In all important areas such as clean energy, fusion energy, biotechnology and AI the Chinese government is heavily investing in and pushing Chinese companies to lead the world.
I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a foreigner. And having to memorize the tones is brutal.
Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. You're just drawing a bunch of symbols on a paper in geometrical arrangements. Which is beautiful but difficult if you're used to being able to spell words based on how they sound.
Unless, of course, you're typing on a computer. In that case you must type the latinised spelling of the characters without tones, then scroll through all the homonyms that match the spelling. Which is still extremely difficult because the consonants don't match Latin languages. And you must still learn the characters to know which one to pick.
Once you get through that, every sentence structure is different as well. Instead of "whose book is this", you say 这本书是谁的 which is like saying "this book is his" but you replace "his/他" with a generic word who/谁 representing that you want to know the person the pronoun was referring to. I can even write 这个什么是谁的 where I have replaced the word "book/书" with "what/什么", meaning I am simultaneously asking what the object is and who it belongs to.
You can effectively do this with any sentence or object. It's a much better designed language since sentences don't magically change the order of everything but it means I cannot think words in English and translate them piecemeal to Chinese. I have to know the whole sentence immediately.
Of course, once you learn this, you have to learn the Chinese idioms. And then everything gets worse because there's so many homonyms everything's a pun, which is why I'm stuck. According to Deepseek, 这个什么是谁的 actually means "what is this thing" and you don't care what the thing is, so it's not really the question. You have to reorder it and ask 这是谁的什么 which glosses as "this is whose what" which is a compound question that's grammatically impossible.
Also, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. Otherwise I'd do it anyways.
Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language. Chinese morphology, tense, and overall grammar are far easier to learn than most European languages. Chinese speakers are extremely forgiving too because modern Chinese speakers span dozens of dialects but all (except 东北人) learn a second dialect: Mandarin.
The characters are indeed a nuisance, but can be overcome with Anki/SRS. Chinese learners struggle with its tonal nature due to a lack of exposure to speaking/listening because they have no experience with tones. English speakers always decry Chinese tones as insurmountable as if it’s the only tonal language, but half of all languages are tonal, so it’s doable with practice.
In fact, Chinese has become more similar to Indo-European languages over the past century. Chinese now has an odd form of hypotaxis (think: conjugation, inflection, etc.), whereas it previously only had parataxis (combine two characters to generate something new). For example, 药性 (medicinal) is OG Chinese (ish), but now you have words like 科学性 and 简化, which make a lot more sense to an English speaker because they were noun-ified. Modern Chinese does this (literally) everywhere: all you see is 是, 性, 化, 的, 被. This makes the language much more amicable to an Indo-European native speaker.
Perhaps your difficulty is due to modern Chinese’s verbose (almost bureaucratic) syntax? These examples you gave make sense to me if you follow their literal reading. They sound stupid if translated to English, but not necessarily nonsensical.
The question is why European/Arabs/Africans aren't moving to China.
> Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language.
It is much easier for me, as a Canadian, to move to basically any European country and learn the language there than to move to China. I would also earn more money than in China. This is true for much of the world.
Chinese is a better language to learn initially but that's like APL being better than ALGOL. Most of the world doesn't want to learn "{⍵[⍋⍵]}X" to sort an array "X". The network effects are key.
I'm still learning Chinese because it is obvious that with the demographic crunch there will be heavy incentives to migrate in the near future. I also have to work with Chinese suppliers and colleagues on a regular basis; it is rapidly growing in %age of workforce.
But I'd have to earn American salaries to move there, because otherwise I would just move to the USA and speak English, a language I already know and can be highly productive in.
It's not just about language.
There's no common practical path to becoming "Chinese", either in a legal or cultural sense. Save for a few rare exceptions, you cannot move there, join the culture, become a citizen, etc even if you're fluent. The western systems arent perfect but they allow a greater number of people who really want to assimilate do so regardless of background.
You can by marrying a Chineze citizen. It won't make you a citizen, but you can get long term residence permit, and your children will be Chinese citizen.
They don't do naturalisation of foreigners, that's true. You can only give that to your children.
100% agree even as someone who grew up around people speaking mandarin. I still cannot write despite having taken the language in both GCSEs and IB, while also living in the country for 3+ years.
i can speak the language just enough to get by but once you get into technical terms, i'm once again completely lost. Unless they do a Singapore or Dubai and make business in English, i dont see any chance of them attracting talent
It’s true that learning Chinese as an adult—especially if you come from an English or other European language background—can be extremely challenging. I have several colleagues who have lived in Beijing for more than a decade, are married to Chinese spouses, and still can barely speak the language, it becomes even more challenging for reading.
This creates real difficulties in daily life. Today, almost all routine activities—online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing—are conducted through smartphone apps. If you can’t read Chinese, even basic tasks become complicated. In recent years, the number of foreigners living in China has declined compared to a decade ago. While political and economic factors clearly play a role, I suspect that the language barrier has also become a more significant obstacle.
Many Chinese people, especially younger generations, can speak some basic English, since it is a mandatory subject in school. As a result, interpersonal communication is usually manageable, and traveling in China is relatively easy. However, living there long-term is a very different experience from visiting as a tourist.
Can you explain how the rise of apps would make things more difficult for those who know little Chinese, as opposed to easier?
