I remember when this thing came out how Walter isaacson came out with his biography treating it as if it was Steve Jobs envisioning the personal computer, celebrating the design process as if the cybertruck’s success was a foregone conclusion.

I lost all my respect for isaacson at that time as it was clear he’d entered a bubble himself.

This also seems along with a lot of other recent moves to reveal that money is getting tighter over there.

IIRC Issacon was sleeping with Musk’s mother while he was writing the book too.

I’ve heard that before but all searches come up completely blank, unsurprisingly

This is so spot on. These things work in a bull market and we’ve been in a bull market for arguably 15 years. In a bear market the distortions that were created over the previous years are reversed and usually to an extreme.

It’s somewhat notable that Tesla was up significantly overnight and closed the day down 2%.

I wonder if this is the beginning of a very lengthy period after which people will look back and wonder “what the hell was everyone thinking?”

Curious why you’d need/want whole home gfi. I’m assuming that means that if there’s a short on any circuit power to the entire house is cut? GFI outlets provide a very localized layer of safety and because they are localized can be extraordinarily sensitive. Like trip with a small amount of condensation on a wire.

Whole house works, sensitivity is not a problem.

It trips whenever hot wire gets exposed and touched by anything other than return wire. So basicaly it protects against any failure of insulation of the hot wire. At the latest when you come in contact with it in any manner.

Ground is pretty useless these days where 90% of the things we plug in are just DC adapters or plastic double-insulated devices that don't use it. In that world, GFCI is more useful in detecting faults. Ground makes sense for your major wet appliances with metal cases and Japan has always had ground in kitchen/laundry.

I can't talk about Japan, but in the European installations that I'm familiar with, all general-use circuits are also protected with RCD (GFCI).

> Curious why you’d need/want whole home gfi

Because the danger they protect against is not confined to bathrooms and the outdoors!

An RCD (GFCI) trips quickly when there is an imbalance between outgoing and returning current exceeding a certain threshold, indicating that some current is likely leaking to earth. A little more than 30mA AC through the body sustained for a couple of seconds can kill someone, but is not enough to trip a regular circuit breaker!

Wetness increases conductivity and therefore the risk of a dangerous electric shock, but a faulty appliance or damaged cable elsewhere exposing you to mains voltage can be life-threatening too!

So, why shouldn't we protect the entire house?

> I'm assuming [...] if there’s a short on any circuit power to the entire house is cut

Small nitpick: a GFCI/RCD doesn't trip because of a line-to-neutral short circuit, it only trips if some current "escapes" to somewhere else. Though it is true that nowadays we often install RCBOs which combine residual-current, overload, and short-circuit protection.

But your concern about nuisance trips is somewhat justified. If there is really only one RCD serving the entire house, which is very common for older installations, a ground fault will cause a larger outage.

Newer installations, however, typically use multiple RCBOs to reduce the blast radius. And really old installations, where small current leaks are more common, might not have an RCD anyway.

Also, in my experience, it's just not a problem in practice. I can count the number of nuisance RCD trips I've had in my life on one hand. And genuine faults are similarly rare. Other kinds of power outages are far more common.

> GFI outlets provide a very localized layer of safety [...] can be extraordinarily sensitive

I fully agree that this is an advantage.

A standard 30mA RCD or RCBO, as would be installed in Europe, should disconnect within 40ms at 150mA, but might take longer at lower currents. That could still be quite a substantial electrical shock. (I'm not qualified to say exactly how dangerous it still is, but I can attest to the fact that it can still hurt pretty bad even if the RCD trips.) A 5mA GFCI, as is typical in the US, provides a much larger safety margin. I guess nuisance trips would be a much bigger problem if the detection threshold for RCDs was lowered to 5mA.

So maybe we can agree that the perfect solution would be to have GFCI outlets everywhere? Because as it stands, you either have crude protection everywhere, or good protection limited to a few outlets.

One last note: Whether you have GFCI outlets or RCDs in your electrical panel, make sure to test them regularly via the test button! A faulty protection is no protection, and it's better to be safe than sorry.

Edit: One more thing worth keeping in mind is that, all else being equal, 230V drives almost twice the current as 120V, making the shock more dangerous and residual-current protection even more important.

> So maybe we can agree that the perfect solution would be to have GFCI outlets everywhere?

Meh, gfci outlets aren’t that expensive so if you’re a super vigilant home owner you could easily put one on every circuit in your house. But modern code calls for them in the laundry room, garage, bathrooms and kitchen, so for all practical purposes you almost do have them on every circuit.

