I think Tesla is being outcompeted, has fallen behind, and is now going all in on pipe dreams rather than producing a car that competes in quality to other car manufacturers.
I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing for them. I don’t think they’re capable of competing with the giants conventionally. They have to remain unique in some subjective way.
I think that is true on looks and some parts of the cabin aesthetic (ie no turn signal stalk is stupid) but the ubderlieing tech is still atleast a decade ahead of everybody (electric motors, battery pack, etherloop instead of canbus, rapidly approaching full 48v across all systems, maybe self driving. etc.). I think you will see the next couple refreshes fix a bunch of the more glaring aesthetic problems and the much ahead tech will continue to make the cars the most profitable as they ratchet down prices squeexing everyone else.
> but the ubderlieing tech is still atleast a decade ahead of everybody (electric motors, battery pack, etherloop instead of canbus, rapidly approaching full 48v across all systems, maybe self driving. etc.).
- motors are about the same as their competitors in the same price range
- same with batteries, though they have more US capacity to build batteries. However, there is a ton of domestic battery manufacturing capacity coming online in the next year or two.
- etherloop is better than than canbus, as is 48v on a technical level. But its also currently a competitative disadvantage for Tesla, they are missing out on economies of scale because they can't share components with ICEs. To maintain dominance they need to do a lot better in the budget space.
- full self-driving is vaporware at best, and other manufacturers are catching up to what's actually available -- mercedes is the only level 3 certified brand
When I was in college, a physics professor said investment in solar is a waste of time and that we should invest in nuclear instead. A part of his calculation was the efficiency of solar cells at the time, but he didn’t take into account the radical increases in efficiency that investment was able to bring, making our investments in solar worth it today.
I think this may be similar, in that maybe the current solutions are not going to solve the problem, but by investing in these, in the long run, they may prove to be necessary as we get better at it.
No, not in this case. The article already assumes the existence of a near perfectly-efficient process. It's just looking at the minimum energy needed to remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to long-established physical laws, no matter what mechanism is used.
We could definitely work harder at supporting the existing natural mechanisms for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but it's far, far easier to reduce the amount we're emitting.
Plants aren't that efficient, there's just a lot of them. You could cover the requisite 764 GW with about 3000 km^2 of solar cells (assuming 250 W/m^2). That's a bit over the land area of Luxembourg. Minuscule compared to the amount of area on Earth taken up by plants, and sunlight that falls on those plants.
This article is about fundamental limits imposed by the laws of thermodynamics. Asserting it is not real limit is like asserting the speed of light is not a real limit.
You can't go faster than the speed of light by "radical increases in efficiency".
The calculations here are based on the laws of thermodynamics that cannot be broken. This represents the ideal efficiency that is way better than we could achieve in real life.
Teslas on the road today all look like they have a stale design compared to new offerings from other manufacturers. I think it’s a fair point even if they are continuously updating the internals.
It's fine to argue you think they have stale design (an opinion), but that's very different from saying their average model is 9 years old, and comparing that to other carmaker's average model age.
Yes, not all customers buy into the original [external] design.
Personally I think it's a low-rent imitation of Mazda, so a refresh would have been nice.
For all the "but the insides have been upgraded/revamped!!" messaging, it's just confirming that they're too cheap to improve, or just change, the outside.
Also they did just update the Model 3 (looks great!) this year so they are moving in the right direction. Did you see this refreshed look on the Model 3?
Porsche has changed the 911 body, quite radically in fact, if you side-by-side anything 1980s or before with 2012 or later.
But what Porsche does very well is introduce new platforms every few years. It's still a 911 but a new generation, that generates excitement and new sales. Then a few years into each cycle, it releases various sub-specialties and performance variants -- the RSes, GTs, Turbos, etc. Yes this often means at the very end of a platform's life sales drop (in anticipation of the next version) but overall its clear that Porsche has been extremely successful with this release model, which I think the other German carmakers emulate, like BMWs 3-series.
We can fight back by not posting anything useful or accurate to the internet until there are protections in place and each person gets to decide how their data is used and whether they are compensated for it.
From the article, presumably the partial destruction of New York and subsequent political struggle over how to rebuild, as metaphor for modern American democracy in light of the late Roman Republic / early Empire.
Or, in other words, what it's about probably depends on whether or not someone classifies Apocalypse Now as a movie about the Vietnam War.
LLM accuracy is so bad, especially in summarization, that I now have to fact check google search results because they’ve been repeatedly wrong about things like the hours restaurants are open.
There's a huge difference between summarizing a stable document that was part of the training data or the prompt, and knowing ephemeral facts like restaurant hours.
Technically true statement. If you're offering it to imply that the GP bears responsibility for knowing what document was in the training data and what's not, I have to quibble with you.
Knowing it's shortcomings should be the responsibility of the search app that is currently designed to give screen real estate to the wrong summary of the ephemeral fact. Or, users will start to lose trust.
It was not targeted. They are not able to meet the constraints written out in the law. Are you saying we should ignore the law as it was written and give them the hand out anyway?
> They are not able to meet the constraints written out in the law.
Which constraints were they not able to meet? Brendan Carr, an FCC Commissioner, has publicly claimed that Starlink clearly met the traditional constraints, but that the FCC invented a new standard and claimed that Starlink failed to meet that. [0]
> Are you saying we should ignore the law as it was written and give them the hand out anyway?
It depends. Did the FCC apply their standard in a consistent way? And is it normal practice for them to revoke the contract of every partner for the mere possibility of their missing a deadline? If the answer to both questions is 'Yes', then this action is proper. If not, then it is not only improper, but would appear to be an act of blatant political corruption, aimed at someone who is clearly considered to be an enemy of the administration.
The selective enforcement of the law is the very definition of corruption.
Starlink was not the only provider that was excluded from the subsidy. Giving public money away to a service provider that cannot provide the service as described in the law is the definition of corruption. You can see the details that led to the commission making its decision here: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A1.pdf
Enough laws have been written that you are in violation of many of them by nature of existing.
There are also plenty of contradictory laws still on the books which are not enforced because it's considered ridiculous to the judicial system. Judges don't like it, and prosecutors have better things to do like going after criminals.
Perusing idiotic nonsense before putting all the murders and rapists in prison really does more to undermine the legitimacy of the legal system than any political adversary to the US could ever dream of.
The rule of law is important and trying to use nihilistic arguments to ignore the laws as they are written to give one of the world's richest people a free billion dollars even though his company is not able to provide the specified service defies all logic.
This isn't some arcane "no horse parking on Sundays" law. The whole purpose of the law is to deliver the specified speeds and the requirements are not being met.
