They look more like complete organizational shit shows.

They just think it makes sense to explore things, rather than just rinse and repeat with more cash.

The good news for John is that when 99.99% of the competitors are doing all the same, it’s when the rewards for looking around can be the biggest. Those are the real moments for disruption, and companies disregard them at their peril.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946686

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Everything you’re talking about is trivial to automate with playwright.

Measuring bot activity became harder after the API changes (I wonder why!), but there’s been some attempts at finding ways to estimate bot activity. All those measures are compatible with increases in bot activity, and incompatible with bot decline.

The only reason Twitter has more active users is that it removed some of the protections for bots, in particular broad filtering coming from certain country involved in a war.

You don’t think Musk is any close to the Oceangate guy? Let’s review some interesting decisions by his companies then:

- Musk mucking around with the blue checks and the bot filters in Twitter skyrocketed the amount of scams in the platform.

- Tesla uses very strict NDAs and settlement to silence the reporting of accidents

- The infamous electric door handle that locks up Teslas when power goes out was an obvious point of failure, it was ignored, people died, and now several countries have legislation against it

- Reportedly Musk had safety lines and other safety features in the factories removed for serious reasons like “not liking yellow”

- Any understanding of how to parse public insurance data will show you Tesla’s have accident rates that are multiples of other brands

- The Starship, a vessel that is intended for human transport, has no safe abort system, no way to fit one in its current state, and no plans to modify that.

Just a reminder that even a very SpaceX-friendly count (in which flights that did not attempt to land are considered “good”) puts the current reliability rate at <40%.

As a naive boundary, for clearing the 97.5% predicted crew survival, SpaceX would need to fly in the order of 300 good Starship launches.

Those are just of the top of my head.

Isaacson’s “biographies” are glorified puff pieces. Musk is as unrecognizable in his as Jobs was in his.

Both Tesla and SpaceX had teams keeping Musk busy on bs just so that the engineering teams could do their work.

The second he took control, we got the cybertruck and the starship, the worse products both companies ever built (or attempted, in the case of the starship).

> Musk relentlessly challenges the existence of every part

This sounds insightful until you find yourself debating with the CEO for the eleventh time about how his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down in a particular case.

Musk is very lucky to be moving such quantities of money that his companies are big enough to protect themselves from him, if you ever wonder how Musk would fare on a tight budget, look no further than the Oceangate.

It’s certainly an achievement of SpaceX engineering what they can do despite his constant meddling.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49741519

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The closest I’ve gotten is using a raspberry pi in the workbench, but for some weird devices that’s sometimes not good enough.

Some years ago a case became quite famous in Spain. Someone wanted to turn a winery into a eco-tourism boutique hotel with a winery tour and experience. Should be simple in theory, in practice they were waiting for authorization to open for more than 4 years.

I’ve been involved with startups and small businesses for more than a decade, and I haven’t still heard of any of them doing things 100% by the book, because it’s just impossible.

People just start and hope the taxman doesn’t come.

30% tree cover looks very different depending on the trees your municipality chooses.

For example, Barcelona covers everything with a variety of Platanus, which is easier to keep than other trees, but it’s quite dirty and produces A LOT of pollen. For me, that I’m allergic to it, it just makes the city unavailable for 2-4 weeks every year.

Having smaller plants, with more variety also feels much better than just sprinkling the right amount of massive trees with equal spacing. I’m pretty convinced part of the “we need more green” feeling people get is actually “I need something in my environment to not look like a grid”.

For most businesses, you’re not the target audience of your website, your potential customers are.

ARM is a much more mature platform, and the licensing scheme helps somewhat to keep really good physical implementations of the cores, since some advances get “distributed” through ARM itself.

Compute capabilities and power efficiency are very tied to physical implementations, which for the best part is happening behind closed doors.

- Early (ESP8622) MCUs had weak security, implementation flaws, and a host of issues that meant an attacker could hijack and maintain control of devices via OTA updates.

- Their chosen way to implement these systems makes them more vulnerable. They explicitly reduce hardware footprint by moving functionality from hardware to software.

- More recently there was some controversy about hidden commands in the BT chain, which were claimed to be debug functionality. Even if you take them at their word, that speaks volumes about their practices and procedures.

That’s the main problem with these kinds of backdoors, you can never really prove they exist because there’s reasonable alternative explanations since bugs do happen.

What I can tell you is that every single company I’ve worked which took security seriously (medical implants, critical safety industry) not only banned their use on our designs, they banned the presence of ESP32 based devices on our networks.

I’d say it’s true, but the LLMs and humans don’t have the exact same definition of what “obscure” is.

Karel is almost a subset of Pascal with some keyword swaps. And there’s a LOT of Pascal (and similar languages) around.

From the PoV of a statistical based tool like an LLM, Karel is just another flavor of a very popular structure.

What would have you done when the Bitcoin fork happened 50/50? Would you have gone int ICOs? Which ones? Etc…

There’s simply too many “new things”, so by trying to get exposure to them you’ll be massively in the red.

Let’s say you get into 1000 “new things”, and you strike it lucky and hit BTC. You’d had to buy BTC in early 2013, hold it over the whole period and sold at the historical maximum for you to be at break even.

If instead of buying 1000 “new things”, you’ve put your money into the S&P you’d be at +250% by the same time.

As a freelancer I do a bit of everything, and I’ve seen places where LLM breezes through and gets me what I want quickly, and times where using an LLM was a complete waste of time.