> online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing
Surely pre-smartphone, all the offline equivalents of these were also Chinese-language only? Especially in that era, effectively no taxi drivers or shop assistants would've known English, and you didn't have a phone to translate for you.
Whenever I get lunch or dinner north of Toronto with colleagues, the restaurant has no English signage. But because the Chinese restaurants have no waiter and all orders are through a website I can translate the ordering interface on my phone.
I have worked in with the Chinese now for two years in technical fields. I have a strict requirement that they learn English as it is a more technical and specific language and less prone to the use of metaphorical weasel words that slow progress.
I have openly stated that it is a strictly less technical language and often draws teams in to vague specifications and much more verbose language to find specificity. I have billions of dollars in progress to back that up.
There is a lot about Chinese and American culture that will surprise you when the rubber meets the road.
Chinese engineers clearly have no problems building specific, technical things; just like Chinese surgeons have no problems carrying out specific, technical surgeries, etc.
So how is the language "strictly less technical and specific"? Can you give specific and technical examples?
Mandarin is a courtly language full of back out vagueness and high context construction. This is simply a product of the society. It’s not a judgement of right or wrong it simply just is.
Rote Surgery is not a good example compared to say writing a PRD about an unknown feature.
I am in no way saying Chinese people cannot do these things. I am saying in mandarin it is less specific and more circumspect ways of getting there.
I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.
I don't speak Mandarin but is this not an issue of style rather than the language itself? English can be courtly or poetic or abstruse but that's a matter of the speaker making a bunch of choices. I can't help but think of "Yes Minister" and Humphrey Appleby working quite skillfully to communicate in a way that ensured he would not be understood.
Do Mandarin speakers not also have such a range of choices to be clear or not?
Maybe it's a matter of code switching? I've read that some Japanese teams prefer English for practical reasons, since a shared second language prevents anyone from getting bogged down in formalities. That is not to say Japanese is unable to be formulated with just as much precision.
> I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.
I'm not sure why you're getting so defensive; I indeed don't speak Chinese, hence why I'm asking a question.
A claim like "Chinese as a language is less technical and specific than English and slows progress" seems pretty grand; and if Chinese people failed to launch satellites in orbit or do brain surgery you could point to that; but they don't seem to be held back by their language when it comes to making specific, technical achievements, so I'm curious to hear actual, concrete details or examples about what makes Chinese a "less technical and specific" language.
It sounds like your answer is "it simply just is, because it's a courtly language" - which is not a very satisfying answer, intellectually speaking.
The "slows progress" part has some bits of truth in it. This is coming from a from-young bilingual chinese/english speaker. Chinese is harder to learn, ceteris paribus, all other things being equal (especially regarding exposure).
English has 26 characters you can put in a buttoned keyboard. You recurse upon these letters to create new words & meanings. Chinese has what, a thousand? And you'd have to create a stroke system first if you don't have hanyu pinyin. Recursing Chinese characters has problems too, the chinese word for 'good', when split to it's sub-characters represent different meanings.
There were also some Chinese historians that specifically pointed out the chinese language was part of the cause of their worst slices of history despite the chinese having invented gunpowder and whatnot first. They also noted chinese was confined to the elite, who made the language even more complex (in contrast to other civilizations), during certain dynastic periods. Today, the chinese government are trying to simplify the language.
I get that there is pride in people's native languages, but they'll repeat the same mistakes if they don't recognize the weaknesses. It's a bitter pill to swallow.
Saphire-Worff is dead; but I think language matters more than we usually assume.
My favourite example is Arabic, which is both an old and hard to extend language.
In Arabic you would have a hard time to express the concept of „a foreigner who is citizen but resides out of state“.
Not that we often speak about this concept in English, but the word used to refer to „citizens“ carries the connotation of „nation“ and the alternative word used for „inhabitants“ carries the connotation of being on site.
Speaking of a Yemeni citizen and than meeting an Asian person, would surprise people even if they new that the person they were meeting was named „Ho“.
China is trying. Around the time the US announced restrictions on the H-1B visa, China announced the K visa for attracting immigrants [1].
At this point in time, I don't think people are lining up to get K visa to go live in China. But if the current trajectory continues in the US, who knows how things will be in 5 years?
Exactly. And what is the EU doing to attract American talent that doesn't want to live under the Trump regime with his ICE stormtroopers? Nothing really. Meanwhile, highly accomplished people in the US with Chinese ancestry are being wooed to China to do important R&D there.
Did you just compare Chinese immigration enforcement favorably against "ICE stormtroopers"? Foreigners in China have to tell the police where they live, even if it's just a stay in a hotel, and they get deported very quickly for minor crimes. There isn't a problem of illegal immigration in China because the police are so strict, nobody can get away with it!
China has a global reputational problem that will take decades to fix.
The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.
This reads like vague posturing instead of accepting (or even just looking at...) the reality on the ground.
I have about a dozen friends spread across 8 different mid-to-high level universities around the country in biomed. Europe and Canada are definitely a preference but China is entering conversation and has been for the last few years.
The alternative is to abandon an entire career or field of interest because the funding is held up by irrational national political policy.
> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
Whatever makes you sleep at night.
> no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.
Oh god, are we still stuck in that "Reddit is a niche US nerd cave" mindset? In most countries where the youth speaks good English you'll see more under 30s on Reddit than on Facebook or Twitter.
