Tesla didn't change lanes to be in front of the bus, slam on the brakes, then get rear ended?
Or pull partially out of a driveway, stopping and blocking a lane with a bus traveling 35mph in said lane and got hit by it?
> A few are low speed reversing into things, the extreme majority of which done by humans are never reported and are not in the dataset comparing how many crashes Tesla have had vs humans.
I'm sure this happens to humans all the time, but not a single one of those humans would be considered a good (or even decent) driver.
That is a completely made up bar that is impossible to test for, and can never be met.
Even Waymo have tons of reported crashes in the same document.
Self driving cars need to be better than the average human - which means less injuries and deaths. Given 100 people will be killed on the road in the US today, it’s actually not a crazy high bar to clear.
Is there evidence of that? No matter who is criticizing Musk's companies, they will get slandered in one way or nother, which doesn't mean Electrek isn't biased.
Tesla is not the market leader in BEVs. It's BYD (2.25m 2025), then Tesla (1.6m), then VW AG (1 million). Given the current growth/shrinkage rates (33% growth for VW AG, 9% drop for Tesla), they'll be third in a year or so.
Apple has removed all mention of theft tracking from their site once they added the stalking protection. Airtag is for people who lose things, not finding stolen things. You have less than an hour before an Airtag alerts a thief they are being tracked.
Unfortunately the anti-stalking features have made Airtag mostly useless for theft prevention. You have less than an hour to retrieve your item before the tag alerts the thief they are being tracked. I've seen it trigger as quickly as 30 minutes.
To me, the bigger problem is the lack of ability for Android phones to register an AirTag as recognized. They've never done anything to address the problem of "drive your wife's car and her AirTag is beeping at you and your Android phone is beeping at you and there's no way to tell either one to stop".
As the owner of many airtags and some Airpods who has switched to Android, this is infuriating. I get beeps and unknown tracker notifications multiple times a day.
There are technical limitations in Apples design that prevents Android or anyone else from fixing it.
I left iOS because of degrading UX, and the UX of these products has got even worse as a result.
Vendor/ecosystem lockin, all on purpose, to give as much friction and annoyment as possible without flatly refusing the service which is generally bad for PR and apple does care about keeping their image up. This is their typical behavior for a long time, their primary mission is to force you into their ecosystem, not selling specific hardware (with 30% margin but still at the end they don't care about that).
Try running airpods pro against any android phone. Severely degraded experience on purpose to the point of rendering them worse than chinese 10$ aliexpress buds and practically useless. Wife had them, worked fine with iphone mini 13 but she hated iOS with passion so eventually reverted back to samsungs. She had to give airpods pro to her sister who still has apple phone and bought some cheapish buds for 50 bucks which work flawlessly and she is happy again.
Maybe engineers at apple are consistently incompetent to implement basic bluetooth unlike any chinese sweatshop, but somehow I refuse to believe so.
I agree with the lock-in, but FWIW I love using my AirPods with my Android phone. They basically work great. I can't change settings on them, but I haven't done that since I set them up. They sound nothing like $10 aliexpress ear buds, they remember and auto-pair to my phone, two laptops, and an iPad. Totally usable.
I developed a device that turns an Airtag on and off at specific intervals (roughly 80% off 20% on). While the AirTag is off, it can’t be detected, and when it turns on again, you can locate it and with it your stolen item: https://undetectag.com
I'm about to order the new version to check whether it works on it too
I'm not fully onboard with the logic that we just have to live with a certain type of criminal behavior because the technology that could prevent it can be misused to enable another type of criminal behavior. We should aim to stop any kind of criminal behavior.
> I'm not fully onboard with the logic that we just have to live with a certain type of criminal behavior because the technology that could prevent it can be misused to enable another type of criminal behavior. We should aim to stop any kind of criminal behavior.
I don’t think anyone is making a claim that we should live with this according to first principles. I think people are saying this trade-off currently exists because it doesn’t seem to be economically or technologically feasible to solve both well.
How do you propose making an improvement to tracking technology that reduces theft while at the same time not assisting stalking?
One idea: if you report your AirTag as stolen, then it can continue to track the item, but you lose the ability to see where it is. In so doing you hand off tracking capability to some authority. This could be an improvement to the extent that the authority is trustworthy and well behaved. Unfortunately, such properties are not guaranteed across the globe. This would create more incentives for bribery for example.
We should, but also we should prioritise more harmful behaviour being prevented over less harmful behaviour, and stalking/harassment is in my opinion more harmful than property theft.
Frequency isn't really an issue here. I don't care that much if someone steals my luggage. I'd be a little mad if someone took my bike, but I have redundant protection for it, along with other things of more importance, or I keep them on me.
But I'd really, really not like to find out someone was following me around.
If society didn't have to spend the amount of resources that it does dealing with the consequences of personal theft then it would have more resources to direct towards issues like stalking.
I bet Apple could produce some really interesting data from these tools and others that could be used to proactively target stalkers and investigate them before their actions escalate to violence.
You're well beyond the scope of an Airtag at that point. Either you've insured the gear, or you ship it in some more secure fashion, or you have a satellite tracker in it, or whatever other mitigation you can do here. Airtags are great things you might misplace more than anything.
