> make laws that prevent a duopoly, penalize anti-competitive behavior and push open-source standards for software/hardware.
None of this is legally easy to implement or enforce, and any attempt of doing it is virtually guaranteed to create an unbelievable amount of unintended consequences as people figure out ways to game this new set of rules.
We need something similar to FIPS for interoperable software and standards. Organizations will fall in line when money is at stake.
Say for example your local/state/federal agency publishes (or accepts) documents exclusively in ods/odf instead of proprietary formats, that will automatically drive adoption of software and prevent lock-in.
Agressive interoperability at the protpcol and exchange format - its why email mostly works even forcing Google to back off when they tried to change email to be rendered by their cdn (i forget the name of the offering - but was similar to what news pages were being pushed for speedup).
Bad actors will always abound - like Microsoft spiking the documnt standards by pushing through ooxml when odt/odf was gaining traction.
Or basically just coercing the decision makers like in Berlin(?) where they moved their offices into hte city to get them to drop Linux/Openoffice.
As i rmeber it ooxml backers made it intentionally harder to parse the specs than was necessary ,if it was fully open i believe the open source implementation would have been on par. As it is its subtly broken in annoying ways , and with Word being the default - its version wins out and gets to be the only acceptable submission format.
If you notice most doc submissions when its not a pdf being requested will specifify MS's version.And by sheer momentum the alts get less traction.
I think their main issue is that they seem to have no one who is seriously looking at the Matrix ecosystem from a product perspective. You have all of these pieces of technology in various states of maturity that more or less fit together if you know what you are doing. But there is also a lot of friction and a lot of things breaking on a regular basis etc.
What the project needs is someone who looks at it from a customer perspective and who can direct resources to make sure the entire thing is packaged as one consistent thing that does what the customer needs.
If you install WA or Signal, or if you sign up to Slack, you don't have to wonder which home server you should install and which of a dozen or so available clients you should use and what features are not yet production ready. Instead, it just works.
The lack of attention that you identify is a real issue with the project but the root issue is ultimately a lack of sufficient funding that would enable all these parts to receive the attention that they require.
Funding fixes all these problems and it has to come from big governmental and institutional players in Europe who are motivated by ending their reliance on American companies like Microsoft.
I think a product focus does exist: Element seems to be a genuine attempt to fully assemble Matrix as one full project. The problem is that it feels like the Element devs are stuck wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
There's some design choices in Matrix that don't really "fit" with what modern messaging infrastructure looks like. (Which to summarize it pretty quickly is a Slack/Discord-esque model, where non-sysadmin users get to fully administer their own spaces, with an expectation for multiple different channels, control over user permissions and user access and so on and so forth.)
Some of these come from the fact that Matrix is pretty blatantly just designed as "what if IRC, but slightly more modern". It's main unit for non-sysadmin moderation is a single channel, with the expectation that one instance of Matrix will never have two channels named #general (as an example). Similarly, it's entirely possible to kick users from a channel... but then have that exact same channel continue independently on a different instance, but under a different label. This makes sense if you look at it as "supercharged IRC", but becomes a complete and utter mess when you factor in things like the encryption between two servers suddenly disagreeing with each other (leading to a bunch of old messages becoming unreadable), content moderation (barely an issue on IRC because message retention is expected to be almost entirely clientside) and so on and so forth.
Element/synapse's people do try to provide for these cases, but you're effectively stuck trying to prod at admin API endpoints, bots to synchronize moderation decisions and they have like 3 different "channel grouping" that's supposed to be their version of the Slack workspace/Discord guild model.
Honestly though, I'm pretty sure that once XMPP gets a proper multi-user multi-channel XEP going (there's one in draft right now which specifically tries to provide workspace-esque support; it's possible to do this already but it's a sysadmin XEP, the proposal aims to give this capability to regular users), it'll just end up blowing Matrix out of the water entirely for most usecases. Unlike Matrix, it's a far more mature protocol that's a lot easier to work with and actually has many different implementations that you can choose from.
