thomaskcr's comments

Just starting to record food in an app made a huge difference for me, I was working out pretty aggressively and making progress on lifting/biking but my weight wasn't moving until I started recording calories. I still have days where I go over by a lot, but grazing was the number one behavior that improved out of just laziness. Recording 8 Oreos, one at a time across a day, is annoying. I've lost 27 pounds across the past two years, pretty consistently/slowly (with a few backslides).

My average calorie deficit on a daily basis is probably 100-150 calories max which is barely noticeable (I'm never hungry) but the app does prevent erasing that by eating 2 cookies at 1 am when I'm not actually hungry.

I like that we're arguing over the word "recall" being an issue when the system it applies to is called "full self driving". I think calling a level 2 driver assistance system "full self driving" is a much bigger inaccuracy.

Tesla is only far ahead in their willingness to take on risk and make at least partially untrue claims. There are multiple companies running actual robo-taxis in other cities but not a single city Tesla is running actual driverless vehicles. If Tesla was actually capable of running robo-taxis in one of the cities with the regulatory atmosphere they would, but they can't.

"People who believe the system they paid 10-12k for called 'full self driving' should be able to drive itself are idiots" is a pretty special class of Elon bootlicking.

People who understand the system don't buy it because they realize it's a scam, everyone who bought it was duped. The most valuable thing at Tesla is the list of rubes they have.

That's not true and Karpathy has confirmed it multiple times. They can create a fingerprint for data they want the system to feed back to the mothership and they may manually label datasets fed back through the report button on the MCU, but disengagements are not a signal they use at all.

> these are support agents and they need access to customer data to do their job.

In these cases, the support agents should not have the ability to open support tickets or modify the companies on them - and then you can give them superuser access to companies with currently open support tickets (preferably those they are assigned only).

It would have been, Musk didn't think so and felt the need to embellish/exaggerate - his habit of exaggerating/lying I think is more on trial than the actual Tesla vehicles here.

Trump literally still calls it the "Trump Vaccine". Also I think people forget how much airtime went into "the vaccine isn't the answer" once Trump started talking about warp speed and the second the election was over it was "the vaccine is the only answer".

I think you can blame a lot on Trump and repubs with regards to protocols, level of concern, being actively anti-mask, etc but it takes a very selective memory to act like Trump wasn't 1000% on board with the vaccine.

Examples:

- Past vaccine disasters show why rushing a coronavirus vaccine now would be 'colossally stupid' By Jen Christensen, CNN Updated 11:34 AM EDT, Tue September 01, 2020

- CNN: The timetable for a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months. Experts say that's risky By Robert Kuznia Updated 2:14 PM EDT, Wed April 01, 2020

- Here's where we stand on getting a coronavirus vaccine By Holly Yan, CNN Updated 1:45 PM EDT, Mon June 08, 2020

- With big talk and hurled insults, the gloves come off in the race for the coronavirus vaccine By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN Senior Medical Correspondent Updated 7:00 AM EDT, Wed May 27, 2020

> (CNN)Ethicists and physicians are concerned that, amid a desire to put an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, developers of drugs and vaccines have become overly enthusiastic about the chances their products will work.

> 2) do not give you a chance to explain your point of view.

You can't eliminate the department meant to answer media queries and then cry that they don't tell your side. He chose to remove the PR department.

> 1) purposely mischarachterize you and your work

That seems to have gone in Musk's favor more than not. Most people think Tesla makes their own batteries (they don't), their cars drive themselves (they don't), they have advanced manufacturing (by every metric they are terribly inefficient and after all the talk of air friction and alien dreadnoughts their model 3 ramp was pure incompetence compared to how other car companies just turn their lines on once validation is done). Musk's lies have been uncritically reported for years.

Honestly, even look at HN articles:

The 2nd highest Tesla article is "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware" from FIVE YEARS AGO...

The top one is "Tesla Cybertruck" - from two years ago.

Third highest - Tesla Roadster - 4 years ago

6th - Tesla Semi - 4 years ago

None of those exist for public sale, all of them got reported and mass upvoted by an uncritical audience. If you fall for Musk's victim complex you're a sucker IMO.

It seems to me that Elon has pulled the pin in the grenade and is now standing there daring the regulators to do something. I think he has realized FSD is a lot further off than they are still saying - and it's an out for him to be able to say "we were sooooo close you'd totally have FSD if it weren't for the NHSTA!". Him prodding the director of the NTSB by posting her wikipedia page while ignoring their calls/requests seems supportive of this. If you were trying to avoid negative findings you'd be responsive to the investigation and recommendations. They've been setting up the "regulator" excuse for years even though no one has ever stood between them and releasing anything they talked about "regulatory approval".

Also - this seems right from the cult handbook - it's not legitimate criticism, it's the enemies who want the company to fail.