For the whole house or circuit, that’s exactly what breakers are for.

For the risk of shock from an electrified appliance, that’s what the ground is for and is a very reliable solution provided that it’s actually done correctly. Unfortunately a lot of builders and electricians cut corners and either don’t ground or don’t do it properly.

To me seems like people are hating on a pretty great system. Put differently, if all you had was a whole house GFCI and someone invented an outlet GFCI that enabled localized fault detection at very low levels it would seem like an advancement. Funny to hear people want to go backwards.

> For the risk of shock from an electrified appliance, that’s what the ground is for

Ground does not protect against every shock hazard! Devices can fail in many ways where live parts are exposed without contacting the grounded casing. Also, imagine a little child poking a metal stick into the outlet. Now you'd better hope that outlet has GFCI. Modern code does not call for it in a child's bedroom, does it?

Edit: To be fair, modern receptacles should be tamper-resistant, but then imagine a child reaching into a lightbulb socket, or cutting through a wire, or the insulation on a wire becoming damaged, etc. pp.

> for all practical purposes you almost do have [GFCI] on every circuit

But there are still gaps! I got shocked by an old clothes iron once (and I'm glad it tripped the RCD at the panel). Bedrooms and living rooms can have electrical faults too!

Another advantage of RCD at the panel is that it protects all downstream parts of the panel and all circuit wiring too! A lot of fatalities come from people working on live wiring. (In fact, many electrocution deaths are electrical contractors.) Now sure, they almost certainly weren't following correct safety procedures, but still, a lot of them could have been saved by an RCD. Some people probably die changing their light bulbs. That's preventable by installing an RCD at the panel, so that the entire circuit is protected, not just everything plugged into a GFCI outlet.

> To me seems like people are hating on a pretty great system. [...] localized fault detection [...] would seem like an advancement

I agree that localized fault detection, all else being equal, is an advancement. But if it comes at the cost of no GFCI protection at all on other circuits, I'm not sure it's worth the tradeoff.

Hundreds of people in the US die every year from low voltage electrical shocks. This number used to be a lot higher before GFCI was common, but it likely could be lower still if GFCI was required everywhere.

Obviously it would be best to have broad coverage and localized tripping, but if I had to pick one, I'd choose broad coverage. Calling it "going backwards" misses the concern of how much is protected, rather than just how localized the impact is when there is a fault.

I've got AFCI/GFCI breakers on every circuit in my house, in the US. Had to get a service upgrade anyway, and the added cost wasn't huge compared to that, so I had them upgrade all the breakers. 0 nuisance trips since then.

The thing that pisses me off about Google recently is that they have made YouTube utterly unusable if you aren’t will to subscribe to premium. The ads are so frequent now that I’ve stopped trying to close them. You could argue well then sign up for premium but if the only benefit you’re providing on a paid tier is fewer ads you’ve run out of ideas and indeed I believe they have run out of ideas to monetize and are fleeing to the last refuge the same way meta has- by flooding everything with ads to meet earnings expectations and have enough cash flow to retain wall streets permission for capex

Ad block on Firefox still block all YouTube ads

This is exactly right and has been proven over and over again. People do not care about sharing their info. Lots of people particularly around these parts pound the table that they should but they are simply fighting the market.

hacker news has a alive tradition if fighting the markets and losing

I dunno what the correct level of abstraction is for LLMs to achieve the type of widespread adoption you’re referring to but I can guarantee it sits above the name of the model. If you have to possess that level of knowledge you ain’t gonna use it. Google achieved mainstream success for a reason. People don’t want to know how the sausage is made.

Pulling on this thread, if the model companies become commoditized and make no money then who is buying the hardware? Seems like it would be the next shoe to drop

Probably more that they are compute constrained. In his latest post Ben Thompson talks about how Microsoft had to use their own infrastructure and supplant outside users in the process so this is probably to free up compute.

I think it's this. They sell a crap ton of b2b inference through Azure and I'm sure this competes with resources needed for training.

This is so spot on and I’ve been harping on this for about two years based on my own professional experiences. The surprising thing, though, is that upper management is ostensibly cool with incompetent people using AI to produce things that are clearly not accurate and have no idea whether it is or not. I believe this is because upper management themselves believe AI is much more accurate in its current form than it is. It’s not clear what if anything will change this but I believe many organizations are rotting from within because they no longer have stringent requirements.

It’s because senior management builds processes with a base assumption of unreliability because a good chunky of employees are.

Thats why they’re relaxed - it’s just switching from one sort of unreliability to a slightly different flavour