Room addresses/aliases (like #matrix:matrix.org) must point to a single room (in fact, they point to a room version, so when rooms are upgraded, addresses must be pointed towards the new room). But for communities, a better way to organize the rooms would be spaces. Spaces can be joined. Spaces can contain rooms and other spaces. Like discord "servers" (guilds), but more flexible.
They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that they have a future-proof product pipeline and that those products are actually being delivered on a reasonable schedule. Now they are increasingly turning into an EV also-ran while their moonshots are unlikely to work out any time soon.
Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it.
The problem is that EVs are basically a solved problem. There isn't any technological advantage to be gained, since the technology in an EV is very basic (+) compared to ICE vehicles. So then it comes down to manufacturing, and there China is king.
(+) Except for the battery, but that's a very long term battle with very tiny steps.
My brother bought a Tesla recently. They dicked him around with delivery, and he had to pay a ton to get charging infrastructure installed at his house, but it's fast so he's happy. On a recent visit, he finally showed me the car, and it was hilarious how janky the final product is. Everything seems cobbled together-- a good example is that there's apparently two separate voice assistants (plus his phone) and none of them can talk to each other, so commands like "turn on the defrost" are responded to with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".
Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.
EVs might be a solved problem, but Tesla is still fighting their own additional layer of complexity that they added on top. The added subscription nonsense makes him look like a fool for having bought in, something I am definitely even more reluctant to do now that I've seen it play out.
> Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.
I caught a ride with a friend in a Tesla, and when we stopped I opened the door - like a human being operating a century-old piece of technology - and he looked at me like I was crazy, and told me not to do that.
Yeah, it apparently damages the weatherstripping (and maybe the window and other things) and is meant to be used only in an emergency /facepalm. Which is probably why your friend was alarmed.
I didn't care, I still tested it out the day I picked up mine to see where the manual handle is and make sure it works, because just a couple days earlier two people had gotten trapped in a burning Tesla, were unable to figure out the mechanism, and died.
I have a 2022 Model 3, and the hilariously tragic part is that the voice assistant was great and basically never gave me any problems until they shoved Grok into it, whereupon it broke completely. I never use it anymore, they effectively removed a feature from my car.
Whoa, did Tesla pull an Apple? Siri used to work okay on the iPhone, but once it got LLMed it frequently sits there indefinitely while failing to make any progress on even the simplest commands.
Counterpoint: I like my Tesla, and I find the AI assistant diverting and useful. I have very little doubt the functionality of the limited on-board voice assistant will be merged into Grok (it's literally on the coming features).
Whether you like this or not, who cares? The pace of improvement in Tesla software compared to any other manufacturer is astonishing, and astonishingly good.
I have no love for the CEO, but my Model Y is a very interesting (and intuitive) car.
I have it set to the "Gork" personality, which is occasionally correct and useful, but is very often genuinely funny. It's like a Spicoli-with-a-PhD that answers your query when it "feels like it".
I have a RULES file for my coding agent which I invoke when I get bored. It basically simulates a real office environment saying things like "while the queue is full our worker is sitting in the corner with its thumb up its ass looking at the wrong queue".
Which is hilarious, but when I'm driving on the freeway and trying to add milk to my grocery list or add a navigation stop at the hardware store (no idea if these are things you can actually do, I'm just using what feel like plausible use cases for a car voice assistant) I wouldn't want the additipnal distraction of the voice assistant being funny.
I have an older X, and I'm kind of happy that the AP and Infotainment hardware in it is largely deprecated, and they are unlikely to be able to shove Grok crap into it. It will stay largely the same for the life of the car.
Do a quick press of the voice button and the old voice control activate; if you hold it down or press too long, it uses the grok AI which can't do anything (and I never use).
This is part of the reason why I believe cars should delegate as much software functionality to your phone as possible. Phones have good voice assistants and they will get better, same with GPS and music. Just let the phone do it. Plus, when the software is out of support you don't have to buy a new car.