On both counts, you're too stuck in your ways. Times have changed, gotta keep up.
No, it is true. You missed the "under 30s" qualifier. Facebook indeed remains incredibly popular in the 40+ category, which is dominant given demographics in most countries of the subset I mentioned: "youth speaks good English".
> Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.
Luckily I didn't make such a claim, instead just rejecting the premise that "The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.". That global reputational advantage has been cratering with no signs of stopping, and is indeed on pace to run out long before "decades".
People already said that 25 years ago when the US started officially torturing prisoners. And 25 years later, highly qualified immigrants are still lining up to move to the US.
The Middle East wars were a reputational hit. The current issues are personal risks. Wildly different.
Do you want to go be an immigrant to a country where the media shows masked agents rounding up suspected immigrants to disappear them in vans?
Do you want to depend on research grants in a country where scientific institutions are being dismantled? Where the administration openly opposes established science? (Medicine, carbon, etc).
Maybe you've missed the things happening in the last year or two, but already most of the world is pivoting to China for stability, and there is presently a sharp and historic decline in US immigration now.
The sad situation is that neither is stable. China could be the new hegemon, but they would have to make decisions leading to the creation of a domestic consumer middle class that is not directly or perhaps even indirectly dependent on the goodwill of the party. Not to mention it would make some ridiculously wealthy people less so. They will not do that. So we are going to have no hegemon. No deep safe sink to store value. If you want stability you will have to pay a premium for gold or Swiss francs because neither can handle the volume demanded. The world will get messy and who knows how long it will last.
I follow your line of thinking and mostly agree... however, would like to also point out that barring apocalyptic scenarios - there are always deep safe value sinks if you consider your needs from first principles.
Consider for example having the capacities to produce your own energy (food and electricity/heat) - these are core expenditures for most people besides a place to live.
All these are direct consequences of productive land control (you can even live on the land you grow food and have solar panels on).
So if one owns and develops an environment to supply their fundamental needs autonomously and near-automatically - that would seem to be a deep value store that is about as long term as the environment can hold up.
Edit P.S. we've observed what industry has accomplished with vertical integration... why not apply it to our inputs, to increase autonomy of abundance in outputs?
> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation. 10 years ago, if you were someone, you wanted to come to the US. The best students in the world came and stayed.
Things are radically different now. Much of the best talent no longer comes and when they do come they leave. It's night and day.
It's not a binary choice. It's not the US or China. It's the US or Canada/EU/etc. And if you're from China, you used to stay, now you leave.
> As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation.
I find that hard to believe. Applications to top U.S. colleges and graduate schools are at an all-time high and acceptance rates keep falling.
No one that has an Ivy League offer or even a state school like UCLA or Michigan would go to Canada or Europe, except perhaps for Oxford and Cambridge.
We're close to the tenth year of the era of Trump, so a decade of reputational loss has already taken place. It's the tenth year of leadership by men who should be home yelling at televisions and cheating on golf courses, not leading countries.
The importance of immigrant “talent” is clearly overstated. Japan became a powerhouse in the 20th century with virtually no immigration and a significantly smaller population than the US. China is becoming a technological powerhouse with no immigration as well.
Even more importantly, there's just a lot of people in China. New York City's population is approximately 8.8 million; that is the scale of a mid-sized Chinese city. The population exceeds 1 billion, which is difficult to comprehend in terms of scale. The reference I like to use is: 1 million seconds is ~11 days, whereas 1 billion seconds is ~31 years.
To put it bluntly, China quite literally doesn't need (nor wants) the average software dev on HN. The immigrants they would likely want are those with expertise in much harder technical disciplines (semiconductor R&D etc.)
China’s pool is smaller than it seems. China has pursued a development trajectory that focuses on the leading provinces first. That is reasonable. Better to get Beijing and a few other key places to the leading edge first, instead of trying to incrementally move all 1.4 billion people together at the same pace.
But the flip side of that is that China’s talent pool is a lot smaller, in practice, than 1.4 billion. Because vast swaths of the country are still basically the third world. Tellingly, China does not participate in the international PISA assessment across the whole country: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... It released scores for four wealthy provinces back in 2018. They were very high, but there’s obviously a reason China doesn’t test and publish scores for the whole country.
This is not true at all. China’s education system is nationally standardized. Although economic development is uneven with far greater investment concentrated in major cities than inland regions, the structure of education itself is consistent across the country. Schools follow the same national curriculum and use the same core teaching materials.
Income disparities may have some impact on teacher quality, but the difference is often less significant than people assume. Broad access to education tends to matter more than whether a particular middle-school teacher is exceptional. In fact, students in some inland provinces frequently achieve very high scores on the national college entrance examination, driven in part by strong incentives to gain admission to top universities and pursue opportunities in more economically developed regions.
Among younger generations, illiteracy is virtually nonexistent. With nine years of compulsory education mandated nationwide, basic literacy rates are effectively at 100 percent.
Those third world provinces have the potential to be improved up to the standard, especially when you have first world provinces to draw talent/knowledge from.
