1. Vehicle needed lidar
2. Vehicle should have a collision detection indicator for anomalous collisions and random mechanical problems

This is directly a result of Elon’s edict that Tesla cars don’t use lidar. If you aren’t aware Elon set that as a requirement at the beginning of Tesla’s self driving project because he didn’t want to spend the money on lidar for all Tesla cars.

His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools. While this statement has some modicum of truth, it’s obviously going to trade off safely in situations where vision is compromised. Think fog or sunlight shining in your cameras / eyes or a person running across the street at night wearing all black. There are obvious scenarios where lidar is a massive safety advantage, but Elon made a decision for $$ to not have that. This sounds like a direct and obvious outcome of that edict.

All electricity is overhead for security reasons, routing solar energy through the rails would destroy that. Doing that (beyond the 100m test-track) would mean a prolongued political discussion.

Electricity is overhead for safety reasons (maybe that’s what you meant by “security reasons”). As long as the voltage is kept low (< 48V) and the runs of solar panels aren’t too long, the power can be run safely in the tracks.

My first reaction was how stupid this is. Dirt, debris and other things will get on the panels and cause lots of problems, but after a few minutes I realized it’s actually quite brilliant.

There are three major costs of solar, the panels, the location, and the wiring + inverters. If the tracks are used as the wires (extremely low resistance paths back to an inverter), the location is wasted space so basically free, and the inverter can be placed anywhere along the path to remove the power from the tracks, the cost of this comes down to mainly the cost of the panel, which is actually pretty cheep these days.

The real challenges will be in cleaning & maintenance, vandalism, and modifying the track to limit the conductive paths (assuming they’re used for this).

This isn’t what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn’t the goal or objective.

Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they’ll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don’t get to decide who they’re cutting. They don’t want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.

The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they’re effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.

There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn’t as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.

I would rather pay an ad-block company a monthly subscription than give it to YouTube in blackmail. This will just be another salvo in a never ending war.

But the reality is managers want to pick who gets laid off. It’s not that they want to just cut heads and reduce costs… upper management. may want that… but the actual managers want to keep their best and brightest. They know who the people are who get shit done, and they want to keep those people. Rto tends to have the opposite effect.

The reality is it is often the best employees, the most experienced employees, and some very high level employees who have the most confidence and are most willing to say " screw you, I know I can find a job somewhere else" And give the middle finger to the employer who’s trying to do an RTO plan.

Don’t be fooled by the headlines. Real businesses want to control who they let go. They want to have all the power in the relationship. They want to cut their lower performers and keep their superstars. RTO is about the worst head cutting program you could dream up.

This is the home of Tesla. There are a million EVs here.

I’m in the SF bay area.

The off-hours rate for my electricity is $0.04 cheaper than the prime hours rate. It’s laughable. $0.51 vs $0.47. Why bother even thinking about it at that pathetic difference? It’s certainly not going to change the math much.

It’s shockingly high. I live in the SF bay area and I’m a bit pissed off at how bad we’re getting screwed.

We have a Volvo XC90. Much bigger (and probably heavier) than your Bolt. It gets ~26MPG on the gas only mode. It has an 18.8kWh battery and can go ~30 miles on a charge. So again, bigger, heavier, and less efficient. At $0.50 per kWh, it takes ~$9 for 30 miles, and ~$5.5 in gas to go 26 miles.

That’s all great, but the real thing that will stop it is economics. We have a PHEV and I calculated it out and we pay $8 per gallon equivalent compared to $5.50 for regular gas. That’s a pretty big difference. Right now we ignore the EV part of the vehicle. (Live in California and I pay $0.50/kwh.)

We’re planning on getting solar shortly and that may make it feasible, but until then, it’s not.

I’ll take a 5 sec delay over ads any fucking day of the week.

I completely agree.

Look that’s nice and all, but it’s not going away and it’s only going to get worse. The age of fake AI porn is only beginning. Full-on porn videos where you can take a couple of photos of someone and the AI will build a model of the person and insert them into the porn video is coming. Whether this is done for laughs, from embarrassment, or because it’s sexy doesn’t matter.

This genie is not going back in the bottle. This is only the tip of the iceberg. We are moving towards an age where you will be able to have virtual sex with anyone you want as long as you have a picture or video of them. VR sex and a porn game that can map someone into a character isn’t that far away. It really doesn’t harm anyone if we quit being such prudes.

That seems like really low numbers. Ex-Twitter is (in theory) a multi-billion dollar company and Visa should be a “whale” of a client… $77.5k is nothing for advertising revenue. A drop in the expense budget. That’s not even one software engineer. How does the company stay afloat if numbers look like that?

The simple reason is that it depends on what in the floor can’t actually handle the 2000 lbs. If it’s a floor 1’x1’ floor tile that will break, then Elon is right. If the loade limit is a beam that spans a larger distance, then he’s totally wrong.

In places like a server room, you typically have a raised floor that supports tiles in the neighborhood of 1.5’-3 feet square. (The raised floor allows for all the cabling and air con to be run around the systems.) If you say that the floor can’t support more than 2000lbs that typically means they can’t guarantee enough of a safety margin and you run the risk of the object breaking through the floor. Musk’s wheel argument is crap unless he can be sure each wheel is not on the same floor support area. (Which obviously he can’t.)

However floors the spec will typically have some safety margin and that probably kept him from going through the floor. His logic, while not 100% wrong in the basic statement, lacked a deeper understanding of what was going on and certainly doesn’t help the idea that he’s a Tony Stark genius. It was a Dunning-Kruger level dumb statement to make.

If this statement was made in isolation I would give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he realized it was a stupid statement once he said it but he just didn’t bother to correct himself. However he’s made so many dumb and arrogant statements over the past few years, I assume it was just a dumb unsophisticated statement from someone who isn’t that bright.

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Yeah, I made the switch on Mobile when YouTube’s ads started getting super annoying. Ad block is a killer app in my book.

There was a clause in the contract that said if he backed out he would have to pay $1 billion. Who knew that would actually have saved him way more to exercise that clause.