These are niche enough use cases I don't think they're worth bothering about.
I wouldn't dump millions into a custom GPS solution for that 1 time out of 1 million someone drives a car without a smartphone. Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported.
If someone else drives your car they can connect their phone. Which is an improvement, because now they have THEIR music and navigation. See, it comes with personalization out of the box and automatically!
> Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported.
I use my car's GPS nav over my phone's because I don't notice being appreciably worse for navigating, but I do notice the ads on Google Maps being appreciably worse than the lack of ads on my car's nav system.
Also doing nav on my phone thrashes my phone battery.
No it should definitely be possible, I just don't think it's worth while creating a subpar and poorly-supported GPS system when phones exist. Especially when said system is forced over phones, which often happens because companies want to promote their own shit. As if their shit don't stink, when really it's the smelliest.
We don't need 1 million different applications that we have to try to integrate together. Just let me connect my messages, my GPS, my music player, even my calendar. Personally, I could give a rat's ass how fancy Tesla's interface is or GM's. It will always, always be second best to what's available on modern smartphones.
EVs are a solved problem, but as amelius notes the real tech is the battery. Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win. Now maybe Telsa has looked at the numbers and decided they can't win and are choosing to pivot rather than die a slow death.
I don't think that is what is happening here. Instead, Tesla is continuing the strategy that brought them to this disaster of going all in on driverless. That isn't a bad strategy, but if they get the timing wrong a third time, they destroy the company and they have gotten the timing wrong on this twice already. This strategy has two downsides:
1. AI has no real moat and Tesla has largely pursued commodity sensors, meaning that other than EVs+battery tech (which Tesla appears abandoning), robotaxis have no hardware or software moat.
2. They could use network effects to win, in which case their competitors are not other car companies but Uber and Lyft. Uber has been pursuing the same long term strategy at Tesla.
Now by itself, going all in robotaxi, is risky but could work if they time it right. Tesla isn't going all in on robotaxi since they are splitting the effort between robotaxi and Optimus robots.
It is likely that the experience Tesla gets with Optimus robots will help other robotics companies, but unlike robotaxis where the timing might (but probably won't work), the timing is clearly isn't right for Optimus.
It seems like the motivation here is that Musk is aligning Tesla to a narrative that justify the absurd stock price, even if that narrative isn't reality.
> It seems like the motivation here is that Musk is aligning Tesla to a narrative that justify the absurd stock price, even if that narrative isn't reality.
Since Tesla stock has always been 90% based on the narrative, the narrative is the reality (and the product) of Tesla, and the actual machinery made and sold are just props and decorations to create the impression of it.
Maybe they should rebrand themselves as poTemkin: keep the T logo and the mysterious Slavic vibe, while shedding the pretense about what they're about.
Won't affect the stock anyway. Everyone knows the company is overvalued based on promises and perception alone.
Everyone's just betting on the charade going on one moment longer than their hold on the stock.
If you squint, the Cybertruck is shaped like a pyramid on wheels, which couldn't work any better as a visual metaphor for the enterprise.
If Tesla has lost the advantage in battery tech, that is unfortunate and speaks poorly to Tesla's long term strategy. Reclaiming this lead would be an important strategic goal and I disagree with that not being prioritized.
> Why? Other robotics companies have been doing it for longer. Is Optimus better than Atlas:
Atlas costs about half a million dollars, targeting a price tag of $160,000 once mass produced, and assumes the user will be able to do some maintenance.
Optimus is targeting a price tag of $30,000, but probably costs around $80,000 to produce. It is plastic, it is cheap, it doesn't work.
Atlas is better than Optimus but all measures. The advantage of Optimus so far has been, the mass production-->usage until failure-->improvement cycles that are already underway. Tesla is, as an extremely high cost, slipping on every single banana peel first and this is clearing a path for other companies to learn what doesn't work when you switch from functional over-engineered robot to barely functional robots that can be mass produced.