Having the people is important, the IS needed immigrants to have people, china already has enough people, it just needs to bring them up to par, which will only taoe a generation or two, and china is patient
US pool is also smaller than it seems. US doesn't have world / 8B to draw from, it has ~1B English speakers where 400-500m where EN is primary, another 600m where English is proficient. Shared with other advanced economy / Anglo institutions. Vs PRC has 1.2B Mandarin. US pool is also immigration gated, even with PRC's shit TFR, PRC will still knock ~2x new births for the foreseeable future vs US 3m newborn+immigration... and PRC can push that 6m disproportionately into STEM.
But PRC's actual talent pool is their 20 year back log of 10-15m per year births (100m+) that hasn't gone through tertiary, i.e. about another 40m+ STEM assuming they don't increase tertiary enrollment (currently 60%) or tertiary (40%). The worse case scenario for PRC is they will have ~OCED combined in STEM (not including other tiers of technical talent), or 3x+ more than US, assuming US pre Trump immigration patterns.
They're to migrating to America any more either, that's the point. So no, the US has no advantage, on current trajectory it'll increasingly only have 'native' talent and some of that may choose to move elsewhere.
If the U.S. is losing talent to anywhere else in the world isn’t it losing a relative advantage or increasing a relative disadvantage with China, even if China is not the one benefiting from the lost talent?
Mandarin is weird, because I don't think it's that hard to speak at a passable level, mostly because the grammar is so simple. Many people are spooked by tones, but I think their importance for simple communication can be a little overstated.
But then, learning to read and write requires enormous additional effort. When I learned in Beijing, I'd spend a couple hours a day working on grammar/speaking/listening - and then like 6 hours a day of rote practice to get familiar with characters.
I learned it in high school and university as European and I can speak decently. China isn't that good of a place for foreigner due to difficulty of getting permanent residency/citizenship. Hong Kong is the exception but the economy is not too hot there now.
I moved to Singapore although it had nothing to do with my language skills.
China doesn't need those other people because Chinese people are naturally smarter than them, generally. If that idea makes you uncomfortable, just look at the data and you'll agree.
It may look that way on the surface, but they are absolutely no better than other ethnicities. The main difference is the culture of pragmatism and the constant strive to better their lives. Education is seen as a path to better opportunities, which becomes a major focus for their youth of all social standing.
China doesn't want as a prime goal to become world leader. They just want to expand their infrastructure, science, production, everything for their own prosperity. If there is no other competitor left, then world leadership will be a by product. They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal (see military presence, coups and secret diplomatic deals in foreign countries that the US was doing after WWII in order to remain at the top by all means). They don't want (until now) to spread their culture worldwide (see language, movies, video games etc) due to the language difficulty. They do want to expand their productive capacity by financing projects in foreign countries, but in a business-as-usual way not in a I-am-the-boss way.
I think we can all look forward to China leading the world in 100 years, and Chinese being the dominant language. They're making all the right moves, while western and other democratic nations are just increasing their xenophobia and electing far-right-wing leaders, and doubling down on stupid policies while refusing to invest sufficiently in future technologies.
Of course, the US epitomizes the stupidity, but we don't see the EU for instance picking up the slack much. If they were smart, they'd be doing everything they can to take advantage of a brain drain from the US to their own countries, but they aren't (but China is).
German universities are now telling any US researcher who looses their funding that they will be funded at a Germany university and get help with their visa application.
> German universities are now telling any US researcher who looses their funding that they will be funded at a Germany university
Is this true? Is there a link to the policy? Anything is possible, but this sounds fishy. German research funding isn't known for either generosity or particularly wide reach.
This, as written, is just an idea. Lots of forward looking statements on how the EU must do this and that and no explicit promise to offer funding to all affected US scientists. Not even many details on the funding. Is it the same funding? Equivalent funding? Some funding (how much? what are the conditions? etc.).
Not claiming that this will not entice anyone over, but it is far, far different from the original claim. Sorry.
Chinas political stance more closely resembles right-wing policies than left leaning ones.
All the xenophobic notions you are talking about china has in spades.
I am not saying China is not doing things right here will lead to your described outcome, what I am saying you conflation with western politics is completely out of this world, and is a excellent example of why the outcome you describe may be a reality for China.
Why do you think right-wing policies are intrinsically tied to anti-science sentiment?
Yes, politically China does look very right-wing with some of their policies (like those trying to push women to have babies), despite the "communism" moniker. However, unlike the US, they are very pro-science and they put their money where their mouth is.
Depends on if the Chinese can get over foreigners messing up the tones all the time.
English has the advantage that it already had a lot of different ways of pronouncing it before becoming the world language, so the expectations for how perfect people's pronunciation should be was lower.
That’s just not true though. Sure English doesn’t have tones, but there are other tricky parts of the language. Additionally, Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up.
The real reason people learn English isn’t because it’s easy. It’s because they need to. As someone who is married to an immigrant, it’s not easy for them. They’ve just worked really hard over decades.
Americans will do fine learning Chinese if it ever becomes an economic necessity.
It's not easy to become highly proficient in english but it's quite easy to speak just barely well enough to communicate effectively in a professional context. Importantly, the written form follows naturally from the spoken. You won't get all the edge cases right (that's incredibly difficult even for native speakers) but getting in the ballpark can be done purely phonetically with a fairly small set of rules. Combine with modern spellcheck and I expect it's pretty difficult to beat for ease of practical use.
I think at least a few of the latin based languages are in the same ballpark but for inane historical reasons it's english that won out.
