With PG’s retarded “Free Palestine” arch, it’s probably best to just leave.

My point is that marriage and kids provide a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment and a certain kind of narrowing clarity and that ideas of what leads to a fulfilling life are well established in old cultural communities for a reason. He’d no longer be looking for the meaning in obscure trivia - which was never the correct place to find it anyway.

The other bit is a lot of jobs are bullshit (probably most) with enormous amounts of waste building stuff that doesn’t matter. You can fix that by working at Tesla, spacex, etc.

I didn’t say I was committed to the religions - I said they’re a battle tested adaptive cultural technology we should be careful about throwing away because there will be unintended consequences. They are very effective at helping people live meaningful lives and have community.

You can choose to be obstinate and read what I wrote through a political lens with no charity - that’s kind of the political religious substitute I’m talking about.

There are places you can work that are more meaningful or where there is a culture of cutting down on bullshit. Elon Musk is famously good at running places that do both.

More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. Religion is in some ways a battle tested cultural technology, throwing it away will have unintended consequences for most people.

Alex Karp touches on some of these ideas indirectly in The Technological Republic which is worth reading anyway for other reasons. A lot of people in the west today grow up without a cultural core and end up aloof believing in nothing, or worse substituting some bullshit political ideology as a poor substitute religion.

My personal favorite would be that style with modern chips and a full glass display. Basically an updated mini without a camera bump.

They'll never make this though because the minis proved the market is tiny.

It's a double edged sword because the amount of time I spend online (X) has been directly responsible for the most valuable opportunities and generally knowing enough of what's going on to leverage that for big financial and career returns. It was pretty easy to drop all non-X social media though (all meta) and just avoid short term video generally.

I've been tempted to try the lightphone 3 though - theory being if I have a separate hardware device that might be enough to help because I can leave the iPhone at home. In theory the Apple Watch could do this, but in practice it hasn't.

Another thing I think can work is committing to avoid using it for one day a week - you get a lot of the benefits, it's more doable, and the downside is minimized.

My point is people will still be calling him a fraud when they do get it to mars, no evidence is sufficient for the HN cynic that thinks their “above the fray” ethos makes them smart.

Tesla has had massive success despite the haters, the model y becoming the literally best selling car on earth and you wouldn’t know it from HN. FSD has gotten really good, good enough to use more than not as they continue to improve it.

The best thing about capitalism is the losers here don’t matter - the winners get rich and keep going.

It’ll be nice when that’s not required anymore, but even today it’s way more comfortable.

The Bay Area has massive traffic, complex interchanges, SF has tight difficult roads with heavy fog. Sometimes there’s heavy rain on 280. 17 is also non trivial.

What Tesla has done is not trivial and roads outside the bay are often easier.

People can ignore this to serve their own petty cognitive bias, but others reading their comments should go look at it for themselves.

The position against lidar was that it traps you in a local max, that humans use vision, that roads and signs are designed for vision so you're going to ultimately have to solve that problem and when you do lidar becomes a redundant waste. The investment in lidar wastes time from training vision and may make it harder to do so. That's still the case.

I love Waymo, but it's doomed to be localized to populated areas with high-res mapping - that's a great business, but it doesn't solve the general problem.

If Tesla keeps jumping on the vision lever and solves it they'll win it all. There's nothing in physics that makes that impossible so I think they'll pull it off. His model is all this sort of first principles thinking, it's why his companies pull off things like starship. I wouldn't bet against it.

I'm in a 2025 with HW4, but it's dramatic improvement over the last couple of years (previously had a 2018 Model 3) increased my confidence that Elon was right to focus on vision. It wasn't until late last year where I found myself using it more than not, now I use it almost every drive point to point (Cupertino to SF) and it does it.

I think people are generally sleeping on how good it is and the politicization means people are under valuing it for stupid reasons. I wouldn't consider a non Tesla because of this (unless it was a stick shift sports car, but that's for different reasons).

Their lead is so crazy far ahead it's weird to see this reality and then see the comments on hn that are so wrong. Though I guess it's been that way for years.

The position against lidar was that it traps you in a local max, that humans use vision, that roads and signs are designed for vision so you're going to have to solve that problem and when you do lidar becomes a redundant waste. The investment in lidar wastes time from training vision and may make it harder to do so. That's still the case. I love Waymo, but it's doomed to be localized to populated areas with high-res mapping - that's a great business, but it doesn't solve the general problem.

If Tesla keeps jumping on the vision lever and solves it they'll win it all. There's nothing in physics that makes that impossible so I think they'll pull it off.

I'd really encourage people to here with a bias to dismiss to ignore the comments and just go in real life to try it out for yourself.