Tesla from top to fan has the most insane victim complex. They got years of completely un-critical press coverage about future promises Musk made. They are valued multiple times higher than companies that make more cars in 2 weeks than they make in a year. Their customer base is the most tolerant group of people in the entire world, people have returned leases with "full self driving" that was never delivered, then turned around and bought new cars. This is a company that has been completely coddled from the start.

I feel like 90% of modern cars would have stopped for the object blocking the lane. Even if the police weren't there, then it would have just smashed into the car stopped on the highway. The fact it didn't recognize the police car isn't the issue, it's that Tesla's are basically blind to anything not moving.

> Beta button will request permission to assess driving behavior using Tesla insurance calculator.

The CA Insurance Board should have some questions about this. According to the paperwork filed by State National (the actual insurance company, it's just branded as Tesla) information about driving habits (hard braking, etc) is not used for the insurance pricing.

Also, CA explicitly does not allow that information to be used for rating - so what algorithm are we discussing here? Prop 103 does not allow for any of this information to be used in rating. Seems like this is just a blatant lie trying to make it seem like Tesla Insurance is more than it is.

Do you mean panasonic battery factory? Because that's who Tesla buys most of their cells from (some LG and in China CATL). Tesla has no scale battery manufacturing right now.

There was a point in the pandemic (very early) where saying people should be wearing masks would have been considered misinformation compared to official statements from the CDC. That should be the only argument against this required.

Also early on, for way too long, human to human transmission was officially not happening per the WHO.

> And don't forget the power bill. Some old servers idle at hundreds of watts, which will add up over the several years you leave it running. 24/7 server hardware is a good example of where it makes sense to be mindful of power consumption.

My rack has an always on laptop for applications that always "need" to be running. I then have an arduino in my office that's sole purpose is to wake on lan or power on via UPS until the servers are online when I turn my switch to the "on" position, and put them to sleep when in the off position. Any servers still on after 15 mins in the "off" position just get halted.

Once I did that and the friction of going on/off was so low my power consumption went way down.

We've been hiring in Panama and its not cheaper really at the end of the day but there's a lot more people to hire. I might do 10 interviews for a position there and find someone vs over 50 in the US and not find anyone.

In the past two years, it seems like the only quality US candidates come from active recruitment - job ads do not seem to produce a high quality of applicant. Even after initial screening I still get people who can't parse a simple CSV applying for senior dev positions (you can use google, you get full credit if you copy-paste from stack overflow, you get full credit if you launch into a monologue about how parsing CSVs seems simple but there are a lot of hidden pitfalls, you can use any language you want, you can use a library or read the file and parse line by line and split (no trick cells with commas, all numeric), it's not meant to be a hard test). Some of the interviews are just brutal.

So really the only difference I've been experiencing is it's a lot easier to passively recruit in less competitive markets (specifically overseas), in the US I have to spend a lot more time ensuring I do things like volunteering for pitch event mentorship so I can find people I can encourage to interview for us or keep in contact with so I can actively recruit them if they don't enjoy their job.

It's one thing to sell "Full Self Driving" with the idea that you are basically preordering and get access for now to something that is level 2 but more advanced than any other level 2 system. I don't know how you sell a subscription to something called "Full Self Driving" that doesn't do that at all.

It kind of kills the fiction that Tesla wasn't selling vaporware and just let people preorder FSD for less than it will cost so that's why its called "Full Self Driving". Now they are literally selling something that doesn't exist. The package does more than auto-pilot, but Tesla is not even close to full self driving regardless of the reality warp field they seem to exist in that puts them plainly behind the majority of the players in the field while their fans think they are the only game in town. They lead only in brazenness, they are the only company willing to deploy something half done to the public with the fine print that you need to monitor/be responsible for your "full self driving" car.

When you search Tesla on HN the second highest article is from FIVE YEARS AGO announcing "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware" (which wasn't even true since that was back at HW2). I have no idea how anyone still thinks this company or Elon have any credibility, especially on FSD.

> Tesla is achieving vertical integration to a degree no other mainstream auto OEM has achieved.

Tesla has made a lot of claims - volumetric efficiency, worrying about air resistance, when Musk toured the Toyota factory there was talk of them moving at granny pace. After the worlds most dramatic production ramp they still have yet to reach the capacity at Freemont of their predecessors (GM/Toyota).

Vertical integration represents the biggest issues with Tesla, a lack of focus. During the ramp of their mass production car, they went and bought Musk's cousin's company for a product that didn't even actually get released until basically this year. I don't see how that is a competitive advantage.

Yeah, and then if you under reserve on warranty costs and stuff repairs into "goodwill" under Services/Other, people who don't know better will go on the internet and talk about how it's fine for the company to not have an overall profit because your margin is 20% even though you spend a good amount fixing cars you already sold because quality control is poor.

And to answer the other responder's response about Amazon - Amazon raised money twice, totaling $108M. Tesla is still raising money $20B later, they are funding their efforts primarily off investors not their own operations.

Almost no one is buying these systems outright and based on my experience last year buying a house the ones with solar leases were unattractive to buyers since they had been on the market for months compared to the single digit days for houses we were looking at.