Compare with chinese where even if you sweep tones under the rug you've got a bunch of idioms (difficult) followed by one of the most difficult writing systems in existence. Don't get me wrong, I think the writing system is quite elegant and has a truly impressive history, but neither of those things has anything to do with ease of mastery.
A tangential thought is that if you intentionally set out to come up with a rule following yet maximally difficult language I think a reasonable approach would be to fuse the equivalent of latin grammar with chinese tones and then fuse a chinese style writing system with arabic style contextually sensitive ligatures.
There’s also the fact that a huge portion of foreign immigrants to the US don’t and won’t learn English, but can still operate just fine (or even have the system cater to them - press 1 for Spanish).
Look at the uproar over requiring commercial drivers to be able to read road signs in English.
Your comment makes no sense. I think it’s pretty safe to say that China has higher technological momentum than the U.S., and the U.S. has higher technological momentum than the EU. But that’s also the same ordering for xenophobia and far-right leadership: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/02/1033687586/china-ban-effemina.... China clearly is the most xenophobic and right wing, followed by the U.S., followed by the EU.
It is kind of crazy that a lot of those moves that are so massively successful is a social media and other actions to specifically destabilize the US. And it was only possible to do BECAUSE we're so open. In China you can't get past the firewall and you can't migrate there without being on watch lists and very easily removed in a way that would make ICE look like an Ice Cream parlor.
The right moves are state control, long horizon policies and regulations, all things the US willingly throw out in the name of freedom. For all its restrictions on human rights and personal freedom, the Chinese people and government have a mutual understanding. As long as the government better the lives of the people, they will be given free reign to do as they wish. This gives the government a long leash to enact far sighted policies to improve themselves. On the other hand, US politics is based on mistrust and the default assumption that anyone with power will abuse it, culminating in the "small government" rhetoric. Idealistic at best, but entirely crippling in the face of powerful organisations and corporations.
I sort of agree with this but also keep in mind that (at least until tiktok) the social media companies doing the destabilization were all entirely home grown. And they actively pursued harmful practices. So rather than blaming outside actors I think we need to confront the fact that what we actually have is an underlying gross political failure directly leading to a lack of effective regulation.
Musk expects ~80% Of Tesla's value will be Optimus robots [1]. It can't be any other way given that he helped elect a President that's against electric cars, against regulation for limiting climate change, against collaborating with our European allies.
I expect that to go about as well as Facebook changing their name to Meta and putting all their eggs in the Metaverse/VR basket...
But at least Meta's legacy businesses (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) were still valuable enough to fall back on - whereas Tesla's seems to be tanking. Only their utility-scale fixed battery business seems to have much potential if they can't turn around their dwindling car business.
Tesla's Robotaxis are bringing a bad name to the entire field of autonomous driving. The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo. When they hear about these Robotaxi crashes, they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone, dangerous and irresponsible.
Once Elon put himself at the epicenter of American political life, Tesla stopped being treated as a brand, and more a placeholder for Elon himself.
Waymo has excellent branding and first to market advantage in defining how self-driving is perceived by users. But, the alternative being Elon's Tesla further widens the perception gap.
I think the Tesla brand and the Elon brand have always been attached at the hip. This was fine when the Elon brand was "eccentric founder who likes memes, wants to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and plans to launch a Mars colony." It only became a marketing problem when he went down the right wing rabbit hole and started sieg heiling on stage.
He has proven to be untrustworthy much longer than his trip down the right wing rabbit hole. For me, it started when he through out the accusation of pedophilia against the cave diver trying to rescue students. And since then it's become clear that he will say whatever he wants without regard for reality in any meaninful way. Whether it was promising FSD over a decade ago, which he still hasn't delivered, lying about video game proficiency, or even his non-sensical statements about twitter technology after he acquired the company, it's clear that he's entered the realm where consequences don't really matter to him and he will say or do whatever he wants. There is no trust to be found there.
I’m not so sure. I think Tesla is so tied up in Musk’s personality that Tesla and Waymo aren’t in the same field, likewise with Optimus. Tesla isn’t self-driving, it is Tesla. Especially now that many mainstream vehicles ship with various levels of self-driving, a lot of people have a lot of exposure to it. Tesla has the best brand recognition but they no longer define the product. Tesla is Tesla, Waymo is self-driving.
Most people are able to be more nuanced than your typical hn zealot. They strongly dislike Musk, but are begrudgingly able to give credit where credit is due wrt Tesla, SpaceX, etc.
I really don't think that's true. Think Uber vs. Lyft. I know I distinguish between the two even if the experience is usually about the same and people I know where this has come up in conversation generally see Lyft as "off-brand" and a little more skeevy. They only take Lyfts when it's cheaper or quicker than Uber.
I'm probably not the average consumer in this situation but I was in Austin recently and took both Waymo and Robotaxi. I significantly preferred the Waymo experience. It felt far more integrated and... complete? It also felt very safe (it avoided getting into an accident in a circumstance where I certainly would have crashed).
I hope Tesla gets their act together so that the autonomous taxi market can engage in real price discovery instead of "same price as an Uber but you don't have to tip." Surely it's lower than that especially as more and more of these vehicles get onto the road.
Unrelated to driving ability but related to the brand discussion: that graffiti font Tesla uses for Cybertruck and Robotaxi is SO ugly and cringey. That alone gives me a slight aversion.