I'm not taking any position on this, but some data to chew on concerning the US. There are roughly fourteen million cases of larceny in the US every year, and between three and four million cases of stalking in the US every year. Rate of violence with larceny is roughly 1% whereas rate of violence with stalking averages 30%. Threats of violence with stalking occurs in about three out of every four cases, if I recall.
Of course, there is an implicit bias with measuring stalking as "peaceful" stalkers who never get caught leave no evidence. Unlike theft which always leaves evidence by its nature (the thing is gone).
It's wild to see someone this forthcoming with their selfishness. You literally said "It’s not fair to me", as if a just world would prioritize your inconvenience over the safety of others.
So you can either keep a tag on your stuff that lets anyone know where you are at all times, or just not misplace your keys. It really doesn't seem that hard to not use something this privacy intrusive if that's your threat model.
That's not the complaint at all - the complaint is that, because of the anti-stalking measures added at the original launch, the AirTags can't be used to track stolen items because the thieves will be notified that they are being "stalked".
How useful is a GPS position for theft prevention? IME cops are not interested in doing more than filing a report after a theft, even if you have a live GPS location of the item for them. Do you try and go get it yourself?
i can speak to this as i had my motorcycle stolen on NYE last year in Santa Monica with an airtag in it. the Santa Monica police said “smart, but it’s in LA so we can’t help you get it. tell the LAPD.”. it took me seven hours of calls to the LAPD while personally hunting down my bike in the shadiest areas of LA, and being a block away from getting it myself, did they come. so yes, if you’re in LA, you basically get it yourself.
in my case, the damage was so much i wish i had just left it stolen and taken the bigger insurance payout.
GPS won't prevent theft, but can help in recovery. Can.
But Apple does more stuff as well, like encrypting your phone and making it so even harvesting a stolen phone for parts is unattractive (everything has serial numbers and you can't just swap a part out).
Good point! But the only thieves I need to worry about are my past selves, who are always stealing time from my future self by not properly cementing the memory of where things get put down...
Setting expectations and thinning the herd. If even half of items had a well hidden air tag, and the cops successfully followed up even half of tagged thefts:
There would a. be less dumb criminals around to repeat offend and b. The smarter would-be criminals will do the calculus and and not steal items which could have tags.
In addition to this, AirTag also makes a sound when on the move.
This is also quite ridiculous, as it literally gives away that there is an AirTag there. I have seen people removing the speaker to eliminate this flaw.
I have only seen the Google side, just a single time when one of my Chipolos threw an alert on my passenger's Samsung.
My Chipolo certainly still works.
There are [cheap] tags being sold that are compatible with both Apple Find My and Google's Find Hub. I would rather have a dual-network device than Apple's improved model.
Would it be so difficult for Apple to put a hole in the Airtag so it could be directly attached to a keychain?
Do these tags need to be configured on both networks to support both protocols? If I own an Android device and configure it there, will Apple devices still find the tag? How does that work?
The Chipolos that I have purchased appear on my phone when first presented, then do not offer to pair to other users' Find Hubs unless I deregister.
I imagine that Airtag functionality is disabled when Find Hub configures these tags.
I have heard in the commentary here that Chipolo is now making dual-network devices, but only one can be active at a time.
Apple has a larger and more sensitive network, so uses requiring tracking quality would lean that way.
I would prefer to find a tag that can be provisioned on both networks. I don't know if any actually work that way.
I'd also like a tag that would let me take it apart and disable the speaker. For my car, that seems appropriate, if I can also find a placement location which is extremely difficult to access.
Edit: Google is saying that "they generally require switching between networks rather than operating on both simultaneously."
> Would it be so difficult for Apple to put a hole in the Airtag so it could be directly attached to a keychain?
Yes. It is surprisingly a near impossible engineering challenge at the levels Apple hardware is being done. Have you even considered the wear and tear that a mere hole in an ABS plastic molded detail would be subjected to over the lifespan of...several years?
(Just kidding, obviously they just want to upsell their customers with extremely overpriced accessories.)
It sends alerts to the thief's iPhone or Android (if you have Apple's Tracker Detect Android app) that they are being tracked within 30 to 60 minutes. It also enables the beeping so the thief can find and remove the Airtag.
If the Airtag can't reach the thief's phone, it starts chirping by itself within an 8-24 hour window.
You can turn it off without resorting to a local account, although it's non-obvious.
GPEdit -> Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → Windows Components → BitLocker Drive Encryption → Operating System Drives → “Choose how BitLocker-protected operating system drives can be recovered”
No, the actual data encryption key doesn't need to change unless you're very paranoid. The backup key and your normal key is just to decrypt the data encryption key.
This is the same model Computer Associates used to run back in the day. Find product with marginal profit but dedicated user base, cut costs, increase pricing and milk it until the next product comes along.
Is this any different than the SaaS business model, except a 3rd party bought the company to strip it?
Everything SaaS these days, hell every subscription these days seems to involve product enshittification + rising pricing. Is this the end game of the financialization of everything?
Not really. A huge number of players are on consoles that have little to no support for mods and games today have too many centralized online servers and companies who keep insisting on control over your local PC which means that game companies can decide what mods you can and cannot have on your system.
There was a time when the concept of "banned mods" only ever applied to a specific server out of countless other servers and locally you could do anything you wanted, even run your own server.
Super interesting to see the original research challenged.
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