A lot of people _need_ the S&P to stay where it is to keep their standard of living stable. If it drops to a rational valuation (say, 2500-3000), there will be a lot of pain.
One thing that was unclear to me from the stats cited on the website is whether the quoted 52% reduction in crashes is when FSD is in use, or overall. This matters because people are much more likely to use FSD in situations where driving is easier. So, if the reduction is just during those times, I'm not even sure that would be better than a human driver.
As an example, let's say most people use FSD on straight US Interstate driving, which is very easy. That could artificially make FSD seem safer than it really is.
My prior on this is supervised FSD ought to be safer, so the 52% number kind of surprised me, however it's computed. I would have expected more like a 90-95% reduction in accidents.
I think this might be right, but it does two interesting things:
1) it let's lemonade reward you for taking safer driving routes (or living in a safer area to drive, whatever that means)
2) it (for better or worse) encourages drivers to use it more. This will improve Tesla's training data but also might negatively impact the fsd safety record (an interesting experiment!)
Do your kids randomly run into the road? I was worried about that but then mine just don’t run into the road for some reason, they are quite careful about it seemingly by default after having “getting bumped into by a car” explained to them. I’m not sure if this is something people are just paranoid about because the consequences are so bad or if some kids really do just run out into the road randomly.
Some kids really do just run into the road seemingly randomly. Other kids run in with a clear purpose, not at all randomly, and sometimes (perhaps very rarely, but it only takes once and bad luck) forget to look both ways. Kids are not cookie cutter copies that all behave the same way in the same circumstances (even with the same training).
> Some kids really do just run into the road seemingly randomly. ... sometimes (perhaps very rarely, but it only takes once and bad luck) forget to look both ways.
Just this week I was telling my law school contract-drafting class that part of our job as lawyers and drafters is to try to to "child-proof" our contracts, because sometimes clients' staff understandably don't fully appreciate the possible consequences of 'running into the street,' no matter how good an idea it might seem at the time.
I'm more worried about the Teslas hitting my kids when they're on bicycles or Teslas swerving off the road into the yards. Regardless, it sure would be nice if technology controlling multi-ton vehicles on public roads were subject to regulations, or at least had clearly define liability.
Kids will randomly run into the road. They might run behind a ball or a dog so that it doesn’t end up on the other side or runned over or are simply too excited to remember your stern road safety talk.
The first thing I was taught when I picked up a car was: if you see a ball on the road you stop immediately. This valuable lesson has saved one kid (and my sanity) with me on the wheel.
Yes it does happen. Otherwise smart kids will do dumb stuff sometimes. Like see their friend across the road, but at that moment someone on a motorcycle is accelerating out of their driveway, kid runs across, dead
Same way you opt out of having drunk drivers drive home along your street and pass out while driving, or drivers getting a stroke or other blood clot while driving and crashing into parked cars.
If you're familiar with the technical specs, I'd be interested in hearing what size of objects the star trackers can sense and at what range. In theory the fancier star trackers can see objects around 10 cm diameter hundreds of kilometers away, without needing to worry about a pesky atmosphere [1], but I don't know how sensitive the sensors on Starlink's current generation satellites are, and this web site isn't saying.
They're mostly touting the improvement in latency over existing tracking, from delays measured in hours to ones measured in minutes. Which is very nice, of course, but the lack of other technical detail is mildly frustrating.
Note from analysis in the paper: (CST = Commercial Star Tracker, for which they model several common ones flown on satellites)
>From Fig. 1, it is clear that many typical CSTs can be used to detect debris with characteristic length less than
10 cm at distances as far as roughly 50 km. These same sensors have the potential to detect debris as small as 1 cm
in diameter as far as 5 km away. Even space-limited CubeSats using nanosatellite-class CSTs can detect 10-cm-class
debris at roughly 25 km away or 1-cm-class debris at a distance of 2.5 km. Higher-performing imagers like the MOST
telescope can further characterize orbital debris of 10 cm diameter as far as 400 km away or be used to characterize
orbital debris smaller than 1 cm at ranges not exceeding 40 km.
I was just thinking about that the other day while relaxing in my Hyperloop pod from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I was reminiscing about how I'd avoided all the traffic in LA by using the Boring Company's tunnels in my second-generation Tesla Roadster. I'd been in LA for a conference about the hugely successful Starship space launch system, which has revolutionized cost to orbit with fully reusable second stages. When I got to San Francisco, I hopped in a Tesla fully self-driving robotaxi, and when I got home, my Optimus robot served me tea after I instructed it to do so using my Neuralink probe. I then sent a video voicemail to my parents, who live in a city of 1 million people on Mars, which has recently been terraformed. I flipped on CNN and was gratified to see that, for the first time in 25 years, the US government was operating at a surplus, thanks to the $2T of annual savings delivered by DOGE.
Good-faith products that launched, were bad ideas, and failed. Musk is absolutely unique in world history for the sheer number of fake products he's used to garner investment (mostly from the government if we're being honest) and then line his own pockets. If Trump is Darth Vader, Musk is The Emperor.
Starship is iterating fast and flying in another 5 weeks. Boring company is executing slowly but steadily, the Vegas tunnel is progressing. Unsupervised robotaxis has started in Austin. Optimus started a few years ago only, it is disingenuous to expect it to be available immediately. Neuralink has 18 patients now. Mars is happening, Elon never promised it will be possible this decade.
Your comment makes it seem that Elon's companies have done nothing. I know you are being disingenuous, but I am trying my luck to respond.
> New video evidence shows that Tesla’s supposedly “unsupervised” Robotaxis in Austin are being closely followed by black Tesla trailing cars with safety monitors inside. Tesla didn’t remove the safety monitors – it just moved them to a different vehicle.
Lol. So a fully self driving car with a following car is not impressive? Elon over promised, no doubt. But don't tell me their tech is not amazing. Pure vision general purpose autonomy. It's going to be a game changer. It could be late but inevitable.
Remember when it was supervised FSD? They have come a long way.
Consider this: What tech might we have if the entire world economy weren't infested with termites like Musk who lie continuously to pull in investment that could have gone elsewhere?
Tesla's high-priced sports cars are the wrong product. The right product is a low-cost car like the BYD cars that aren't legally allowed to be sold in the US. The US has probably already lost the EV war, and Tesla is principally responsible. Everything Musk touches turns to garbage.
They’re both things the legacy automakers have been trying to do for 10 or 15 years, but they just couldn’t pull it off without getting all the suppliers on board.
Both result in much lighter wiring, saving money.
The steer by wire is also very cool, but I don’t know enough to say if it’s justified on regular cars or a cost saving.
Also, no one even tries to argue that he's wrong. Does one "race" trying to "help" another ever really "pay off"? Debating that question would actually be pretty interesting.
I'm sure Powell is a very nice man, and I have no issue with the idea that the other leaders aren't such great people.
But, I actually think in an ironic twist Powell's tenure may have had the most damaging effects on the US of any of these people. In my worldview, the Fed's interest rate policy was one of the main catalysts in the US shift toward extreme polarization and authoritarianism (on both sides, honestly).
I realize Powell wasn't alone in promoting this, and a lot of blame goes to Yellen, Bernanke and Greenspan. But, as a member of the Fed board since 2012, I think he's presided over the last best chance to change course and avoid a debt bomb.
Back in 2012-2016, I believe the Fed could have allowed a recession and solved a lot of the problems we now face. Same goes for 2020 (which I view as a fake recession). Fast forward to 2026, I'm not actually sure there's a way out.
HNers like to think they are experts on monetary policy. It reminds me of the average (astro)physics HN thread. A bunch of laymen talking with authority.
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