I worked in some fully autonomous car projects back in ~2010. I would say every single company and the industry at large felt HUGE pressure to not have any incidents, as a single bad incident from one company can wreck the entire initiative.
Right, but humans are never marketed as infallible, nor do you pay big bucks for them. You just are one already, and you know the limitations of humans.
Yep, feels a lot like that submarine that got crushed trying to get to the Titanic a year or two ago. It made the entire marine industry look worse, and other companies making submarines were concerned it would hurt their business.
The difference is the OceanGate Titan failure only harmed those who didn't do their due diligence and the grossly negligent owner. The risk was contained to those who explicitly opted in. In this case, Tesla Robotaxis harm others to keep Tesla's valuation and share price propped up. The performance art is the investor relations.
Inb4: not remotely in the marine field, so a genuine question. Would it really make an impact?
Robotaxis market is much broader than the submersibles one, so the effect of consumers' irrationality would be much bigger there. I'd expect an average customer of the submarines market to do quite a bit more research on what they're getting into.
Having the whole world meming on rich dudes in submarines could plausibly make the whole industry seem less cool to people with the money to buy even a good submarine. Imagine being a rich dude with a new submarine and everybody you talk to about it snickers about you getting crushed like Stockton. Maybe you'd just buy a bigger yacht and skip the submarine, which you were probably only buying for the cool factor in the first place...
yes, I talk to people and they have confidence in tesla. But then I mention that waymo is level 4 and tesla is level 2, and it doesn't make any difference.
I don't know what a clear/direct way of explaining the difference would be.
This is actually a rational explanation for this. Perhaps Elon wants to sink the whole industry until he can actually build a self driving car like Waymo's.
He wants to break trust in the whole industry by giving Tesla a massive black eye, undoubtedly hurting their stock and sales significantly, in order to, later, create actual self driving cars into the market that he's already poisoned?
> are bringing a bad name to the entire field of autonomous driving.
A small number of humans bring a bad name to the entire field of regular driving.
> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.
What's actually "distinct?" The secret sauce of their code? It always amazed me that corporate giants were willing to compete over cab rides. It sort of makes me feel, tongue in cheek, that they have fully run out of ideas.
> they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone
The difference in failure modes between regular driving and autonomous driving is stark. Many consumers feel the overall compromise is unviable even if the error rates between providers are different.
Watching a Waymo drive into oncoming traffic, pull over, and hear a tech support voice talk to you over the nav system is quite the experience. You can have zero crashes, but if your users end up in this scenario, they're not going to appreciate the difference.
They're not investors. They're just people who have somewhere to go. They don't _care_ about "the field". Nor should they.
> dangerous and irresponsible.
These are, in fact, pilot programs. Why this lede always gets buried is beyond me. Instead of accepting the data and incorporating it into the world view here, people just want to wave their hands and dissemble over how difficult this problem _actually_ is.
Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.
> Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.
That’s the problem right there.
It’s EXTREMELY hard.
Waymo has very carefully increased its abilities, tip-toeing forward little by little until after all this time they’ve achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.
Tesla appears to continuously make big jumps they seem totally unprepared for yelling “YOLO” and then expect to be treated the same when it doesn’t work out by saying “but it’s hard.”
I have zero respect for how they’ve approached this since day 1 of autopilot and think what they’re doing is flat out dangerous.
So yeah. Some of us call them out. A lot. And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
I’ve often felt that much of the crowd touting how close the problem was to being solved was conflating a driving problem to just being a perception problem. Perception is just a sub-space of the driving problem.
Genuine question though: has Waymo gotten better at their reporting? A couple years back they seemingly inflated their safety numbers by sanitizing the classifications with subjective “a human would have crashed too so we don’t count it as an accident”. That is measuring something quite different than how safety numbers are colloquially interpreted.
It seems like there is a need for more standardized testing and reporting, but I may be out of the loop.
> achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.
Driving around in good weather and never on freeways is not much of an achievement. Having vehicles that continually interfere in active medical and police cordons isn't particularly safe, even though there haven't been terrible consequences from it, yet.
If all you're doing is observing a single number you're drastically under prepared for what happens when they expand this program beyond these paltry self imposed limits.
> Some of us call them out.
You should be working to get their certificate pulled at the government level. If this program is so dangerous then why wouldn't you do that?
> And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
It's tragic you can't apply the same logic in isolation to Waymo.
Freeway accidents, due to their nature, are a lot harder to ignore and underreport than accidentally bumping or scraping into another car at low speeds. It's like using murder rates to estimate real crime rates because murders, unlike most other crimes, are far more likely to be properly documented.
Elon definitely has this cult of personality around him where people will jump in and defend his companies (as a stand-in for him) on the internet, even in the face of some common sense observations. I don't get the sense that anything you've said is particularly reasonable outside of being lured in by Elon's personality.
This is absolutely true. There is a flip side however, where people who dislike Elon Musk will sometimes talk up his competitors, seemingly for no good reason other than them being at least nominally competitors to Musk companies. Nikola and Spinlaunch are two that come to mind; quite blatant scams that have gotten far too much attention because they aren't Musk companies.