Telsa isn't alone in this space, but they investing a lot and trying to cut corners. So much of engineering is learning the corners you can cut and the corners that cause a battery fire after 8 weeks of use.
> Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win.
This is a very wrong way to tell the story.
Tesla + Panasonic were the first to commit to a massive factor car cells with very advanced chemistry. But this advantage didn't hold long as the model was soon copied.
And at that point, when that investment happened Tesla did actually not have 'a massive amount of capital'. And Panasonic also didn't, and even more so, Panasonic didn't want to go all in on batteries. As they were a company from Japan that still believed in the Hydrogen future.
By the time Tesla had serious capital, the other battery companies had long shot past Tesla+Panasonic and it wasn't even close.
Claiming that Panasonic and Tesla can win now is just silly and based on nothing.
Tesla was actually pretty clever on this and invested rather a large amount in their own battery supply chain. And they spun up a whole battery supply chain pretty quickly. But arguably they were a bit two ambitious. Musk really pushed the boundary with the cells, introducing or trying to introduce a lot of things that were hard to do and simply took time. They should have started more conservatively first and only tried to innovated once they could match the other companies on the standard process.
There was no chance for them to be a massive battery supplier to the outside, but making their own batteries for their own cars and getting better margin then all the other companies was well within the cards. And that by itself is a win.
But overall their battery strategy wasn't really the problem. They did a lot of good things there. And things that can pay off over time. The problem was to much investment in stuff other then batteries and their car models. The most important thing for them was to have growing volume every year. Work on manufacturing improvements and fight on margins.
But as you say, I agree the focus on driverless was a mistake.
There have been significant advances in power electronics and electric motors in the recent decades. Yes, there's not a lot to gain when you're starting at 85%+ efficiency, but it's far from "basic" technology.
You can say the same about the traditional car industry. Just because it’s a “solved problem” doesn’t mean you can ignore the TAM.
I think people are frustrated because Musk has been pretty up front that Tesla only exists to further his goals for Mars and robots. He doesn’t actually care about selling cars.
I recently read Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, and one of the interesting things it talks about is the path of the Model T.
Ford invested heavily in an in-house, highly optimized production pathway for the Model T. Other manufacturers sourced a lot of their parts from vendors.
This gave the Model T a great advantage at first, but they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models. Ford ended up converging with the rest of the industry in sourcing more of their parts externally.
The lack of new Tesla models makes me feel like a similar pivot is what Tesla needs. My suspicion is that they probably need a less terminally distracted Musk to pull it off.
One of the things Jim Farley, Ford CEO, brought up was they have a lot of 3rd party suppliers, and changes take a long time to implement. So a firmware update may require change notifications and responses from dozens of suppliers for something like door locks. This was in response to why Ford couldn't do firmware as fast or as often as Tesla. Vertically integrated means you have 1 big ship to turn around. Modern JIT manufacturing means your ship is built of 100s of cards and each one needs to be turned.
The lack of new models from updates I believe comes from the fact the CEO is busy elsewhere and the board is reluctant to address that. They have made the P/E so high that they can only continue to function in one direction, do just enough to bring in more outside investment.
Doesn't matter if it was or wasn't, it was a failure that GM never followed up with. Why it was a failure is also irrelevant, because whether you feel it was a technical failure or killed by GM, GM never did anything with the project or knowledge. Effectively it was a curiosity.
If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding, then there is massive precedent to never reuse the tech. In fact, their NiMH battery patents were sold to Texaco/Chevron who held them close and never let anyone use them. From that point, they couldn't follow-up without dumping even more cash into it, effectively burying it. Until new lithium battery tech matured, there was no way to do it again.
Not only were electric cars available since the very beginning of cars, but they've always been available as niche options. There are tens of electric cars that postdate the EV1 and predate the Tesla. Do you even know their names?
We have stupidly cheap gas. An electric car has only ever been a curiosity for America. Even now, the primary driver of people buying electric cars is ideological, and a mild convenience of never having to go to a gas station.
