I really thought this would be about our company CFO who appears once every winter season, gets all lit up at the holiday party and then disappears until next year.
SAE automation levels are the industry standard, not FSD (which is a brand name), and FSD is clearly Level 2 (driver is always responsible and must be engaged, at least in consumer teslas, I don't know about robotaxis). The question is if "AGI" is as well defined as "Level 5" as an independent standard.
The point trying to be made is FSD is deceptive marketing, and it's unbelievable how long that "marketing term" has been allowed to exist given its inaccuracy in representing what is actually being delivered to the customer.
What's deceptive? What in the term "Full Self Driving" makes you think that your car will drive itself fully? It's fully capable of facilitating your driving of yourself, clearly.
Well the faster you get off the grid, the cheaper it'll be for the rest of us. All PGE's problems are caused by running powerlines for you through fire-prone kindling wilderness.
We could have had atomic energy generated right here in the Bay Area (Sonoma). You can actually go visit the “hole in Bodega Head” where PG&E started digging the reactor pit before being made to stop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant
PG&E's problems are caused by malcompliance and the rules being written by a public traded company instead of by an accountable government. There are plenty of people living in the woods in other states that aren't causing massive wildfires that cover the US in smoke every season.
What strikes me is the fact that nuclear power has received an incredible amount of backslash after the Chernobyl incident (a few thousands deaths) and the Fukushima incident (one disputed death), but hydroelectric power is considered a "good" source of energy despite a few incredibly deadly incidents:
- Banquiao (China, 1975): between 26.000 and 240.000 [1]
- Derna (Lybia, 2023): between 6000 and 20.000 deaths [2]
I think this line of thinking comes from a westernized world where all water is controlled.
Many dams have been built around the world not for power generation, but to control flooding. The power generation is a secondary concern.
In aggregate dams have saved far more lives, by managing flood waters.
The great thing in 2025 is that we don’t need either the dam or nuclear risk for our electricity needs.
Just build renewables and storage and the risk for the general public is as close to zero as we can get. The only people involved in accidents are those that chose to work in the industry installing and maintaining the gear.
We should of course continue to focus on work place safety but for the general public the risk of a life changing evacuation, radiation exposure or flood from dam failure does not exist.
As you say, dams are a net positive, and while failures do happen, these days we tend to be wiser about where we put PHES in particular.
I guess I’m surprised it isn’t more of an option for California - the U.K. uses Snowdonia as a giant battery, and afaik there’s been one failure of a dam that wiped half of trefriw off the map a century ago - which wasn’t hard as it’s a speck of a place. Since then the lakes have pretty reliably and safely provided somewhere to stick excess energy, and now are largely pumped by the offshore wind arrays nearby.
California has big mountains, but I’m not sure if the geology or terrain is right for PHES.
In Quebec, most of the dams are in the middle of nowhere, but your point still stands.
There are costs/risks for most forms of power. If you're in an environment where wind and solar can make economical sense, go for it. For reliable base loads, I still think order of preference should be:
- geothermal (very rare and hard to do at scale, though)
- hydro
- nuclear
- natural gas
- oil/diesel (at very small, localized levels eg remote villages)
If a nuclear reactor was bombed during the war, would the resulting deaths be counted as a nuclear disaster and used as argument against it, or just another war crime? Depends who you ask I'd say.
Does that really matter? The cleanup costs are still socialized.
It is time we move on from the fossil tradition of socialized losses on private profits [1] and instead let the nuclear industry bear their true insurance cost.
Then I suppose nuclear power is also a scam given thant 45% of the capacity in Sweden was out last week and we all know how it went for the French during the energy crisis. [1]
The electricity grid is fundamentally running on marginal cost. How will you force everyone with rooftop solar and home batteries to buy horrendously expensive new built nuclear power when they can supply their own electricity?
I am just correcting misinformation and disinformation.
And no, you suppose incorrectly.
Intermittent renewables are a scam, because they get to privately reap benefits and socialize their costs, particularly their intermittency.
They can be useful, as long as they have to bear the costs of being intermittent. That means at minimum no feed-in priority and no fixed and/or guaranteed feed-in prices. Ideally, they would be required either (a) provide guaranteed power or (b) only be allowed to feed in after all the reliable plants.
This tells me you don't know how a grid works. You do know that the demand is variable right?
With the same reasoning nuclear power is a scam because it can't adapt to the grid demand and forces gas peakers to sit in standby. Socializing the losses, to use your words.
In California the grid shifts between ~15 GW at the minimum and 52 GW at the peak.
When studies have looked at the difference in dispatchable power required comparing majorly renewables or nuclear powered grids when meeting true a grid demand the difference is quite small.
It does favor nuclear power but the differences are not significant in the grand scheme of things when factoring in the absolutely stupid cost for new built western nuclear power.
These studies of course did not take into account 45% of the nuclear fleet being offline, they modeled it based on their average ~85% capacity factor.
Or are you suggesting that we should have peaking nuclear plants to match grid demand? So it isn't a scam for the ratepayers?
The one who doesn't know how the grid works is you.
Some demand is variable. But a lot (usually most) is not. So having reliable base generation is highly valuable and not having that base-load generation ramp up and down is a feature, not a bug.
Intermittent generation is not variable, it is intermittent. Whereas to meet variable demand it would need to be dispatchable. Look it up.
Intermittent renewables are not dispatchable. Not even a bit.
The US nuclear fleet's CF has hovered over 90%. France's is only in the high 70s or low 80s because they do extensive load following (the stuff you say nuclear can't do...they've only been doing it for four decades or so).
France took its fleet offline in the summer of 2022, because that is where demand is lowest and generation from intermittent renewables is highest, for example Germany typically has to give away lots of electricity (or even pay consumers to get rid of it) because of their guaranteed feed-in.