Tesla FSD is crap. But I also think we wouldn't see quite so much praise of Waymo unless Tesla also had aspirations in this domain. Genuinely, what is so great about a robo taxi even if it works well? Do people really hate immigrants this much?
I think we’d see praise, but maybe not as much. Every time it’s clear Tesla screwed up it’s an incredibly obvious thing to do to compare them to the number one self driving car out there.
Tesla provides such an obvious anchor point for comparisons it’s really hard for Waymo not to come out on top.
What’s so great about a robotaxi even if it works well? It’s neat. As a technology person I like it exists. I don’t know past that. I’ve never used one they’re not deployed where I live.
It isn't about hatred of the human drivers for me. Waymo's service is so safe and consistent that I would trust my 10-yr-old to take a ride in it solo if it were permitted by the ToS. Most Uber/Lyft/etc. rides are just as safe, but due to the inconsistency I would never reach that level of trust.
I don't live in a covered area, but when I am in range I will gladly pay 10-20% more for a Waymo ride than an Uber/Lyft/etc.
Kind of like how people maintained that LLMs were trash well past the point where it was obvious that that wasn't true anymore, I often wonder how many people who talk confidently about Tesla FSD have actually used a recent version. Because when we tried a recent FSD and Waymo, we found FSD to be excellent in handling pretty complex scenarios, including one of the worst, a busy airport loop, and we found Waymo to behave a bit weirdly (but still good). But FSD clearly isn't the dumpster fire that people try to make it out to be. v12 was a bit sketchy, and I was too nervous to use it past the first couple of times I tried it, but v14 is great.
Thanks for the feedback! Click and scroll up/down to turn the knobs. I will fix this as it isn't an intuitive way to control knobs.
EDIT: Done! Please disregard this comment.
Works very well now, but initially I was confused by why it was getting stuck occasionally. Turns out you can't move it between 4'o clock and 8'o clock, which is reasonable, but there is no visual indication of these limits, so it is hard to understand.
Thanks for the feedback! I agree there needs to be visual indication for the knobs' min and max points. I'm thinking about how to do this without adding visual clutter.
When React launched in 2013, its defining idea was strict one-way data flow: parents pass data down via props, and updates happen in a clear, explicit place. Children can't mutate parent state directly; they signal changes through callbacks. The result is predictable, traceable state changes.
This contrasted with MVVM frameworks like early AngularJS, Knockout, and WPF, which relied on two-way data binding. That automatic syncing felt convenient for small apps, but at scale it often led to hidden coupling and hard-to-trace update chains.
Over time, many developers came to view pervasive two-way binding as a design mistake in complex systems. React's unidirectional model gained traction because it favored clarity and control over "magic."
Thanks GPT but I know all of that. I was expecting some eye opening new evidence because person I was asking seemed really confident and using strong words.
But that’s just generic „blablabla”. MVVM is not a mistake and is still plenty useful.
Whether application state is short-lived (e.g., request/response CRUD) or long-lived (e.g., an in-memory interactive UI) is orthogonal to MVC. MVC is a structural separation of responsibilities between model, view, and control logic. The duration of state affects implementation strategy, not the applicability of the pattern itself.
MVC is a structural separation of responsibilities between model, view, and control logic.
Yes, but the “MVC” pattern used by various back-end web frameworks that borrowed the term a while back actually has very little to do with the original MVC of the Reenskaug era.
The original concept of MVC is based on a triangle of three modules with quite specific responsibilities and relationships. The closest equivalent on the back-end of a web application might be having a data model persisted via a database or similar, and then a web server providing a set of HTTP GET endpoints allowing queries of that model state (perhaps including some sort of WebSocket or Server-Sent Event provision to observe any changes) and a separate set of HTTP POST/PUT/PATCH endpoints allowing updates of the model state. Then on the back end, your “view” code handles any query requests, including monitoring the model state for changes and notifying any observers via WS/SSE, while your “controller” code handles any mutation requests. And then on the front end, you render your page content based on the back-end view endpoints, subscribe for notifications of changes that cause you to update your rendering, and any user interactions get sent to the back-end controller endpoints.
In practice, I don’t recall ever seeing an “MVC” back-end framework used anything like that. Instead, they typically have a “controller” in front of the “model” and have it manage all incoming HTTP requests, with “view” referring to the front-end code. This is fundamentally a tiered, linear relationship and it allocates responsibilities quite differently to the original, triangular MVC.
Omg yes finally someone acknowledges this. I am always pointing out how react and jsx are a port of XHP. This is why react was class based at first (because php is a class based OO language).
Hack was created later though. XHP was a php 5 extension created around 2008
If you move the data (the M and the C) entirely out of react, and only pass it in via props, there would be only one place — the root react node — where the props could get into react. Is this what you have in mind? Or are you envisioning multiple root nodes?
Well, i've always been a fan of the island architecture that effectively mounts root nodes as little islands of isolated state, yes.
Mainly this avoids the hell that global state SPA patterns produce: redux, reducer patterns in general, and 8 thousand context providers.
I do think there's use cases that warrant global in-memory state, but it's such a pain in the ass to maintain and evolve, i'd always plan against it. Every html node in your app does not need to know about literally everything going on and react instantly to it. it just doesn't.
Just make another page!
Also: so the islands pattern can be as fancy or rudimentary as desired. they can bootstrap themselves via async endpoints, they can be shipped as web components even, or they can be static, pre-hydrated in some manner.