Pre-lithium battery electric cars are a huge hassle, for very little gain, even outside the US. The history of cars is a global one, and no amount of conspiracy theory about GM can counter the fact that nobody else made electric cars either, even in places with drastically more expensive and unreliable gasoline.
They have always been a novelty, like hydrogen and LPG and compressed gas engines.
Hybrids were the closest anyone got to making older battery chemistries meaningful for car-style transportation, and even that was extremely limited.
Cheap gas, car culture and the incredibly long distances makes America a very different place from the urban centres of the Netherlands, China and Korea.
GM didn't sell EVs for years after releasing the EV1. They didn't get any market advantage from the EV1 because they left the market after, for a long time.
It is very widely known that GM held a 7 year head start on every other automaker on manufacturing the modern EV. Several other EVs were sold during it's time in low volume.
Regular IPOs usually have commitments from pension funds, mutual funds, private equity firms and other institutional investors secured in advance of going public. How many of those parties would be interested considering that SpaceX really only has one main customer whose business isn't guaranteed considering his political partisanship?
Their main customer is Starlink and it will continue to be cash printing machine.
Their second customer is the Federal government and SpaceX has a monopoly on cheap reliable fast launch services that will overcome most politics. Even EU companies and Amazon and OneWeb have been forced to use them because there is no better option.
It's just that the company has stalled every major project they started, and, so far, completed a rather shitty an uninspiring one in Vegas that has no reason to exist in the first place (it's subway but with Teslas instead of trains).
Its only purpose is to prevent the money from being spent on viable public transportation projects, and in that sense, it's very interesting that it got so far.
Or, digging tunnels is a lot harder than expected and there have been no big technical leaps to change that. The idea is great, but only if the cost goes down and digging speed goes up by a lot.
I assume you got a cut of the $23bn my state took with the promise of a high-speed rail, which afaik is the only "viable(?!)" transportation project that could have been affected by this, or you just hate subways/subterranean transportation progress?
The idea isn’t great, tunnels for cars or pods have really low throughput (low occupancy + safety margin headways, even at a high speed). And it hinged on them magically revolutionising an already highly mature field, which surprise, surprise didn’t work out.
If it had been possible to speed up and reduce the cost of tunneling, the thing that would most make sense is running regular trains through them. But they never had any real ideas to actually make it cheaper or faster (apart for making it too small for proper emergency egress), just the idea that SV tech guys would be able to find a way to do it.
I disagree, tunnels for transport of both people and goods, especially in high-density urban areas is the best way to go. Walking and biking is great for their distance, but cars and trucks are still needed for larger and heavier items. Using shared transportation (like a train) is terrible for "The last mile". Doing everything at night just seems like a band-aid and sucks for all those workers.
The idea of trying to solve the hard infrastructure problem of digging first also seems like a great idea. Build the aqueduct before you build the millions of houses and farms, and even let anyone do that part.
It's still premature to say that they haven't revolutionized the field, people around the world are still digging tunnels so there's still a market. It wouldn't be the first time an already highly mature field got revolutionized, I still don't get why you're so anti-tunnel.
Here is the thing, you demand incredibly high amounts of capital cost for not actually achieving much. And that capital could be use for far, far, far, far more useful things the city actually needs. Like high capacity transports, like metros, trams or bike lanes.
The amount of goods that need to be transported to stores and such things isn't that big. And using literally free unused roads at night or early in the morning is just a great deal.
For individual transport last mile is regularly being done by cargo bike or small electric truck just fine.
But you are right, tunnels do make sense for some things. Like transporting garbage underground. Or transporting heat underground for district heating, or district cooling. Both would be better investments then trying to move logistics under-ground.
There is a reason, no serious attempt anywhere in the world is trying to move logistics under-ground. There are just so, so many better ways to invest in the city. Its literally not even in the Top 100 most needed things.