In the end, France had to import only 4% of its electricity even in 2022, and most of that was in the summer, again where electricity prices are lowest because of high generation and low demand. And during all the other years it tends to be largest exporter of electricity in Europe if not the world.
So it is apparently fine to balance a nuclear grid with fossil fuels????
Just pretend that the fossil fuels doesn’t exist by exporting the nuclear electricity and have someone else build them and balance both grids!
What do you think would happen if you tried sticking two French grids with an over supply of nuclear powered electricity when no one wants the electricity next to each other?
You mean the brownouts storage and renewables have now completely fixed?
Yeah, way faster than handouts to new built nuclear power and waiting until the 2040s for the solution!
> Sweden just approved new nuclear construction, after rescinding a nuclear exit.
Yes. The current government has spent soon four years pushing paperwork around. They want nuclear power without having to accept the costs.
They seem to not want to have the costs associated with new built nuclear power subsidies on their political records for their entire careers.
I bet they will push through a monstrous handout package the final weeks before the election next September and then spend years crying about it being cut.
I am a bit biased, as an engineer who works exclusively in hydro powerplants, but i think they're awesome too. With that said, it's becoming more apparent that in addition to the biosphere issues they cause, they also cause a pretty significant amount of methane to be released. https://www.hydropower.org/blog/new-study-sheds-light-on-res...
It would put me out of a job but I'd still rather see a surge in nuke generation and solar with storage, at least until we get fusion figured out.
Hydro does rule. Top 8 power stations are hydro right now. And the top power station has been a hydro for over a hundred years now. Very cool! Three Gorges has capacity of 22.5 GW.
I really hope nothing bad happens at the three gorges dam. There's nearly half a billion people that would have to be evacuated, and tens of millions who likely wouldn't be able to evacuate in time due to proximity.
I'd rather live near a modern nuclear plant myself.
Can we even determine if what they found is the key, or just the plaintext? The article mentions they recognized bits of plaintext (Berlin clock) in the archives.
This is good, in means we have checks and balances. I don't have the details of this particular case, but does it mean every action ICE takes is illegal?
If someone breaks the law ICE or otherwise, there should be enforcement and justice.
I'm willing to see a difference in software standards between (say) Waymo and Jeep. One is a software company, the other is a sheet-metal company. If you just tar the whole industry you lose an ability to learn from those doing it better.
Tesla is very controversial, and they have clearly made some serious software mistakes, but they are so much better at software than any other maker I've encountered, except maybe mazda who eschew touch screens for physical buttons, but that is a ui success, not a software culture success. Tesla wrapped an electric car around a software company. They treated fit and finish and panel mating etc. as the throwaway/buy it cheap aspect (ok that is pretty harsh. It isn't that bad) and focused on the software. Where legacy makers did the opposite.
you are being generous. Tesla's software "mistakes" have killed several people. They needlessly try to reinvent the wheel in the name of innovation and end up ignoring decades of auto industry knowledge.
I do not trust them and never will. This is the #1 reason why every car is buy is just a car. I do not trust techbros with devices that can kill you, especially cars.
The software mistakes that killed people were software doing things no other automaker even tries to do. Very possibly with good reason. The software that does bog standard normal things like coolant control and battery preconditioning works well and seems to be tested and deployed in a reliable way. That is still so much better than what we get out of others. I would love an electric car with no can bus or microcontrollers, so I'm right with you. If anything the point to be made is that Tesla, who has killed people with its software, is still way better than average... So yeah, we are bad at what we do.
> doing things no other automaker even tries to do
"Move fast and break things" is not really a virtue when the thing moving fast is a two-ton hunk of steel and the things breaking are people's bodies. Getting the easier stuff right but then then also killing people isn't "doing better" in my opinion; sometimes it's better to have a lot of lower magnitude failures than infrequent but catastrophic ones.
I presume you're referring to Autopilot/FSD. I don't trust it at all, don't use it on my Tesla, and will not get into a "robotaxi" using it, but it's an optional feature.
Autopilot aside, though, the regular boring car software bits are rock-solid, and I've never had an issue with using it or after an update.
I do recall a story a number of years ago where one of the automatic updates changed the UI and hid the defrost behind a menu (or something along those lines). I don't know that anyone died as a consequence, but it was criticised as being quite reckless as it is a feature that when you need it, you need it right away.
Probably because the regular boring car stuff is not even made by car companies anymore LMAO.
The steering racks are made by Bosch or maybe ZF. Brakes come from Brembo. ABS module and its software is Bosch aswell. same goes for brakebooster, EPS pumps, AC compressors, and airbag controllers. I think the only electronics Tesla develops and manufactures are EV power electronics, infotainment, ADAS&Co and the drive motors.
If you take a VW Golf, you'll find the ECU and all of the software running the car is built by Bosch too. Essentially they sell VW a kit which needs to be mounted on a vehicle platform. Tesla is likely one of the only companies for better or worse that don't follow this model.
> you are being generous. Tesla's software "mistakes" have killed several people.
Citation needed.
In the early days of autopilot/FSD most of the fatalities were people doing stupid things like watching a movie or sleeping in the back seat. That's why it now has to monitor your face with a camera to detect whether or not you are watching the road - to stop people from being idiots.
However we must acknowledge that any change in the automotive space is going to lead to problems and some percentage of those are going to cause injuries. That is the nature of cars. They do not have the certification standards of aircraft nor the training of pilots. They can't and they won't.
It is also inevitable that autonomous driving is going to make different mistakes than a person would make. On a miles-driven basis it still produces fewer accidents and injuries than human drivers.
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