Do you need react at this point? Isn’t it just html/css/components?
I remember the birth of React was because Facebook had a problem - you would add a comment and your notification bar would sometimes not get updated.
They had so many bugs with normal html / css that they wanted to solve this on the application layer - to make inconsistent UI elements unrepresentable.
So they came up with react with global state - because in their use case changing one thing does affect a bunch of other unrelated things, and they all need to sync together.
I mean honestly that’s what I use React _for_ - especially with contexts it’s very easy to express all of this complex interconnected state of a webapp in a consistent way.
And of course there are other ways to solve it - for example with elixir/phoenix you just push all that complexity to the backend and trust in websockets and the BEAM.
I just feel that if you really don’t need global state, then react kinda isn’t needed as well…
> I just feel that if you really don’t need global state, then react kinda isn’t needed as well…
I don't know, in my mind "re-render (efficiently) when state changes" is the core point of react and similar frameworks. That requirement still stands even if I have a smaller, local state.
The islands pattern is underrated for maintainability. I've found the biggest win isn't even the state isolation — it's that each island can have a completely independent upgrade path. You can rewrite one island from React to vanilla JS (or whatever comes next) without touching anything else.
The global state SPA pattern fails for a more fundamental reason than just being painful to maintain: it creates an implicit contract between every component in the app. Change one reducer and you're debugging side effects three layers away. Islands make the contract explicit — each one owns its data, full stop.
The one gotcha I've hit is cross-island communication. PostMessage works but gets messy. Custom events on a shared DOM ancestor end up being the cleanest pattern for the rare cases where islands genuinely need to coordinate.
That is the classic Flow model or Redux model (if you prefer the common implementation name over the Facebook paper name). Build a central store. Pass the single store down to all necessary components via prop-drilling, then later Contexts (and HOCs) to skip layers as a nice-to-have.
Redux is a lot less fashionable today, but hasn't entirely disappeared as an M and C option.
I think the parent wants to separate the V from the M/C. If you smuggle signals inside of components to avoid prop drilling, you would be coupling the M/C and the V. I suppose that's not what the parent has in mind.
M stands for Model layer. This layer handles business logic and knows nothing about UI. It does not have any html or CSS.
V stands for View. This layer handles HTML and CSS. You can use React here.
C stands for Controller. Controllers know about Views and Models and which model objects to instantiate for which view. It makes REST API calls and does caching, and handles errors. Controllers know about the application state and decide what page to display next.
In the original MVC architecture, the fundamental idea was that the model was responsible for storing the application state, a view was responsible for rendering output to the user, and a controller was responsible for responding to user interactions.
The model can be completely unaware of any specific views or controllers. It only needs to provide an interface allowing views to observe the current state and controllers to update that state.
In practice, views and controllers usually aren’t independent and instead come as a pair. This is because most modern UIs use some kind of event-driven architecture where user interactions are indicated by events from some component rendered by the view that the controller then handles.
My go-to example to understand why this architecture is helpful is a UI that features a table showing some names and a count for each, alongside a chart visualising that data graphically. Here you would have a model that stores the names and counts as pure data, and you would have two view+controller pairs, one managing the table and one the chart. Each view observes the model and renders an updated table or chart when the model state changes. Each controller responds to user interactions that perhaps edit a name or change its count — whether by typing a new value as text in an editable table cell or by dragging somewhere relevant in the chart — by telling the model to update its state to match (which in turn causes all views observing the model to refresh, without any further action from whichever controller happened to be handling that user interaction).
In practical terms for a React application, we might implement this with a simple object/Map somewhere that holds the names and values (our “model”) and two top-level React components that each get rendered once into some appropriate container within the page. Each component would have props to pass in (a) the current state and (b) any functions to be called when the user makes a change. Then you just write some simple glue logic in plain old JavaScript/TypeScript that handles keeping track of observers of the model, registering an observer for each top-level component that causes it rerender when the state changes, and providing a handler for each type of change the user is allowed to make that updates the state and then notifies the observers.
There are lots of variations on this theme, for example once you start needing more complicated business logic to interpret a user interaction and decide what state change is required or you need to synchronise your front-end model state with some remote service. However, you can scale a very long way with the basic principle that you hold your application state as pure data in a model that doesn’t know anything about any specific user interface or remote service and instead provides an interface for any other modules in the system to observe and/or update that state.
> humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well
In May 2016, Tesla Model S driver Joshua Brown died in Williston, Florida, when his vehicle on Autopilot collided with a white tractor-trailer that turned across the highway. The Autopilot system and driver failed to detect the truck's white side against a brightly lit sky, causing the car to pass underneath the trailer.
Our eyes are supported by our brain's AGI which can evaluate the input from our eyes in context. All Tesla had is a camera, and it didn't perform as well as eyes + AGI would have.
When you don't have AGI, additional sensors can provide backup. LiDAR would have saved Joshua Brown's life.
China Is Outspending the U.S. to Achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of Clean Energy: Fusion See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/climate/china-us-fusion-e...
America's lead in biotechnology is slipping, while China has made synthetic biology a national priority. In the iGEM international competition, only one American school finished in top 10, seven were from China. See: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teens-may-have-come-up-with-new... Or watch video: https://youtu.be/VEj5I4CBbgU
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