Some of these kids eventually grow up and meet people who are kind to them. They find positive lessons in real human social interactions. They leave their protective fantasy bubble behind. They eventually learn to seek justice where there was injustice.

Others never grow up. They end up seeking to fight injustice with a new form of injustice. Only this time, they get to be the tormentor.

Once upon a time, Robotaxi and Optimus sounded like visionary futuristic ideas. However:

We now live in a world where Waymo exists, and autonomous taxi hasn’t proven to be as socially transformative as promised. No huge latent market exposed. Aslo, Tesla is lagging behind.

We now live in the world where Unitree exists, and is shipping! Again, Tesla is on the back foot. The technology no longer seems quite so futuristic. Disruptors usually disrupt from down-market— that puts BYD cars and Unitree robots in the better position.

With a merger, the joint sci-fi future proposition is colonies on Mars. That one is likely to stay in the future for a long time. From a stock valuation point of view, the goal is for the promise to be forever in the future. That way, the investor thinks the upside is still to come. Once the promise is delivered, it’s time to cash out.

"Yeah, and quotas on web scrapers!"

—— I see it as:

“Let’s do a study on abstract future concerns.”

Vs.

“Let’s take action on concrete present-day concerns.”

Similarly, when the author says “trash bag”, I don’t take it to mean a literal trash bag.

Perhaps, but at the moment AI is at the forefront of the pre-regulation land grab.

Can you imagine a few decades earlier some former corporate executive giving a commencement speech at a US college extolling the virtues of offshoring, and how it will make his mega corp a lot of money?!

But even if scaling plateaus for the frontier models, maybe distillation will improve to the point where smaller more manageable models can reach the same plateau. That would be great for local.

I think this is the reason for the weird pivot to humanoid robots and for taking SpaceX public even though he originally said he wouldn’t. Better story for the investors than EVs.

Raising your hand alone is a common gesture that pretty much everyone has done. Saying “my heart goes out to you” gives plausible deniability. But making the hand gesture while clicking your heels together and snapping to attention with a stern jaw-jutting look on your face is pretty unmistakably a nazi salute.

Elon has publicly denied it was a nazi salute, but any normal person would go a step further and also disavow neo nazi ideology in the same breath. But doing that would break the dog whistle effect.

Some people say he’s just trolling, and yes, Elon likes to troll. But trolling or not, it has the same effect if you don’t also renounce neo nazism. It normalizes and shows you are comfortable with it.

Can I prove he’s a neo nazi? No I haven’t gone through his wallet and found his membership card. But his support for the AfD and all his great-replacement-theory adjacent talk are strong signals.