Specially in the US where the road network is so hilariously overbuilt that it could serve 10x the amount of people on the same area if public transport was just taken minimally serious. And in the US, underground cargo transport isn't even in the Top 1000 things a city should consider spending money on.
There’s only so much gridlock you can avoid without going above or below grade. I was shocked when I moved to Seattle and they had no subway system. It was made even worse by being crammed up against a tall hill with a ridiculously deep lake behind it. They are finally changing it now but I’d spent time in Tokyo before, and time in London and Paris shortly after and it was a real head scratcher. One bus tunnel helped, as was evidenced when they shut it down for a couple years, but cmon.
Because The Boring Company hasn't built any tunnels worth noting, perhaps, and stalled most of its projects.
This isn't a case against tunnels, this is a case against The Boring Company.
The tunnels aren't a great idea apriori. Good luck pitching the tunnels idea in Venice.
The tunnels may be a good or a bad idea depending on many variables, and the tunnels that the Boring Company has actually built are worthless.
As for the tunneling equipment: selling those machines isn't their core business, and there's no evidence these machines have, or may in the feasible future, do anything revolutionary in the tunnel industry (i.e., built radically better, radically cheaper, or radically faster).
The idea of having such machines is good. They don't have such machines.
> It's still premature to say that they haven't revolutionized the field
It's never premature to say that. Read what you wrote.
You can say a field has been revolutionized once a revolution takes place.
It's hasn't.
The impact of the Boring company on the way tunnels are dug is, very sharply, zero.
Is it possible that they will? Sure. It's also possible that Britney Spears will. She still has the time, it's premature to say she wouldn't do it, right?
Their mistake was to go from tunnels to transportation systems. I'm sure there are some innovations possible in tunnel boring. But that's not going to be some massive growth market.
> But trying to reinvent transportation was stupid.
It's not stupid, it's weaponized incompetence to divert funding from actual transportation infrastructure to their non-solutions which are all about the company owner's biggest money-making product (cars).
He barely needs Tesla now, pretty much the only thing stopping electric cars from being ubiquitous are people in politics and media. The new mission statement is just to make everything for everyone, which I guess solves the people-on-earth problems he wanted to tackle. Next is a push for Mars (which again is mostly threatened by some politicians at this point).
> Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it.
Well he knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive on Earth, so he can't be replaced /s
They literally tried that strategy with Internet Explorer 6 a long time ago where they didn't really update it for years, only doing the bare minimum. The result was a downward spiral in market share that they were unable to stop once they started trying again, ultimately resulting in IE effectively becoming obsolete.
Because browsers are one of the very few components that actually need to catch up to the rest of the world, but they've already outsourced most of that work to Chromium.
Every time there is anything posted about Proton on HN, there is an immediate wave of super negative comments, none of which ever offer any arguments of substance. It's always just some vague allegations, and this has been the case for years. It's pretty obvious what is going on.
These vapid fanboy-esque comments make me significantly more likely to believe that Proton is astroturfing than the inverse that you are implying, that some unspecified actor is engaging in a conspiracy to impugn Proton's reputation. That said, if criticising Proton is indeed a paid vocation and you have some concrete details about where I can get paid for my comments daring to doubt the uncompromising holiness of Proton, I'm all ears.
The whole AAA video game industry has been struggling in recent years as oversupply, astronomical development costs, and competition from nimbler AA and indie studios have put a serious dent into their profits. And unlike EA or Activision, Ubisoft no longer has any reliable cash cow franchises, which puts them into precarious position.
But the fact that their only answer to this is doubling down on the strategy that has stopped worked years ago does not bode well for them.
It isn’t just AA and indie. A lot of the play hours are soaked up by mega titles like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite before AA and indie even kick in. I’d say the low tier is just as impacted by this dynamic.
Everyone else is fighting over a tiny slice of the pie.
None of this is legally easy to implement or enforce, and any attempt of doing it is virtually guaranteed to create an unbelievable amount of unintended consequences as people figure out ways to game this new set of rules.
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